Elections

The front-runner in the parliamentary vote has pledged “not to send a single cartridge” to neighboring Ukraine, a sign of the flagging European support for a victim of Russian aggression.The victory of Robert Fico, a former prime minister who took a pro-Russian campaign stance, in Slovakia’s parliamentary elections is a further sign of eroding support for Ukraine in the West as the war drags on and the front line remains largely static.Slovakia is a small country with historical Russian sympathies, and the nature of the coalition government Mr. Fico will seek to form is unclear. He may lean more toward pragmatism, as Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has done since her election last year. Still, the shift in Slovakia is stark: It was the first country to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.The election results come as disquiet over the billions of dollars in military aid that the West has provided to Ukraine over the past 19 months has grown more acute in the United States and the European Union, with demands increasing for the money to go to domestic priorities instead.House Republicans declined to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in Washington last month, and tensions between Kyiv and the White House over Ukrainian military strategy have surfaced. In Central Europe, once the core of fierce anti-Russian sentiment among fearful frontline states that endured decades of harsh communist rule as reluctant members of the Soviet bloc, the war is now viewed with greater nuance.Mr. Fico’s victory, taking about 23 percent of the vote on a platform that included stopping all arms shipments to Ukraine and placing blame for the war equally on the West and Kyiv, is a case in point.He laced social conservatism, nationalism, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric and promises of generous welfare handouts in what proved to be an effective anti-liberal agenda, especially in small towns and rural areas.“The wear and tear from the war is more palpable in Central Europe than Western Europe for now,” said Jacques Rupnik, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris and an expert on the region. “Slovakia demonstrates that the threat at your door does not necessarily mean you are full-hearted in support of Ukraine.”Ukrainian artillery positions firing at enemy forces near the front line in the Donbas region this month.Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesA Globsec survey in March of public opinion across Central and Eastern Europe found that 51 percent of Slovaks believed either the West or Ukraine to be “primarily responsible” for the war. Mr. Fico, who served for more than a decade as prime minister until 2018, played off this sentiment.He adopted some of the rhetoric of Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orban, who has resisted the overwhelming Western position on Ukraine that Russia’s brutal invasion of the country was a flagrant violation of international law that must be resisted in the name of liberty, democracy and the sanctity of national sovereignty.“Fico was inspired by Orban, but does not have the same deep ideological roots, and is more of a pragmatist,” said Ludek Sekyra, a Czech businessman who chairs the Sekyra Foundation, a supporter of liberal causes. “He has been adept in exploiting unease over the vast influx of Ukrainian refugees, small-country resentment of the European Union and Russian sympathies that do not exist in the Czech Republic.”A possible coalition with another former prime minister, Peter Pellegrini of the social democratic Voice party, which won almost 15 percent of the vote, may increase the likelihood of pragmatism from Mr. Fico, who was responsible for Slovakia’s adoption of the euro and has shown strong pro-European sentiments in the past.With Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia all showing significant sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the tides have shifted in this part of Europe. Even Poland, an ardent supporter of Ukraine that has taken in more than 1.5 million refugees from there during the war, recently decided to close its border to low-price Ukrainian grain imports.The governing hard-right nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland is in a tense electoral standoff this month against the liberal opposition. Although the country’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczynski, remains staunchly anti-Russian, his nationalism and conservative values mesh with Mr. Orban’s and Mr. Fico’s. A PiS victory would undermine European unity further as the war shows no sign of a possible resolution.Mr. Kaczynski opposes the kind of European political, military and economic integration of which President Emmanuel Macron of France is a fierce advocate. There has even been murmuring of a possible Polish exit from the European Union — a far-fetched notion but one suggestive of the European tensions that the war has begun to feed.The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, left, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at a news conference in Kyiv on Thursday.Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven in Western Europe, a recent German Marshall Fund survey found that support for Ukrainian membership in the European Union stood at just 52 percent in France and 49 percent in Germany. In Germany, only 45 percent of respondents favored Ukrainian membership in NATO.Still, overall, the survey found that on both sides of the Atlantic, some 69 percent of people favor financial support for Ukraine’s reconstruction, while countries including Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Lithuania showed strong support for the Ukrainian cause across the board.“More and more, we are hearing a clear message to Mr. Zelensky: Please cut a deal with Putin,” said Mr. Rupnik.After the immense sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in defense of their country against a flagrant Russian aggression, that, however, is the thing most difficult for Mr. Zelensky to contemplate, let alone pursue.That a country on the Ukrainian border should now have voted for a man who has said he will “not send a single cartridge” of ammunition across that border can only increase the pressure on Ukraine’s leadership.It also poses evident problems for a European Union already worried that Donald J. Trump may retake the White House next year, and facing internal divisions that a Polish election may sharpen further. More

