Elections

Israeli elections can be dramatic, and its five elections within four years have been full of political surprises and firsts, including the first time an independent Israeli Arab party joined a governing coalition. This series of new governments and the sometimes tumultuous process of forming them are part of Israel’s proud tradition as a boisterous and pluralistic democracy.Yet the far-right government that will soon take power, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, marks a qualitative and alarming break with all the other governments in Israel’s 75-year history. While Mr. Netanyahu clearly has the support of the Israeli electorate, his coalition’s victory was narrow and cannot be seen as a broad mandate to make concessions to ultrareligious and ultranationalist parties that are putting the ideal of a democratic Jewish state in jeopardy.This board has been a strong supporter of Israel and a two-state solution for many years, and we remain committed to that support. Antisemitism is on the rise around the globe, and at least some of the criticism of Israel is the result of such hatred.Mr. Netanyahu’s government, however, is a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland. For one, the government’s posture could make it militarily and politically impossible for a two-state solution to ever emerge. Rather than accept this outcome, the Biden administration should do everything it can to express its support for a society governed by equal rights and the rule of law in Israel, as it does in countries all over the world. That would be an act of friendship, consistent with the deep bond between the two nations.Mr. Netanyahu’s comeback as prime minister, a year and a half after he was ousted from office, can’t be divorced from the corruption allegations that have followed him. He is now doing everything he can to stay in power, by catering to the demands of the most extreme elements of Israeli politics. The new cabinet he is forming includes radical far-right parties that have called for, among other things, expanding and legalizing settlements in a way that would effectively render a Palestinian state in the West Bank impossible; changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, an action that risks provoking a new round of Arab-Israeli violence; and undermining the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court, thus freeing the Knesset, the Israeli legislature, to do whatever it wants, with little judicial restraint.Ministers in the new government are set to include figures such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was convicted in Israel in 2007 for incitement to racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization. He will probably be minister of national security. Bezalel Smotrich, who has long supported outright annexation of the West Bank, is expected to be named the next finance minister, with additional authority over the administration of the West Bank. For the deputy in the prime minister’s office in charge of Jewish identity, Mr. Netanyahu is expected to name Avi Maoz, who once described himself as a “proud homophobe.”These moves are troubling, and America’s leaders should say so. The Biden administration’s main response so far has been a cautious speech by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the liberal advocacy group J Street on Dec. 4, in which he declared that the United States would deal with Israeli policies, not individuals. The new government has yet to be formed, so it is not surprising that the State Department does not yet have a well-defined position, but the administration has already discussed, according to a report in Axios, how to manage its meetings with the most extreme members of the new cabinet and which core interests to focus on.This approach understates the potential consequences of the shift in Israeli politics that this government represents. The cabinet about to take charge is not simply another iteration of the unstable, shifting alliances that followed the past four inconclusive elections. Those coalitions, like many before them, often included fringe religious or nationalist parties, but they were usually kept in check by more moderate political parties or even by Mr. Netanyahu over the 15 years he served as prime minister.All that is now threatened. Right-wing parties have an absolute majority in the Knesset, and Mr. Netanyahu, hoping that the new government will save him from prosecution and potential prison time, is in their power. Among the targets of the new leaders is the Israeli Supreme Court, which, in the absence of a national constitution, has served to weigh government actions against international law and the Israeli state’s own traditions and values. The nationalists would diminish this authority by voting to give themselves the power to override Supreme Court decisions. Not incidentally, they have also proposed eliminating the law under which Mr. Netanyahu faces a possible prison term.As Thomas L. Friedman, a Times columnist who has closely followed Israeli affairs for four decades, wrote shortly after the election results were known, “We are truly entering a dark tunnel.” While Mr. Netanyahu in the past used the “energy of this illiberal Israeli constituency to win office,” Mr. Friedman wrote, until now, he had never given them this kind of ministerial authority over critical defense and economic portfolios.This is not simply a disappointing turn in an old ally. The relationship between Israel and the United States has long been one that transcends traditional definitions of a military alliance or of diplomatic friendship. A body of deeply shared values has forged powerful and complex bonds. A commitment to Israel, both in its security and in its treatment by the world, has been an unquestioned principle of American foreign and domestic policy for decades, even when Mr. Netanyahu openly defied Barack Obama or embraced Donald Trump. As Mr. Blinken said in his speech, the United States will hold Israel “to the mutual standards we have established in our relationship over the past seven decades.”Israel has been moving steadily rightward in recent years. That is, in part, due to genuine concerns about crime and security, especially after violence between Israeli Arabs and Jews last year. Many Israelis also express fear that the peace process has failed because of a lack of interest in peace among Palestinian leaders, a fear heightened by Hamas control in Gaza since 2007 and a sense that Mahmoud Abbas’s grip on the Palestinian Authority is coming to an end without a clear succession plan.Demographic change in Israel has also shifted the country’s politics. Religious families in Israel tend to have large families and to vote with the right. A recent analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute found that about 60 percent of Jewish Israelis identify as right wing today; among people ages 18 to 24, the number rises to 70 percent. In the Nov. 1 election, the old Labor Party, once the liberal face of Israel’s founders, won only four seats, and the left-wing Meretz won none.Moderating forces in Israeli politics and civil society are already planning energetic resistance to legislation that would curtail the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court or the rights of the Arab minority or the L.G.B.T.Q. community. They deserve support from the American public and from the Biden administration.Whatever the contours of the new Israeli government, the United States will continue to be engaged with it on many issues of shared concern. Negotiations on a new nuclear deal with Iran are all but dead, a situation that poses a threat to security across the region. The Abraham Accords, while not a substitute for peace with the Palestinians, normalized relations between Israel and several Arab nations. That is welcome progress, and the United States could play an important role in helping to expand them to include other countries, such as Saudi Arabia.While Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have long been moribund, the principle of someday achieving two states remains the bedrock of American and Israeli cooperation. Hopes for a Palestinian state have dimmed under the combined pressure of Israeli resistance and Palestinian corruption, ineptitude and internal divisions. Anything that undermines Israel’s democratic ideals — whether outright annexation of Jewish settlements or legalization of illegal settlements and outposts — would undermine the possibility of a two-state solution.America’s support for Israel reflects our two countries’ respect for democratic ideals. President Biden and Mr. Netanyahu should do everything they can to reaffirm that commitment.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

Newt Gingrich was not happy. It was the night of Dec. 6, minutes before the U.S. Senate race in Georgia was called for Raphael Warnock, and over on the Fox News show “Hannity,” the finger-pointing for Herschel Walker’s imminent loss had begun. One major culprit: TikTok.TikTok? The Chinese-owned social media platform, which hadn’t even existed at the beginning of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, should be banned “for national security reasons,” Mr. Gingrich said. “But as long as it’s legal,” he continued, “we have to learn to compete in a place like that, because that’s where Generation Z gets such a high percent of their information.” “We have to learn how to be competitive within it,” he added.That is one — and likely the only — point on which Mr. Gingrich and Annie Wu Henry would agree. At 26, Ms. Henry — or @Annie_Wu_22, as she’s known on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok — had been a relatively low-level staffer since July on Senator-elect John Fetterman’s campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race, when she took over Mr. Fetterman’s TikTok account. “John already had this amazing comms team working for him, and he himself had been a Twitter guy for years,” Ms. Henry, said on a video call from her apartment in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia. She was wearing sweats and a hoodie (“very on-brand today,” she said with laugh). “But we were able to move his voice and his message to other platforms,” she said.And those other platforms were even “more important than it might have been normally,” Ms. Henry said, because Mr. Fetterman couldn’t be out on the trail after his stroke in May.Ms. Henry quickly became, according to Mr. Fetterman’s director of communications, Joe Calvello, their “TikTok Queen.” The account accrued more than 240,000 followers in three months, with three million likes and tens of millions of views. Ms. Henry’s was able to make the fun serious, and the serious fun; and her motto — in life and on TikTok — is “embrace the cringe.” That is, let the world see you as your messy, authentic self. ‘Trust Young People’Of course you need to have a candidate who’s willing to let you do this. “John isn’t an Instagram dude” — polished, carefully curated — “and it also wouldn’t be him to put him on TikTok dancing around,” she said. “But if we can use a kind of a weird, quirky sound and edit our messages to be a little, well, not messy, but not superrefined, it aligns with who he is, who this campaign is.” Some of her hits: the video of Dr. Oz boasting about growing up “south of Philadelphia” followed by a map showing that on the other side of the water is … New Jersey, overlaid with Smash Mouth’s “All Star” (“Somebody once told me the world is going to roll me/I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”). Another one of her more cutting examples: a trippy TikTok duet of the heavy metal puppets in Psychostick’s “Numbers (I Can Only Count to Four)” with Dr. Oz being unable to count the number of houses he owns.After Mr. Fetterman’s stroke in May, communicating using social media was even “more important than it might have been normally,” Ms. Henry said.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesWhile she did not create Mr. Fetterman’s response to Dr. Oz’s infamous crudités video, in which he complains about the price of “crudités” and conflates the Philly grocery stores Wegmans and Redner’s, she did have a eureka fund-raising moment. For any donation above $5, donors would receive a sticker that read: “Wegners: Let Them Eat Crudité.” Very quickly, the money rolled in.“Annie is like this generational force,” said a young political operative known as Memes. He runs a Twitter account called @OrganizerMemes, an aggregator for clever political images and texts, which also serves as a place where harried young staffers can vent without being outed to their bosses. (Memes is 25, works in politics and would like to keep his job, hence the anonymity.) He considers Ms. Henry a close friend, though they just met non-virtually for the first time in Georgia, when Ms. Henry made a last-minute decision to fly to Georgia and help get out the Asian vote for Senator Warnock during the runoff. “Young people are often not trusted on campaigns to do stuff,” Memes said. “Annie is what happens when you trust young people to do what they’re good at.” Political tchotchkes and pop culture references fill Ms. Henry’s apartment in Philadelphia. Taylor Swift merch is mixed in with signed copies of books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem.Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times‘She Will Get What She Wants’Ms. Henry grew up in a rural, deeply conservative town in York County, Pa., the only child of Tom and Beth Henry, both special education teachers. She was adopted in China at 13 months. When her exhausted and thrilled parents were handed their new daughter, Mr. Henry said, the nurse told them, “This one is very proud, she will get what she wants in life.” From a very early age, her parents said, injustice would make her head explode. Her liberal but devoutly Methodist parents despaired when they could not get their daughter to go to church with them once she learned what gay marriage was, and that their church wouldn’t allow it. “I think because she was adopted in China and we had very few other ethnic races in our town, she might have felt like an underdog herself,” her father said. “Sometimes she was picked on. But when she saw someone else being picked on, she was furious.” She got her first smartphone in high school and was tweeting about the 2012 election before she could vote. Four years ago, she led the Black Lives Matter protests in her mostly white hometown.And it was her father who first told her about Mr. Fetterman. “When he was mayor of Braddock, I admired him for really helping people who were down and out, for standing up for the common person,” Mr. Henry said. “When he announced he was thinking about running for Senate, I told Annie, ‘This is a man you need to think about. This is someone you can support.’”She graduated from Lehigh University in 2018 — her honors thesis was about the intersection of identity and social media — and then worked a series of jobs: organizing for a couple of local Philadelphia politicians and doing social media for a bridal company to pay the bills. At the beginning of the pandemic, she wrote an essay that got attention about dealing with her ethnicity for the first time and feeling truly afraid as an Asian American in a country where the president was calling Covid-19 “the China Flu.” Wearing a mask in public, she would remind herself to “look friendly” and not sneeze or cough. Last year, she made her first viral tweet with a friend: a Stop Asian Hate meme that got millions of views, helped along by reposts from celebrities including Chrissy Teigen and Ellen Pompeo. Sophie Ota, Mr. Fetterman’s digital director, hired her at the end of July. The next few months, Ms. Henry said, were a blur. There were no days off. There was no time to check out what pundits were saying about the predicted “red wave,” and Ms. Henry and other staff members assiduously tuned out the news.Ms. Henry was also one of the only people on the campaign who had a car, which meant she was driving co-workers from one part of the state to the other, logging about 1,000 miles a week; the joke was that she had memorized the Pennsylvania turnpike, and knew all the best rest stops and coffee joints. (At one point the compliance officer, who checks on staffers’ expenses, looked at how many lattes she was buying and wanted to know who she was buying coffee for every day. They were just for her.)While she and Mr. Fetterman were often in different places, she would turn up at events early so she could shoot and post photos of the crowds, the lines, the people. At most events there was a tracker: a guy from the Oz team who monitored the goings-on. “That’s really common,” Ms. Henry said, “but this guy was there mostly to see if he could record John messing up words so they could make fun of John’s health. He recorded John’s kids too. There are ways to do this where you’re not rude and disrespectful.” Ms. Henry had a final word of contempt: “And he was using a camcorder.”Ms Henry has a fairly high online profile apart from her Fetterman connection. Her personal Instagram account (which has more than 80,000 followers) alternates information on how to get involved fighting racism and protecting abortion rights with selfies with rally pals like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker or the actress Kerry Washington. And Ms. Henry is not shy about supporting low-paying political work with a side hustle or two. She has teamed up not only with nonprofits that promote reproductive rights or protect democracy, but also with the occasional skin cream or vibrator manufacturer.Political tchotchkes and pop culture references — “just little references to people I look up to — fill her apartment. Her doormat reads, “In this house, we understand that basic human rights are not political issues and that science is a matter of fact not opinion. Welcome.” Taylor Swift merch is scattered around, and signed copies of books by Jimmy Carter and Gloria Steinem lie on the coffee table. Next to her door is a tote bag that reads: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Miss Elections.”She is trying to catch up on her real life after the blur of the past few months — answering emails, paying a speeding ticket and, perhaps most important, snagging tickets to the upcoming Taylor Swift concert. (She and Mr. Fetterman’s wife, Giselle, have “text bonded” over Taylor Swift, she said.) She is single and jobless, but like many of her ‌peers, not panicked.“I don’t know how this is going to play out, and I don’t necessarily want to know,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll have this, like, one big dream job forever.” She said she doesn’t think she wants to work on the Hill, though a recent Instagram post features her looking very Jackie O, mysteriously visiting the White House.And she is enjoying that first taste of celebrity. She said that she had recently been walking down the street and a man rolled down his window and yelled, “Are you Annie?” “I said ‘Yes,’ but kinda surprised/confused,” she texted to me. Then he shouted, “Thanks for all you did,” and sped off. More

In Leo Varadkar’s first stint as prime minister, he embodied for many his country’s move into modernity. But after several missteps, he now takes up the role for a second time, with the glow of optimism dimmed.When Leo Varadkar became Ireland’s prime minister in 2017, he was hailed as a fresh face in European politics, only 38 years old, his country’s first openly gay leader and the first with South Asian heritage — a personification of a rapidly modernizing state.Now he returns to office on Saturday, in a prearranged power-sharing deal, with that initial optimism dissipated, and with question marks over his judgment and leadership style.Mr. Varadkar, who trained as a doctor, was one of Europe’s youngest heads of government when he took over from Enda Kenny, then his party’s leader, who had become embroiled in a police whistle-blowing scandal. At the time, many Irish commentators viewed him as a breath of fresh air. He “comes across to the public, especially younger voters, as if he is not a politician at all,” the political columnist Stephen Collins wrote in The Irish Times in 2017.