Elections

In five years in office, Virginia Raggi failed to stem the dysfunction of Italy’s capital, where voters will choose between two of her rivals in a runoff.ROME — Voters on Monday resoundingly rejected the re-election bid of Rome’s mayor, Virginia Raggi of the Five Star Movement, who swept into power five years ago promising change but was unable to turn around the degradation of services and quality of life that has become a hallmark of the capital.Instead, Ms. Raggi, the first woman to govern Rome and its youngest mayor, became associated with the city’s decline, earning her — and her party — a national reputation for incompetence.Speaking to supporters at a hotel in downtown Rome late on Monday, Ms. Raggi appeared to concede defeat.“As they say in Rome, I took on the most difficult part of the job and I did it with conviction,” she said. “Now those who come after me have no more excuses for not doing a good job, and we’re going to be watching them closely.”She lagged well behind the two leading candidates: Enrico Michetti, a lawyer supported by several parties on the right, and Roberto Gualtieri, a former finance minister and the candidate of a center-left coalition led by the Democratic Party.With most election districts counted, Mr. Michetti had more than 30 percent of the vote, Mr. Gualtieri 27 percent and Ms. Raggi just under 20 percent. Carlo Calenda, a rival to Mr. Gualtieri to be the center-left standard-bearer, had about 19 percent.With no candidate winning more than half the vote, Mr. Michetti and Mr. Gualtieri will compete in a runoff election on Oct. 18. Ms. Raggi told her supporters that she would not openly back either man.“The vote is free,” she said. “Votes are not packages to move around, nor are citizens cattle to be taken to pasture.”Ms. Raggi was once a bright spot in the firmament of Five Star, an upstart anti-establishment party that had charmed Italians who were jaded with the country’s political class.But the city’s problems piled up on her watch, as did uncollected garbage, attracting swarms of sea gulls, crows, and even hungry boars. A pothole epidemic saw no fix in sight. Public buses caught on fire, and some cyclists complained that the bike lanes the mayor had installed were unsafe and poorly maintained.Then on Saturday night, just hours before polls opened, a 19th century bridge in a trendy Rome neighborhood caught fire. Investigators and experts are still looking into the causes of the fire, but the metaphor of Rome burning was not lost on Ms. Raggi’s critics.Municipal elections were held on Monday in over 1,000 Italian cities and towns, but it is not yet clear what they mean for national politics. The next parliamentary elections could be more than a year and a half away.Prime Minister Mario Draghi, an independent and the former president of the European Central Bank, has broad support in Parliament, but low voter turnout may be a reflection of general disaffection among the electorate. Only 48.8 percent of Rome’s electors went to the polls, about ten percent less than five years ago, and the national average fell just short of 55 percent, the lowest ever.Ms. Raggi’s fate was, in part, a reflection of her party’s. Five Star has hemorrhaged support since triumphant national elections in 2018, when it won the largest share of the vote and formed part of the governing coalition.“It’s one thing to promise changes when you’re in the opposition, another to transform them into effective policies when you’re in the government,” said Roberto Biorcio, a professor of political sociology at the University of Milan at Bicocca. “In this sense, she followed this downward trajectory.”In Rome, disillusionment with Ms. Raggi grew as she failed to build a strong team, frequently replacing top cabinet members, which paralyzed administrative decisions.“It was the continuation of a trend of the deterioration of the city,” said Giovanni Orsina, the dean of Luiss University’s School of Government.“Rome’s problems are all still there,” after five years of Five Star government, he said, citing the garbage crisis and the city’s notoriously ineffective transport system. “And now the bridge caught fire ahead of the elections.”Support for the Five Star Movement also eroded in other cities. In Turin, another big win for the party in 2016, its mayoral candidate finished a distant third.But center-leftists where the Five Star and Democratic Party were allied won their races outright in closely watched races in Bologna and Naples, giving a boost to former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who was elected president of the Five Star in August. He has been pushing for these alliances, putting him on a collision course with more orthodox Five Star members who remain grounded in their anti-establishment roots.The outcome in various cities “suggests that where the Five Star and Democrats joined forces they can obtain some good results,” Mr. Biorcio said.Ms. Raggi may have lost her job, but she still has clout within Five Star, after being elected last month to the party’s governing body. And at 43, she is still young.“After being mayor of Rome for five years, it will be hard for her to go back to being a lawyer,” said Professor Orsina. “Now she’ll try to see if she’s able to parlay a different political future in the Five Star Movement.” More

