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      As Tunisia Drifts Farther From Democracy, Voters Shun Election

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      Turnout in Saturday’s parliamentary elections was just over 11 percent, reflecting deep skepticism that politics can solve the North African nation’s grave governmental and economic crises.A feeble turnout in Tunisia’s inconclusive parliamentary elections over the weekend drew opposition calls for the country’s strongman president to step down, with critics calling it yet another step in the North African’s nation descent from the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring uprisings to an increasingly autocratic state.Just over 11 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the first election since President Kais Saied orchestrated a sweeping power grab in 2021, suspending the Parliament and sidelining political parties. As Tunisia drifts farther and farther from its decade-long experiment with democracy, opponents say the president now relies on elections only to add a sheen of legitimacy to his actions.“No one can find a single party of importance across the political spectrum or a civil society organization that sees Saturday’s election as anything other than a sham vote to create a Potemkin parliament,” said Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi.The largest opposition coalition, the Salvation Front, called for protests and sit-ins, saying the low turnout indicated that Mr. Saied lacked legitimacy and should leave office. Abir Moussi, the head of the opposition Free Constitutional Party, also called on the president to step down, saying that the vast majority of Tunisians had “rejected Saied’s plan.”The election was the first step in reinstating the Parliament, but with drastically reduced powers that will transform it essentially into an advisory body. It cannot fire the government or remove the president, and bills that Mr. Saied presents will take priority over those proposed by lawmakers. He also barred political parties from participating in elections, making it difficult to decipher the political leanings of the mostly unknown candidates who won seats.Ms. Marks described the candidates that were able to run under the new election law “a shambolic grab bag of individual esoteric loyalists, jobless people who simply wanted a salary and random community members.”President Kais Saied preparing to cast his ballot at a polling station on Saturday. Mr. Saied was elected in 2019 and concentrated power in his own hands in 2021, sidelining Parliament and political parties.Tunisian Presidential Press ServiceShe called Mr. Saied’s ruling style “adhocracy,” meaning he makes it up as he goes along, with minimal checks and balances.The election commission announced late Monday the victors in races for only 23 of the body’s 161 seats; most of the remainder will be decided in runoff elections expected next month.The election came just days after President Biden hosted leaders from across Africa in Washington to declare the United States’ commitment to the continent and voice his support for democracy.Mr. Saied attended the summit and roundly dismissed American criticism of his power grab in a meeting with the editorial board of The Washington Post. He blamed “fake news” for creating the sense that he is an autocrat and accused unidentified “foreign forces” of supporting his political foes.“There are so many enemies of democracy in Tunisia who want to do everything they can to torpedo the country’s democratic and social life from within,” Mr. Saied said.The Biden administration drew some criticism over its sanguine reaction to the election. Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, called it “an essential initial step toward restoring the country’s democratic trajectory.”Ms. Marks said on Twitter that the U.S. statement “absurdly dubbed the sham ballot ‘essential step’ to return to democracy.”The electoral commission said on Monday that only 11.2 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots in what was the country’s fourth election since Tunisians toppled their longtime dictator in a 2011 popular uprising, which set off the wave of Arab Spring revolts across the Middle East.That was the lowest participation level since the revolution and analysts attributed it to dwindling faith among voters in democracy itself. It was even below the roughly 30 percent turnout for a July constitutional referendum that enshrined the expansion of Mr. Saied’s powers and well below the participation rate in the 2019 presidential vote that brought him to power, which was about 50 percent. In 2014, about two-thirds of registered voters participated in parliamentary elections.The 23 confirmed winners included Ibrahim Bouderbala, the former head of the Tunisian Bar Association and a vocal supporter of Mr. Saied. Three women also won seats.When the Arab Spring revolts toppled leaders across the Arab world, Tunisia was lauded as the only one to emerge from the tumult as a multiparty democracy. But that legacy has fallen apart in recent years, as economic distress has spread and Mr. Saied has concentrated power in his hands, all but killing the country’s young democracy.After being elected by a large margin in 2019, Mr. Saied, formerly a little known constitutional law professor, suspended Parliament in 2021 in a move that many Tunisians welcomed, hoping it was a step toward curbing corruption and reviving the economy.A rally against Mr. Saied in Tunis this month organized by the opposition Salvation Front. The coalition called for protests and sit-ins after this weekend’s vote.Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut change has not come, with poverty spreading and increasing numbers of Tunisians attempting often-lethal boat trips to Europe in hopes of starting new lives. Mr. Saied has ruled by presidential decree, pushed through a new constitution that grants him greater powers and issued the electoral law that governed Saturday’s election.That law banned political parties from the electoral process, instead allowing voters to choose individual candidates in each district. It also did away with quotas for women and young candidates, provisions added after the revolution.Contributing to the low turnout was the absence of activities by political parties — which many Tunisians despise as corrupt and responsible for the country’s declining fortunes. The major parties boycotted the referendum this year that made Mr. Saied’s constitution into law.Also keeping people away were deep economic woes and a growing sense among voters that it would make little difference who won anyway.Mr. Saied’s supporters argued that the new electoral law would increase accountability by allowing voters to chose their representatives directly and not only as members of party lists.But critics said that keeping the parties out meant that only candidates wealthy enough to finance their own campaigns would be able to run.Analysts had low expectations for the newly chosen Parliament in any case, saying the lack of organized parties to set an agenda would leave it fractured and chaotic, and likely to follow Mr. Saied’s lead on any legislation.Ben Hubbard More

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      Elon Musk Is Tweeting Through a Tide of Criticism

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      The new owner of Twitter has embarked on a tweeting spree to push back, spar and justify his actions.Illustration By The New York Times; Photo By Adrees Latif/reutersUnder pressure and facing a wave of criticism, Elon Musk has increasingly turned to his favorite release valve: Twitter.Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweeting spree so voluminous that he is on a pace to post more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis from the digital investigations company Memetica. That would be up from about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.His recent tweets have covered an increasingly broad range of topics. Over the last four days, Mr. Musk, 51, needled the comedian Kathy Griffin and beefed with the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He made masturbation jokes aimed at a rival — and much smaller — social media platform. He posted, then deleted, a tweet engaging with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he had laid off 50 percent of the company’s staff and why people should not impersonate others on the service.All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as “Chief Twit” before later changing the description to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mainly about Twitter, according to a tally by Memetica.“Birds haven’t been real since 1986,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Sunday in a discussion thread about Twitter, including a meme from an absurdist conspiracy theory that posits that birds are actually robot spies. He did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Musk is under tremendous scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. On Friday, he cut roughly 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. At the same time, he has found himself embroiled in the same content debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak out without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.More on Elon Musk’s Twitter TakeoverA Familiar Playbook: In his first days at Twitter, Elon Musk has been emulating some of the actions of Mark Zuckerberg, who leads Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.A Different Kind of Deal: Silicon Valley moguls used to buy yachts and islands. Now they are rich enough to acquire companies they fancy.‘Hard Fork’: In an episode of The Times’s tech podcast, two Twitter employees described the atmosphere inside the company in the aftermath of the acquisition.Effect on Midterms: Mr. Musk is in the middle of firing thousands of Twitter employees, including many who helped fight misinformation. What could that mean for the upcoming elections?Already Mr. Musk has had to delay the rollout of a subscription product that would have given people check marks on their Twitter profiles. Advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter over fears that Mr. Musk will loosen content rules on the platform. And the midterm elections are set to be a test of how a slimmed-down Twitter will perform in catching inflammatory posts and misinformation about voting and election results.In a report that was published on Monday, researchers at the Fletcher School at Tufts University said the early signs of Mr. Musk’s Twitter “show the platform is heading in the wrong direction under his leadership — at a particularly inconvenient time for American democracy.”The researchers said they had tracked narratives about civil war, election fraud, citizen policing of voting, and allegations of pedophilia and grooming on Twitter from July through October. “Post-Musk takeover, the quality of the conversation has decayed” as more extremists and misinformation peddlers have tested the platform’s boundaries, the researchers wrote.Amid the hubbub, Mr. Musk’s behavior on Twitter suggests that he intends to simply post through it. And while he has always been a prolific tweeter, he has raised the level in recent days.On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, proposed a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said that he had done everything he could to appease advertisers but that activists had worked against him to cause brands to drop out of spending on Twitter.At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a fight over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, which would give a check mark to anyone who paid. The check mark had been free for notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect against impersonation.Critics were unhappy about Mr. Musk’s plans to monetize the check mark, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts that had check marks changed their display names and photographs to match Mr. Musk’s account over the weekend, a move intended to illustrate why it would be confusing if anyone could buy a check mark.On Sunday, Mr. Musk announced that he would permanently suspend any account “engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody.’” The billionaire, who had previously criticized Twitter when it permanently barred users, then barred Ms. Griffin, who had posed as him on the service.Mr. Musk, who has called himself a “free speech absolutist,” is learning the basic expectation of content moderation for popular social networks, said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.“His ideas have been incoherent for a while,” she said.On Sunday night, Mr. Musk responded to a tweet featuring a quote from a white nationalist, before deleting the post and moving on to squabble with Mr. Dorsey over Birdwatch, a feature that lets community members add context to tweets that they believe are misleading. Mr. Musk, who previously lauded the feature, proposed changing the feature’s name to “Community Notes.”“Community notes is the most boring Facebook name ever,” replied Mr. Dorsey, who owns a $1 billion stake in Mr. Musk’s Twitter.Then on Monday, Mr. Musk suggested he might pursue civil society groups and activists who were pushing for Twitter advertiser boycotts, when he replied to a right-wing commentator that “we do” have grounds for legal action. Legal experts said the holding of boycotts for social and political goals is protected under the First Amendment.Mr. Musk also tweeted that people should vote Republican in Tuesday’s midterm elections. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” he tweeted. He later posted that he was an independent with a “voting history of entirely Democrat until this year.”He soon moved on. Mr. Musk’s attention became fixed on Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that has gained traction over the past 10 days. Playing off Mastodon’s name, he made several crude jokes about masturbation — then deleted those posts an hour later.Tiffany Hsu More

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      Your Thursday Briefing: Liz Cheney, Out

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      Plus a mortgage strike in China and resistance fighters in Ukraine.Good morning. We’re covering Donald Trump’s growing power over the Republican Party and a mortgage strike in China.In her concession speech, Liz Cheney noted that her dedication to the party has its limits: “I love my country more.”Kim Raff for The New York TimesLiz Cheney will lose her seatLiz Cheney — Donald Trump’s highest-profile critic within the Republican Party — resoundingly lost her primary race for Wyoming’s lone House seat. She will not be on the ballot in November.Cheney refused to go along with the lie that Trump won the election — and voted to impeach him a second time. Now, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him remain.Her loss offered the latest evidence of Trump’s continued influence over the Republican Party. Cheney was a reliable vote on much of the Trump agenda, but the party has shifted away from specific policies in favor of Trump’s current wishes and talking points.Details: Votes are still being counted, but Cheney lost by more than 30 percentage points to Harriet Hageman, a Trump-endorsed lawyer who has not held elected office before. Here are the latest vote counts from Alaska and Wyoming.Profile: The daughter of a former vice president, Cheney serves as the vice chairwoman of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks. Here’s how she thinks about her place in history.What’s next: Cheney has started a leadership political action committee, a sign that she plans to escalate her fight against Trump. She said that she is thinking about running for president.Apartment buildings in Zhengzhou, China, last month.Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesA mortgage boycott in ChinaHundreds of thousands of frustrated homeowners in more than 100 cities across China are joining together and refusing to pay back loans on their unfinished properties.Their boycott represents one of the most widespread acts of public defiance in China. Despite efforts from internet censors to quash the news, collectives of homeowners have started or threatened to boycott in 326 properties, according to a crowdsourced list. By some estimates, they could affect about $222 billion of home loans, or roughly 4 percent of outstanding mortgages.The boycotts are also a sign of a growing economic fallout as China reckons with the impacts of its Covid restrictions. The country’s economy is on track for its slowest growth in decades. The real estate market, which drives about one-third of China’s economic activity, has proved particularly vulnerable.Context: In 2020, China started to crack down on excessive borrowing by developers to address concerns about an overheating property market. The move created a cash crunch, leading Evergrande and other large property developers to spiral into default.Background: Protests erupted last month in Henan Province when a bank froze withdrawals. The demonstration set off a violent showdown between depositors and security forces.Politics: The boycotts threaten to undermine Xi Jinping’s pursuit of a third term as China’s leader.A partisan fighter, code-named Svarog, told The Times about efforts to booby-trap a car in the parking lot of a Russian-controlled police station.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesPartisan fighters aid UkraineIn recent weeks, Ukrainian guerrilla fighters known as partisans have taken an ever more prominent role in the war.The clandestine resistance cells slip across the front lines, hiding explosives down darkened alleys and identifying Russian targets. They blow up rail lines and assassinate Ukrainian officials that they consider collaborators.“The goal is to show the occupiers that they are not at home, that they should not settle in, that they should not sleep comfortably,” said one fighter, code-named Svarog.Increasingly, their efforts are helping Ukraine take the fight into Russian-controlled areas. Last week, they had a hand in a successful strike on an air base in Crimea, which destroyed eight fighter jets. Here are live updates.Analysis: The legal status of the partisan forces remains murky. Partisans say they are civilians, regulated under a Ukrainian law that calls them “community volunteers.” But under international law, a civilian becomes a combatant when they take part in hostilities.Fighting: Ukrainian officials warned of a buildup of long-range Russian missile systems to the north, in Belarus. One official cited weapons just 15 miles (about 24 kilometers) from their shared border.Your questions: Do you have questions about the war? We’d love to try to answer them.THE LATEST NEWSAsiaThe U.S. and South Korea had canceled or pared down similar military exercises in recent years.Yonhap, via EPA, via ShutterstockNorth Korea conducted a missile test yesterday, its first since June, as South Korea and the U.S. prepared for joint military drills.Drought is gripping parts of China, the BBC reports, and authorities are attempting to induce rainfall.Floods in Pakistan have killed more than 580 people, The Guardian reports.Bombings and arson attacks swept southern Thailand last night, The Associated Press reports. Muslim separatists have long operated there.India freed 11 Hindu men who were serving life sentences for gang-raping a pregnant woman during Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002, CNN reports.The PacificAustralia’s highest court overturned a ruling that Google had engaged in defamation by acting as a “library” for a disputed article, Reuters reports.Police in New Zealand are looking into reports that human remains were found in suitcases bought at a storage unit auction, The Guardian reports.U.S. News“This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever,” President Biden said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPresident Biden signed the climate, health and tax bill into law. (Here is a breakdown of its programs.)The head of the C.D.C. said the agency had failed to respond quickly enough to the pandemic and would overhaul its operations.Mike Pence called on Republicans to stop attacking top law enforcement agencies over the F.B.I.’s search of Donald Trump’s home.The Academy Awards apologized to a Native woman, Sacheen Littlefeather, who was booed in 1973 when she refused an award on behalf of Marlon Brando.World NewsInflation in Britain jumped 10.1 percent in July from a year earlier, the fastest pace in four decades. Soaring food prices are behind the rise.For the first time in months, European officials expressed optimism about reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, accused Israel of “50 Holocausts.” After an outcry, he walked back his remarks.Israel and Turkey will restore full diplomatic ties after a four-year chill.Mexico’s president is staking the country’s future on fossil fuels.A Morning Read“It was pretty gut-wrenching when we first learned our Galileo was not actually a Galileo,” a library official said.via University of Michigan LibraryThe University of Michigan Library announced that a treasured manuscript in its collection, once thought to be written by Galileo, is actually a forgery.Strange