“In this anti-politician phase of Western democracy,” Mr. Collins added, “that is a crucial asset.”Much was expected of Mr. Varadkar as he climbed the ranks. The son of an immigrant — his father, who is also a doctor, is from Mumbai; his mother is an Irish nurse — Mr. Varadkar announced that he was gay in 2015 while serving as health minister. That statement, during a referendum about legalizing gay marriage, was cited by some as having contributed to the measure’s approval.Then, as prime minister, or taoiseach, Mr. Varadkar oversaw another referendum — and another cultural watershed in a country long a stronghold of Roman Catholic doctrine — this time to legalize abortion. That measure, voted on in 2018, was also approved.A crowd in Dublin reacting to the result of the referendum that liberalized the abortion law in 2018. The measure was approved while Mr. Varadkar was taoiseach.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesFor many, Mr. Varadkar, a conservative who had once opposed abortion and allowing gay couples to adopt, was a symbol of Ireland’s transition to a socially liberal, secular nation.But by the time Mr. Varadkar became prime minister, his party, Fine Gael, had already been in power for six years, and he could not shield it from deepening crises in housing, health and education on its watch. In the 2020 election, Fine Gael slumped to third place for the first time in its history and was forced into a coalition with a rival center-right party, Fianna Fail, to hold onto power.The coalition deal demoted Mr. Varadkar to deputy prime minister. Micheal Martin of Fianna Fail took over for the first two and a half years of the usual five-year term; now, Mr. Varadkar gets another chance.So far, his return to power has been marked by little fanfare, and there have been no announcements of major new policies, which would in any case have to be agreed upon with his coalition partners in Fianna Fail, the Green Party and a few independent lawmakers.Critics have pointed to Mr. Varadkar’s stiffness of manner and tendency to speak his mind, to the point of insensitivity, as counting against him in Ireland’s relatively conciliatory political climate.Last month, for example, Mr. Varadkar responded to reports that many young Irish people were thinking of emigrating to escape the housing and cost of living crisis by saying that they should not expect to find cheaper rents abroad.“The grass can look greener, and considering emigration is not the same as actually doing it, and many do come back,” he said in a radio interview.Traditional brick houses in Stoneybatter, a gentrified neighborhood of Dublin. The Irish government’s Central Statistics Office found that 43 percent of renters were thinking of leaving Ireland to find better and cheaper housing abroad.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesThose comments prompted a storm of social media posts from young Irish emigrants reporting that they had indeed found better and cheaper accommodation in major cities abroad. Critics noted that in 2021, Dublin was the most expensive city in the European Union for renting a small house or one-bedroom apartment — higher than Amsterdam, Berlin or Paris — and pointed out that rents in Ireland had increased by another 8.2 percent since then. This month, the government’s Central Statistics Office found that 43 percent of renters were thinking of leaving Ireland to find better and cheaper housing abroad.Lorcan Sirr, a housing policy lecturer at Technological University Dublin, said Mr. Varadkar’s comments portrayed him as out of touch.“The tin ear and lack of sensitivity to other people’s needs is fairly characteristic of his party,” Mr. Sirr noted. “Varadkar has had a fairly privileged housing upbringing in that he didn’t have to suffer the trials and tribulations that many young voters — now including many who would have voted Fine Gael — have to go through to find somewhere to live.”For the past two years, he has also been dogged by questions about the legality and appropriateness of his actions when, as prime minister, he leaked details from a closed negotiation with Ireland’s main doctors’ organization to an acquaintance with an interest in the talks.Without referring to anything in particular, this past week, Mr. Varadkar acknowledged his fallibility. “Everyone makes errors in judgment — you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t,” he told reporters, but he added that he was confident that he had the full support of the coalition.Whether the public is behind him is another question. At the start of this month, an opinion poll found that 43 percent would prefer Mr. Martin to remain Taoiseach. Only 34 percent wanted Mr. Varadkar to take over again. A month before, the two had been tied at 39 percent.Winning the next election, scheduled for 2025, looks to be an uphill battle for Mr. Varadkar. The agreement between his party, Fine Gael, and Fianna Fail — also in long-term decline — was seen as an awkward alliance to check the growing influence of an up and coming rival for power, Sinn Fein.Mr. Varadkar, center, with Micheal Martin of Fianna Fail and Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Fein leader, at an election debate in February 2020 in Dublin.Pool photo by Niall CarsonOnce the political wing of the militant Provisional Irish Republican Army, which used violence to try to end British rule in Northern Ireland during the bloody “Troubles” of 1968 to 1998, Sinn Fein has sought to rebrand itself as a democratic force of the center-left. The party vows to solve the housing crisis by abandoning the reliance on private developers and landlords to supply properties, instead spending state money to build 100,000 new homes. That, together with promises to overhaul health and education, have won Sinn Fein considerable support.A Politico poll this month showed voter support for Sinn Fein at 34 percent, with Fine Gael at 23 percent and Fianna Fail at 18 percent. If replicated in an election, that would put the Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald in a strong position to become the first female taoiseach, and also the first from outside the Fine Gael and Fianna Fail political movements since the state was founded a century ago.After being in government in various roles for 11 years, Mr. Varadkar may no longer carry the novelty of being a political outsider, but his supporters say that he is older and wiser and has learned from his mistakes.Gary Murphy, a professor of politics at Dublin City University, said he believed that Mr. Varadkar’s main priority in his second term as prime minister would be to show he can guide his party to the electoral success that has so far eluded him.“In 2017, when he walked home in the party leadership competition, he was being hailed as a generational change,” Professor Murphy said, “but that hasn’t happened.”“He’s young, and he could still have a life outside politics,” Professor Murphy added, “but I don’t think he’ll want to go until he has shown he can do well in an election.” More