Ms. Warren will leave office early as part of a plea deal on campaign finance violations. The deal also resolves gun charges against her.Lovely Warren, the embattled Democratic mayor of Rochester, N.Y., agreed to resign on Monday as part of a plea deal on several state criminal charges, capping a swift and staggering fall for a politician once considered a rising star in the state Democratic Party.The plea deal, in Monroe County court, resolves two separate state cases against Ms. Warren: one arising from campaign finance violations and another that included gun and child-endangerment charges that Ms. Warren and her estranged husband faced.Ms. Warren’s resignation is effective Dec. 1, just a month before she would have left office, having lost a June primary for a third term to Malik Evans, a city councilman.Last October, Ms. Warren was indicted by a grand jury in Monroe County on two campaign finance charges related to her 2017 re-election campaign, involving her official campaign fund and a political action committee.Those charges came just a month after Ms. Warren’s administration had been engulfed in a scandal involving accusations of a cover-up in the death in March 2020 of Daniel Prude, a Black man, after the Rochester police pinned him to the ground and put a hood over his head while taking him into custody.In July, Ms. Warren and her husband, Timothy Granison, were indicted on gun and child-endangerment charges, after police found weapons in a May raid of the home they shared, despite being estranged. Both pleaded not guilty.Mr. Granison had previously been charged in state and federal court as part of what prosecutors called a drug-trafficking ring. His charges weren’t resolved by Ms. Warren’s plea, his lawyer said Monday.In a news conference after her husband’s May arrest, Ms. Warren said she was the victim of a conspiracy, engineered in part by the county prosecutor, to discredit her on the eve of the Democratic primary. “People will try anything to break me,” she said.Ms. Warren’s resignation adds to a period of turmoil in Rochester, a city of some 200,000 people on the shores of Lake Ontario that suffered a steep toll from the coronavirus and was shaken by the fallout from the death of Mr. Prude, including heated demonstrations and the firing of the city’s police chief.A lawyer and onetime president of the City Council, Ms. Warren was the city’s first female mayor and the youngest in the modern era. She was first elected in 2013 after scoring a stunning upset against a Democratic incumbent, Thomas S. Richards, in both a September primary and a general election two months later. (Mr. Richards ran on two third-party lines.)She was also the city’s second Black mayor and spoke passionately in her 2014 inaugural address about the city’s future, devoting her speech to promises to her young daughter.“I know this isn’t going to be easy,” she said. “But I’m going to fight for changes and outcomes with the fierceness of a parent defending their child. Because I am defending you, and all of Rochester’s children.”She was handily re-elected in 2017, but the criminal charges against her arose from allegations raised at the time by her challengers about evasion of donor limits. Those complaints led to an investigation by the state Board of Elections.Ms. Warren’s trial on the campaign finance charges was set to begin on Monday. Carrie Cohen, her lawyer, said that the mayor’s plea — to a misdemeanor, rather than the initial felony charges she had faced — was in line with her previous admission that payments to her political action committee “were not categorized correctly.”“There never was any allegation of theft of any campaign or other funds by the mayor, or anybody else involved in the campaign,” said Ms. Cohen, adding that the plea resolved all the pending state criminal charges without admission of any fraud or dishonesty.Calli Marianetti, a spokeswoman for Sandra Doorley, the Monroe County district attorney, said that as part of a plea deal with Ms. Warren, the gun and child endangerment charges would no longer be pursued.In a statement, Ms. Doorley said that the resolution of the charges facing Ms. Warren — and those facing two fellow defendants, her campaign treasurer and Rochester’s finance director — was “fair and just based on the nature of their crimes.”“This is an important step in our larger efforts in promoting ethical elections in our state,” said Ms. Doorley, a Republican.It was the Daniel Prude case that came to define much of Ms. Warren’s second term. In March 2020, Mr. Prude, visiting Rochester from Chicago, ran out of his brother’s home in an agitated state. After his brother called 911, police responded and handcuffed Mr. Prude. When he began spitting, they covered his head with a hood and later pinned him on the ground, face down.Mr. Prude stopped breathing and was resuscitated, but died a week later at a hospital. An internal investigation by police quickly cleared the officers involved, despite a medical examiner’s finding that Mr. Prude’s death was a homicide caused by “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint.”Months later, the public release of a video of the encounter sparked outrage in the wake of a national reckoning over police brutality. Ms. Warren soon announced the firing of the police chief and suspension of other city officials, but questions about her response — and allegations of a cover-up — continued to dog her.Mr. Evans, the Democratic nominee and Ms. Warren’s presumptive successor, said Monday that he expected to continue to work with the administration until Ms. Warren stepped down.“We have to stay focused on making sure the city of Rochester continues to move forward,” Mr. Evans said. More

The chairman of the New York State Democratic Party endorsed Gov. Kathy Hochul, contending that a multicandidate primary in 2022 could damage the party.The chairman of the New York State Democratic Party on Monday endorsed Gov. Kathy Hochul in next year’s primary race, arguing that a fierce multicandidate free-for-all could be damaging to the party — even as several potential contenders take increasingly serious steps toward runs of their own.Jay Jacobs, the party chairman, said that the endorsement was his own, and not that of the state party. But his announcement was seen as an early effort to coalesce support behind Ms. Hochul, who ascended to the governorship after Andrew M. Cuomo resigned in disgrace.But Mr. Jacobs’s effort to bring the whole party along is already facing resistance — and he acknowledged as much, as he alluded to the increasing activity surrounding the race.“From the beginning, I have been urging those interested in looking into running for governor to hold their powder, to wait and allow Governor Hochul to get the job done and to make her mark,” Mr. Jacobs said at a news conference on Long Island. “Unfortunately, over the past few days, it seems that a number of candidates are becoming more anxious.”Indeed, last week the New York City public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, launched an exploratory committee; the state attorney general, Letitia James, indicated that she was nearing a final decision on whether to run; and other Democrats, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, U.S. Representative Thomas Suozzi of Long Island and the Suffolk County executive, Steven Bellone, are also thought to be interested.