Elections

The former South Carolina governor has made gains in recent months — in fund-raising and polling — that have helped her compete for the No. 2 spot in the primary field.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has ramped up her fund-raising in recent months, a sign that her performance in the early presidential debates may have invigorated her 2024 candidacy.Ms. Haley, who, according to her campaign, has raised $11 million across her political committees, entered October with significantly more cash on hand that can be spent on the 2024 primary than Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — $9.1 million to roughly his $5 million — even as he out-raised her overall.But both Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis’s fund-raising figures were dwarfed by the man they are chasing in the polls: Former President Donald J. Trump announced in recent days that he had raised $45.5 million in the quarter and had $36 million on hand that is eligible to be spent on the primary.Ms. Haley’s campaign provided her fund-raising figures for the third quarter, from July 1 to the end of September, to The New York Times in advance of the Oct. 15 disclosure deadline. The numbers underscore not just her financial gains from the debates, but the extent to which she has run a lean operation, keeping a limited payroll and eschewing campaign-backed television ads so far. Her campaign said it had saved roughly half of every dollar it had raised into her 2024 account in the last three months.“We have seen a big surge in support and have real momentum,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for Ms. Haley. “Nikki is emerging as the candidate who can move America beyond the chaos and drama of the past and present, and we have the resources we need to do it.”Her campaign said it had received more than 165,000 donations in July, August and September, including from 40,000 new donors. Overall, her campaign has topped 100,000 unique contributors.The next stage of the 2024 Republican race has in many ways become a primary within the primary between Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley as they compete for the role of chief rival to Mr. Trump.At the start of the summer, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina had appeared poised to benefit as Mr. DeSantis slid in the polls. Mr. Scott was emerging as a favorite among major donors, and he already had ample funds in his campaign coffers. But his poll numbers have remained stagnant. His campaign has not yet released third-quarter fund-raising numbers — it had more than $21 million cash on hand at the end of June, much of which had been drawn from his senate campaign fund.For the first half of 2023, the position of second to Mr. Trump had been held by Mr. DeSantis. But Mr. DeSantis’s campaign momentum stalled over the summer, and his support has deteriorated. In some surveys in New Hampshire and in her home state of South Carolina, Ms. Haley has taken the second spot. As he retools his campaign, Mr. DeSantis recently announced he was shifting staff from his Tallahassee headquarters to Iowa after raising $15 million in the third quarter.Advisers to both Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley are headed to Texas this week for an important gathering of major Republican donors, a group known as the American Opportunity Alliance, to convince those contributors of their path forward against Mr. Trump. The former president’s apparently impermeable poll numbers and robust grass-roots fund-raising have led to desperation and frustration among some donors.Among the talking points that Ms. Haley’s team will arrive armed with in Texas is that her fund-raising has ticked up while Mr. DeSantis has gone down in recent months, and that he remains more strapped than her overall. Both have supportive super PACs, but Mr. DeSantis’s allies have reported far more money — a $130 million war chest that is more than everyone else in the field — and have created a robust infrastructure in Iowa that is unrivaled in the race.Ms. Haley’s recent rise in the polls has been accompanied by television ad spending from her super PAC, Stand for America, a major advertiser in the early states over the summer.For Ms. Haley, the coming report will show that her campaign’s overall cash on hand grew to $11.6 million from $6.8 million at the end of the previous quarter. Most of that money, $9.1 million, is eligible to be spent in the primary; the rest is earmarked for her only if she becomes the Republican nominee. More

The disarray engulfing the House of Representatives has been unprecedented, yet somehow it has also felt inevitable. No sitting speaker has ever been removed before, but the process that brought about Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow was the culmination of several related trends that have amounted to a repudiation of coalition building in American politics.That process has been overdetermined in an era of partisan polarization and geographic sorting (Americans increasingly live in communities full of like-minded partisans), but that doesn’t mean we are powerless against it. The rules of our politics should be designed to counteract our worst vices, not to reinforce them. That means we particularly need to rethink party primaries — which give our politicians all the wrong incentives.The upheaval in the House is rooted in the dynamics of an era of deadlock. American politics isn’t just polarized but nearly tied, and it has been that way for much of the past 30 years. The average House majority since 1995 has been just over 30 seats. The average over the previous century was more than 80 seats. The current Congress and the previous one, with their incredibly slim House majorities (first Democratic and then Republican), are rare in historical perspective.Such narrow majorities empower the fringes of our politics. Only eight Republican members voted to remove their speaker, but when the majority’s margin is so small (and the minority party can be relied on to play its lock-step part), a tiny tail can wag the dog. Razor-thin majorities are inherently unstable, yet neither party seems capable of broadening its appeal and therefore its coalition.Mr. McCarthy’s ouster was also a function of the centralization of power in Congress. The toppling of the speaker might suggest that House leaders are too weak, but partisan dissatisfaction with Mr. McCarthy had to do with the effectively impossible expectations members now have of party leaders. The members who rebelled against him claimed to want regular order in the House, but they also insisted that legislative outcomes must conform to strict partisan goals.These are plainly contradictory demands: Regular order involves cross-partisan negotiation and bargaining and so would result in legislative outcomes that are more durable but less ideologically satisfying. In the end, the rebels revealed their real priorities. They kicked out the speaker for passing a continuing resolution with Democratic votes, putting their weight behind the notion that party leaders must tightly control the House and prevent cross-partisan coalitions from forming. The Democrats’ unanimity in supporting the speaker’s removal evinced the same view.But perhaps above all, the tumult in the House is a function of deformed expectations of Congress itself. Members are increasingly pulled in different directions by the imperatives of legislative work and those of electoral politics.A legislature is an arena for negotiation, where differences are worked out through bargains. But our polarized political culture treats deals with the other party as betrayals of principle and failures of nerve. Traditionally, winning an election to Congress has meant winning a seat at the negotiating table, where you can represent the interests and priorities of your voters. Increasingly, it has come instead to mean winning a prominent platform for performative outrage, where you can articulate your voters’ frustrations with elite power and show them that you are working to disrupt the uses of that power.These expectations coexist, sometimes within individual members. But they point in very different directions, because the latter view does not involve traditional legislative objectives and so