The co-chief executive of an FTX unit who told regulators about wrongdoing at the exchange was a big Republican donor. He also bought restaurants.In Western Massachusetts, Ryan Salame was known as a local boy turned hometown hero who struck gold as a top executive at FTX, the now-collapsed cryptocurrency exchange, and used some of that wealth to buy a few small restaurants in the area.In Washington, D.C., Mr. Salame was hailed as a “budding Republican megadonor,” bankrolling candidates and political action committees, and establishing FTX’s presence as a crypto heavyweight invested in shaping the regulation of the nascent industry.Now, Mr. Salame has emerged as a central player in the scandal surrounding FTX after he told regulators in the Bahamas, where the exchange was based, that FTX was misappropriating billions in customer funds to prop up an allied crypto trading firm called Alameda Research.On Monday, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas, accused of lying to investors, lenders and customers about the close financial dealings between FTX and Alameda, and committing fraud by using both companies as a “piggy bank.” Prosecutors said Mr. Bankman-Fried used customer funds to trade, buy expensive real estate, invest in other crypto firms, make political contributions and extend personal loans to executives.So far, Mr. Bankman-Fried, who is being held without bail in a Bahamas prison, is the only FTX executive charged with wrongdoing. But Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, said the investigation is continuing and prosecutors are not done charging individuals.Mr. Salame’s activities may be scrutinized, given that he was pivotal to FTX’s political influence operation along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. Mr. Salame, a former co-chief executive of FTX Digital Markets, the company’s subsidiary in the Bahamas, also received a $55 million personal loan from Alameda.Mr. Salame (pronounced Salem) did not return multiple requests for comment. His lawyer, Jason Linder at Mayer Brown, also did not return requests for comment.Born in Sandisfield, Mass., a town of just 1,000 people in the Berkshires, Mr. Salame worked briefly at the accounting giant EY. In 2019, he graduated from Georgetown University with a master’s in finance before landing a job at Alameda in Hong Kong. He later moved to FTX in the Bahamas, where he was a primary point of contact between the exchange and the local government.Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas on Monday.Mario Duncanson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Salame was not in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, but he was fiercely loyal to him, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Bankman-Fried and his closest advisers all shared a purported commitment to giving away most of the money they made under the banner of “effective altruism.”By contrast, Mr. Salame said at times that he was in crypto because it was a way to get rich, according to a person who knows him. He enjoyed expensive cars, flew on private jets and had a reputation for hard partying.What to Know About the Collapse of FTXCard 1 of 5What is FTX? More

Voters will choose a new Parliament, but under revised rules that vastly dilute the influence of political parties that many blame for sabotaging the North African nation’s 10-year experiment with democracy.TUNIS — Depending on whom you ask in Tunisia, Saturday’s parliamentary elections — the first since a 2021 presidential power grab that all but killed the country’s young democracy — represent either major progress or a charade.To some, the new electoral law governing the vote is an innovation that will shatter the power of the corrupt political parties that wrecked Tunisia’s economy, subverted justice and made a mockery of the country’s 10-year experiment with democracy. To others, it is the illegitimate brainchild of a president with autocratic aspirations of his own.It may be seen as delivering a group of parliamentarians perceived as far more representative of their districts than previous Tunisian assemblies, or a rubber-stamp chamber that will impose few checks on President Kais Saied’s one-man rule. It might be the next step in Mr. Saied’s plan to clean up corruption and return Tunisia to prosperity and the original goals of the 2011 revolution. Or it is the next stop on the way to looming political and economic ruin.This will be the fourth time that Tunisians have gone to the polls since overthrowing an autocrat in the 2011 revolt, which inspired the Arab Spring uprisings across the region and established the only democracy to emerge from the movement.The elections will resuscitate a body that Mr. Saied suspended in July 2021 in what growing numbers of Tunisians now call a coup, demolishing the young democracy as he began governing by presidential decree. At the time, Tunisians from all classes and regions greeted the moment with cheers and relief, hoping and believing that Mr. Saied would fulfill the revolution’s unmet promises.The president later vowed to restore the assembly as part of a series of sweeping political changes, including the drafting of a new constitution that he personally oversaw, that would put Tunisia back on track.Caught between their misgivings about the president and loathing of the political parties who oppose him, many Tunisians appear lukewarm at best on this vote. The scant interest may partly reflect the fact that Tunisians’ minds are occupied by making ends meet, not politics.But the new Parliament will look little like the one it replaces thanks to Mr. Saied’s new constitution and electoral law, which, among other changes, prevents political parties from being involved in elections. And as the economy has cratered over the past year, more Tunisians are losing faith that Mr. Saied’s project will bring about the changes they are desperate to see.A secondhand clothing stall in front of a poster of President Kais Saied in Kairouan, Tunisia, this summer. The country’s economy has been struggling, with high prices and not enough jobs.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“What is happening is just a charade,” said Haifa Homri, 24, a law student who went from volunteering for Mr. Saied’s presidential campaign in 2019 to joining an anti-Saied protest of several hundred people in central Tunis last Saturday. “We can’t call them elections,” she added.