“A party torn apart by multiple candidates in multiple primaries for multiple offices will exhaust precious resources, divide us and make us weaker in a year that we need to be at our strongest,” Mr. Jacobs added. “We have a governor that is proving she can do the job and do it with distinction. We have a governor who we know can win against any Republican candidate they put up in the fall.”The backing of Mr. Jacobs, who is also the chair of the Nassau County Democratic Committee, and another endorsement on Monday from Rich Schaffer, the head of the Suffolk County Democrats, underscore Ms. Hochul’s potential strength on vote-rich Long Island ahead of next year’s Democratic primary.Yet even as Mr. Jacobs spoke, perhaps Ms. Hochul’s most powerful would-be rival was about 25 miles away, appearing on a stage that, stylistically if not in substance, could have been mistaken for a campaign tableau.Ms. James was in the South Bronx on Monday morning, kicking off a statewide tour in which “she will begin delivering the first of up to $1.5 billion to combat the opioid epidemic,” her office said, tapping into settlements she negotiated. The tour is run through her government team, and the event was often sober as speakers shared painful stories about how the opioid crisis has ravaged neighborhoods across the city.“We’re not talking about politics, we’re talking about lives today,” she admonished a reporter who asked about Mr. Jacobs’s endorsement.Letitia James, the state attorney general, appeared in the South Bronx on Monday to begin a statewide tour to distribute money to fight the opioid epidemic.Dieu-Nalio Chéry for The New York TimesNevertheless, the tour comes as Ms. James and her allies have made clear that she is weighing a run for governor — and so the event, which illustrated Ms. James’s relationships in diverse communities around New York City, took on a fresh layer of significance.She was flanked by City Council members, Assembly members and state senators, and Representatives Adriano Espaillat and Jamaal Bowman.“With an event like this, she’s an effective A.G., capturing all those dollars to help our communities,” Mr. Espaillat said in a brief interview after the event. “That means that she would probably be an effective governor.”“We’ll be taking a look at all the candidates,” he added. “I think she would make a terrific candidate but that’s her choice.”Questions around whether Ms. James would run and what the rest of the field would look like have stopped some county chairs from joining Mr. Jacobs in making endorsements, though he suggested he expected others to indicate their support in coming days.“Kathy Hochul’s been doing a great job as governor and I hope she succeeds, but I think things need to play out a little bit more,” said Suzanne Berger, the chair of the Westchester County Democratic Committee. “The attorney general, who has also been a great elected official, needs an opportunity and space to make the best decision for herself and the state as well.”Other Democrats were openly critical of Mr. Jacobs’s move to intervene in a primary, especially at a relatively early juncture in the race — though there are few other recent points of comparison. Mr. Cuomo was in office for a decade, and before that, party officials asked Gov. David A. Paterson not to seek a full term after he took over from the disgraced former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.Mr. Williams said in a statement that Mr. Jacobs’s role, “and that of the highest ranking Democratic officials in our state, should be to uplift Democratic candidates, Democratic voters, and democratic values.” Mr. Williams also noted Mr. Jacobs’s longtime alliance with Mr. Cuomo, who on Monday released yet another statement ripping into the independent investigation into his conduct released by Ms. James’s office. The ex-governor lamented that “this is not New York at her finest.” There has been considerable speculation around whether Mr. Cuomo — whose resignation speech doubled as a defense of his legacy — would seek to put real money into meddling in the race.Mr. Jacobs said that he had given Mr. Cuomo, among others, a heads-up on the endorsement, a remark that drew some attention on Monday.“I’m not involved in that, I truly am not,” Ms. Hochul said, when asked about Mr. Jacobs’s decision to engage Mr. Cuomo. “I’m proud to have the support of Jay Jacobs, Rich Schaffer and anyone else who wants to line up behind me, but they know that’s not my focus.”And asked about Mr. Cuomo’s missive, she replied, “I’m actually too busy governing New York to worry about emails that are written by people.” More

Mr. Yang, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020 and for mayor of New York this year, said he could be more “honest” about politics if he were not a Democrat.Andrew Yang, the former long-shot presidential candidate and onetime technology entrepreneur, announced on Monday that he had left the Democratic Party and become an independent.In an essay on his website, Mr. Yang, who built a passionate following in 2019 during the party’s primary race, highlighted his work for Democrats. He noted the deep relationships he had developed with activists and local leaders and the fund-raisers he had headlined, and he took credit for helping to elect the party’s candidates, including President Biden.Yet he described the two-party system as “stuck,” saying he could be more “honest” about politics and politicians if he were not constrained by official membership as a Democrat. Mr. Yang offered his support for alternative election systems, like open primaries and ranked-choice voting, saying these were “key reforms” that would give voters more choices in campaigns.