More than a year after its passage, much about President Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, is working.America is putting in more solar panels than ever before, with installations expected to be up 52 percent compared with last year. The law has helped lock in America’s transition to electric vehicles. Companies have announced more than $60 billion in E.V. manufacturing investments since the I.R.A. passed, and Hyundai is rushing to finish its new E.V. factory in Georgia because the law’s incentives are so good. Across the country, investment in all forms of clean-energy manufacturing has ramped up, with spending this spring five times the level of two years ago, according to a new tracker from M.I.T. and the Rhodium Group, a research firm.The law is supposed to do more than transform the economy, though. It’s also supposed to change how and even where Americans live. The I.R.A. contains nearly $9 billion in rebates meant to help people upgrade and decarbonize their homes — for example, install an induction stove, a heat pump or a new electrical or insulation system. Since the climate law passed last year, Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress have hyped the savings on energy that these policies will bring to consumers; that is, after all, the inflation that the law is meant to be reducing.But I have grown worried about these efforts — and about the next phase of the I.R.A.’s implementation more broadly. The building sector accounts for about 13 percent of America’s climate pollution, so the success of these programs is essential to the country’s decarbonization efforts. Yet more important, the execution of these programs poses a political risk for the Biden administration. These rebate and tax credit programs are some of the law’s most visible provisions. Other than the law’s electric vehicle subsidies, these home-focused policies will be most Americans’ best opportunity to get I.R.A. money in their pockets.If the programs fail, they could seriously mar the I.R.A.’s public image. And right now, they are faltering.Perhaps the biggest problem is inherent to their design. The most successful federal programs are simple, straightforward and easy to use. Think of the U.S. Postal Service sending free at-home Covid tests to all Americans or the relative ease of signing up for and receiving Social Security benefits. These new home-upgrade programs, meanwhile, seem likely to be especially persnickety, complicated and onerous for many Americans.That’s because, first, there are a lot of programs in play. Although the I.R.A. streamlined some of the most important existing climate tax credits (for example, for greening the grid), it included four home-focused programs. Two of these programs are tax credits meant to give Americans a tax discount when they install a new rooftop solar system, a geothermal-powered heater, a heat pump or another technology that reduces demand for carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Unlike other tax credits in the law, these programs have no income cap, so they can be used by wealthy Americans who can presumably afford to pay upfront to install residential equipment like a water heater. But like other new tax credits in the law, they require Americans to have some federal tax liability in the first place. If you owe nothing on your taxes, then you can’t get a discount.These credits are likely to be generous in aggregate, but in some cases they will be too small to spur a serious change of behavior. Installing a whole-home heat-pump system, for instance, can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but the I.R.A.’s new tax credit will cover only $2,000 of that in one calendar year.That’s when another set of programs is supposed to come in. The I.R.A. introduced a pair of rebate programs meant to help working- and middle-class Americans afford to upgrade appliances and other features of their homes. These two programs, known as HOMES and HEEHRA, are important. When it’s finally put in place, HEEHRA will lower the cost of heat pumps and other climate-friendly appliances at the point of sale, making them more affordable to consumers, including those who are not even aware of the policy. More than perhaps any other programs in the law, these rebates are meant to allow low-income Americans to reduce their monthly energy costs. And because they involve direct cash grants, using the rebates will not require oweing any taxes to the federal government. That is huge for retirees and Social Security recipients, many of whom have no earned income and little to no federal tax liability.Regardless of how consumers are reimbursed, the programs are exceedingly — perhaps even fatally — complicated. The reason they have yet to take effect is that although these programs will be overseen by the Department of Energy, they will be administered separately by each state’s energy office. The department is still finalizing the last few rules that will govern how these programs work. When it finishes that process, then states will apply for their share of the money. Only then — after states receive their funding and set up their programs — will they be able to start disbursing it to their residents.So far, very few state offices have received any funds from the programs — not even the preliminary funds meant to help them hire more staff members and manage administration costs. This could directly hurt the programs’ chances of success in the next year. State energy offices employ anywhere from a handful of people to more than 100, and they have now been tasked with overseeing complicated, high-stakes federal programs.The experts and business leaders I’ve talked to think that these problems will push any serious efforts to carry out the programs well into next year. Montana has said that it doesn’t expect to make rebates available until the first half of 2024. Georgia’s energy office recently estimated that rebates would become available by Sept. 30, 2024, at the latest — barely a month before the presidential election.Even then, major questions remain about how the programs will work. Democratic lawmakers have called on the Energy Department to consider allowing the rebates to be used retroactively — meaning that someone who bought, say, a heat pump in late 2022 could get free money for it under the law. But that would sharply increase the program’s complexity, and it would more quickly deplete the limited funds allocated to the rebates. The programs draw from fixed pools of funding — about $250 million per state — and