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      An American Moment in an Australian Campaign

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      To some analysts, a spat over transition surgery looks like something from an overseas culture war.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. Perhaps the ugliest part of Australia’s election campaign has been the debate around the rights of transgender people. Katherine Deves, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s handpicked candidate for the seat of Warringah, courted controversy this week when she walked back a previous apology for calling transition surgery “mutilation.”Mr. Morrison has resisted calls — including from within his own Liberal Party — to drop Ms. Deves since tweets that had been deleted from her account resurfaced, including the original comment about transition surgery. In another tweet, she compared her campaign to ban trans women from women’s sports to standing up against the Holocaust.Mr. Morrison has dismissed the reaction to Ms. Deves’s comments as cancel culture, and in an election season that’s been light on policy and heavy on spectacle, the issue has spawned furious commentary and countless headlines. For many, the tone and the arguments feel very, well, American. It seems as though a conservative conversation in the United States has been exported to Australia. Or is this something that reflects Australia’s own political urges or unresolved divides?It’s not the first time that culture war and identity issues have formed part of an Australian election campaign. But this time feels particularly ugly, both because of the topics being debated and the vitriolic language being used.“I think it’s more personal, intrusive, and I think hurtful for those who are caught up in it,” said John Warhurst, an emeritus professor of politics at the Australian National University. He said it seemed to be an example of overlap with American culture. “We’ve had earlier political debates about political correctness and wokeness,” Professor Warhurst said. “Those generally arise in the U.S. and are picked up in Australia by those who use them for their advantage.”Political analysts say Mr. Morrison seems to be hoping that Ms. Deves’s views will resonate with religious voters in rural areas, in districts that the coalition needs to win on May 21, even if some moderate Liberal seats have to be sacrificed.But will it work? According to Paul Williams, a political analyst and associate professor at Griffith University, the issue of transgender rights doesn’t resonate in Australia the way it does in the United States.“You can see culture wars is at the heart of American politics,” he said. “I don’t think we’re at that point in Australia.”“Middle Australia seems to be a fairly reasonable electorate,” he added. With economic concerns at the forefront of people’s minds, issues like trans women’s participation in sports are hardly a priority.That doesn’t mean there aren’t voters who view politics through the prism of pro- and anti-political correctness. But do they amount to a critical mass? No, Professor Williams said. And would the trans rights issue decide their votes? Probably not, he added.But he’s concerned about the future. This campaign has been particularly “presidential,” he said — driven by leaders’ personalities, not parties’ policies. It has also been marked by the “atomization” of news coverage, with different outlets constructing different realities for different constituencies, and by the weaponization of issues like trans rights, he said. He fears that “Australia will become not just polarized but as irrational as post-Obama America, where the old adage that you’re entitled to your own opinion but you’re not entitled to your own facts has been completely thrown out the window.”“This idea of win at all costs, win on ethos and pathos, feeling and character — or at least perception of character — but not on facts, is a terribly slippery road to go down,” Professor Williams said.Now here are our stories of the week. Australia and New ZealandPrime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand in Parliament in March, announcing the easing of some of the country’s pandemic restrictions. Pool photo by Mark MitchellJacinda Ardern, whose restrictions buffered New Zealand from the worst of the pandemic, tests positive. The prime minister’s rules kept transmission at bay for two years, and by the time the highly infectious Omicron variant hit, the vast majority of New Zealand’s population had been vaccinated.There’s an election in Australia. Here’s how climate fits in. The country has been hit hard by wildfires and other climate disasters, but it’s also making tons of money from fossil fuels.U.S. Picked as Host of Rugby World Cup. Eager to establish a foothold in a coveted market, world rugby officials awarded the 2031 men’s World Cup and 2033 women’s event to the United States.New Zealand will fully reopen its borders at the end of July. The move comes two months ahead of schedule, in an attempt to speed up economic recovery.Around The TimesChang W. Lee/The New York Times Tattoos, Still Illegal in South Korea, Thrive Underground. Tattoo artists, long treated as criminals for their work, say that it is time to end the stigma against their business.Butt Lifts Are Booming. Healing Is No Joke. Beauty, pain, race and money play out in Miami’s post-surgical recovery houses.Life in a Ukrainian Unit: Diving for Cover, Waiting for Western Weapons. Analysts say the outcome of fighting now is riding on the accuracy, quantity and the striking power of long-range weapons. Ukraine is pleading for more.The Mundane Thrill of ‘Romanticizing Your Life.’ A trend that took off early in the pandemic encourages people to appreciate life’s simple pleasures, a philosophy that resonates just as strongly two years later.Enjoying the Australia Letter? Sign up here or forward to a friend.For more Australia coverage and discussion, start your day with your local Morning Briefing and join us in our Facebook group. More