“I see that the president has made promises,” she said. “But in reality, we can all see the economy is collapsing,” she added, pointing to Tunisia’s grim reality: prices too high, jobs too few, basics such as cooking oil and bottled water scarce on store shelves, and record numbers of people drowning off the coast in a desperate bid to migrate to Europe.Mr. Saied’s new electoral law, which, like all laws since July 2021, was issued by decree, removes from the electoral process the much-despised political parties that constitute some of his only organized opposition.It has voters selecting individual candidates in each district instead of a party list — a change Mr. Saied’s supporters say will buttress democratic accountability by ensuring new members of Parliament know and are known by the people they represent.All political parties are also banned from financing candidates, and there are no longer quotas for female or young candidates, which were instituted after the revolution.Those regulations have raised concerns that, far from becoming more representative of the country, Parliament will fill with men with the means to fund their own campaigns: businessmen, local notables and tribal elders. Of the 1,055 candidates running for 161 seats, just 122 are women.Such rules have led most of the major parties to boycott the elections, as they did the referendum earlier this year in which Tunisians approved Mr. Saied’s new constitution. They say the vote is illegitimate.Yet some analysts warn that sitting out the election risks ceding the entire field to Saied supporters, who include many of the candidates.Without parties to set the agenda and unite members around common causes, the new Parliament is expected to be fractured, chaotic and unproductive, offering few checks on the president’s power.Even an assembly full of political opponents would be largely helpless, as Mr. Saied’s new constitution greatly increases presidential power, reducing Parliament to an advisory role from the main force in government.Tunisians waiting to receive salaries and pensions at a post office in Tunis this summer. The government is struggling to meet a heavy debt burden and pay public salaries, among other economic problems.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“So this is doomed to be a Parliament that is marginalized,” said Youssef Cherif, a political analyst who is the director of the Columbia Global Centers in Tunis. “I think people will now understand more and more that the power is in the hands of the president.”With Mr. Saied as the focus, opposition leaders defending the post-2011, pre-July 2021 order confidently predict that more Tunisians will abandon Mr. Saied as the economy degenerates. But analysts say his failure does not guarantee their success unless they can offer Tunisians a convincing alternative, a challenge for politicians whom Tunisians blame for what they call the “black decade” after the revolution.“Tunisians who are expecting their socioeconomic conditions to improve once Ennahda is pushed out of power and once Saied is able to implement his project — I think they will be disappointed, because things will not improve quickly,” Mr. Cherif said, referring to the Islamist party that dominated Parliament until July 2021.While polls have shown Mr. Saied’s support declining, the opposition parties’ numbers are far worse. Anti-government demonstrations, though growing, remain much smaller than in previous years, something analysts attribute to Mr. Saied’s enduring popularity.Though the major political parties have been stripped of power for nearly a year and a half, Mr. Saied’s supporters say those same parties are conspiring to block his changes.“Political parties are boycotting because these elections will put an end to their corruption,” said Salah Mait, an unemployed man from the capital, Tunis, who said he strongly supported Mr. Saied and his plans. “Their programs were just slogans. They just want to be in power.”Turnout has declined in every election since the revolution as faith in democracy has dwindled. The Chahed Observatory, an elections monitor, said the level of interest in the vote is the lowest in a decade, even below July’s constitutional referendum, when turnout was less than a third.In previous elections, party organizations helped boost turnout and energy. But this time, the self-funded candidates have mounted anemic campaigns, and only one candidate is on the ballot in some districts.And then there is the preoccupation with the flailing economy.Though the government has struck a preliminary deal with the International Monetary Fund for a $1.9 billion loan, economists say it will cover only a small part of the country’s needs. The government is struggling to meet a heavy debt burden, pay public salaries and keep importing basic commodities.A demonstration against Mr. Saied last week in Tunis.Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe conditions the government agreed to have drawn the ire of Tunisia’s public-sector labor union, earning Mr. Saied a powerful new opponent over the very issue on which he is most vulnerable.“The country is living through a suffocating situation and deteriorating on every level,” Noureddine Taboubi, the secretary general of the union, said in a speech to members this month. “We are going into elections without color or taste that came from a constitution that was not collaborative, not a result of consensus nor approval by the majority,” he added.“The elections are a charade,” some in the crowd began shouting.The union’s opposition has helped prevent previous Tunisian governments from pushing through the tough changes that the I.M.F. demands, such as selling off publicly owned companies and lifting subsidies on food, gas and electricity.With the economy in free fall, the drumbeat of politically motivated prosecutions and the weakening of civil liberties under Mr. Saied have drawn less attention. But the president remains steadfast against criticism.“Tunisians know that all the work I’m doing is for Tunisians to live with dignity and liberty,” he said while visiting a poor neighborhood in Tunis on Sunday night, going on to criticize the opposition as doing little to improve living conditions when it was in power. “We will stick to the principles we started with, and we will carry on.” More