when that money runs out at the state level, the rebates will lapse in most cases.This is not the only place where the I.R.A.’s implementation is mired in confusion. The initial rules of the home energy rebates have left state officials unsure of whether they can use someone’s eligibility for other social welfare programs, such as food stamps, to gauge whether they qualify for a rebate. (The Energy Department has published guidelines about this, but they are not comprehensive.) That may force states to set up expensive processes that will duplicate work that’s already been done and make it even more burdensome for people to use these programs. It’s also unclear whether households can use several Energy Department programs at once — such as the new HOMES rebates and the longstanding weatherization-assistance program — to reduce the cost of a major project.Unless the Biden administration acts now, these consumer-facing programs could be a big mess by next fall. They will have confusing criteria, work differently in each state and may require applicants to go through time-sucking paperwork before receiving any funds. They will not showcase the nimble, modern government, fighting for working people, that Mr. Biden hopes to sell to voters.The I.R.A. is going to change people’s lives — I have little doubt of that. But only eventually. And for the next year, many of the law’s benefits for average Americans will remain largely theoretical. The M.I.T. and Rhodium tracker says that of the $137 billion in announced clean-energy investment, only $37 billion — just 27 percent — has started to flow. There is a growing risk that as the presidential election arrives, the law’s most world-changing programs to stimulate clean electricity and E.V.s will have yet to show their impact, and its smaller programs will be mired in public operation headaches.There is recent precedent for such a failure. Although most Americans now approve of the Affordable Care Act, the law was blamed for Democrats’ losses in the 2010 midterms, and it remained desperately unpopular for much of the following decade. Even when Donald Trump was elected, most independents still disapproved of the law and wanted to see it rolled back. Only in 2017, when Republicans repeatedly tried to repeal the law, did popular opinion swing in its favor. It has remained popular ever since.The I.R.A., like the Affordable Care Act, aims for a higher purpose than being politically popular. But the law’s survival depends on its — and Mr. Biden’s — ability to win a literal popularity contest next year. Mr. Trump and other Republicans are already cultivating a hatred of the clean-energy transition among voters; failing consumer-facing rebate programs would be a gift to them. And if Mr. Trump wins next year, his team will have plenty of opportunities to undermine the I.R.A.’s emission-cutting policies, even without repealing the whole law.The aspirations of 30 years of climate policies ride on the I.R.A. If this one law is successful, it will open up other ways of making policy for the environment and economy; if it fails, then lawmakers will shy away from tackling climate change for years. The law’s home-rebate programs will not be large enough to fully decarbonize America’s millions of buildings. But if they are successful, then they will allow the creation of future policy that is.The I.R.A., I believe, is still on track to be a success. But voters won’t see the new E.V. factories that it’s building or the sparkling new manufacturing hubs. They will see what’s at Home Depot or in the back of their contractor’s pickup truck. And if people have to fill out 20 pages of paperwork just to save less money on a heat pump than they initially hoped for, that’s what they’ll always remember about the I.R.A.The climate fight might be waged in the streets. But it will be won in the appliance aisle.Robinson Meyer is a contributing Opinion writer and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change.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 more I consider the challenge posed by Christian nationalism, the more I think most observers and critics are paying too much attention to the wrong group of Christian nationalists. We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy. In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to Donald Trump.Three related stories illustrate the challenge.First, Katherine Stewart wrote a disturbing report for The New Republic about the latest iteration of the ReAwaken America Tour, a radical right-wing road show sponsored by Charisma News, a Pentecostal Christian publication. The tour has attracted national attention, including in The Times, and features a collection of the far right’s most notorious conspiracy theorists and Christian populists.The rhetoric at these events, which often attract crowds of thousands, is unhinged. There, as Stewart reported, you’ll hear a pastor named Mark Burns declare, “This is a God nation, this is a Jesus nation, and you will never take my God and my gun out of this nation.” You’ll also hear him say, “I have come ready to declare war on Satan and every race-baiting Democrat that tries to destroy our way of life here in the United States of America.” You’ll hear the right-wing radio host Stew Peters call for “Nuremberg Trials 2.0” and death for Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden. The same speaker taunted the Fulton County, Ga., prosecutor Fani Willis by shouting: “Big Fani. Big fat Fani. Big fat Black Fani Willis.”Then there’s Thursday’s report in The Times describing how an anti-Trump conservative group with close ties to the Club for Growth is finding that virtually nothing is shaking Trump voters’ confidence in Trump. As the group wrote in a memo to donors, “Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability.” Even video evidence of Trump making “liberal” or “stupid” comments failed to shake supporters’ faith in him.And finally, we cannot forget the astounding finding of a HarrisX poll for The Deseret News, showing that more Republicans see Donald Trump as a “person of faith” than see openly religious figures like Mitt Romney, Tim Scott and Mike Pence, Trump’s own (very evangelical) vice president, that way. It’s an utterly inexplicable result, until you understand the nature of the connection between so many Christian voters and Donald Trump.In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, there was a tremendous surge of interest in Christian nationalism. Christian displays were common in the crowd at the