is not subject to the incentives that have generally facilitated Congress’s work. Instead, some members respond to the incentives of political theater, which is often at least as well served by legislative failure as success. This impulse is evident in both parties, though it is clearly most intense among a portion of congressional Republicans.Most members still have a more traditional view of their job, and most voters do too, and yet today’s most powerful electoral incentives nonetheless militate toward the more populist, performative view. That’s because electoral incentives for most members of the House now have to do with winning party primaries.This is not only because geographic sorting has made more seats safe in general elections but also because the parties have grown institutionally weak and so have little say over who runs under their banners. Whether justifiably or not, even established incumbents and swing-seat members often worry most about primary challenges and therefore about voters who do not want them to give ground or compromise. This effectively means they find it politically dangerous to do the job Congress exists to do.This is a perverse misalignment of incentives. And it contributes to the dynamics that shaped the drama in the House, because it ultimately undermines the imperative for coalition building. Our parties are deadlocked in part because neither really strives to significantly broaden its coalition — doing so would involve playing down some priorities that most energize primary voters. Power is centralized in Congress to avert unpredictable cross-partisan coalitions and more effectively stage-manage a partisan Kabuki theater.But more than anything, party primaries now leave both voters and members confused about the purpose of Congress and so disable the institution.While there are some reforms of Congress’s procedures that could help it work better — like a budget process that did not culminate in needlessly dramatic crisis moments and a committee system with more genuine legislative power — it is also increasingly clear that nominee selection reforms are in order.Primaries did not create our polarized culture war. They have been widely used to select congressional candidates in most of the country for over a century, and since the 1970s they have also dominated presidential candidate selection in both parties. But party primaries have come to interact with our embittered political culture in destructive ways. As Nick Troiano argues in a forthcoming book, primaries are bad for voters, bad for parties and bad for the country.We can’t go back to the preprimary system in which party professionals deliberated about candidate selection. No politician wants to tell his or her most intensely devoted voters that they are the problem, and in any case that older approach had its own grave deficiencies. So reformers have to look for ways forward within the primary system. They should structure primary elections in ways that incentivize actual legislative work and draw into politics a type of officeseeker inclined to appeal to a broader range of voters and to build coalitions.Ranked-choice voting in primaries could be particularly promising. A ranked-choice election allows voters to select multiple candidates in order of preference and then have their vote count on behalf of their second or third choice if their first or second choice is not among the top vote getters. In most forms, it is essentially an automatic runoff. From the point of view of candidates, such a system creates a strong reason to be many voters’ second choice, as well as the first choice of some. That naturally invites a coalition-building mind-set and could do a better job of attracting candidates capable of broad appeal both on the campaign trail and in office. It would compel politicians to feel accountable to a broader swath of voters, even in safe districts where only the primary matters.This was the experience of the Virginia Republican Party, which turned to a ranked-choice process to select its gubernatorial nominee in 2021 and through it landed on a candidate, Glenn Youngkin, capable of winning in a purple state. Similar reforms at the primary stage could plausibly help both parties, though there is reason to think that Republicans would have more to gain from deploying them, because at this point they appear to suffer more from the tendency of primaries to yield candidates who turn off winnable but uncommitted voters in the general election and who have little interest in the jobs they are elected to perform.Republicans tend to be more staunchly opposed to such proposals and to assume they would only benefit the left. The evidence so far does not support that assumption. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Kevin Kosar argued in a recent paper, Republicans have particularly strong reasons to consider such reforms — at least in primaries.Deploying ranked-choice methods in general elections could tend to further weaken the parties, which is not the right way to take on our broken political culture. The two parties as institutions are actually moderating forces, because each has an interest in making its tent as broad as possible. But ranked-choice primaries would strengthen the parties by reinforcing their ability to nominate candidates with broad appeal and better aligning primary, general election and governing incentivesRanked-choice methods would be particularly valuable in congressional primaries because, as we have seen, Congress particularly suffers from the tendency of members to neglect coalition building and deplore negotiation. The dysfunction of the national legislature is also the source from which most other constitutional dysfunctions now radiate. But if they prove effective, similar reforms might ultimately be of use in presidential primaries as well and in primaries for state and local offices.There is no silver bullet for what ails our politics. And ideas like these should be pursued as experiments, state by state. There is always a risk that they could make things worse. But the risks we run by doing nothing are plainly mounting.Yuval Levin, a contributing Opinion writer, is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Gail Collins: Bret, when we started our conversations, you generously agreed to stick to domestic issues. I’ve always steered away from commenting on foreign affairs because I have so very many colleagues who know so very much more about them than I do.But I know you’re weighed down by the situation in the Middle East. I’m gonna hand off to you here so you can share your thoughts.Bret Stephens: Thanks for raising the subject, Gail. And since I’ve written a column about it, I promise to keep it brief so we can talk about marginally less depressing things, like the increasingly plausible prospect of a second Trump term.Israel occupies such a big place in the public imagination that people often forget what a small country it is. When an estimated 700 Israelis (a number that is sure to grow, out of a total population of a little over nine million) are killed in terrorist attacks, as they have been since Hamas’s rampage began Saturday morning, that’s the proportional equivalent of around 25,000 Americans. In other words, eight 9/11s.I know some of our readers have strong feelings about Israeli policies or despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But what we witnessed on Saturday was pure evil. Habitual critics of Israel should at least pause to mourn the hundreds of young Israelis murdered at a music festival, the mothers and young children kidnapped to Gaza to be used as human shields, the Israeli captives brutalized, the thousands of wounded and maimed civilians who were just going about their morning on sovereign Israeli territory. And the critics should also ask whether the version of Palestine embodied by Hamas, which tyrannizes its own people even as it terrorizes its neighbor, is one they can stomach.Gail: Horrific stories like the music festival massacre make it flat-out clear how this was an abomination that has to be decried around the globe, no matter what your particular position on Palestine is.Now I will follow my own rule and dip back into domestic politics.Bret: OK, and I will have lots more to say about this