Unusually, a protest vote may be coalescing around a centrist, Pieter Omtzigt, as the Dutch vote in national elections on Wednesday.After 13 years with Mark Rutte as their prime minister, the Dutch will cast their ballots on Wednesday in a national election that is expected to scatter votes across the spectrum. But there is one man who has emerged as the campaign’s chief protagonist.It is Pieter Omtzigt, a longtime parliamentarian and founder of a new party, who says he wants to overhaul the Dutch political system from the political center — appealing to voters increasingly disillusioned with the establishment yet wary of extremes.Mr. Omtzigt, 49, has offered voters a novel mix of left-leaning economic policies and right-leaning migration policies, packaged in a party he created this summer, called New Social Contract.“It’s a protest party in the political middle,” said Tom Louwerse, a political scientist at Leiden University who created a website that combines and summarizes polls.Yet it is one that does not pit the elite against the common man in the way populist parties often do, political analysts said. While anti-establishment votes in many European countries have often gone to right-wing parties, Mr. Omtzigt’s presence seems to have provided an alternative to Dutch voters who don’t feel quite at home in the far right.The Dutch election is shaping up as one of the most significant and competitive in years. It is being held two years ahead of schedule, after Mr. Rutte’s government collapsed in July when the parties in his coalition failed to reach an agreement on migration policy.Mr. Rutte, who is serving as caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed, was considered a mainstay of Dutch politics. But trust in the leader who was nicknamed “Teflon Mark” has suffered because of several scandals, including a lack of action by his government after earthquakes caused by decades-long gas production in the northern province of Groningen damaged thousands of homes.Mr. Rutte was also a strong voice for fiscal restraint inside the European Union, especially after the British exit, allowing the Netherlands to punch above its weight on E.U. budget matters.Those are big political shoes to fill, and the race remains unpredictable, analysts said, with three or four parties closely jockeying near the top of polls in the homestretch.In recent days, the far-right Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, has inched up at the expense of Mr. Omtzigt’s party. The other contenders include a Green-Labor coalition on the left led by Frans Timmermans, a former European Union climate czar; and Mr. Rutte’s party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy.No one party is expected to win an outright majority, making it likely that whoever comes out on top will have to govern in a coalition, which could take weeks or months to hammer out.Mr. Omtzigt has been somewhat coy as to whether he would serve as prime minister, but he has emerged as the campaign’s most popular figure, said Asher van der Schelde, a researcher for I&O Research, an independent Dutch polling organization.“He is considered by Dutch people as a man with integrity who can enact change,” Mr. van der Schelde said. “The campaign really revolves around him.”Even as he runs as a change agent, Mr. Omtzigt is also regarded as a safe pair of hands. A former member of the center-right Christian party, he spent the better part of the past two decades in the House of Representatives in The Hague. The familiarity may be reassuring for a relatively conservative country that is looking for change but also security after Mr. Rutte’s long tenure.Mr. Omtzigt, right, during a debate last Thursday with opponents including Geert Wilders, center, whose far-right Party for Freedom has been gaining in recent polls.Koen Van Weel/EPA, via ShutterstockIn recent years, Mr. Omtzigt has built a reputation for holding those in power accountable. He rose to prominence in 2021 after he played a pivotal role in uncovering a systemic failure by Mr. Rutte’s government to protect thousands of families from overzealous tax inspectors.As a result of that scandal, Mr. Rutte’s government resigned in 2021, only to be easily re-elected. The scandal added to a growing distrust of the Dutch government, experts say.“There’s a lack of checks and balances in the Dutch political system,” Mr. Omtzigt said in a phone interview. Among the changes he is proposing is the creation of a constitutional court that would perform a role similar to the Supreme Court in the United States, adjudicating whether laws jibe the Constitution.“His style, compared to hard-core populists, is a bit more intellectual,” said Gerrit Voerman, a professor at the University of Groningen who is an expert in the Dutch and European party system.“You could say that the sentiment of distrust in the government has reached the political center,” Professor Voerman said. “Criticism of the government isn’t specifically left wing or right wing.”But even as he has promised “a new way of doing politics,” Mr. Omtzigt is himself very much part of the establishment. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Exeter in England.The way the government is run doesn’t work for many people, Mr. Omtzigt said. He also said that many politicians were out of touch with what citizens were worried about.Migration is one of the major issues in this election. Dutch citizens across the political spectrum are in favor of curtailing migration to some degree, pollsters say, including in some cases the number of labor migrants and foreign students.But immigration is not the first issue on Dutch voters’ minds — it’s the country’s housing crisis, which Mr. Omtzigt has linked to an influx of migrants who are competing with Dutch citizens for living spaces.Demonstrators calling for affordable housing during a march in Amsterdam last February.Robin Utrecht/EPA, via Shutterstock“Everyone’s talking about the rights of migrants,” Mr. Omtzigt told a Dutch political podcast this month. “Nobody is talking about the rights to a secure livelihood for those 390,000 households that don’t have a home in the Netherlands.”New Social Contract says it wants a “conscious, active and selective migration policy,” and proposes a maximum migration balance of 50,000 people per year. (In 2022, that number — the difference between people emigrating and immigrating — was roughly 224,000, according to Statistics Netherlands.)