Capitol. Rioters and protesters carried Christian flags, Christian banners and Bibles. They prayed openly, and a Dispatch reporter in the crowd told me that in the late afternoon Christian worship music was blaring from loudspeakers. I started to hear questions I’d never heard before: What is Christian nationalism and how is it different from patriotism?I’ve long thought that the best single answer to that question comes from a church history professor at Baylor named Thomas Kidd. In the days before Jan. 6, when apocalyptic Christian rhetoric about the 2020 election was building to a fever pitch, Kidd distinguished between intellectual or theological Christian nationalism and emotional Christian nationalism.The intellectual definition is contentious. There are differences, for example, among Catholic integralism, which specifically seeks to “integrate” Catholic religious authority with the state; Protestant theonomy, which “believes that civil law should follow the example of Israel’s civil and judicial laws under the Mosaic covenant”; and Pentecostalism’s Seven Mountain Mandate, which seeks to place every key political and cultural institution in the United States under Christian control.But walk into Christian MAGA America and mention any one of those terms, and you’re likely to be greeted with a blank look. “Actual Christian nationalism,” Kidd argues, “is more a visceral reaction than a rationally chosen stance.” He’s right. Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They’re much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism.Arguments about the proper role of virtue in the public square, for example, or arguments over the proper balance between order and liberty, are helpless in the face of prophecies, like the declarations from Christian “apostles” that Donald Trump is God’s appointed leader, destined to save the nation from destruction. Sometimes there’s no need for a prophet to deliver the message. Instead, Christians will claim that the Holy Spirit spoke to them directly. As one longtime friend told me, “David, I was with you on opposing Trump until the Holy Spirit told me that God had appointed him to lead.”Several weeks ago, I wrote about the “rage and joy” of MAGA America. Outsiders see the rage and hatred directed at them and miss that a key part of Trump’s appeal is the joy and fellowship that Trump supporters feel with each other. But there’s one last element that cements that bond with Trump: faith, including a burning sense of certainty that by supporting him, they are instruments of God’s divine plan.For this reason, I’ve started answering questions about Christian nationalism by saying it’s not serious, but it’s very dangerous. It’s not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it’s exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States.That’s why the Trump fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself. In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the “prophecies” change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.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

In dueling speeches in California, the two Republican candidates pushed for mass deportations, a position that is as extreme as it may be unfeasible.As a presidential candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has said he would authorize the use of deadly force against people crossing the border, seek to end the practice of birthright citizenship and send the military to strike against drug cartels inside Mexico, a key ally of the United States, even without the permission of its government.Those positions put him on the hard right among the Republicans running for president, many of whom are tapping into deep anger among G.O.P. primary voters over immigration.Now, Mr. DeSantis, who often tries to stoke outrage with his border policies, has unveiled another extreme position: deporting all undocumented immigrants who crossed the border during the Biden administration.“Everyone that has come illegally under Biden” should be sent back, Mr. DeSantis said on Friday in response to a reporter’s question at a campaign event in Long Beach, Calif. “That’s probably six or seven million people right there. It’s going to require a lot of effort. It’s going to require us to lean in.”Though Mr. DeSantis greatly overestimated the number of people who have entered the country illegally since Mr. Biden took office, such mass deportations would require enormous investments in the nation’s immigration enforcement system and could do severe economic harm to key American industries.Conducting so many deportations would require Mr. DeSantis to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, authorize widespread raids into immigrant communities, significantly expand immigration detention space to meet national standards and substantially grow the fleet of airplanes used for deportations. Billions more dollars would need to be spent on bolstering immigration courts to adjudicate cases within months instead of years. Currently, some migrants who have recently arrived in the United States have been given court dates a decade from now because the immigration court backlog is so large.Still, Mr. DeSantis is not alone in his promises to upend the nation’s immigration system.Speaking to a crowd in Anaheim, Calif., former President Donald J. Trump pledged to enact the largest deportation in the country’s history.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesOn Friday, former President Donald J. Trump, who is leading the Florida governor by roughly 40 points in national polls, pledged to enact “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” if re-elected. Mr. Trump was speaking at the same time as Mr. DeSantis, roughly 20 miles away at a convention of Republican activists in Anaheim, Calif.The dueling speeches highlighted how crucial an issue border security has become in the Republican presidential primary. At his campaign event, Mr. DeSantis took the opportunity to criticize Mr. Trump, saying that his rival had failed to “get the job done” on the border during his first term. Though the two men are largely aligned on immigration policy, Mr. DeSantis is making the argument that he would be more effective in carrying out a hard-line vision.