“I believe I can reach people who are outside the system more effectively,” he wrote. “I feel more … independent.”Mr. Yang has struggled to find his footing since skyrocketing to prominence during the 2020 race. One of the highest-profile Asian Americans to ever run a presidential campaign, Mr. Yang built a fiercely loyal following of disaffected voters through proposals like providing every American with a universal basic income of $1,000 per month.After ending his unlikely campaign, he joined CNN as a political commentator, started his own podcast and moved to Georgia to help Democrats win the runoff Senate races in January.A bid for New York City mayor this spring ended in defeat, after Mr. Yang struggled to answer basic questions about the functions of city government and failed to build on early momentum.Last month, he announced plans to start his own political party called “The Forward Party” — a phrase lifted from the last chapter of his new book.In an excerpt from his book published by Politico Magazine this week, Mr. Yang recounted the strangeness of running for president and how the experience had inflated his sense of his own importance.“I’d been a C.E.O. and founder of a company, but running for office was a different animal,” he wrote. “Everyone in my orbit started treating me like I might be a presidential contender. I was getting a crash course in how we treat the very powerful — and it was weird.”He added: “It turns out that power actually gives you brain damage.” More

FacebookFacebook ‘tearing our societies apart’: key excerpts from a whistleblower Frances Haugen tells US news show why she decided to reveal inside story about social networking firm Dan Milmo Global technology editorMon 4 Oct 2021 08.33 EDTLast modified on Mon 4 Oct 2021 10.30 EDTFrances Haugen’s interview with the US news programme 60 Minutes contained a litany of damning statements about Facebook. Haugen, a former Facebook employee who had joined the company to help it combat misinformation, told the CBS show the tech firm prioritised profit over safety and was “tearing our societies apart”.Haugen will testify in Washington on Tuesday, as political pressure builds on Facebook. Here are some of the key excerpts from Haugen’s interview.Choosing profit over the public goodHaugen’s most cutting words echoed what is becoming a regular refrain from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic: that Facebook puts profit above the wellbeing of its users and the public. “The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimise for its own interests, like making more money.”She also accused Facebook of endangering public safety by reversing changes to its algorithm once the 2020 presidential election was over, allowing misinformation to spread on the platform again. “And as soon as the election was over, they turned them [the safety systems] back off or they changed the settings back to what they were before, to prioritise growth over safety. And that really feels like a betrayal of democracy to me.”Facebook’s approach to safety compared with othersIn a 15-year career as a tech professional, Haugen, 37, has worked for companies including Google and Pinterest but she said Facebook had the worst approach to restricting harmful content. She said: “I’ve seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I’d seen before.” Referring to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, she said: “I have a lot of empathy for Mark. And Mark has never set out to make a hateful platform. But he has allowed choices to be made where the side-effects of those choices are that hateful, polarising content gets more distribution and more reach.”Instagram and mental healthThe document leak that had the greatest impact was a series of research slides that showed Facebook’s Instagram app was damaging the mental health and wellbeing of some teenage users, with 30% of teenage girls feeling that it made dissatisfaction with their body worse.She said: “And what’s super tragic is Facebook’s own research says, as these young women begin to consume this eating disorder content, they get more and more depressed. And it actually makes them use the app more. And so, they end up in this feedback cycle where they hate their bodies more and more. Facebook’s own research says it is not just that Instagram is dangerous for teenagers, that it harms teenagers, it’s that it is distinctly worse than other forms of social media.”Facebook has described the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the slides as a “mischaracterisation” of its research.Why Haugen leaked the documentsHaugen said “person after person” had attempted to tackle Facebook’s problems but had been ground down. “Imagine you know what’s going on inside of Facebook and you know no one on the outside knows. I knew what my future looked like if I continued to stay inside of Facebook, which is person after person after person has tackled this inside of Facebook and ground themselves to the ground.”Having joined the company in 2019, Haugen said she decided to act this year and started copying tens of thousands of documents from Facebook’s internal system, which she believed show that Facebook is not, despite public comments to the contrary, making significant progress in combating online hate and misinformation . “At some point in 2021, I realised, ‘OK, I’m gonna have to do this in a systemic way, and I have to get out enough that no one can question that this is real.’”Facebook and violenceHaugen said the company had contributed to ethnic violence, a reference to Burma. In 2018, following the massacre of Rohingya Muslims by the military, Facebook admitted that its platform had been used to “foment division and incite offline violence” relating to the country. Speaking on 60 Minutes, Haugen said: “When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarising content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world.”Facebook and the Washington riotThe 6 January riot, when crowds of rightwing protesters stormed the Capitol, came after Facebook disbanded the Civic Integrity team of which Haugen was a member. The team, which focused on issues linked to elections around the world, was dispersed to other Facebook units following the US presidential election. “They told us: ‘We’re dissolving Civic Integrity.’ Like, they basically said: ‘Oh good, we made it through the election. There wasn’t riots. We can get rid of Civic Integrity now.’ Fast-forward a couple months, we got the insurrection. And when they got rid of Civic Integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.’”The 2018 algorithm changeFacebook changed the algorithm on its news feed – Facebook’s central feature, which supplies users with a customised feed of content such as friends’ photos and news stories – to prioritise content that increased user engagement. Haugen said this made divisive content more prominent.“One of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is optimising for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarising – it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.” She added: “Facebook has realised that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.”Haugen said European political parties contacted Facebook to say that the news feed change was forcing them to take more extreme political positions in order to win users’ attention. Describing polititicians’ concerns, she said: “You are forcing us to take positions that we don’t like, that we know are bad for society. We know if we don’t take those positions, we won’t win in the marketplace of social media.”In a statement to 60 Minutes, Facebook said: “Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true. If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago.”TopicsFacebookSocial networkingUS Capitol attackInstagramMental healthSocial mediaYoung peoplenewsReuse this content More

The drubbing inflicted on Germany’s Christian Democratic Union in the country’s recent elections is a sign that, alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year stint in power, something larger is coming to an end.Aside from NATO, the Christian Democratic Union is the most venerable postwar political institution in continental Europe. It has led Germany, usually in coalition, for all but 20 years of the country’s post-Nazi political history. Focused on economic growth, Christian traditions, anti-Communism and maintenance of the Atlantic alliance, the party was a guarantee to Germany’s allies that Europe’s largest, richest country would be stable and dependable. With the measly 24 percent of the vote that Ms. Merkel’s successor, Armin Laschet, managed to win, the C.D.U. can no longer play that role. A pillar of the European order has collapsed.The C.D.U.’s decline has been underway since at least the turn of the century. While Ms. Merkel managed to disguise it, she showed little aptitude for reversing it. In the five elections since 2005, when she took power, her party’s vote share fell in all but one.Perhaps not every country needs a “people’s party” of the center-right. Big gainers in this election included Greens worried about climate change and Free Democrats worried about supply chains — two preoccupations that didn’t exist at the time of the C.D.U.’s founding. But there has always been more at stake for the party than an up-to-date servicing to voter preferences. In light of Germany’s Nazi past, it fell to the C.D.U. to play a moderating role — to speak to the patriotic longings of ordinary Germans in a way that would dissuade them from drifting to the political fringes.This role was almost constitutional. Half a century ago, Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the C.D.U.’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, justified his own rock-ribbed conservatism by saying it came with a guarantee that “no legitimate political party” could exist to his party’s right. Many felt they could trust Mr. Strauss to police the country’s rightmost ideological boundary.But in electoral politics, or game theory, or whatever you want to call it, there is a fallacy in such an arrangement. Ms. Merkel was not slow in discovering it: If there really were no legitimate viewpoints to the right of the C.D.U., then the party’s optimal strategy would be to move ever leftward, which it could do with no fear of an alternative right-wing party ever outflanking it.And this is what Ms. Merkel did, whether out of idealism or calculation. In the wake of the Fukushima meltdown of 2011, she announced an exit from nuclear power, long sought by the Greens. In 2015, she joined Social Democrats in passing a minimum wage. In 2017, she secured a vote legalizing gay marriage (without voting for it herself). Most crucially, in 2015, she announced that Germany would welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the war in Syria, creating a continentwide political crisis that, among other consequences, arguably drove Britain out of the European Union.The effect on German politics was unnerving. The Alternative for Germany party, up to that point a wonkish group obsessed with the European Union’s monetary policy, changed its focus to immigration in July 2015. The following March — eight months before Donald Trump’s election — the party harvested 13, 15 and 24 percent of the vote in state elections. In 2017, Alternative for Germany, now well-established on the C.D.U.’s right, not only sent nearly 100 members to the Bundestag, it also became the leading opposition party. It appeared that Ms. Merkel was heedlessly allowing votes to “drain” out of her own party into an American-style populism.Ms. Merkel, of course, is not the first conservative politician to poach voters from her progressive opponents. But certain problems come predictably with this strategy. The leader benefits more than the party’s rank and file, because the landscape of progressive issues is foreign territory to them. In last month’s rout, things that Christian Democrats might ordinarily have talked about and rallied kindred spirits around — Covid-19, migrants, the euro — were suddenly off limits. The rank and file fell silent. In last week’s rout, the C.D.U. lost half its voters from the previous election. Fewer than 3 percent defected to Alternative for Germany. The lion’s share went to the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens.Now German politics has become less predictable. The Green delegation in the Bundestag has nearly doubled. Many of the newcomers