“It seems that some politicians are out of sync with citizens’ concerns,” Mr. Omtzigt said.The lack of clarity about whether Mr. Omtzigt wants to become prime minister or serve as his party’s leader in the House of Representatives has hurt his popularity over the final days of the campaign, pollsters say. But on Sunday, he told Dutch television that he would be open to leading the country under certain circumstances.Mr. Rutte’s successor as the lead candidate of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius, has criticized Mr. Omtzigt for his lack of decisiveness.“Leadership is making decisions,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, in a thinly veiled criticism of Mr. Omtzigt. “If you don’t want to be prime minister, fine, but just say so.” More

The subject line of a recent fund-raising email from Gavin Newsom, the politically embattled governor of California, reads like the wheedling apologia of a busted boyfriend: “Can I please have a chance to explain?”What Mr. Newsom wants to explain is why he desperately needs donations to fight the “partisan, Republican-led recall” in which he is currently embroiled — and that polling suggests he could very well lose.California has way more registered Democrats than Republicans, and the latter are indeed driving this recall effort. But Republicans are all revved up about the fight, making the to-recall-or-not-to-recall split among likely voters uncomfortably close. Depending on who bothers to participate in the Sept. 14 election, Mr. Newsom could soon find himself out of a job. If that happens, his likely successor looks to be a right-wing, outrage-peddling misogynistic radio host who opposes abortion rights, mask mandates and any type of minimum wage.So much for America’s political dynamics getting less weird after Donald Trump.How did Mr. Newsom, the Democratic governor of deep-blue California, find himself in this pickle? Like any leader, he has had his share of stumbles. He has also been hammered by forces largely beyond his control — a deadly pandemic, raging wildfires, economic turmoil and an energized, MAGA-fied Republican Party seeking payback for Mr. Trump’s electoral thumping last year, to name just a few.All elected officials, of course, must contend with unhappy constituents and partisan passions. But California leaders face an additional challenge: an out-of-touch recall system adopted more than a century ago that invites frequent, even frivolous, attempts to oust officials for any perceived offense. Every California governor since 1960 has endured at least one recall attempt. In his first term, Mr. Newsom has faced five. The only Republican to capture the state’s governorship in the past two decades was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won as part of the 2003 recall of the Democrat Gray Davis.Why fret now about a process that has been around so long and, while promiscuously used, rarely succeeds? For starters, it is undemocratic — some say even unconstitutional. It is also ripe for abuse by a Republican Party that has grown increasingly anti-majoritarian and antidemocratic. Nationwide, the G.O.P. has basically given up trying to build winning electoral majorities and instead focused on tilting the playing field in its favor. Refusing to consider a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nominee? Check. Trying to meddle with the census? Check. Passing restrictive voting laws? Check. Trying to overturn a free and fair presidential election? Check. And so on. There is no reason for California to allow its flawed recall system to facilitate this ignoble mission.No question, Mr. Newsom has made mistakes — most memorably, last year’s French Laundry fiasco. It would have been bad enough for him to be caught gallivanting at a posh restaurant during a lethal, economically crushing pandemic. But to get spotted doing so without a mask, even as he was lecturing others to mask up and stay home? Pure idiocy. Small wonder that his rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me display turbocharged a previously plodding recall effort originally organized by conservatives miffed about his handling of issues like immigration.Hypocritical, entitled cluelessness notwithstanding, Mr. Newsom, like many governors, is an obvious focus for all the rage and frustration percolating as the pandemic drags on. This might not be quite so problematic if everything else in the state were hunky-dory. But it’s wildfire season again, meaning that even areas not threatened with flaming destruction are plagued by smoke-clogged air and creepy-colored skies. Then there are the crises of homelessness and a rise in homicides. It’s enough to make anyone crabby. And crabby voters, even many Democrats, might not feel moved to head to the polls or even mail in their ballots to save him.Mr. Newsom’s conservative critics, by contrast, are highly motivated to kick him to the curb. Aware of this enthusiasm gap, the governor has been begging Democrats to “wake up” and see this race as a referendum not on his leadership so much as on Trumpism. As Mr. Newsom frames it, his ouster would be a blow to the national Democratic Party and the entire cause of liberal democracy.Whatever the governor’s fate, his battle has spotlighted the peculiarities in a recall system that many feel is overdue for reform. For starters, the