in my regular column this week. I also know you’re raring to talk about those charming House Republicans who ended Kevin McCarthy’s speakership last week. But first I have to ask: How do you feel about Build the Wall Biden?Gail: I knew you were going to head for the wall! Couple of thoughts here, the first being that the money was appropriated by Congress during the Trump administration for his favorite barrier and President Biden was right when he asked for it to be reallocated to a general migration-control program.Which, of course, didn’t happen. I still hate, hate, hate the wall and all it symbolizes. But also understand why Biden didn’t want to give Republicans ammunition to claim he wasn’t trying to control the immigration problem.Now feel free to tell me that you differ.Bret: It ought to be axiomatic that you can’t have a gate without a wall. If we want more legal immigration, which we both do, we need to do more to prevent illegal immigration. It’s also a shame Biden didn’t do this two years ago when he could have traded wall building for something truly constructive, like citizenship for Dreamers and a higher annual ceiling for the number of political refugees allowed into the United States. Now he just looks desperate and reactive and late to address a crisis he kept trying to pretend wasn’t real.Not to mention the political gift this whole fiasco is to Donald Trump, who now has a slight lead over Biden in the polls. Aren’t you a wee bit nervous?Gail: Impossible not to be a wee bit nervous when Trump’s one of the options. But I still think when we really get into all the multitudinous criminal and civil trials, it’s going to be very hard for the middle-of-the-road, don’t-ask-me-yet voters to pick the Trump option.Bret: I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that front. For so many Americans, Trump’s indictments have gone from being the scandal of the century to just so much white noise on cable TV, like all of Trump’s other scandals. The only thing millions of Americans care about is whether they are better off in 2023 than they were in 2019, the last full year under Trump that wasn’t affected by the pandemic. And the sad truth is: Many believe that they aren’t.Gail: I will refrain from veering off into a discussion of how the Trump tax cuts caused the deficit to surge. Or mentioning the latest jobs report, which was really good.Bret: Shame about the high gas prices, rising mortgage rates, urban decay, a border crisis and all the other stuff my liberal friends keep thinking is just some sort of American hypochondria.Gail: It’s settled — we disagree. Time for us to get on to those embattled House Republicans. Anybody in contention for speaker of the House you actually like?Bret: You’re asking me to pick my poison. I’d say Steve Scalise, the majority leader who once described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” is still better than Jim Jordan, but that’s because almost everyone is better than Jim Jordan, the former wrestling coach. Republicans don’t have particularly good experiences with former wrestling coaches who become speakers of the House.Admit it: You’re sorta enjoying this G.O.P. meltdown, right?Gail: At the moment, absolutely. Once again, this is a Trump creation. He was the one who engineered the nomination of so many awful House candidates that the Republicans couldn’t get the usual postpresidential election surge in the out-party’s seats. They’re not even a majority if you subtract the total loons, like our friend Matt Gaetz.But I’m not looking forward to a government shutdown, and I doubt these guys will be able to get the votes together to avoid one next month.Bret: We are in agreement. All the clichés about lunatics running the asylum, letting the foxes in the henhouse, picking the wrong week to stop sniffing glue and really futile and stupid gestures apply. A government shutdown will accomplish exactly nothing for Republicans except make them seem like the party of total dysfunction — which, of course, is what they are. Not exactly a winning political slogan.Gail: Can you make dysfunction a slogan? Maybe: Vote for this — total dys!Bret: Our colleague Michelle Goldberg got it right last week when she said that centrist Republicans would have been smart to team up with Democrats to elect a unity candidate as speaker, someone like Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican. But of course, that would have meant putting country over party, a slogan that John McCain ran for president on but hardly exists today as a meaningful concept.Gail: You know, my first real covering of a presidential race was the one in 2000, and McCain was my focus. I followed him around on his early trips to New Hampshire. He’d drive to a town and talk to some small veterans’ gathering or student club or anybody who’d ask him. And his obsession was campaign finance reform.It was pretty wonderful to watch up close. Later, he got a bill passed that improved the regulations. Can’t think of a current Republican candidate who is superfocused on driving out big-money donors.Bret: I thought McCain was wrong about campaign finance reform; he would often be the first to admit that he was wrong about a lot of stuff. But politics was more fun, more functional, more humane and more honorable when his way of doing business ruled Congress than it is with the current gang of ideological gangsters.Gail: So true.Bret: Speaking of our political malfunctions, our colleague Alex Kingsbury had a really thoughtful Opinion audio short talking about how violent Trump’s rhetoric has become. Trump had suggested that Gen. Mark Milley had behaved treasonously and said shoplifters deserved to be executed. One point Alex makes is that a second Trump term would very likely be much worse than the first. Do you agree, or do you think it will be the same Spiro Agnew-Inspector Clouseau mash-up we had last time?Gail: You know, a basic rule of Trumpism is that he always gets worse. Alex’s piece is smart, and his prediction is deeply depressing.Bret: The scary scenario is that Trump 2.0 makes no concessions to the normal conservatives who populated the first administration: people like Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster and Scott Gottlieb. So imagine Stephen Miller as secretary of homeland security, Tucker Carlson as secretary of state, Sean Hannity as director of national intelligence and Vivek Ramaswamy as vice president. This could be an administration that would pull the United States out of NATO, defund Ukraine, invade Mexico and invite Vladimir Putin for skeet shooting at Camp David.Gail: As I’ve pointed out before, this is one reason people watch football.Bret: Just wait until Steve Bannon somehow becomes N.F.L. commissioner during the second Trump term.Gail: One last issue: I know you’re not in favor of bringing up global warming when it’s time to admire the leaves, but whenever the weather gets bad now, I worry that it’s a hint of more dire things to come. This winter, if it’s colder than usual, I’ll be miserable because it’s … cold. But now I can’t really feel totally chipper if it’s warm, either.Bret: I really am concerned with the climate. But, hey, we may as well enjoy some nice fall weather while we still can.Gail: You totally win that thought. Look for the good moments whenever you can.Here at the end, you generally conclude with a poem or a nod to a great piece you read. Particularly eager to hear it this week.Bret: Did you know that one of Shakespeare’s sonnets touches on climate change? Here is another gem my dad had the good sense to make me memorize:When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’dThe rich proud cost of outworn buried age;When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’dAnd brass eternal slave to mortal rage;When I have seen the hungry ocean gainAdvantage on the kingdom of the shore,And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,Increasing store with loss and loss with store;When I have seen such interchange of state,Or state itself confounded to decay;Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,That Time will come and take my love away.This thought is as a death, which cannot chooseBut weep to have that which it fears to lose.