“I would note that the former president is campaigning on the same promise he made in ’16 that he didn’t deliver on,” Mr. DeSantis said.With his “six or seven” million figure, Mr. DeSantis was probably referring to the roughly six million people who have been caught crossing the border since 2021. That is about double the number of unauthorized immigrants who actually entered the country under Mr. Biden and are still here.Of those six million, at least 1.6 million have been allowed to stay in the country temporarily and face charges in immigration court. Officials estimate about 1.5 million others have entered the country illegally without being detained.The government estimates about 11 million undocumented people live in the country overall.Mass deportations are not as simple as the Republican contenders make them sound.Many of the people they call illegal immigrants are eligible for legal status in the United States or are already here on a legal status. An example of a legal status is Temporary Protected Status, the humanitarian benefit Mr. Biden just extended to nearly 500,000 Venezuelans who have come to the country since the spring of 2021. People who are in the country and eligible for legal status are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, said Greg Chen, the senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.The time it would take to remove millions of people is substantial. In the past, the greatest number of deportations has been around 400,000 a year. The year with the highest number in recent history is 2013, during the Obama administration, when there were more than 432,000. During the Trump administration, the year that saw the most deportations was 2019, with more than 359,000.Deporting such a large amount of people poses “logistical, practical and legal challenges,” said Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration.Justin Hamel for The New York Times“DeSantis’s statement demonstrates his utter lack of any understanding of immigration enforcement operations,” Mr. Chen said. “At a practical level, deporting that many people would be impossible in even a single term.”Mr. Chen also pointed out the serious economic costs of deporting many of the workers who take on the United States’ most dangerous and low-paying jobs, particularly in agriculture.Immigration laws signed by Mr. DeSantis in Florida this year have already led to worker shortages in the agricultural sector, as well as in construction and hospitality, some employers have said. In addition, undocumented workers play a key role in hurricane cleanup in the state, but many have said they would no longer risk traveling to Florida because of the threat of deportation.There is also a significant diplomatic component to deportations — countries must be willing to take back their citizens, and the United States must have relations with those countries to coordinate those return trips. This stipulation would pose a huge challenge in returning the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have fled to the United States in the past few years. A DeSantis or Trump administration would most likely need to reestablish diplomatic relations with Venezuela and recognize the government of Nicolás Maduro — something Mr. Trump did not do as president — to carry out their plans.“Mass deportations are really, really, really hard to do,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant organization. “The political backlash would be enormous.”Ron Vitiello, a former acting director of ICE during the Trump administration, acknowledged that there were “logistical, practical and legal challenges” to deporting so many people. But he said that immigrants would continue to cross the border illegally if they believed that they would be able to stay long-term.“If the rest of the world believes they’ll never be deported, that is an incentive for lots of people,” Mr. Vitiello said. “You have to end the incentives to change the traffic patterns at the border.”When Republicans tried to enact comprehensive immigration reform under President George W. Bush, the idea of deporting large numbers of undocumented people was not considered realistic or desirable, reflecting how deeply the political mood in the G.O.P. has shifted in the years since.“Mass deportation is not a workable solution,” the Bush administration argued in a 2007 fact sheet, at a time when the population of unauthorized immigrants was even higher than it is today. “Deporting the millions of illegal immigrants who are already in the country would be impractical, harmful to our economy, and potentially devastating to families with deep roots in their communities.”Jonathan Swan More

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a part of the American landscape for so long that the improbability of his story is all too easy to take for granted: An immigrant bodybuilder from Austria with a long and unwieldy name, a heavy accent and a physical appearance unlike that of any other major movie star became one […] More

The former governor of South Carolina, who was ambassador to the United Nations under Donald Trump, now needs to appeal to early state voters.About 15 minutes after Nikki Haley took the stage at a town hall in a Des Moines suburb on Saturday, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, was heckled — twice — by men demanding to know her views on Taylor Swift.Members of the crowd booed, and both questioners were escorted out. Ms. Haley — who often tells audiences in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina that she is no stranger to dealing with hostile actors — took a beat.Then, she smiled.“Remember how blessed we are that we have freedom of this speech in this country,” she said, scanning the crowd. Then, after a smattering of applause, Ms. Haley went back to her message about slashing federal spending.Ms. Haley’s mastery of moments like these, in front of crowds and in the first two Republican debates — during which she successfully fended off interruptions and delivered pithy, memorable one-liners — has delivered buzz, attention and money. But her successes, while notable, are qualified: She and the rest of the pack are polling significantly behind former President Donald J. Trump. And both nationally and in first-in-the-nation Iowa, she lags behind Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.To boost her chances, Ms. Haley is banking on events like Saturday’s town hall, an intimate gathering of around 150 people in a nondescript ballroom festooned with campaign posters.Ms. Haley staged a kind of political theater in the round, standing on a platform surrounded by audience members on all sides. Dressed casually, Ms. Haley played more to the crowd than to the cameras. She emphasized her small-town origins and nodded to