state has an unusually low signature hurdle for recall petitions: enough registered voters to equal 12 percent of the turnout in the previous election for governor — in this case, close to 1.5 million. Most recall states have higher thresholds: 15, 25, 30, even 40 percent. As The Los Angeles Times noted in a recent pro-reform editorial, 12 percent “might have been a high bar in 1911, when the population was scattered across the 770-mile length of the state, but is it too low in 2021, when petitions for ballot measures are gathered en masse by paid staff in parking lots?”The voting process itself is also troubling. The question of whether to recall an incumbent and the question of who should replace him or her appear on the same ballot. The incumbent must clear 50 percent to remain in office. Failing that, whichever replacement candidate pulls the most votes wins, no matter how tiny the plurality. For this recall, there will be 46 aspiring replacements on the ballot. If Mr. Newsom pulls, say, 49.5 percent of the vote, then whichever challenger does slightly better than the rest will become the leader of the most populous state in the nation and the fifth-largest economy in the world.“In other California elections,” The Los Angeles Times pointed out, “a candidate cannot win without the support of a majority of voters. If a candidate doesn’t win outright, the top two vote-getters compete in a runoff.” This helps protect the system from manipulation by daffy or dangerous fringe groups and candidates with narrow but intense appeal. Why should recalls be any different?Many California voters seem to agree. While the vast majority of likely voters support having a recall process (86 percent), two-thirds believe it should be reformed, according to a July survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. Among the more popular potential changes are raising the signature requirement to 25 percent (55 percent support), requiring a runoff if no replacement candidate receives a majority (68 percent) and establishing standards that limit the reasons for which an incumbent may be recalled to illegal or unethical behavior (60 percent).These are hardly the only issues to consider, prompting some political observers to call for the creation of a bipartisan commission to explore possible reforms.Mr. Newsom is correct that this fight is about more than his political future. It should also serve as a wake-up call for Californians to improve an outdated system that is undemocratic and that gives too much sway to the swampy fringes of America’s political ecosystem.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

If President Biden sometimes sounded a lot like Donald Trump during his State of the Union address, boasting about a record of economic nationalism, the imitation may soon run the other way. Biden’s attacks on congressional Republicans for being allegedly eager to cut Medicare and Social Security were a clear preview of how he hopes to run against the G.O.P. in 2024. But they were also a possible preview of how Trump may try to reclaim his own party’s nomination — by reprising his 2016 campaign’s rejection of Tea Party austerity and attacking potential rivals (which means, primarily, Ron DeSantis) as libertarian dogmatists who don’t care about the middle class.That strategy was previewed a bit recently by Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Their subject was the so-called Fair Tax, a longstanding fascination for certain right-wing activists that proposes to replace the U.S. tax code with a sales tax. This would yield certain advantages in economic efficiency; it would also result in a dramatic tax increase on the middle class.In the heyday of the Tea Party, when implausible policy proposals were all the rage, the Fair Tax was endorsed by many of today’s 2024 hopefuls: by Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and, yes, by DeSantis himself. Which gives Trump a license to accuse all these potential rivals of supporting a middle-class tax hike — and the Semafor writers quote a Trumpworld source basically promising an attack along those lines, to force Trump’s rivals to “answer for what they supported and what they’ve advocated in the past.”That same quote could easily apply to the proposed entitlement changes that many Republicans (again, including DeSantis) embraced in the same era, under the influence of Paul Ryan’s budget blueprints. Those proposals were serious rather than crankish, if ill-timed for a moment when there was more fiscal space than deficit hawks believed. But they were also seriously unpopular, and Trump’s discarding of them was crucial to his success in 2016. And having discarded them then, he’s well positioned to go after DeSantis and others now — in imitation of not only his prior campaign but also, as National Review’s Philip Klein points out, the strategy pursued by Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, when he sank Rick Perry’s candidacy in part by blasting Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”This means that the non-Trump G.O.P. can expect to spend the looming presidential race facing similar attacks from the Biden White House and the Trump campaign. Making the similarity too obvious could backfire on Trump. But the peril for the G.O.P. is that even if Trump can’t beat DeSantis by harping on his past positions, he will still be reinforcing for swing voters the liberal narrative that (non-Trump) Republicans care only about the rich.In one sense that narrative shouldn’t be too hard for DeSantis to counteract, since his record as governor of Florida is more moderate than libertarian — with increases in teacher pay, support for environmental protection and so on — and it’s not clear that voters care that much about long-ago votes if they aren’t tied to specific policy proposals now.But the question is what exactly DeSantis’s more of-the-moment policy