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The election served as a midterm report card for Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the grades were not good.German voters handed a victory on Sunday to mainstream conservatives in a state election in Bavaria — as well as in the smaller central state of Hesse — while punishing the three parties running the country.While all three of the governing parties lost votes, symbolically at least, the far-right Alternative for Germany and another populist party were the evening’s clear victors, notching record results in both states when compared with other western states.The results were considered an important midterm report card for the national coalition government of the Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, which received some tough grades. They were also seen as a bellwether of the larger political trends building in the country, not least the fracturing of the political landscape as populist and far-right parties make inroads.Here’s what happened and what it means.The mainstream is eroding.In Bavaria, the conservative Christian Social Union, which has governed the southern region for nearly seven decades, received its lowest level of support in more than a half-century, garnering less than 37 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results.That will allow the incumbent governor, Markus Söder, to serve another term, but only in coalition with the populist Free Voters, who came in at well over 15 percent of the vote, despite a last-minute antisemitism scandal involving the party’s firebrand leader, Hubert Aiwanger.In Hesse, which has fewer than half the voters of Bavaria, the incumbent governor for the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or C.D.U., won a decisive victory after an ineffective campaign by the federal interior minister, who ran for the Social Democrats and came in third, behind the far-right AfD.Bavaria’s governor, Markus Söder, left, and Hubert Aiwanger, the leader of the Bavarian Free Voters party, in 2018 after signing the coalition contract in Munich.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut it was the vote in Bavaria that was the most closely watched, and the outcome was taken as further evidence of the erosion of Germany’s traditional mainstream political parties, left and right. It is a phenomenon that has been witnessed across Europe — in Spain, Italy and France, as well as in Scandinavian countries.Less than a generation ago, the Christian Social Union could depend on the support of large masses of German voters, earning it the name Volkspartei, or people’s party.No more.“The crisis of the mainstream parties has also reached Bavaria and is hitting the CSU with increasing force,” said Thomas Schlemmer, a historian of Bavarian politics. “Today, you vote based on your individual lifestyle, not because of tradition.”Even before Sunday’s vote, Mr. Söder and his Christian Social Union were having to govern in coalition with the populist Free Voters. Now, they will be even more dependent on the Free Voters, underscoring the Christian Social Union’s increasing vulnerability.Much the same has happened nationally to its sister party, the much larger C.D.U., the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, as center-right support has been eaten into by populist and extremist parties, like AfD.Virtually the only reason the AfD, which came in second at just under 16 percent, did not do better in Bavaria was the presence of Free Voters, a homegrown Bavarian party with populist tendencies, which split the right-wing vote.Populists are rising.The Free Voters, a party that was founded by independent municipal and district politicians in 2009, is playing an ever-larger role in Bavarian state politics, where it is once again expected to be the junior partner in the state coalition.Its outsize role has underscored the rise of populist forces nationwide.Mr. Aiwanger, a fiery beer-tent speaker, has become the face of the party, bringing it further toward populism by criticizing immigration and environmental legislation.Mr. Aiwanger speaking at a campaign event on Thursday in Mainburg, Germany.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressAt an event this summer, Mr. Aiwanger called for the “silent majority” to “take back democracy” from the government in Berlin, in language that for many Germans evoked the country’s Nazi past. Although he was criticized by other politicians and the mainstream news media, the speech did nothing to quell his popularity among voters.“The success of the Free Voters is due to Hubert Aiwanger’s populist impulses and not to the constructive policies they have pursued in the municipalities for many decades,” said Roman Deininger, a reporter with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a daily newspaper based in Munich, who has followed Bavarian politics for decades.Mr. Aiwanger and his party managed to succeed despite a campaign marred by scandal in August, when Mr. Aiwanger was discovered to have had a homemade antisemitic handbill in his possession while he was in high school in the 1980s.Mr. Aiwanger quickly turned the scandal into an advantage, claiming that the newspaper that broke the story had waited until the heat of the campaign to discredit him. Voters apparently believed the narrative: Mr. Aiwanger and his party saw a bump in polling numbers.The Greens are despised.Throughout the campaign, conservative and populist parties made the left-leaning environmentalist Green party a stand-in for the governing coalition of Mr. Scholz.Though the Greens are just one of three parties in the coalition, along with the center-left Social Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats, they were singled out for special antipathy.“The Greens are the new enemy,” said Andrea Römmele, a political analyst at the Hertie School, a university in Berlin. “It’s a framing that the Greens are somehow the party of bans and the opponent in a culture war.”Election posters in Unterempfenbach, Germany, near Mainburg.Matthias Schrader/Associated PressThe verbal attacks seemed to have had an effect. During one campaign appearance in Neu-Ulm, in the west of the state, Katharina Schulze and Ludwig Hartmann, the co-chairs of the Bavarian Greens, were onstage when a man in the crowd threw a stone at them.“That really was a shock,” Ms. Schulze, who campaigns with a police security detail, said in an interview.There were no confrontations during a majority of her campaign stops, she said, but added, “Of course our political competitors like to pour oil on the fire.”Despite that, the Greens in Bavaria came in at well over 14 percent.Mr. Söder, the governor, himself vowed he would not form a coalition with the Greens — even though Sunday’s election returns gave him the numbers to do so — and instead said he would continue in coalition with the populist Free Voters.“With their worldview, the Greens do not fit Bavaria, and that is why there will be no Greens in the Bavarian state government,” Mr. Söder said during a campaign stop in September. “No way!”Mr. Scholz’s coalition is in trouble.Although the results in Bavaria have no direct consequence on the government in Berlin, all three parties in the national coalition lost significant voter share in the election.The liberal Free Democratic Party, which occupies the important post of finance minister, is predicted to fail entry into the state house because of its bad showing.That portends badly for Mr. Scholz, who is about two years into a four-year term, especially because parties in Bavaria ran against his coalition in Berlin as much as against each other.In their stump speeches, both Mr. Söder and Mr. Aiwanger made dissatisfaction with the Berlin government their theme, railing against perceived dictums on gender-neutral speech, vegetarianism and rules for heating private homes — a Green party push that has engendered special animus.Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany last month in Berlin.Clemens Bilan/EPA, via ShutterstockThey also pushed back against the unpopular decision to close the three remaining nuclear power plants this past April.“The coalition is the worst government Germany has ever had,” Mr. Söder said during a speech last month.While such statements are typical of over-the-top campaigning, a recent opinion poll shows that 79 percent of Germans are unhappy with the coalition. Only 19 percent are satisfied with its work.Those are the government’s lowest approval ratings since it was formed in December 2021. More