her alma mater’s football team, Clemson. Though one-liners have challenged some of her rivals, Ms. Haley’s jokes elicited the desired response.Yet even as she commanded a room filled largely with people leaning toward supporting her, Ms. Haley still had yet to fully win some over.Nancy Vaught, of West Des Moines, said that she had been impressed with Ms. Haley’s performance in the debates and was drawn to her experience, particularly her record on international affairs. “Our world is in really dire straits,” Ms. Vaught said, “and we need somebody to take control who can deal with the international world.”But Ms. Vaught also said that she had not ruled out the other candidate with international experience in the race: Mr. Trump.The former president and his team appear to be considering Ms. Haley a more serious contender. During Wednesday’s debate, the Trump campaign sent a news release assailing her for not being conservative enough.On Friday, Mr. Trump attacked Ms. Haley on Truth Social, his social media platform, referring to her as “birdbrain” and criticizing her for running despite having told Fox News in February that “I’m glad she’s running, I want her to follow her heart.”Ms. Haley appeared to take the broadside in stride, posting a screenshot of it on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with the caption: “Love this. It means we are in 2nd and moving up fast!” She added: “Bring it!”Haley at a Fair-Side Chat with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds at the Iowa State Fair in August.Jeff Roberson/Associated PressThough Ms. Haley, 51, did not criticize Mr. Trump by name at her town hall in Clive, she did criticize the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill he signed in 2020. She also said that Republicans needed “a new generational conservative leader” if they wanted to win the popular vote in 2024. Mr. Trump, 77, did not win it in 2016 or 2020.With Mr. Trump the clear front-runner, Ms. Haley’s campaign has been trying to court Republicans opposed to his renomination or worried about his electability in a general race.Charlie Johnson, 69, who attended the Clive event, said that he initially backed Mr. DeSantis before the governor committed “blunders” that “put me off him.”Mr. Johnson, of Council Bluffs, pointed to a controversy over Florida’s standards for teaching about slavery in schools and Mr. DeSantis’s rhetorical vow to start “slitting throats” if elected, a reference to his plans to pull apart the federal bureaucracy.Ms. Haley’s performance in the debates, Mr. Johnson said, had partially won him over. But her experience helped seal the deal.“I got off the DeSantis train,” Mr. Johnson said. “And I really liked Nikki, so that’s where I’m at now.”Yet many of the same elements of Ms. Haley’s pitch — her age, her political experience and her track record in a governor’s mansion — are shared by Mr. DeSantis.Advisers to Ms. Haley will next month attend a meeting of a network of megadonors, where they and advisers to Mr. DeSantis are expected to make a pitch to those who are considering whether investing in a candidate other than Mr. Trump may be worthwhile.But in Clive, Ms. Haley was mainly focused on winning over the audience in front of her, telling the crowd that she would not shy away from hard truths, and that she would not dodge questions — including from hecklers.“I think we do need to give it to these fellas that happened to show up,” she said, about 20 minutes after her stump speech had been interrupted. “Yes, I do like Taylor Swift.” More

In much of Europe, the election was seen as a bellwether of mainstream support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. But voters seemed most concerned with pocketbook issues.Two exit polls released early Sunday after Slovakia’s parliamentary election showed a tight finish between a liberal party that wants to maintain robust support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and a Russia-friendly populist party, in a vote that many in Europe saw as a bellwether of support for the war.But neither of the top two finishers came close to winning a majority, leaving the shape of the next government — and its policy toward Ukraine — dependent on the performance of smaller parties with widely differing views on Russia and on their readiness to form a coalition with either Progressive Slovakia, a liberal grouping, or a rival party headed by Robert Fico, a pugnacious former prime minister strongly opposed to helping Ukraine.Faced with a plethora of choices between communists and far-right nationalists, Slovakia, a small Central European nation that borders Ukraine, voted on Saturday in a general election freighted with outsize consequences about the West’s support for Ukraine.Twenty-five parties from across the political spectrum put up candidates for Parliament, but the first- and second-place finishers — separated by less than two percentage points, according to exit polls — offered diametrically opposed positions on Ukraine.Exit polls indicated that Progressive Slovakia, a liberal party that wants to continue support for Ukraine, had finished just ahead of Mr. Fico’s Smer party.Analysts cautioned that the official vote count, which was expected to drag on until Sunday morning, could put either party in the lead but with such a narrow margin that both have a shot at forming a coalition government. Early official results that gave Mr. Fico’s party a strong lead came mostly from villages, which are more conservative, and did not include liberal-tilting cities like Bratislava, the capital.The seemingly close result leaves Voice, the social democratic party of Peter Pellegrini, an estranged former ally of Mr. Fico, as a likely kingmaker.Despite near-constant political upheaval since the last election in 2020, Slovakia, a member of the European Union and NATO, has been a particularly robust and steady supporter of Ukraine in its war with Russia, welcoming refugees and providing millions of dollars’ worth of mostly Soviet-era weapons. It was the first country to provide Ukraine with fighter jets and air defense missiles.Given Mr. Fico’s vociferous opposition to aiding the Ukrainians, the election was closely watched across Europe as an indicator of mainstream consensus on the war.But Slovakia’s election, for most voters, was not primarily about Ukraine, said Dominika Hajdu, an analyst with Globsec, a research group based in Bratislava. “It was more about values, conservatism versus liberalism” and bread-and-butter issues, like food and fuel