President Biden’s polling has ticked upward. Gas prices are down. And Republicans are at loggerheads.There are no honeymoons in American politics anymore. But President Biden is enjoying something akin to a post-wedding limo ride.It would be a stretch to say that he is popular, exactly. But he’s better off in polling than he was six months ago, when gas prices were at their peak. Since the midterm elections, prominent Democrats who seemed to be positioning themselves against him have said they would support him if he ran in 2024. Progressive candidates who might ordinarily be expected to snipe at a centrist president ran on his agenda rather than against it; so did more conservative Democrats. And the opponent he defeated in 2020 looks about as politically weak as he has ever been.Democrats are gawking at the lackluster start of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which so far has earned him very few endorsements from Republican members of Congress. On Thursday, Trump lashed out at the recent run of polls showing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida outpacing him in hypothetical matchups — including in The Wall Street Journal, an influential newspaper among Republican donors.Then, several of Trump’s most prominent supporters mocked what he had billed as a “major announcement,” which turned out to be a low-energy infomercial for digital trading cards selling for $99.“I can’t do this anymore,” Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to Trump, said on his podcast as his two Trumpworld guests, Steve Cortes and Sebastian Gorka, nodded in agreement. Bannon then called for the advisers responsible to be fired “today.” The New York Post ran an editorial calling Trump a “con artist.”Trump’s fumble prompted a cheeky snap of the towel from the White House. “I had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks, too,” Biden tweeted, rattling off a number of recent accomplishments.The average price of a gallon of gasoline has fallen to $3.18 from a height of $5.02 in June. And even though Americans are still feeling pretty sour about the overall state of the economy, the overall rate of inflation rose by 7.1 percent in November — still a lot, but less than expected. Twelve Republican senators voted for the same-sex marriage law that Biden championed, a recognition of just how far public opinion has moved on the issue over the last decade.If all goes as planned next week, Congress also looks poised to pass an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, a major bipartisan victory led by Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.The legislation, which will be tucked into the $1.7 trillion year-end spending bill, was designed to prevent a repeat of the mess that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021. And while outside advocates didn’t get everything they wanted, those involved in the negotiations credit the White House for deftly staying out of the way as they forged a compromise that could win over Republicans in the Senate.Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the Republican National Committee, meanwhile, are still squabbling over who will lead them amid widespread unhappiness in the party over its showing in November.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

Prosecutors have combed through more than 100,000 documents from John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski, who played roles in the effort to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.Federal prosecutors have examined more than 100,000 documents seized from the email accounts of three lawyers associated with former President Donald J. Trump in a continuing investigation into the roles they played in a wide-ranging scheme to help Mr. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to court papers released on Friday.The material came from email accounts belonging to John Eastman, who helped devise and promote a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and two former Justice Department lawyers, Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski, who have faced scrutiny for their own roles in the fake electors scheme, the papers say.As part of their inquiry, federal investigators in Washington obtained a search warrant for the three men’s email accounts in May and the following month seized their cellphones and other electronic devices. The court papers, unsealed by Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington, revealed for the first time the extent of the emails that investigators had obtained.The court papers, which emerged from a behind-the-scenes review of the material for any that might be protected by attorney-client privilege, said little about the contents of the emails. But they noted that each of the men was in contact with a leader of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, whose own phone was seized in August as part of the investigation into the fake elector scheme.Reviewing seized materials for any that might be privileged is a common step in criminal investigations — especially in sensitive ones targeting lawyers. The review of the emails in this case occurred over the summer and was conducted by a team of prosecutors code-named “Project Coconut” that was walled off from the prosecutors running the main investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Mr. Eastman, a professor of constitutional law, has long been a focus of the Justice Department’s efforts to unravel the fake elector scheme, which involved a broad array of characters, including pro-Trump lawyers, White House aides and numerous local officials in key swing states around the country.Mr. Eastman has also been at the center of a parallel inquiry run by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, which has accused him of conspiring with Mr. Trump to defraud the United States and obstruct the final certification of the 2020 election.Encouraged by Mr. Perry, Mr. Trump considered then abandoned a plan in the days before the Capitol attack to put Mr. Clark in charge of the Justice Department as acting attorney general.At the time, Mr. Clark was proposing to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key state. The effort to send the letter was cut short by Mr. Clark’s superiors.Mr. Klukowski, who briefly served under Mr. Clark at the Justice Department and had earlier worked at the White House budget office, helped Mr. Clark draft the letter to state officials in Georgia. While working at the department, he was also in contact with Mr. Eastman, according to evidence presented by the Jan. 6 House committee.According to the newly unsealed papers, Mr. Klukowski sent Mr. Perry an email eight days after the election with a document attached titled “Electors Clause/The Legislature Option.” The document outlined an argument central to the fake elector scheme — namely, that “the Constitution makes state legislatures the final authority on presidential elections,” the court papers said.Mr. Eastman’s emails to Mr. Perry suggest that the two men traded phone calls in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. The court papers note that Mr. Clark exchanged several emails with Mr. Perry in February 2021, after the Capitol was stormed, but the descriptions of their contents were redacted.The papers also say that investigators found a draft of Mr. Clark’s autobiography in his emails, tracing his life from “growing up deplorable in Philadelphia” to working in the Justice Department. An outlined portion of the draft provides a “detailed description” of a previously disclosed meeting that Mr. Clark had on Jan. 3, 2021, with Mr. Trump and two top Justice Department officials at which they “discussed Clark’s draft letter” to the officials in Georgia. More