letter forms and word choices set off a biographer’s alarm bells. A deeper look into its provenance confirmed his worst suspicions.ARTS AND IDEASThe chef Tony Tung at her restaurant, Good to Eat Dumplings. Mark Davis for The New York TimesTaiwan’s complex food historyTejal Rao, our California restaurant critic, took a deep dive into the political complexities around Taiwanese cuisine in the U.S. diaspora.Taiwanese food is often subsumed under the umbrella description of “Chinese.” For China’s government, which seeks unification, the conflation is convenient, and even strategic.But the cuisine has also been shaped by the island’s Indigenous tribes, long-established groups of Fujianese and Hakka people, and by Japanese colonial rule. The idea of distinguishing Taiwanese cuisine started to really take hold on the island in the 1980s, as the country transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy.Some Taiwanese chefs, like Tony Tung, are using their food to start conversations. At her new restaurant in California, Tung treats every question, no matter how obtuse, as an opening to explain the island’s unique history and culture. As tensions rise over the self-governed island, Tejal writes, “cooking Taiwanese food can be a way of illuminating the nuances obscured by that news.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJoe Lingeman for The New York TimesBelieve it or not, there’s zucchini in this chocolate cake.What to ReadRead your way through Reykjavík.TravelHere are some tech hacks to manage trip chaos and maximize comfort.Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: “Cozy place for a cat” (three letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Julie Bloom will be our next Live editor, helping us handle breaking news across the globe.The latest episode of “The Daily” is about airline chaos this summer.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      Older Americans Fight to Make America Better

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      Neil Young and Joni Mitchell did more than go after Spotify for spreading Covid disinformation last week. They also, inadvertently, signaled what could turn out to be an extraordinarily important revival: of an older generation fully rejoining the fight for a working future.You could call it (with a wink!) codger power.We’ve seen this close up: over the last few months we’ve worked with others of our generation to start the group Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change. That’s no easy task. The baby boomers and the Silent Generation before them make up a huge share of the population — more nearly 75 million people, a larger population than France. And conventional wisdom (and a certain amount of data) holds that people become more conservative as they age, perhaps because they have more to protect.But as those musicians reminded us, these are no “normal” generations. We’re both in our 60s; in the 1960s and ’70s, our generation either bore witness to or participated in truly profound cultural, social and political transformations. Think of Neil Young singing “four dead in O-hi-o” in the weeks after Kent State, or Joni Mitchell singing “they paved paradise” after the first Earth Day. Perhaps we thought we’d won those fights. But now we emerge into older age with skills, resources, grandchildren — and a growing fear that we’re about to leave the world a worse place than we found it. So some of us are more than ready to turn things around.It’s not that there aren’t plenty of older Americans involved in the business of politics: We’ve perhaps never had more aged people in positions of power, with most of the highest offices in the nation occupied by septuagenarians and up, yet even with all their skills they can’t get anything done because of the country’s political divisions.But the daily business of politics — the inside game — is very different from the sort of political movements that helped change the world in the ’60s. Those we traditionally leave to the young, and indeed at the moment it’s young people who are making most of the difference, from the new civil rights movement exemplified by Black Lives Matter to the teenage ranks of the climate strikers. But we can’t assign tasks this large to high school students as extra homework; that’s neither fair nor practical.Instead, we need older people returning to the movement politics they helped invent. It’s true that the effort to embarrass Spotify over its contributions to the stupidification of our body politic hasn’t managed yet to make it change its policies yet. But the users of that streaming service skew young: slightly more than half are below the age of 35, and just under a fifth are 55 or older.Other important pressure points may play out differently. One of Third Act’s first campaigns, for instance, aims to take on the biggest banks in America for their continued funding of the fossil fuel industry even as the global temperature keeps climbing. Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo might want to take note, because (fairly or not) 70 percent of the country’s financial assets are in the hands of boomers and the Silent Generation, compared with just about 5 percent for millennials. More

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      Iran Activists Urge Election Boycott. Raisi Likely Winner.