More from our inbox:Defending GiulianiAntidepressants on Shirts: Don’t Trivialize Mental Illness Illustration by The New York Times. Photographs by Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “My Fellow Republicans Need to Grow Up,” by Bob Inglis (Opinion guest essay, Oct. 3):We are divided not by ideology but by a deep lack of willingness to consider ideas before party alliances.I wasn’t paying attention to politics until 2015. But Donald Trump was so outrageous I was shocked into political activism. I speak out often because silence is not an option.The MAGA followers I encounter on internet political sites call me Communist, Marxist, treasonous and fascist. I find their attitudes loathsome. I blame Mr. Trump’s constant attacks on anyone who speaks out against him — his most virulent and nasty attacks being against Democrats. We have become deeply divided because Mr. Trump models divisive behavior. I fear for our Republic.But, if I am honest, it is Mr. Trump who has taught me something vital. I must be careful of rejecting someone just because they are on the other side. At least I must be able to define our differences and find our similarities. As a result I may expand my point of view to be richer, more inclusive and balanced. And that is what our system of debate and compromise demands.Jo TraffordPortland, MaineTo the Editor:I appreciate Bob Inglis’s call for Republicans to stop with the mindless vilifying of their Democratic colleagues (and with them the millions of Americans who voted for them), and start engaging on substantive issues that really matter.Elected Republicans prioritize demonizing and scapegoating and temper tantrums over concern for the challenges of the lived lives of their constituents. Those challenges are shared, to varying degrees, by most Americans. Look for legislative common ground there.When elected Republicans at all levels of government start noticing the specifics of their constituents’ suffering, and then start using their offices to do something about it — that’s when we’ll know they’ve really grown up.Jeri ZederLexington, Mass.Defending GiulianiRudolph W. Giuliani’s drinking was long whispered about by former City Hall aides, White House advisers and political socialites. Now it has become a factor in one of the federal cases against former President Donald J. Trump. Erin Schaff for The New York TimesTo the Editor:In “Giuliani’s Drinking Is Subplot in Trump Inquiry” (front page, Oct. 5), I was quoted as saying:“It’s no secret, nor do I do him any favors if I don’t mention that problem, because he has it. … It’s actually one of the saddest things I can think about in politics.”While I don’t deny the quote — Rudy Giuliani had a drinking problem that he has dealt with, and I believe he is no longer drinking — I also said a lot of good things about Rudy.He was one of our greatest mayors. He cleaned New York City up and made it livable. He was a national hero during 9/11, when the country needed leadership. He was “America’s Mayor” and beloved by many.We should also not forget that he was a great U.S. attorney for the Southern District and prosecuted many people who committed heinous crimes.I have the greatest respect and empathy for this man, who did so much good.Andrew SteinNew YorkThe writer is a former president of the New York City Council.Antidepressants on Shirts: Don’t Trivialize Mental IllnessTo the Editor:Re “Prozac Nation, Meet Lexapro Sweatshirts” (Style, nytimes.com, Oct. 2):I cringed when I read this article about using the names of antidepressants on shirts. I personally think it trivializes the seriousness of depression. Having suffered from manic depression for 50 years now, I don’t see that as reducing the stigma of mental illness. It reflects privilege if anything.Too many moan about being depressed or anxious, but some of us are battling a chronic illness. And we see no point in publicizing our conditions. We are too busy taking care of ourselves.Nancy C. Langwiser-KearWellesley, Mass. More

With Democrats worried that a third-party bid could throw a tight race to Donald Trump, President Biden’s top aides have blessed a broad offensive to starve such efforts of cash and ballot access.Powerful allies of President Biden are aggressively working to stop third-party and independent presidential candidacies, fearing that an outside bid could cost Democrats an election that many believe will again come down to a few percentage points in key battleground states.As attempts to mount outside campaigns multiply, a broad coalition has accelerated a multipronged assault to starve such efforts of financial and political support and warn fellow Democrats that supporting outsider candidacies, including the centrist organization No Labels, could throw the election to former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden’s top aides have blessed the multimillion-dollar offensive, which cuts across the party, tapping the resources of the Democratic National Committee, labor unions, abortion rights groups, top donors and advocacy groups backing moderate and liberal Democrats. Even the president has helped spread the word: Mr. Biden, in an interview with ProPublica, said a No Labels candidacy would “help the other guy.”The endeavor is far-reaching. In Washington, Democratic allies are working alongside top party strategists to spread negative information about possible outsider candidates. Across the country, lawyers have begun researching moves to limit ballot access — or at least make it more costly to qualify.At expensive resorts and closed-door conferences, Democratic donors are urging their friends not to fund potential spoiler candidates. And in key swing states, lone-wolf operators, including a librarian from Arizona, are trying their own tactics to make life difficult for third-party contenders.The anxiety over candidates and parties traditionally consigned to the fringes of American politics reflects voters’ deep dissatisfaction with both men who are likely to become the major parties’ nominees. No third-party candidate has risen out of the single digits in three decades, since Ross Perot captured nearly a fifth of the vote in 1992. Given the devotion of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters, Democrats fear that most of the attrition would come from Mr. Biden’s fragile coalition.“They’ve got to understand the risk that they are exposing the country to by doing this,” said Richard A. Gephardt, a former House majority leader and a Democratic Party graybeard who has formed a super PAC to attack outsider campaigns. “This is too dangerous of an idea to put in play in this context, in this year. These are not normal times.”Mr. Gephardt warned that third-party candidates threatened not only Mr. Biden’s chances of victory but also the stability of American democracy. Internal polling conducted by his group found that an independent centrist candidate could attract more than 20 percent of the vote in competitive states, helping Mr. Trump in all but one of them.Richard A. Gephardt, a Democratic former House majority leader, has warned that third-party candidates threaten not only President Biden’s chances of victory but also the stability of American democracy.Steve Jennings/Getty Images for Square RootsIn recent days, two candidates have taken steps toward mounting independent bids. Cornel West, the left-wing Harvard professor, announced on Thursday that he would run as an independent candidate. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hinted that he may announce on Monday that he is leaving the Democratic presidential primary race to run as an independent. Already, a super PAC backing his bid has raised $17 million, according to Tony Lyons, the group’s treasurer.Still, most of the Biden allies’ attention is directed at No Labels, the best-funded outsider organization, which after years of sponsoring bipartisan congressional caucuses is working to gain ballot access for a presidential candidate for the first time.The group’s chief executive, Nancy Jacobson, has told potential donors and allies that the No Labels candidate will be a moderate Republican, according to three people familiar with the conversations. That decision would rule out Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat whose flirtation with the idea has prompted a wave of angst within his party.No Labels has already raised $60 million, Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, and has qualified for the ballot in 11 states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina. The group plans to spend about half of the money on securing ballot access across all 50 states.Ms. Jacobson said her organization was devoted to presenting voters with an option beyond Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump. No Labels is in the process of vetting potential candidates now and will announce its delegate selection process in the coming weeks, she said. The plan is to hold a nominating convention in April in Dallas and anoint a presidential ticket if it is clear the country is heading toward a 2020 rematch.Ms. Jacobson and her chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, insist that their effort is in good faith and is not a secret plot to help Mr. Trump win.“We’re never going to be a party to something that would spoil it for Trump,” Mr. Clancy said.No Labels has focused its recent polling on eight states that are expected to be competitive in a Biden-Trump contest, though Mr. Clancy said he believed a No Labels ticket would be viable in 25 states. If a third-party or independent candidate were to gain serious traction, it could reshuffle the entire presidential map, potentially turning states like New York or Texas into true battlegrounds.Mr. Kennedy has also been a source of concern for Democrats, who worry that his anti-corporate politics and famous last name could pull some of their voters away from Mr. Biden. But some of Mr. Biden’s top allies also believe that Mr. Kennedy, who has increasingly pushed right-wing ideas, would hurt Mr. Trump.The broad Democratic unease is rooted in a core belief that Mr. Trump has both a low ceiling and a high floor of general-election support — meaning that his voters are less likely to be swayed by a third-party or independent candidate. Mr. Biden has wider appeal, but his supporters are not as loyal, and polling has suggested that they could be persuaded to back someone else if given more options.Cornel West, the left-wing Harvard professor, announced on Thursday that he would run as an independent candidate.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has hinted that he may leave the Democratic presidential primary race to run for the White House as an independent.Public and private surveys point to increased interest in alternatives this election. In polling released this week by Monmouth University, majorities of voters said that they were not enthusiastic about Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden being at the top of their party’s ticket and that they would not back either man if the race became a rematch.Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the center-left group Third Way who is serving as a clearinghouse for Democrats’ effort to block third-party and independent candidates, is working with the progressive organization MoveOn and a host of like-minded Biden allies to dissuade anyone from having any association with No Labels. Those efforts are bankrolled by more than $1 million from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic megadonor.Mr. Bennett is using Third Way’s connections with centrist donors to try to block No Labels’ access to money, while Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, has been briefing other progressive groups and labor unions about the dangers of their members’ supporting third-party candidates instead of Mr. Biden.“Anything that divides the anti-Trump coalition is bad,” Mr. Bennett said.Marc Elias, one of the party’s most dogged and litigious election lawyers, has been retained by American Bridge, the Democratic Party’s primary opposition research organization, to vet ballot-qualification efforts by No Labels and other third-party efforts.And the Democratic National Committee has instructed state and county party leaders to say nothing in public about No Labels, according to an email the Utah Democratic Party sent to county leaders in the state.“We need to do everything we can to stop this effort NOW, and not wait until they name a ticket and this becomes a runaway train,” Thom DeSirant, the executive director of the Utah Democratic Party, wrote in a missive that included links to Third Way’s talking points about how to speak about No Labels.The efforts resemble hand-to-hand political combat in both public and private. The abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All wrote on social media that Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a Republican former governor of Utah who has been linked to the No Labels bid, is an “abortion extremist,” based on anti-abortion views he articulated during his 2012 presidential campaign.And Michael Steele, who served as a lieutenant governor of Maryland and as Republican National Committee chairman, has assumed the portfolio of persuading former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a moderate Republican who has publicly toyed with accepting the No Labels nomination, to end his association with the group.“I’ve told the governor what I think he should do,” Mr. Steele said.Perhaps nowhere has No Labels run into as many real-world roadblocks as in Arizona.After the group successfully qualified for the presidential ballot, the Arizona Democratic Party sued to remove it. That legal effort failed, but the attention led two people to submit candidate statements to run for down-ballot offices on the No Labels ticket — something the group had tried to block so as to avoid being categorized as a political party, which could trigger requirements to disclose No Labels donors, who have so far been kept secret.For different reasons, the Arizona candidates who are seeking the No Labels line could prove awkward for the movement.One of them, Tyson Draper, a high school coach from Thatcher, Ariz., is seeking the group’s line to run for the Senate. In an interview last week, he called himself a centrist political newcomer who had never sought public office before. A day later, he filed papers to begin a movement to recall Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.The other would-be No Labeler is Richard Grayson, an assistant librarian at a community college south of Phoenix.Richard Grayson, a librarian from Arizona, is trying his own tactics to make life difficult for No Labels.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesMr. Grayson, 72, is seeking the No Labels nomination for the state’s Corporation Commission, which regulates public utilities. He has appeared as a candidate for office dozens of times since 1982, and said he was a Biden supporter.“I’m a perennial candidate whose goal is to torture No Labels,” he said. “I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m tormenting them.”Rebecca Davis O’Brien More