prices.As in many other European countries, Slovakia has a proportional voting system that helps smaller parties win seats, so long as they get 5 percent of the vote, and that makes the shape of the government dependent on which smaller parties meet the threshold.Mr. Pellegrini, whose Voice party finished third, according to exit polls, campaigned on promises to strengthen the state and lower grocery prices. He shares the anti-immigrant views of Mr. Fico, his former boss, and of the far-right nationalist party Republika. Unlike Mr. Fico and the far right, though, Mr. Pellegrini has shown no interest in halting support for Ukraine.Voice, the party of former Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, could be a kingmaker.Darko Bandic/Associated PressMr. Fico’s party, Smer, led in the polls throughout much of the campaign but lost momentum in recent days, as previously undecided voters, apparently put off by Mr. Fico’s often aggressive style, sought calmer alternative candidates.Mr. Fico served for more than a decade as Slovakia’s prime minister until he was forced to step down in 2018 amid widespread public outrage over the murders of Jan Kuciak, a young investigative journalist who was digging into government corruption, and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova.Mr. Fico was succeeded as prime minister by Mr. Pellegrini, a protégé who later formed his own rival party.Progressive Slovakia, which narrowly failed to win seats in the last election, appears to have benefited in Saturday’s vote by its distance from Mr. Fico and the often squabbling center-right politicians who have run the country for the last three years in a series of unstable coalitions.Previously, the only E.U. member to speak out forcefully against aiding Ukraine was Hungary, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an increasingly authoritarian leader whose constant clashes with his nominal partners in NATO and the E.U. on a range of issues have made his country a noisy outlier with limited influence.Slovakia, governed since 2020 by a series of mainstream, if fractious and very unstable, coalition governments, played an important and early part in rallying Europe’s support to Ukraine and cannot be as easily ignored as Hungary, which officials in Brussels and other major European capitals have come to see as an inveterate troublemaker.Michal Simecka, who leads the Progressive Slovakia party, is a former journalist and a member of the European Parliament. Vladimir Simicek/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe failure of any party to win anything near a majority on Saturday opened the way to laborious back-room haggling over the composition of a new coalition government which could leave either of the probable top two finishers — Mr. Fico’s Smer party or Progressive Slovakia, led by Michal Simecka, a former journalist and liberal member of the European Parliament — in overall charge.Mr. Fico vowed during the campaign to “not send a single cartridge” of ammunition to Ukraine if elected and staked out increasingly pro-Russian views, a position amplified by a galaxy of small but influential Moscow-friendly news media outlets in Slovakia and pro-Russian voices on social media.The vice president of the European Union’s executive arm in Brussels, Vera Jourova, a Czech politician responsible for digital policy, called last week on digital platforms like Facebook and TikTok to do more to blunt what she described as Russia’s “multimillion-euro weapon of mass manipulation” ahead of elections in Slovakia, and in Poland in mid-October.The Slovak vote, she said, was a “test case” for Russia’s ability to influence voters’ choices through online disinformation.Slovakia has deep pools of genuine sympathy for Russia stretching back to the 19th century, when an early Slovak nationalist politician and writer, Ludovit Stur, despairing of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s grip on the region, looked to Russia, a fellow Slavic nation, for help. He suggested that land inhabited by Slovaks be absorbed by the Russian Empire.Russia has worked hard to strengthen these historical sympathies through pro-Russian media outlets and groups like Brat za Brata, or Brother for Brother, a belligerent motorcycle gang affiliated with the Kremlin-sponsored Night Wolves bikers’ group in Russia, which has an influential presence on social media. A Globsec survey in March of public opinion across Eastern and Central Europe found that 51 percent of Slovaks believed either Ukraine or the West to be “primarily responsible” for the war. The figure is much lower in other Eastern European countries.Any shift away from support for Ukraine by whatever coalition government is ultimately formed would be unlikely to reduce the flow of arms significantly, given that Slovakia has already given most of what it can spare. Still, it could help bring into the mainstream calls for an end to support, or at least a reduction, which are so far limited to Europe’s political fringes.The slow progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against entrenched Russian positions in Ukraine’s south has dampened expectations of a quick victory and amplified voices in France and other major European countries opposed to an open-ended commitment to arming Ukraine. More

When I was interviewing Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2011 for a book about San Francisco’s tumultuous history from the 1960s to the ’80s, she suddenly began to tear off her microphone and terminate the exchange. My offense? I asked about her decision as mayor of the city to veto a 1982 ordinance that would have extended health insurance benefits to live-in partners of municipal employees, including lesbians and gay men. I managed to coax the irate Ms. Feinstein back into her chair, but she had clearly drawn a line: I’m ready to leave whenever I don’t like the direction this is headed.Ms. Feinstein could be imperious, thin-skinned and intolerant. She was also the leader that San Francisco sorely needed on Nov. 27, 1978, when she was abruptly thrust, at the age of 45, into City Hall’s Room 200 after Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated by another colleague, Dan White.