proposals would be, in a fiscal landscape constrained by inflation for the first time in decades. There’s certainly a scenario in which he abjures austerity and embraces pro-family and industrial-policy spending, maybe even finds a few modest tax increases that own the professional-class liberals, and thereby evades the Trump-Biden pincer.But it won’t be easy to pull off. Especially because part of Trump’s strength has always been that he doesn’t need the Republican Party’s donor class in the way that normal politicians do, while DeSantis will need to rally that class if he’s going to dethrone the former president. And the price of their support will be, most likely, something that isn’t particularly popular: not an idea from the fringes like Fair Tax or a big entitlement overhaul proposal, necessarily, but at the very least a budget-eating tax cut that probably won’t be populist in any way.Again, 2012 is an interesting precedent. Part of what killed Romney in that general election was that even though he championed Social Security against Perry and declined to embrace any crankish tax proposals, he still ended up saddled with a tax overhaul plan that donors and activists liked but that was easy for the Democrats to attack.It’s not hard to imagine a DeSantis candidacy that rallies the establishment and defeats Trump only to end up in a similar general‌-‌election position. Which suggests one way in which Trump’s populist attacks on other Republicans could actually be helpful to the party’s chances. They’ll leave no doubt, for DeSantis or any other figure, about the political weaknesses of traditional right-wing policymaking. And they might force an early adaptation that otherwise could come, like Romney’s attempted pivots in 2012, as too little and too late.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

On Sunday, after Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to the southern border, the White House felt the need to issue a statement calling her trip a “success.” The statement cited as supporting evidence five tweets by Democratic allies of hers and some neutral media accounts. That’s a relatively modest definition of success, but then again, there were no defensive moments like during the NBC News interview in Guatemala in which she called a border visit a “grand gesture” and noted that she hadn’t visited Europe as vice president, either.Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues or the decades-long quandary of federal immigration reform. He has also asked her to lead the administration’s voting-rights efforts, which are in a filibuster limbo. According to The Times, he has her working on combating vaccine hesitancy and fighting for policing reform, too, among other uphill battles.It’s gotten to the point that every time I see Ms. Harris, I immediately think of “The Wiz” and hear Michael Jackson singing:You can’t win, you can’t break evenAnd you can’t get out of the gamePeople keep sayin’ things are gonna changeBut they look just like they’re stayin’ the sameMs. Harris, at this point, can’t seem to win for trying. She is a historic yet inexperienced vice president who is taking on work that can easily backfire as so many people sit in judgment, with critics sniping (especially right-wing commentators) and allies spinning (like with official statements about “success”).And all the while, the clock is ticking. Most political observers think that if Mr. Biden decides not to run for re-election in 2024 (when he will be 81), Ms. Harris most definitely will. He had to know that in choosing her as his vice president, he was making her his heir apparent. But based on how things look now, her work as his No. 2 could end up being baggage more than a boon. Mr. Biden and his team aren’t giving her chances to get some wins and more experience on her ledger. Rather, it’s the hardest of the hard stuff.Ms. Harris is a complicated figure. She is not a progressive darling — never has been. As with Barack Obama, the only thing radical about her is her skin color and gender in the Oval Office. On a more substantive level, how Ms. Harris deals with her portfolio will surely alienate the left and centrist factions of the Democratic Party. She was far from a diversity hire for Mr. Biden, and she has clear potential as a national leader, but she needs the time, support and right combination of goals to learn and grow. She needs a mix of tough targets and ones that show her ideas and creativity, as Al Gore had with his Reinventing Government effort, rather than a portfolio consisting of the most difficult policy challenges in 21st-century America.The way things are going, if Mr. Biden decides not to run again in 2024, countless male Democratic senators and governors would challenge Ms. Harris for the nomination. On one level, there are far too many male leaders who wake up each morning, brush their teeth, look in the mirror and say, “I can do this job I am wholly unqualified for. Let’s go!” But there are also other reasons she would face competition — ones we aren’t talking about.This country has yet to have an honest conversation and reflection on the ways in which race and gender play out in electoral politics. There are voters who look at Ms. Harris and immediately believe she is unqualified for the job because of her gender, her immigrant parents and the color of her skin. Republicans tend to say the quiet part loud, but if we are being honest, far too many Democrats would never be able to vote for a Black woman at the top of the ticket, no matter how qualified.Many white liberals like racial and gender equality in theory but get a little gun shy when asked to make room at the table for others on a long list of issues — school integration, housing, homelessness, incarceration, policing and executive leadership among them. And for those of you scoffing, ask yourself why you can list almost every major and minor flaw of Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name just a few. Many liberals struggle with issues of gender and race in practice; they may not admit to having a problem with Ms. Harris per se, but many still expect her to conform to certain standards and judge her harshly when she struggles on issues that are difficult to begin with.Many voters do not see women of color, and Black women specifically, as capable of executive leadership, as evidenced by the lack of any Black female governors in the history of the United States. We must also wrestle with the fact that there have been only two Black female U.S. senators in history. Therefore, for Mr. Biden to select an African American woman from the traditional pool of acceptable vice-presidential candidates of senators and governors, he had an N of one. As brilliant as Stacey Abrams has proved herself to be, the political imagination in this country has yet to evolve to the point that many voters would support a selection of a brilliant politician and policy expert whose highest elected office was minority leader of the Georgia House.No one has been able to solve the complicated issue of immigration and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. border, yet Ms. Harris is charged with solving it. As the child of not one but two immigrants and the No. 2 leader of an imperial nation, she is the one charged with telling people in Guatemala “do not come” to the United States. She undertakes tasks at the pleasure of the president, but this particular role reminds me of Admiral Ackbar’s declaration in “Return of the Jedi”: “It’s a trap!” If she is somehow miraculously able to detangle the complex “immigration crisis,” she will be heralded by some, but not all, as a success and worthy of the Democratic nomination in 2024. If she becomes only the latest leader (in either party) who cannot solve the problem, she specifically will be viewed as a failure.The role of the vice president has always been undefined, left largely up to the president to shape. Ms. Harris is clearly not a yes man like Mike Pence, the one completely running the show like Dick Cheney or an institutional encyclopedia and counsel the way Mr. Biden was to Mr. Obama.Ms. Harris’s political aspirations clearly extend beyond the vice presidency, but the way the Biden team seems to be playing out the old Life cereal commercial here — “Let’s get Mikey” — makes her political future uncertain. There will be no shortage of Democratic colleagues gunning for her, not to mention Republican politicians and the right-wing media that together revel in misinformation and caricature. I can imagine a scenario in which she is the face that launches a thousand ships but all of those ships will be fighting against her, not for her.Until then, Ms. Harris will do what any faithful vice president does: put her head down, let the president shine and work on her vast portfolio with the staff she has. Hopefully for her, those lyrics from “The Wiz” won’t ring true.Christina Greer is a political scientist at Fordham University. She is political editor at TheGrio and a co-host of the podcast “What’s in It for Us?” More

Donald Trump says he plans to pardon US Capitol attack participants if elected‘I mean full pardons with an apology to many,’ says former president as January 6 rioter sentenced to 10 years for assault Donald Trump said on Thursday he would pardon and apologize to those who participated in the deadly attack on the US Capitol on January 6 if he were elected to the White House again.“I mean full pardons with an apology to many,” he told Wendy Bell, a conservative radio host on Thursday. “I will be looking very, very strongly about pardons, full pardons.”‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracyRead moreFive people died in connection with the attack and more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured. More than 875 people have been charged with crimes related to January 6, according to an NPR tracker. 370 people have pleaded guilty to crimes so far.Trump also said he was offering financial support to some of those involved in the attack. “I am financially supporting people that are incredible and they were in my office actually two days ago, so they’re very much in my mind,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace what they’ve done to them. What they’ve done to these people is disgraceful.”It was not immediately clear what the extent of Trump’s financial assistance was.In a series of televised hearings this summer, the US House panel investigating the Capitol attack laid out extensive evidence that Trump encouraged the mob to go to the Capitol on January 6 and resisted efforts to quell the violence.The panel is set to continue its work this fall, but the decision over whether to file criminal charges will ultimately be made by the US Department of Justice.Trump has heavily hinted that he will run for the presidency again in 2024, but has so far not confirmed any bid. If he does run, he will automatically be the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican nominee as his grip on the party and its base remains strong.Trump’s comments came the same day that Thomas Webster, a retired New York police department officer, was sentenced to 10 years in prison, the longest sentence issued so far for any defendant in the attack, according to the Associated Press. A jury found Webster guilty after he argued he was acting in self-defense when he assaulted a Washington DC police officer and pulled his gas mask off.“Some of the legal people on the other side, they’re the most cold-hearted people. They don’t care about families. They don’t care about anything,” Trump said Thursday.Amit Mehta, the US district judge who sentenced Webster, said that other than the police officer, the other victim in the attack was “democracy”.TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More