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      Inside Le Pen Territory as France Votes in a Runoff Election

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      Whatever happens in the runoff election on Sunday, France has changed, and the winner may face a turbulent season.ST. RÉMY-SUR-AVRE, France — Eternal France, its villages gathered around church spires, its fields etched in a bright patchwork of green and rapeseed yellow, unfolds as if to offer reassurance in troubled times that some things do not change. But the presidential election on Sunday, an earthquake whatever its outcome, suggests otherwise.France has changed. It has eviscerated the center-left and center-right parties that were the chief vehicles of its postwar politics. It has split into three blocs: the hard left, an amorphous center gathered around President Emmanuel Macron, and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen.Above all, with Ms. Le Pen likely to get some 45 percent of the vote, it has buried a tenacious taboo. In a country that for four wartime years lived under the racist Nazi-puppet Vichy government, no xenophobic, nationalist leader would be allowed into the political mainstream, let alone be able to claim the highest office in the land.Unlikely to win, but well within the zone of a potential surprise, Ms. Le Pen has shattered all of that. She is no outlier. She is the new French normal. If Mr. Macron does edge to victory, as polls suggest, he will face a restive, fractured country, where hatred of him is not uncommon. The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.In St. Rémy-sur-Avre, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesSt. Rémy-sur-Avre, a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants about 60 miles west of Paris, is Le Pen territory. In the Maryland cafe, named for a cigarette brand that is no more, the prevailing view is that something has to give in a France that has lost its way under a president too privileged and remote to know anything of the burden of struggle.Customers buy lottery tickets, or bet on the harness racing on television, in the hope of unlikely relief from hardship. A kir, white wine with a little black current liqueur, is a popular morning drink. The streets are deserted; most stores have disappeared, crushed by the hypermarkets out on the highway. In this town, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election on April 10, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Jean-Michel Gérard, 66, one of the kir drinkers, worked in the meat business from age 15, as a butcher, in slaughterhouses, or as a trucker hauling beef carcasses. But he had to stop at 60, when his knees gave out from regularly carrying several tons of meat a day on his back, the record being a single 465-pound rear of a bull.“Now we have a generation of slackers,” he said. “When I was young, if you did not work, you did not eat.”The old France of solidarity and fraternity had disappeared, he lamented, gone like the horse butchers where he started work and replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence.The old France of solidarity and fraternity has disappeared and been replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence, said Jean-Michel Gérard, who worked in the meat industry until a few years ago.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesHe voted for the left until François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, imposed limits on work hours, and then switched his allegiance to the far-right National Front party, now Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally. What infuriated him, he said, was foreigners collecting social benefits and handouts without working.“We didn’t want to work less, we wanted to work more to earn more. What’s the use of free time without money?” he asked. “If foreigners work, they have their place. If not, no.”Mr. Gérard gazed out at the church. That jogged a memory. The other day, he said, he saw a young man from the Maghreb urinating on the church wall. He shouted at the man, who looked about 17. “What would you do if I urinated on a mosque?”The fraught relationship between France and Islam — in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and a recent history of terrorist attacks — has been one of the themes of the election campaign. Mr. Macron has called Ms. Le Pen’s program racist for wanting to make head scarves illegal on the grounds that they constitute a threatening “Islamist uniform” — on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, given that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France just want to live peacefully.Muslims attending Friday Prayer this week at a mosque in an eastern suburb of Paris. The fraught relationship between France and Islam has been one of the themes of the election campaign.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“If women are wearing them just for their religion, OK,” Mr. Gérard said, “but I think in general it’s a provocation.”Maryvonne Duché, another firm supporter of Ms. Le Pen, was seated at a table close by. She started work at 14 as a sales clerk, before spending 34 years on the production line at a nearby Philips electronics factory, which closed 12 years ago.“Apart from two pregnancies, I worked nonstop from age 14 to 60, and now I have a pension of 1,160 euros a month,” she said — or about $1,250. “It’s pathetic, with almost half going in rent, but Macron doesn’t care.”And Ms. Le Pen? “I don’t love her, but I will vote for her to get rid of Macron.”The view of Mr. Macron in this town was of near-universal disdain: a man with no respect for French people, removed from reality, so cerebral he has no idea of “real life,” insensitive to the everyday problems of many people, from a class that has “never changed a kid’s diaper,” in Mr. Gérard’s words.Ms. Le Pen, by contrast, is seen as someone who will protect people from the disruptive onslaught of the modern world.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      France’s Marine Le Pen Is as Dangerous as Ever