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      In a soft pleading voice, the white-haired woman in the video implores, “For the sake of my son, Pouya Bakhtiari, don’t vote.” She holds the young man’s photo, and continues, “Because of the bullet they shot at his head and shattered his dreams, don’t vote.” In a second video, another mother, sitting next to a gravestone, echoed the same message: “At 30, my son lies under a huge pile of dirt.” A third woman described her 18-year-old son as full of hope, until Nov. 17, 2019, when a bullet pierced his heart.“Voting means betrayal,” she added.Videos like these, circulating on Iranian activists’ social media accounts with the hashtag that in Persian means #notovoting, have been appearing in increasing numbers in the weeks and months leading up to Iran’s presidential election on Friday. Some of the videos have been made by parents who say their children were shot dead during antigovernment protests over the last few years. Others are by the parents of political prisoners who were executed by the regime in the 1980s, as well as by the families of those who died in the Ukrainian passenger plane that crashed last year shortly after takeoff from Tehran. (Iran’s military said it mistakenly shot down the plane).What’s remarkable about the videos is their audacity: that Iranians are speaking up, seemingly without fear, about boycotting an election in an authoritarian country whose leaders rarely tolerate open displays of dissent. Iranians have had enough. And besides, what’s the point of voting when the result is predetermined?The call for an election boycott seems to be resonating: a recent poll by the state-run Iranian Student Polling Agency predicts that turnout will be as low as 40 percent — the lowest since the 1979 revolution.A low turnout in Friday’s election would certainly signal a rejection of the Islamic regime. But not voting will also give the regime exactly what it wants: a near-certain assurance that its handpicked candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric who is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, will win.Of course, the regime has done its part as well for Mr. Raisi. Last month, the Guardian Council, the body that vets election candidates, rejected all the potential candidates except for Mr. Raisi and six relatively unknown figures.Even insiders to the regime were reportedly stunned that the council had gone so far as to bar a current vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, and a former speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani.To be sure, the Guardian Council has rejected other presidential hopefuls over the past four decades. But this time it’s especially significant because the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 82, which raises the issue of succession. Hard-liners within the Revolutionary Guards are grooming Mr. Raisi to take his place, making his election into office even more important. The ayatollah’s support for Mr. Raisi is no secret. After Mr. Raisi failed a bid for the presidency in 2017, Ayatollah Khamenei made him head of the judiciary two years later.The tightly controlled process has led many Iranians to question the entire exercise. And institutions such as the Guardian Council, which is controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei, have stymied any democratic change and crippled the efforts of presidents who have tried to introduce political and social freedoms. (Two presidential candidates during the 2009 race, Mehdi Karroubi and the former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, who campaigned on a platform of delivering democratic reforms, remain under house arrest. The regime at the time suppressed massive protests in the aftermath of what was seen as a widely disputed election.)The campaign to boycott the election highlights the rising levels of both anger and apathy toward the regime, at a time when the economy has been suffering under the weight of U.S. sanctions, as well as mismanagement and corruption by Iranian officials. The government also badly botched the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving more than 82,000dead so far. In addition, the regime has brutally cracked down on protests that have erupted since 2009, mostly over worsening economic conditions.Those boycotting the vote include a wide group of people inside and outside Iran, including many who formerly used to be sympathetic to the regime, such as the former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Mousavi and Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Last month, over 230 prominent activists signed an open letter calling for an election boycott and stated that their goal is to bring “nonviolent transition from the Islamic Republic to the rule of the people.”Unsurprisingly, Ayatollah Khamenei has branded those pushing for a boycott as enemies and has urged Iranians to go to the polls. Here lies the regime’s dilemma: Iran’s leadership wants just enough turnout to legitimize Mr. Raisi’s victory, but not so much that the result might demonstrate how unpopular he really is.During his campaign trips in recent weeks, Mr. Raisi has sought to cast himself as a man of the people and has promised to fight corruption. He talked to people who approached him about pending court cases, depicting himself as an accessible man. But his past as head of the judiciary is testament to what may lie ahead under his rule. Young activists were tried behind closed doors and executed. As a young cleric, he signed off on the executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.Boycotting the elections, for a population that is deeply scarred, is understandable. But sadly, a boycott this time may cement the hard-liners’ grip on power for many years to come.Nazila Fathi is the author of “The Lonely War: One Woman’s Account of the Struggle for Modern Iran.” She is a fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. She lives in Maryland.