Mourners gathered around San Francisco City Hall this week to remember Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most formidable politicians of her generation. Her passing meant not just the end of her political career, but also the end of a furious argument over her age and condition. Why did she stay in the Senate for so long? And even so, as one argument ends, others continue: about Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump and many others.I can’t remember the last time our country had a longer or more agonizing conversation about age. It kicked off in the most morally troubling way possible, in the early days of the pandemic, when a number of politicians, celebrities and even ordinary people minimized the severity of the disease in language that diminished the value of older Americans.Notoriously, in March 2020, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, went on Tucker Carlson’s television show and suggested that senior citizens should be “willing to take a chance” on their survival to preserve the American economy. In New York, nursing home deaths were deliberately concealed, an act that publicly minimized the magnitude of the loss.The right-wing influencer Candace Owens dismissed the seriousness of Covid, because, in her words, “people think it’s novel that 80 year olds are dying at a high rate from a flu.” I heard similar sentiments from members of my own community throughout the lockdowns. I can’t tell you how many times someone said, when an older person died, “How much time did they have left anyway?”This debate unfolded as the term “OK Boomer” was taking off, both as a silly mockery of tech-ignorant grandparents and an angry battle cry against an older generation that younger Americans believe failed them. Worse still, they just won’t get out of the way.It’s impossible to ignore the advanced age of key American leaders. Joe Biden is 80. Donald Trump is 77. Mitch McConnell is 81. Chuck Grassley is 90. Feinstein was 90 when she died in office. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 87. Age was on 76-year-old Mitt Romney’s mind when he announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election to the Senate. “At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s. Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders,” he said.I don’t equate all these situations. Some of the sentiments expressed at the start of the pandemic were monstrous. Concerns about aging and often infirm leaders at the highest levels of American politics, in all three branches of government, are far more understandable and much less grotesque than asking senior citizens to court death in the midst of a pandemic. The generational dismissiveness inherent in “OK Boomer” lies somewhere in between. Nonetheless, there is a common theme — a shift to viewing older people in America not as assets, but rather as obstacles. They’re barriers to our own dreams and ambitions.One column is insufficient for teasing out all the reasons for this shift, but I want to explore one aspect that bothers me greatly. The centrality of work and career to our sense of self and identity — especially in America’s educated classes — is damaging old and young alike. In 2019, Derek Thompson popularized the term “workism” in The Atlantic to describe how our careers have “morphed into a religious identity.” Earlier this year, he summed up the “history of work” like this: “from jobs to careers to callings.”In January, the Pew Research Center released a startling report describing parents’ priorities for their children. An extraordinary 88 percent said that financial independence was extremely or very important. The same percentage placed the same priority on their kids having careers they enjoy. In contrast, only 21 percent said it was extremely or very important for their children to get married. A mere 20 percent said it was extremely or very important for their kids to have children.Workism tells older Americans who might think otherwise that their job is core to who they are. Likewise, workism tells younger Americans that their job will define them. It is core to who they’re becoming. Read in this way, it is easy to see why older Americans are reluctant to simply “step aside.” If they feel able — and it’s easier to feel able when your job centers on your mind rather than your body — then the demand to leave is an attack on their essential identity.At the same time, for those who are seeking to forge their identity, the obstacle of aging leadership can be maddening. Young professionals do seek mentorship, of course, but all too often mentors are seen as valuable only so long as they keep giving. And then, when they’ve given all they can, they must decrease, so that their protégés can increase and take their place in the sun.It’s necessary to think hard about our first answers to a deceptively simple question: “Who are you?” If my honest first response is “I am a columnist” more than a husband, a father, or a grandfather, then when I get older I will wrap my arms around that identity and refuse to let go. If that first answer is centered on faith and family, then the sunset of my career will not be the sunset of my purpose. I will be more willing to release that which I value less because I still preserve that which I value most.But just as older Americans can have an obligation to let go of professions and power, young Americans can have obligations to hold on to their elders, to treasure them rather than shove them aside. Ancient wisdom can speak to modern conflicts, and ever since the onset of the generational conflicts during the pandemic, I’ve pondered a key part of the Westminster Larger Catechism, an almost 400-year-old statement of Protestant theology. It takes an expansive view of the Fifth Commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” The catechism asserts that father and mother don’t merely refer to your biological parents, but to “all superiors in age and gifts.”And what duties do we owe to the older people in our lives? The catechism outlines a beautiful balance. We are called to the “defense and maintenance of their persons and authority” at the same time that we are “bearing with their infirmities, and covering them in love.” In a true ethic of respect and care, the spirit of “OK Boomer” is nowhere to be found.The Mitt Romney Christmas card is legendary in some niche circles in Washington. Every December, he sends out a simple picture of his growing family. You can Google it and see it expand, year by year. First, he and his five sons could field a Romney basketball team. Then, when the sons married and had children, they could field a Romney football team. But that picture is also a declaration — this is who I am.Skeptics might claim that Romney let go of his power because holding it would be hard. In these polarized times, he was vulnerable to a challenge from the Utah right. Perhaps, but it’s also true that he retains immense purpose, and the picture captures that purpose. An ethos that locates our meaning in those relationships can tell the young to value the wisdom and experience of the old and tell our nation’s older generations that great blessings can flow from the end of even the most rewarding careers.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Poland’s Law and Justice party is using Germany as a punching bag to rally its base for the election on Oct. 15, a tactic driven by the country’s de facto leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.Amid rising alarm this summer in Poland and the Baltic States over a possible military attack from the east, the Polish Embassy in Lithuania requested an urgent meeting with the head of Germany’s diplomatic mission. Polish embassies in other European countries made similar requests.What the Polish diplomats wanted to talk about, however, was not the risk of an assault from Belarus or the war in Ukraine, but a less pressing matter: a demand that Germany cough up more than a trillion dollars to cover damage done by the Nazis during World War II.The issue of reparations, which was settled decades ago, is a personal fixation of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of the Polish governing party, Law and Justice. Last weekend, rallying supporters ahead of a critical general election next Sunday, he told a party convention that it was not only about the money, but also a “matter of dignity.”Demands that Germany pay Poland $1.3 trillion — the exact figure keeps changing — first surfaced several years ago, but they have flared with new intensity as Mr. Kaczynski looks for ways to secure his party a third consecutive term. Attacking Germany and its supposed hold on the leader of the opposition has become his main tool for mobilizing voters.Recent opinion polls put Law and Justice slightly ahead of its main rival, Civic Coalition, which groups center-right forces and progressives upset by the current government’s hard lines against abortion and minority rights. But neither of the front-runners is likely to win enough seats in Parliament to form a government on its own. Which side can do that will depend on the performances of smaller parties, including a far-right outfit opposed to helping Ukraine and a leftist coalition.Posters demanding that Germany pay reparations to Poland for crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II are seen in 2021 in Warsaw.Czarek Sokolowski/Associated PressLaw and Justice’s use of Germany to rile up its nationalist base in a tight race reflects the extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence of Mr. Kaczynski, 74. He dictates Polish policy on most matters of state even though he holds only one government post, deputy prime minister, a position that he assumed in June and that carries little formal power.