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      TOULOUSE, France — In 2017, we thought we’d seen the worst French politics could offer.Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, had made it through to the second round of the country’s presidential elections. For the first time since 2002, a far-right figure was in the runoff to become president — and with considerably more support. When Ms. Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron, albeit with a worrying 34 percent share of the vote, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many hoped Ms. Le Pen, after falling at the final hurdle, would fade into obscurity.It was not to be. Ms. Le Pen never went away, instead biding her time and preparing for the next tilt at power. She now has more chance of winning it than ever: After taking 23 percent in the first round, she’s within eight points of Mr. Macron in the second, on April 24. She’s benefited from the presence of the even more hard-line Éric Zemmour, whose lurid reactionary persona made Ms. Le Pen seem, by contrast, more reasonable. Yet she’s also embarked on a comprehensive effort to soften her image, renaming her party, downplaying the harsher elements of her platform and presenting herself as a warm, even folksy woman who loves her cats.But no one should be fooled. At the head of a party that long housed Nazi collaborators, Ms. Le Pen is an authoritarian whose deeply racist and Islamophobic politics threaten to turn France into an outright illiberal state. She may pretend to be a regular politician, but she remains as dangerous as ever. For the good of minorities and France itself, she must not prevail.If Ms. Le Pen looks more mainstream now, it’s because the mainstream looks more like her. In the years running up to the last election, she ran on a hard-right platform, stoking antagonism toward immigrants and French Muslims under the guise of protecting public order. She especially targeted minorities, “to whom,” she said bitterly, “everything is due and to whom we give everything.” In response to her success in 2017, nearly every party on the political spectrum — centrist, traditional right wing and even socialist — used the talking points of her party, now named National Rally (formerly National Front).The tenor of political discussion, as a result, has shifted substantially to the right. There is now barely any space in French politics to advocate for French citizens who don’t look, behave, pray or eat the way “traditional” French people are supposed to — let alone to champion the rights of immigrants and refugees. In this environment, Ms. Le Pen can turn her attention to more everyday issues, such as rising energy bills and the cost of living, safe in the knowledge that on immigration, citizenship and “national identity,” she’s already won the argument.That success didn’t happen overnight. For more than 30 years now, French political debate has centered itself around issues of identity at the expense of more pressing topics such as health care, climate change, unemployment and poverty. The far right has led the way. Exploiting feelings of decline at the end of the 1960s — as France shed its colonial empire, lost the war in Algeria and submitted to American domination of Western Europe — the far right became a potent political force. It used its influence to defend its conception of French identity, evoking a thousand-year-old European Christian civilization threatened by North African Muslim immigration.This was the foundation upon which the National Front was created in 1972 by Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. As people from France’s former colonies migrated to the metropole, the party focused obsessively on the supposed dangers of immigration. Mr. Le Pen’s tone was often apocalyptic: “Tomorrow,” he infamously said in 1984, “immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup and sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son.” Such rancorous resentment found some sympathy in certain quarters of French society, where the homogenizing effects of globalization and the increased visibility of Islam among French-born citizens were held to be stripping France of its essential character.This antipathy took in many targets, among them French Jews. Mr. Le Pen was notorious for his antisemitic remarks — for which he was condemned by the courts multiple times — and the party created in his image trafficked in antisemitic ideas, tropes and images. Though Ms. Le Pen claimed to be moving past her father’s fixation on Jews, she continued to fan the flames — refusing in 2017 to accept France’s culpability for the Vichy regime’s role in the Holocaust and even, in a campaign poster this April, appearing to make a gesture associated with neo-Nazis. Capped by Mr. Zemmour’s open embrace of the Vichy regime, antisemitism has re-entered the political