“This will not be a rudderless city,” she firmly told the shellshocked public after the murders, even though she was shaken by them. When she met with the hastily assembled press soon after the killings, her skirt was stained with Mr. Milk’s blood.During her nine plus years as the first female mayor of the famously cantankerous metropolis, Ms. Feinstein won the grudging respect of the old boys’ network that had always run City Hall. She managed to steer San Francisco between the liberal, freewheeling future that Mr. Moscone aimed toward — the era of San Francisco values — and its older, more conservative traditions, including its downtown business interests. As mayor, she opposed rent control on vacant housing and some demands from the gay community, like domestic partner legislation. But she also pushed through a tough gun control ordinance, environmental regulations and pro-labor laws and hosted a wedding ceremony of lesbian friends in her backyard.All the while, she kept a strong hand on the rudder, emphasizing law and order and putting more cops on the streets but also drawing the line against police mayhem after the White Night riot and violent police sweep of the gay Castro district after the stunningly lenient verdict for Mr. White.“This city has to be managed,” she said. “If you don’t manage, it falls apart.”The Chinatown activist Rose Pak witnessed Ms. Feinstein’s hands-on approach one day when she was riding with her in the mayoral limousine. Spotting an older man collapsed on the sidewalk, Ms. Feinstein ordered her chauffeur to stop, jumped out, wiped foam from the stricken man’s lips and began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him. People later commented that this incident proved she was not a cold fish.“But I didn’t see it that way,” Ms. Pak recalled. “I saw her as a doctor’s daughter and a doctor’s widow, doing the proper clinical thing.”Most important, Ms. Feinstein became a national face of AIDS compassion when President Ronald Reagan was ignoring the growing suffering and conservative activists like Patrick Buchanan were crowing that the disease was nature’s “awful retribution” on gay men. When the gay progressive supervisor Harry Britt, who often clashed with the mayor, brought Ms. Feinstein the city’s first AIDS proposal in 1982, she told him simply, “Fund everything.”Other cities dumped their AIDS patients on San Francisco, including a notorious incident in 1983 when hospital officials in Gainesville, Fla., put a dying man on a plane to the city, miles from his loved ones. San Francisco took care of the sick men, but Ms. Feinstein denounced the practice as “outrageous and inhumane.”“Dianne spent more time visiting AIDS patients in hospitals than I did,” Mr. Britt remembered. “She was a giver. She was a very compassionate person. I don’t want to say ‘queenly,’ because that sounds negative, but she was a good queen.”Led by Ms. Feinstein — and the city’s gay and lesbian activists and frontline medical workers — San Francisco wrapped the sick and dying men in its arms and finally became the city of its eponymous friar, St. Francis, who cared for the needy.San Francisco made Dianne Feinstein, but until the gunfire that exploded at City Hall, she had concluded that her political career as a city supervisor was over. After returning from a challenging trek through the Himalayas that month with her future husband, the investment banker Richard Blum, she recalled, “I was firmly convinced I was not electable as mayor.”Ms. Feinstein was widely perceived as too starchy, a goody-goody, the Margaret Dumont in a wacky city filled with Marx Brothers. She was raised to be a political animal; her paternal uncle Morris Goldman, a clothing manufacturer and Democratic Party wheeler-dealer, took her as a girl to “board of stupidvisors” meetings and pointed out how the flick of a city boss’s cigar could change the vote tally. But later, as a young civic reformer, when she visited a hippie commune in the Haight-Ashbury district that had been trashed by a police raid or seedy porn theaters or the down-and-out Tenderloin neighborhood (where she posed as a prostitute in a wig), Ms. Feinstein came off as slightly ridiculous.Newly elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Ms. Feinstein addressed the hard-luck worshipers at Glide Memorial Church, lecturing them about the importance of good hygiene and hard work — and predictably got a tepid response from the congregation. “Dianne,” Glide’s minister, the Rev. Cecil Williams, told her later, “you don’t talk that way to these folks. If they had a place to get cleaned up, most of them would get cleaned up. If they could get a job, they’d get a job.”But Ms. Feinstein — a daughter of privilege, educated at the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and Stanford University — did her political homework. She was ready to lead when history came calling.One day in 1979, when Ms. Feinstein, then the interim mayor, was campaigning for election, she went door to door in the city’s rough and redeveloped Fillmore district. Suddenly she was approached by a man who pointed a silver pistol at her head and pulled the trigger. She froze in fear; the City Hall assassinations happened the year before. Out of the man’s gun shot a butane flame instead of a bullet. She quickly gathered herself and went on campaigning. She won the election, even though The San Francisco Chronicle and key political establishment figures supported her more conservative opponent.“She ran the city with an iron fist,” Mike Hennessey, a progressive who served as San Francisco’s sheriff for 32 years, told me. “Of all the mayors I’ve worked with, she was the best. That’s because she took responsibility for this city. San Francisco is a very hard city to run. It’s very politically fractious. It takes a lot of work to hold it together. And that’s what Feinstein did.”In her three decades in the U.S. Senate, to which she was elected in 1992 (four years after her last term as mayor), Ms. Feinstein turned in a more mixed record. Over the years, she gained wide respect, even across the political aisle, for her hard work and political wisdom. But her success at banning assault weapons was undone, and her legislative record is uneven at best.In 2017, as a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, I warned Ms. Feinstein not to run again the next year for the Senate, writing that she would then be 85 and too old for the rigors of the job. But she didn’t listen — and neither did California’s voters.When I think of Dianne Feinstein, I think of her as San Francisco’s mayor. She may not have been the leader many San Franciscans (including me) wanted, but she was the one we needed.David Talbot is the author of, among other books, “Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.” 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