are people who have never been in elected office before, giving them something in common with upstart European parties, like the Five Star Movement in Italy and LREM in France, and with Democrats in the United States on the arrival of their progressive wing after 2018. The Social Democrats are young, too. This year they took Ms. Merkel’s seat, which will go to Anna Kassautzki, a 27-year-old self-described feminist and environmentalist who wasn’t born when Ms. Merkel was first elected.Certainly some traditional German conservatives deplore Ms. Merkel’s legacy. But there was one sense in which she was mostly in continuity with her predecessors — her resistance to utopianism. Germany’s society, economy and (since Covid-19) health care system have lately performed more efficiently than those of its neighbors. The great achievement of Ms. Merkel was to understand that in the global economy, efficiency is often a synonym for vulnerability. Like a lot of its best machinery, Germany is both high-functioning and delicate.Many Germany watchers forget this. Ms. Merkel pushed her country’s relatively generous “social market economy” to do a lot more — to offer a reasonable minimum wage, to accept the burden of educating and assimilating millions of desperate immigrants from the Syrian war, and to do those things while promising to forgo the relatively cheap energy that nuclear power provides. She assented to the creation of European Union bonds — a perennial taboo in her party — to finance an emergency Covid-19 package.She was conservative mostly in what she did not do. She realized that Germany does not have the resources to do everything. It cannot underwrite the debts of other European countries, as many of Germany’s southern neighbors assume. It cannot dismantle its existing carbon-based energy system as quickly as Greens would wish — that would pose significant direct transitional costs and indirectly undermine the auto industry that is the linchpin of its manufacturing system. It cannot sever all contact with economies that American boycott enthusiasts deem boogeymen. It cannot say no to Nord Stream II (the pipeline that permits cheap energy from Russia) nor can it revisit its manufacturing arrangements with the “illiberal democracies” of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.Overindulging a country’s virtues can be as dangerous as overindulging its vices. More than her predecessors Ms. Merkel ran the risk of exposing Germany to instability — in her case, to an American-style class conflict between the beneficiaries and the outcasts of the global economy. She avoided the worst. But she had some close calls, and the shrinking of Germany’s great, stabilizing bourgeois party is bound to reduce her successors’ room for error.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

With victory nearly assured, Mr. Adams has amassed a substantial war chest ahead of the general election for New York City mayor. His opponent lags far behind.Eric Adams is heavily favored to become the next mayor of New York City, but that hasn’t stopped him from amassing an intimidatingly large war chest ahead of November’s general election.Mr. Adams, the Democratic nominee, has raised another $2.4 million since late August, leaving his campaign with roughly $7.7 million to promote his message and to signal strength. Over the course of five weeks, some 700 donors gave him the legal maximum donation of $2,000, according to the latest campaign finance reports released on Friday.His Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, raised roughly $200,000 during the latest filing period and has $1.2 million on hand. Only two people gave him the maximum donation of $2,000.There has been no public polling, but Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly seven to one in New York City, and many are predicting a landslide for Mr. Adams. Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, has been struggling to gain momentum and recently released his first campaign ads, which showed him scratching the chin of a rescue cat and riding the subway.Curtis Sliwa, the Republican mayoral candidate, has $1.2 million on hand.Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesMr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has spent much of his summer focused on fund-raising, traveling to the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard and courting wealthy donors who favor his brand of centrism. His travels appeared to have paid off: He raised more than $950,000 from donors outside New York City during the latest filing period — about 40 percent of his haul.His donors ran the gamut, from billionaires to a plumber from the Bronx.The billionaires included the Mediacom Communications chief executive, Rocco Commisso; the Estée Lauder heir William Lauder; Laurie Tisch, the Loews Corporation heiress, and her brother, Steve Tisch, the chairman of the New York Giants.Mr. Adams raked in handsome donations from the hedge fund industry, too, including from John Griffin, the founder of Blue Ridge Capital; Lee Ainslie, the founder of Maverick Ventures; and the New York Mets owner, Steven A. Cohen, the chief executive of Point72, who donated $1,800 to Mr. Adams, and whose employees donated an additional $26,500.Mr. Adams has said in recent weeks that he would swing open New York’s doors to businesses big and small and use incentives when necessary to lure them here. In his rhetoric, he is drawing a sharp contrast with the outgoing mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has openly quarreled with the city’s business elite.“The support for our campaign from every corner of the city continues to be overwhelming and humbling,” Mr. Adams said in a statement on Friday.Early voting in the general election begins on Oct. 23. Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa are expected to participate in two debates this month on WNBC and WABC. Mr. Sliwa, who is fighting for exposure, is pushing for more debates.Mr. Sliwa recently qualified for public matching funds and has sought to capture attention with dog-and-pony media events, like crossing the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey in a showy effort to find out where Mr. Adams lives. But Mr. Sliwa’s proclivity for drama backfired last week when his campaign claimed on Twitter that he had found a gun at a crime scene on the Upper West Side when, in fact, he had not.Mr. Sliwa’s campaign released a statement on Friday trumpeting his recent fund-raising and said it believes “this will be a very competitive and close race.”But even Mr. Sliwa has acknowledged that he is facing an uphill battle. As a sign of Mr. Adams’s broad appeal, both Mr. de Blasio, a self-described progressive, and Michael R. Bloomberg, a pro-business centrist, have embraced him.Mr. Adams’s most recent campaign finance filings indicate that special interests from a cross-section of New York labor and industry are eager to make his acquaintance. Many of his donations came from landlords and developers, including William Blodgett, the co-founder of Fairstead; the Durst Organization executive Alexander Durst; Anthony Malkin, chairman of the company that owns the Empire State Building; and Joseph Sitt, chairman of Thor Equities Group.Eric Adams’s campaign has raised more than $7.7 million heading into the general election.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesThere were also donations from the philanthropists David Rockefeller Jr. and Susan Rockefeller; Jeffrey Gural, a major landlord and the owner of the Tioga Downs casino in the Southern Tier; and members of the Rudin family, who are prominent in commercial real estate.With New York gearing up to sell recreational marijuana, cannabis investors sought Mr. Adams’s good graces, too, including the LeafLink CEO, Ryan Smith, and Gregory Heyman, the managing partner of Beehouse.The Adams campaign has spent about $630,000 since late August — on consultants, polling and other expenses — and appears to saving the bulk of its money for advertising in the final weeks before Election Day. Mr. Sliwa spent $1.5 million during the latest filing period, including about $1 million on television and radio ads.Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist, said Mr. Adams most likely plans to spend his campaign war chest “not just to promote interest in his candidacy, but to build a mandate for his approach to governing New York.”“At every turn in this mayoral race, Adams and his campaign have been strategic,” he said. “So my hunch is that Eric Adams will use this spending advantage purposefully.”Mr. Adams has already started to plan his transition ahead of Inauguration Day in January. In recent weeks, he has released a series of broad-based proposals about how he would address climate change and the affordable housing crisis.Now that Mr. Adams can devote less time to fund-raising, he is planning a trip that he hopes will benefit him as mayor: visiting the Netherlands to examine its solutions to flooding.A firm date for the trip has yet to be determined. More

A new generation of lawmakers is entering Germany’s Parliament. They felt ignored by the previous government, so they set out to change that by winning elections.BERLIN — Emilia Fester is 23 and has yet to finish college. Max Lucks is 24 and calls himself a militant cyclist. Ria Schröder is 29 and has the rainbow flag on her Twitter profile. Muhanad Al-Halak is 31 and came to Germany from Iraq when he was 11.And all of them are now in the German Parliament.The German election result was in many ways a muddle. The winners, the Social Democrats led by Olaf Scholz, barely won. No party got more than 25.7 percent. Voters spread their ballots evenly across candidates associated with the left and the right.But one thing is clear: Germans elected their youngest ever Parliament, and the two parties at the center of this generational shift, the Greens and the Free Democrats, will not just shape the next government but are also poised to help shape the future of the country.For now, the Greens, focused on climate change and social justice, and the Free Democrats, who campaigned on civil liberties and digital modernization, are kingmakers: Whoever becomes the next chancellor almost certainly needs both parties to form a government.“We will no longer leave politics to the older generation,” said Ms. Schröder, a newly minted lawmaker for the Free Democrats from Hamburg. “The world has changed around us. We want to take our country into the future — because it’s our future.”Ria Schröder, center, the chairwoman of the youth organization of the Free Democrats, listening to a speech at the party’s European Congress in 2019.Gregor Fischer/Picture Alliance, via Getty ImagesFor decades, Germany has been governed by two rival establishment parties, each run by older men, and, more recently, by a somewhat older woman. Indeed, when Chancellor Angela Merkel took office in 2005 at age 51, she was the youngest ever chancellor. Germany’s electorate still skews older, with one in four voters over 60, yet it was a younger vote, some of it angry, that lifted the two upstart parties.Fully 44 percent of voters under 25 cast their ballot for the Greens and the Free Democrats, compared with only 25 percent in that age range who voted for Ms. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the traditional center-left party.The most immediate effect will be felt in Parliament. Roughly one in seven lawmakers in the departing Parliament were under 40. Now the ratio is closer to one in three. (In the U.S. Congress, one in five members are 40 or younger. The average age in Congress is 58, compared with 47.5 for Germany’s new Parliament.)