“He always had an obsession about Germany,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, who served as defense minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Kaczynski. “There is no chance of getting any money, but this is a good way to excite voters,” he added.Mr. Kaczynski “is a virtuoso at playing on fear, on what is worst in us as a nation,” Mr. Sikorski said.The influence of Mr. Kaczynski is so great that “he is No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 in this country,” said Bartlomiej Rajchert, a political strategist who worked closely with Law and Justice on its successful 2005 presidential election campaign for Mr. Kaczynski’s twin brother, Lech Kaczynski, who died in a plane crash in 2010.The office of Mr. Rajchert’s consulting company, GDS, is next to Mr. Kaczynski’s on the second floor of a dingy, Communist-era building in the center of Warsaw that also houses Law and Justice headquarters. When Mr. Kaczynski is in town, Mr. Rajchert said, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, regularly visits him, as do other key government officials, apparently to receive instructions.“This is where important decisions get taken,” Mr. Rajchert said, pointing to Mr. Kaczynski’s office next door.Stanislaw Kostrzewski, Law and Justice’s longtime former treasurer, described Mr. Kaczynski as “a highly intelligent person” who “obviously doesn’t believe” the elaborate conspiracy theories featuring Germany that are being pumped out ahead of Election Day by a state broadcasting system controlled by the governing party.“It is all such nonsense, but it works,” Mr. Kostrzewski said. “I feel bad as a Pole because of the stupidity of my nation.”Donald Tusk, the leader of the opposition Civic Coalition party, last Sunday at an anti-government march in Warsaw. Mr. Tusk, according to Mr. Kaczynski, is not only a political rival, but a national traitor intent on selling his country out to German — and Russian — interests.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBashing Germans not only stokes grievances left by World War II, when Poland lost around six million people, but also helps turn boring political arguments over taxation rates and the age of retirement, currently 65, into an exciting moral drama.In that telling, Law and Justice’s main opponent, the Civic Coalition’s leader, Donald Tusk, a former prime minister, figures as a German lap dog who, in Mr. Kaczynski’s description, is the “personification of pure evil” who must be “morally exterminated.”Mr. Tusk, according to Mr. Kaczynski, is a national traitor intent on selling his country out to German — and also Russian — interests.Mr. Kaczynski recently starred in an anti-German election ad on television that features him taking a phone call from a Polish-speaking man with a comically thick German accent playing Berlin’s ambassador in Warsaw.The ambassador, with Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” blaring in the background, informs Mr. Kaczynski imperiously that the German chancellor wants him to raise Poland’s retirement age back to what it was — 67 — when Mr. Tusk was Poland’s prime minister from 2007 to 2014. Mr. Kaczynski sternly tells the ambassador that Warsaw no longer takes orders from Berlin. “Mr. Tusk is no longer here and these customs are gone,” he says.Casting Germany as a malevolent force in cahoots with Mr. Tusk helps justify the governing party’s long-running feuds over the rule of law and other issues with the European Union, which Mr. Kaczynski has described as a German-led “Fourth Reich.” Before returning to Polish politics in 2019, Mr. Tusk served as president of the European Council, the European bloc’s principal power center.Mr. Kostrzewski, the former party treasurer, said that Mr. Kaczynski had never cared about money or luxury — his car is a humble Skoda — and that his only real passion had always been politics, which took on a cold, deeply cynical edge after his brother’s death.Left alone in command of Law and Justice and free of his brother’s moderating influence, Mr. Kaczynski, Mr. Kostrzewski said, stacked the party and the government it formed after winning a 2015 election with “people who only tell him what he wants to hear” and who serve his “Machiavellian vision of executing power.”Mr. Kaczynski with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland, left, and Mariusz Blaszczak, the country’s defense minister, in August at the Law and Justice party’s headquarters in Warsaw.Radek Pietruszka/EPA, via ShutterstockFor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski — an opposition member of Parliament and deputy chairman of the legislature’s foreign affairs committee, whose father was an Auschwitz survivor and Poland’s foreign minister after the end of Communist rule — Law and Justice’s crude pre-election antics mean that “we have no foreign policy anymore, only foreign affairs for domestic use.”Mr. Kaczynski, he said, “thinks that whatever damage he does by being fanatically anti-German does not matter so long as it helps mobilize core voters.”For weeks now, state television has peppered news broadcasts with a recording of two single words — “für Deutschland” or “for Germany” — uttered by Mr. Tusk during a 2021 speech in German that thanked Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party for its role in healing Europe’s divisions at the end of the Cold War.The two words — a tiny and misleading fragment of what Mr. Tusk said — have become Exhibit A in Law and Justice’s case against the opposition leader as a German stooge.Aimed at rallying a party base that is mostly older, rural and often resentful of foreigners, the barrage of anti-German messaging has stunned and appalled Germans invested in postwar reconciliation and Poles who want to see their country as a serious player.At a security conference this past week in Warsaw — an event that was meant to spotlight Poland as Europe’s “new center of gravity” because of the war in Ukraine — politicians and experts from Poland and Germany bewailed the damage done to Poland’s image and European solidarity by Law and Justice’s pre-election stunts.A monument in Warsaw honoring the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. In the view of many Poles, Polish suffering in World War II has often been ignored by outsiders.Anna Liminowicz for The New York TimesIn an interview, Knut Abraham, a member of the German Parliament and a former diplomat in Warsaw, described Law and Justice’s demonization of Germany and Mr. Tusk as “not only nonsense, but insane,” accusing the Polish governing party of shredding hard-won postwar reconciliation for electoral gain. Last year, Mr. Abraham accompanied the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union to Mr. Kaczynski’s office in Warsaw. The Polish party leader, he recalled, was civil, even charming, but peppered the conversation with historical references to slights against Poland. He is a “hard-core Polish nationalist” with a keen eye for political advantage, Mr. Abraham said.And no issue is easier to exploit at election time than the wounds of World War II, in which Polish suffering, in the view of many Poles, has been often ignored by outsiders focused on the Holocaust, a big part of which took place in Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland.Pawel Poncyliusz, who served as Mr. Kaczynski’s press officer before jumping to the opposition, said his former boss had a genuine interest in history but had harnessed the horrors endured by Poland in the past to serve his political ambitions.A lifelong bachelor who lives alone in the same modest Warsaw house he shared with his mother until her death a decade ago, Mr. Kaczynski, he said, “does not need women, money or holidays in Asia” but desperately needs to win and hold power.“In his head, he has unified himself with Poland,” Mr. Poncyliusz added. “Everything that is good for him is good for Poland. Everything that is against him is against Poland.”Anatol Magdziarz More