mainstream.Muslims have similarly borne the brunt of bigotry. Initially considered a threat from elsewhere — supposedly coming to France to deprive the native-born of jobs — Muslims have in recent decades been viewed as an internal threat. With the rise of Islamist terrorism, Muslims were seen to be practicing an inherently violent religion that required containment by public authorities. To be a Muslim was to be guilty until proved innocent.The past decade has taken this equation to a new level. The widespread fear now is not that a handful of people among nearly six million Muslims might pose a danger to public safety, but that all French Muslims by their very existence threaten the cultural identity of “traditional France.” It is, for some voters, an existential fear. In response, politicians have pushed measures to curb Islam’s purported infringement on French life, such as banning religious attire in public schools, full-face coverings in public spaces and burkinis on public beaches, and passing a bill that gives the state power to monitor Muslim religious observance and organizations.To justify such moves, politicians weaponized the liberal concept of laïcité — effectively state-backed secularism — to restrict freedom of religion and conscience in the interests of an anti-Muslim agenda. This process, crucially, has made it possible for Ms. Le Pen to turn from radical firebrand to reasonable truth-teller. But underneath the sheen of normalcy, the brutally racist ideology her party pioneered over the past 30 years is very much intact.Her manifesto, for example, promises to amend the Constitution to prohibit the settlement of a “a number of foreigners so large that it would change the composition and identity of the French people” — a rewording of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory. She also plans to legally distinguish between “native-born French” and “others” for access to housing, employment and benefits, and allow citizenship only to people who have “earned it and assimilated.” Completing the picture, Ms. Le Pen has said she would ban the wearing of the head scarf in public spaces.In these promises as well as the company she keeps — she has associated with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Viktor Orban — Ms. Le Pen has made clear her intention to reshape France at home and abroad. Her administration would echo those in Brazil, India and other countries where a similar rightward slide has taken hold. For minorities, immigrants, dissidents and democracy itself, it would be a disaster. Though her momentum appears to have stalled in recent days, Ms. Le Pen is not going away, no matter what happens on Sunday. As a French Muslim citizen born and raised here, I fear for my country.And it is my country, as much as it is Ms. Le Pen’s or Mr. Macron’s. At a time when politicians and pundits are demanding Muslims “abide by republican values” if they want to be part of the country, it’s instructive that voters may elect a politician whose core ideology violates the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that France has long championed. In that irony lies the gap between what France could be and what it is.Rim-Sarah Alouane (@RimSarah) is a Ph.D. candidate and a researcher in comparative law at Toulouse 1 Capitole University in France. Her research focuses on civil liberties, constitutional law and human rights in Europe and North America.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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      Marine Le Pen Proposes Ban on Muslim Women Wearing Head Scarves

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      Marine Le Pen, the far-right contender, has proposed a ban on Muslim women wearing head scarves in public.PARIS — A Muslim woman in a blue and white hijab confronted Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate, as she made her way through a crowd in the southern town of Pertuis last week. “What is the head scarf doing in politics?” the woman demanded.Ms. Le Pen, a nationalist with an anti-immigrant agenda, has vowed to ban the wearing of the head scarf in public if she is elected in the second round of voting next Sunday. She says that it is “an Islamist uniform,” or a sign of adherence to an extremist, anti-Western interpretation of the Muslim faith.The woman who argued with Ms. Le Pen was having none of this. Her choice to wear a head scarf was made, she said, “when I was an older woman,” as a sign of “being a grandmother.” Ms. Le Pen insisted that in many French neighborhoods women who do not wear a veil are “separated, isolated and judged.” In the country with the largest Muslim population in western Europe, what a woman wears on her head matters. France has a troubled relationship with Islam because of its colonial history in Algeria and several jihadist terror attacks in recent years. As Ms. Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron confront each other in a tight race, religious freedom, particularly for the Muslims who make up about 8 percent of the population, has emerged as a pivotal issue.Mr. Macron, who has called Ms. Le Pen’s plan “an extremist project,” has nevertheless angered some members of the Muslim community, mainly through legislation designed to combat what he calls “Islamist separatism.” That law, passed last year, has been used to close some mosques and Islamic associations accused of fostering radicalism. It was designed in part to draw right-wing voters to his centrist camp.Mr. Macron, whose lead in polls has widened slightly over the past week to 53.5 percent against Ms. Le Pen’s 46.5 percent, had his own confrontation with a young French woman wearing a hijab during a campaign stop in Strasbourg last week.