“We have a generational rift, a very stark polarization that didn’t exist before: It’s the under-30s vs. the over-50s,” said Klaus Hurrelmann, a sociologist who studies young people at the Hertie School in Berlin. “Young people want change and these two parties got the change vote.”The Greens finished in third place, while the Free Democrats came in fourth, both seeing their vote share rise. The split-screen quality of the race was unmistakable: Candidates for the two traditional parties campaigned for the status quo while the Free Democrats and Greens unabashedly campaigned for change.A polling station in Berlin during the election last Sunday.Lena Mucha for The New York Times“It mustn’t stay as it is,” read one Free Democrats campaign poster.The two parties are already signaling that they intend to change the old ways of doing business in German politics. Their leaders reached out to one another — an unprecedented step — before meeting with representatives of the bigger parties in advance of coalition negotiations, a process that began over the weekend.Rather than publicize their meeting with a leak to a newspaper or a public broadcaster, they posted a selfie of their four leaders on Instagram, causing a sensation in a country where political discussion has focused more on curbing social media than using it to reach new audiences.Many of the young lawmakers now moving to Berlin, like Mr. Lucks, say they will bike or — in the case of Ms. Fester — skateboard to work. Some are looking to rent communal housing. Others plan cross-party “beer pong” gatherings to meet one another. And all of them are in regular communication with their voters via social media.“What are your hopes and fears for a traffic light?” Mr. Lucks asked his followers on Instagram this week, referring to the green, yellow and red party colors of the most likely governing coalition of Greens and Free Democrats with the Social Democrats at the helm.Max Lucks, right, with Annalena Baerbock, the Greens’ candidate for chancellor, in Bochum, Germany, in August.Kay Nietfeld/Picture Alliance, via Getty ImagesWithin a couple of hours, Mr. Lucks, who was elected for the Greens, had received 200 comments. “Maintaining that direct line to my voters is really important to me,” he said. “Young people yearn to be heard. They’ve felt betrayed by politics — their issues were just not taken seriously by those in power.”The two issues that appeared to animate young voters most in the election were climate change and freedom, polls suggest.“There is no more important issue than climate change — it’s existential,” said Roberta Müller, a 20-year-old first-time voter in the Steglitz district of Berlin. “It doesn’t feel very democratic to me that older people get to decide on — and effectively destroy — our future.”The handling of the pandemic also played a big role. Schools were closed and college classes moved online, while billions of euros in aid flowed into the economy to keep businesses afloat and prevent widespread layoffs.“Hair salons were more important than education during the pandemic,” said Ms. Fester, of the Greens, who at 23 is the youngest of the 735 members of the new Parliament. “There were long discussions about how the hair salons could stay open, but universities and kindergartens remained closed.”The pandemic also put the spotlight on key workers who are often badly paid — and younger — while bringing to light how far behind Europe’s biggest economy is on developing the digital infrastructure needed to be competitive in the modern, globalized world.A younger cohort of lawmakers has also helped increase other kinds of diversity in what previously had been a mostly homogeneous chamber. There will be more women and lawmakers from ethnic minorities than ever before — and Germany’s first two transgender members of Parliament.At 31, Mr. Al-Halak, of the Free Democrats, could be considered one of the “older” new members of Parliament.Muhanad Al-Halak, who was born in Iraq before emigrating with his family to Germany, will represent a Lower Bavaria district in Parliament.Free DemocratsBorn in Iraq, he was 11 when he emigrated with his family to Germany, settling in a southern part of Lower Bavaria, which he will now represent in Parliament. He wants to serve as a voice for a new generation of Germans who were born elsewhere but have successfully learned the language and a trade — he worked at a wastewater facility — to become active members of society.“I wanted to be an example for other young people that you can get ahead as a working man, regardless of where you come from, what you look like or what religion you practice,” Mr. Al-Halak said.Despite having a woman as chancellor for 16 years, the percentage of women represented in Parliament only rose slightly from 31 percent in the previous legislature.“I know there are some people who are happy that we now have 34 percent women represented in Parliament, but I don’t think it is anything to celebrate,” said Ms. Fester, who included feminism as one of her campaign issues. “The predominance of old, white men is still very visible, not only in politics but in other areas where decisions are made and money flows.”Germany’s smaller parties have traditionally defined themselves by issues, rather than staking out broadly defined ideological stances. They also agree on several things; both parties want to legalize cannabis and lower the voting age to 16.“There are now other coordinates in the system, progressive and conservative, collectivist and individualist, that describe the differences much better than left and right,” Ms. Schröder said.Still, the two junior parties disagree on much. The Greens want to raise taxes on the rich, while the Free Democrats oppose a tax hike. The Greens believe the state is essential to address climate change and social issues, while the Free Democrats are counting on industry.A climate demonstration in Berlin last month.Markus Schreiber/Associated Press“The big question is: Will they paralyze each other or will they manage to build the novelty and innovation they represent into the next government?” said Mr. Hurrelmann, the sociologist. “The balancing act will be: You get climate, we get freedom.”This week, incoming freshman lawmakers went to the Parliament building, the Reichstag, to learn rules and procedures, as well as how to find their way around.“The first days were very exciting,” Ms. Fester said. “It was a bit like orientation week at university. You get your travel card and have to find your way around — only it is in the Reichstag.”Mr. Lucks said he still has to remind himself that it is all real.“It’s a great feeling,” he said, “but then it’s also kind of humbling: We have a big responsibility. Our generation campaigned for us and voted for us and they expect us to deliver. We can’t let them down.”Christopher F. Schuetze More