He helped dispel the candidate’s stiff image for the 1968 presidential campaign and then led U.S. government broadcasting efforts overseas under Nixon and Reagan.Frank Shakespeare, a self-described “conservative’s conservative” who used skills he had learned in the television industry to help elect Richard M. Nixon as president and then led the United States Information Agency, putting a hard edge on the Nixon administration’s message abroad, died on Wednesday in Deerfield, Wis. He was 97.His daughter Fredricka Shakespeare Manning confirmed the death, at her home, where Mr. Shakespeare had also been living. His death was also announced by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative Washington think tank, where he was chairman of its board of trustees in the 1980s. He also held ambassadorships in Portugal and at the Vatican.Mr. Shakespeare joined the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign while on leave as a CBS executive. As an adviser he was principally responsible for coming up with a novel way to present the candidate on television, in large part to make viewers forget Nixon’s stiff TV performances in 1960, when as vice president he was the Republican presidential standard-bearer.Mr. Shakespeare took on that task with Harry W. Treleaven Jr., an advertising executive who was credited with coming up with the slogan “Nixon’s the One!”; Leonard Garment, a lawyer who would become a Nixon White House counsel; and Roger E. Ailes, a television producer and the future Fox News president. They devised an approach in which panels of seemingly regular folks would ask Nixon questions and he would answer them conversationally.“We wanted a program concept of what Richard Nixon is in a way in which the public could make its own judgment,” Mr. Shakespeare told The New York Times in 1968. “We wanted to try to create electronically what would happen if five or six people sat in a living room with him and got to know him.”The four advisers “knew television as a weapon” that could be used to sell candidates in the manner of toothpaste, wrote Joe McGinniss in his 1969 book, “The Selling of the President 1968.”Mr. McGinniss said Mr. Shakespeare had been “more equal than the others,” ruling on matters as minute as whether Nixon’s daughters should sit in the first or second row at a telethon. (He overruled an aide who had assigned them to Row 2; he wanted Nixon to be able to greet them on his arrival easily.)Mr. Shakespeare helped plan Nixon’s inaugural pageantry before he was appointed director of the information agency, which had been created at the height of the Cold War to broadcast programming that would further American interests overseas.There he shifted its financing efforts from movies to television. He arranged U.S.I.A. coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, reaching 154 million people, and introduced television programs giving American views on issues in less developed countries.He also used his position to press his own anti-Communist thinking, sometimes to the ire of the State Department, which was negotiating treaties with the Soviet Union. He had a film made that argued that most Americans supported the Vietnam War, and he ordered that the works of conservative authors be placed in his agency’s libraries.Richard Nixon, as a presidential candidate, answered questions from a panel during a CBS television appearance in 1968.Associated PressMr. Shakespeare publicly clashed with Senator J. William Fulbright, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling him “bad news for America” in an argument over the agency’s budget authorization.Mr. Fulbright countered that Mr. Shakespeare was “a very inadequate man for his job.”Francis Joseph Shakespeare Jr. was born in New York City on April 9, 1925, to Francis and Frances (Hughes) Shakespeare. He attended Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1946, and served in the Navy from 1945 to 1946. He worked briefly for the Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Procter & Gamble before becoming an advertising salesman for radio stations.In 1957, at 32, he was named general manager of WXIX-TV, a CBS affiliate in Milwaukee. Two years later, he was named vice president and general manager of WCBS-TV in New York. There he personally presented what was regarded as the first television editorial on local affairs, a critique of off-track betting. In another editorial, he examined how critics had treated a new CBS comedy show.He soon became a protégé of James T. Aubrey Jr., a top executive at CBS. In 1965, Mr. Shakespeare was appointed executive vice president, the second-highest post at the network.But after Mr. Aubrey was dismissed as president that same year, Mr. Shakespeare’s star waned. His last job at CBS was as head of its cable TV, syndication of programs and foreign investment. He said he volunteered for the Nixon campaign after being impressed by the candidate’s intellect when they met.Mr. Shakespeare left the Nixon administration in 1973 to become executive vice president of the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, where he oversaw the company’s broadcasting operations. He went on to become president and vice chairman of RKO General, which owned radio and television stations.He was named chairman of the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s as it pushed conservative positions like abolishing the Energy Department and cutting food stamps.In 1981, President Ronald Reagan named him chairman of the Board for International Broadcasting, overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. He served as ambassador to Portugal from 1985 to 1986 and to the Vatican from 1987 to 1989.Mr. Shakespeare’s wife, Deborah Anne (Spaeth) Shakespeare, with whom he had three children, died in 1998. In addition to his daughter Fredricka, he is survived by another daughter, Andrea Renna; a son, Mark; and 11 grandchildren.For all his skill in honing an image, Mr. Shakespeare knew his limitations in trying to mold Nixon, according to the McGinniss book. When other Nixon aides complained that the candidate had resisted their entreaties to stop repeating the phrase “Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” Mr. Shakespeare had the last word.Drop the subject, he said — it wasn’t going to happen.Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More