“Are you a feminist?” he asked. “Are you for the equality of women and men?”President Emmanuel Macron of France at a rally in Marseille on Saturday.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen the woman answered yes to both questions, and said her head scarf was chosen, not imposed, Mr. Macron, clearly alluding to Ms. Le Pen, said this was “the best answer to all the stupidity I keep hearing.”It was another example of Mr. Macron, who scarcely campaigned before the first round of voting on April 10, adjusting his message to appeal to blocs of voters who have felt betrayed by him over the past five years — the Muslim community and the left.In the first round, about 70 percent of French Muslims voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate who was narrowly eliminated, according to a study by the Ifop polling institute. Where those votes now go matters.France is a secular republic and in theory a nondiscriminatory society where people are free to believe, or not, in any god they wish. But it finds itself in a fracturing debate over Islam. A growing Muslim presence is seen by the extreme-right as a mortal threat to French identity, and this view has gained a foothold in the political mainstream.Intensely attached to its model of a secular society, known as laïcité, which is supposed to subsume all men and women into the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship, France has been reluctant to acknowledge failures that have left many Muslim immigrants and their descendants in dismal housing projects on the periphery of big cities, feeling no viable French identity or future.Since 2011 it has been illegal to wear a face-covering niqab, or a burqa covering the entire body, in public. But there is no ban on the head scarf.French laws prohibit wearing ostentatious religious symbols — the head scarf is considered one — in schools. Civil servants are also barred from doing so on the job. Debate has raged over whether parents accompanying school trips should be allowed to wear head scarves, but attempts to stop them have failed.A woman in a head scarf in Marseille on Saturday ahead of a campaign appearance by Mr. Macron.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStrongly held French feelings about the equality of men and women, about secularism, and about its supposedly colorblind society lie behind the virulence of the discussion of these issues. So does unacknowledged or overt prejudice.Mr. Macron has accused Ms. Le Pen of undermining the principles of laïcité and the Constitution itself with the proposed head scarf ban. In an interview with Franceinfo radio last week, he said she would also have to ban the use of the “kippa, the cross and other religious symbols” in public or she would be discriminating among believers.Not so, Ms. Le Pen retorted in an interview with France Inter radio. “The head scarf is in reality an Islamist uniform, it is not a Muslim uniform, and that makes all the difference. It is the uniform of an ideology, not of a religion.”She continued: “This ban is not based on the concept of laïcité. It is based on the battle against Islamist ideologies.”However, Ms. Le Pen appeared to hedge a little on Sunday, saying that the issue is a “complex problem” and that her proposed ban would be debated in the National Assembly.Whether the ban would also apply to women choosing head scarves as fashion statements à la Audrey Hepburn is unclear.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      Macron Sets Out to Build a ‘Dam’ Against Le Pen. Can It Hold?

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      After Sunday’s vote, when nearly a third of ballots went to the extreme right, a united front of mainstream voters looked more precarious than ever. PARIS — A day after Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, emerged as his challenger for the final round of France’s presidential election in less than two weeks, President Emmanuel Macron immediately set about on Monday to build the “dam.”Dams are the mainstream French voters who, time and again, have put political differences aside in the second round and voted for anyone but a Le Pen in a so-called “Republican front” to deny the far right the presidency.But after Sunday’s first round, when 32 percent of French voters supported candidates on the extreme right — a record — the dam may be more precarious than ever.Mr. Macron, widely criticized for a listless campaign, moved quickly Monday to shore it up, directly challenging Ms. Le Pen and her party, the National Rally, in the economically depressed north where she dominated Sunday.In Denain, a city won by Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Macron spoke of the worries of the youth in Denain and other social issues. He tried to remind voters of the extremist roots of Ms. Le Pen’s party, referring to it by its old name, the National Front.At a campaign stop of her own in a rural area, Yonne, Ms. Le Pen said that the dam was a dishonest strategy to win an election, adding that “it’s a way to save yourself when you don’t deserve it.’’In a triumphant speech against the majestic backdrop of the Louvre Museum five years ago, Mr. Macron had launched his presidency by pledging to unite the French so that there would be “no reason at all to vote for the extremes.’’But in addition to Ms. Le Pen’s second-place finish, with 23 percent of the vote, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist veteran, won 22 percent of Sunday’s votes to finish a strong third. Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters — split in their attitudes toward Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen — could now help determine the election’s final outcome on April 24.Outside a small market in Amiens, France, in March. Mr. Macron quickly moved Monday to challenge Ms. Le Pen in the economically depressed north where he lost to her even in Amiens, his hometown.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesAfter five years of Mr. Macron, who trounced Ms. Le Pen in the 2017 runoff, the far-right leader emerged stronger than ever. She has softened her image in a successful process of “undemonizing’’ and focused relentlessly on ordinary voters’ economic hardship.In Yonne, Ms. Le Pen hammered away at the themes that carried her through to the second round. Meeting with a cereal farmer, she spoke of how rising prices of fuel and fertilizers following the war in Ukraine would raise the cost of staples at supermarkets and hurt the most vulnerable.The far right’s record performance on Sunday resulted from a combination of factors, including Ms. Le Pen’s own efforts to revamp her image, a successful cultural battle waged by conservative forces in recent years, and a series of Islamist attacks in France since 2015. But critics say that it also reflected Mr. Macron’s continued strategy of triangulating France’s electoral landscape. While Mr. Macron was regarded as a center-left candidate five years ago, he shifted rightward during his presidency, sensing that his main challenge would come from Ms. Le Pen. That shift was embodied by a series of laws toughening France’s stance on immigration, empowering the police, and combating Islamist extremism. Many working French also felt that his economic policies unfairly favored the rich and have left them more adrift.If Mr. Macron’s intention was to defuse Ms. Le Pen’s appeal by stripping her of her core issues, critics say the approach backfired by ushering the talking points of the far right deeper into the mainstream political debate. Then, Ms. Le Pen also shifted her message to pocketbook issues that have now resonated even more broadly as energy prices spike because of the war in Ukraine.Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker and a spokesman for Mr. Macron’s campaign, said that the president was aiming to strengthen the dam strategy. He acknowledged that there have been “some mistakes” and “blunders,” noting that some government ministers had picked up themes and expressions promoted by the far right. Supporters of Ms. Le Pen singing the national anthem at her rally after voting results were announced on Sunday. Mr. Macron has described the far-right leader as a danger to French democracy.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Houlié denied that Mr. Macron had normalized far-right ideas, saying his government had mainly tried to respond to people’s growing concerns on crime and immigration. “We cannot sweep the dust under the carpet,” he said, referring to the issues. But many, especially Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters of the left, feel so betrayed that Mr. Macron may have a harder time in this next election persuading them to join his call for unity by building a dam against Ms. Le Pen, whom the president has called a danger to democracy. Alexis Lévrier, a historian who has written about Mr. Macron’s relations with the news media, said that as Mr. Macron tried to reshape French politics around a strict divide between his mainstream movement and Ms. Le Pen, he “contributed to the rise in power of the far right.” Unwittingly, “he’s a pyromaniac firefighter,” Mr. Lévrier said.A resident of Guyancourt — a well-off, left-leaning city southwest of Paris where Mr. Mélenchon came in first Sunday — Stéphanie Noury said that, in 2017, she gave Mr. Macron her vote as part of a dam against the far right. But this time, she planned to stay home for the final round.“Macron played into the hands of the extreme right,’’ said Ms. Noury, 55, a human resources manager who voted Sunday for Mr. Mélenchon. “He told himself that he would always win against the extreme right.’’Compared to 2017, Ms. Le Pen’s share of the first-round vote went up by a couple of percentage points despite the direct challenge of a new rival, the far-right TV pundit Éric Zemmour, who urged his supporters to vote for Ms. Le Pen in the upcoming showdown.On Sunday, Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Zemmour and a third far-right candidate, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, together got 32 percent of the vote. In 2017, Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Dupont-Aignan collected 26 percent in the first round.Ms. Le Pen meeting supporters at a rally in Stiring-Wendel, France, on April 1. The far-right candidate has sought to soften her image.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesVoters first formed a dam against the extreme right in 2002 when Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the political establishment by making it into a runoff against Jacques Chirac. Another dam helped defeat Ms. Le Pen in 2017.To gain credibility on the right, in 2019, Mr. Macron gave his first long interview on the sensitive issues of immigration and Islam to Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that straddles the right and far right.“By talking to us, Emmanuel Macron came to seek some legitimacy on these subjects, from right-wing people who felt he was doing nothing,” said Geoffroy Lejeune, the publication’s editor. “He knows that by doing this, he’s sending a big signal.” Aurélien Taché, a lawmaker once allied with Mr. Macron, said the president was elected in 2017 thanks to voters who put aside their political differences and united against Ms. Le Pen. He said Mr. Macron should have taken those votes — mainly from the left — into account in his policies afterward.