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Arrest of Opposition Leader in Georgia Raises Fear of Growing Instability

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyArrest of Opposition Leader in Georgia Raises Fear of Growing InstabilityLawmakers from parties aligned against the government have vowed to continue a boycott of Parliament until Nika Melia is released from police custody.A protest on Tuesday in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, after the arrest of Nika Melia, an opposition leader.Credit…Vano Shlamov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFeb. 24, 2021, 12:00 p.m. ETMOSCOW — Major opposition parties in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia vowed on Wednesday to boycott Parliament until the government releases a prominent opponent detained recently.The instability adds yet another country to a growing list of former Soviet republics gripped by political tensions, street protests or outright war.Just in the past few months, demonstrations have shaken the government in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan has endured its third post-Soviet revolution, and Azerbaijan and Armenia have fought a vicious war over a breakaway enclave.Though politics in Georgia, a country of just over four million people, have always been sharp-elbowed, the arrest of the opposition leader, Nika Melia, suggested an alarming pivot to more repressive policies by the governing party, Georgian Dream.Mr. Melia, chairman of the United National Movement, a political party founded by a former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had blockaded himself into the party’s headquarters in Tbilisi, the capital. To make the arrest, police officers scaled fire ladders onto the roof and battered through barricades of furniture inside the building.Mr. Melia stands accused of fomenting a crowd to storm Parliament in 2019, a charge he has dismissed as politically motivated.In a joint statement issued on Tuesday, several United States senators sharply criticized the arrest, saying it “jeopardizes what remains of Georgia’s democracy and its Euro-Atlantic path.”Mr. Melia is the head of the United National Movement, a political party founded by a former president, Mikheil Saakashvili.Credit…Vano Shlamov/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe statement called for Mr. Melia’s release and for a dialogue between parties to resolve the political crisis that has been brewing since a contested election in October. Members of several opposition parties, including the United National Movement, contend that the vote was rigged and have refused to be seated in Parliament. They have vowed to continue the boycott until Mr. Melia is released.A member of the United National Movement, Zaal Udumashvili, told local news outlets, “We are ready to sit down at the negotiating table, provided that Nika Melia will also be sitting at the table.” Several thousand people protested Mr. Melia’s arrest in central Tbilisi on Tuesday evening.Underlying the political crisis are accusations from the opposition that a billionaire who went into politics, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a backer of the governing party, has destroyed the country’s pluralistic institutions, something Mr. Ivanishvili denies.Shota Utiashvili, vice president of the Atlantic Council of Georgia, said in a telephone interview, “Georgia has been labeled as a beacon of democracy in the region, and it’s really unfortunate to see it sliding toward these signs of authoritarianism.”“Georgia has never been a perfect democracy, but at least its trajectory was in the right direction,” he added.The arrest has also roiled Georgian Dream, the governing party. The prime minister, Giorgi Gakharia, a member of the party, resigned last week to protest the issuing of a warrant for Mr. Melia’s detention. “Polarization and confrontation pose the greatest risks to our country’s future,” he said.The escalating standoff over the disputed election has alarmed Western diplomats who for years have held up Georgia as a democratic success story in the former Soviet Union.The State Department issued a statement last week saying it was “deeply concerned” about the political parties’ inability to resolve the election dispute. The United States, it said, called “on all parties to exercise restraint and avoid any actions or rhetoric that could escalate tensions or result in violence.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More