“He did not consider them,” he said, adding that Mr. Macron instead worked to “set up this cleavage’’ between him and Ms. Le Pen, leading to a “high-risk rematch.”“There have been, on a whole range of topics, very strong concessions made to the far right,” Mr. Taché said, also citing tougher immigration rules and the application of a stricter version of French secularism, called laïcité.A migrant family waiting for emergency accommodation with a host family in front of the Paris City Hall last year. Some allies distanced themselves from Mr. Macron after he toughened his stance on immigration.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesBut Mr. Taché, who quit Mr. Macron’s party in 2020 over the president’s shift to the right, was especially critical of the government’s landmark law against separatism, which has been criticized inside and outside France, including by the U.S. envoy on international religious freedom. The law amounted to “making Islam and Muslims invisible,” Mr. Taché said. Some academics, political opponents and Muslim organizations have also criticized the law as discriminating against French Muslims by leading to the widespread closing of mosques, Muslim associations and schools.That resentment may now also complicate Mr. Macron’s dam-building effort. To be re-elected this time, for instance, he will have to persuade voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population southwest of Paris, to join the dam against Ms. Le Pen. A longtime stronghold of Mélenchon supporters, Trappes strongly backed Mr. Macron in the 2017 runoff. But comments by voters Sunday suggested that the dam might not be as effective this time. Frédéric Renan, 47, a computer programmer, said he would abstain or cast a blank vote in a showdown between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen.“Macron opened the door to the extreme right,’’ Mr. Renan said, adding that the president’s economic policies hurt the poor and fueled the rise of the far right. “I don’t see how voting for Macron is a vote in a dam against the extreme right,” he said. “Some people will say that not participating in the dam against the extreme right is irresponsible, that the threat of the extreme right is greater than what Emmanuel Macron proposes, but I’m not convinced.’’The Islamic Center of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in Trappes, a Paris suburb, on Sunday. To be re-elected, Mr. Macron will need to woo voters in places likes Trappes, a working-class city with a large Muslim population.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesAdèle Cordonnier More

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      Republican in Ohio Senate Primary Spoke Offensively About Asians

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      Mike Gibbons, a leading contender to succeed Senator Rob Portman, made the comments in a 2013 podcast on doing business in China.The leading Republican candidate in the Ohio Senate primary employed offensive stereotypes about Asian people in a 2013 podcast, citing a widely discredited book, “The Bell Curve,” that has drawn allegations of racism and sloppy research.The Senate candidate, Mike Gibbons, a financier who has poured millions of dollars of his own money into his campaign, made the comments during a discussion of how to do business in China. The remarks, published here for the first time, come as Republican candidates grapple with how to address a topic that has inflamed their voters, many of whom blame Beijing for a coronavirus pandemic that Donald Trump has referred to as the “Chinese virus.”And though Gibbons hasn’t used that terminology, his decade-old comments on China and Asian people could draw fresh scrutiny to a candidate who has received little national media attention despite running in one of the marquee races in this year’s midterm elections.“I’ve often thought that when I’ve run into Asians they’re all — you know, if you’ve ever read ‘The Bell Curve,’ it’s a book, a very controversial book, I can’t even remember who wrote, I think his name is Murray wrote this book,” Gibbons said in the Nov. 3, 2013, podcast, according to a transcript of his comments reviewed by The New York Times. He was referring to Charles Murray, a co-author of the 1994 book.Gibbons continued: “And it said that the smartest people in the world as far as measurable I.Q. were Ashkenazi Jews. And then right below them was basically everybody in China, India and, you know, throughout the Asian countries.”About a minute later, Gibbons, who earned a master’s degree from the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, described being in a class with “mostly Asians” during graduate school.“It was astounding to me how much they studied, how they were incredibly bright, but they memorized formulas,” Gibbons said. “And when we ran into a word problem — and you know, I think this is a function of the educational track they put them on — they got lost in the weeds.”As the discussion continued, his co-host asserted that the Chinese education system did a poor job of teaching critical thinking.“They’re very good at copying,” Gibbons added.Asked about Gibbons’s comments, Samantha Cotten, a senior communications adviser to the campaign, said in an email, “Mike was discussing the difference in educational structure and attainment that he experienced in both business and graduate school in relation to China.”Asian American leaders and advocates described Gibbons’s comments as offensive.“Defining an entire continent of billions of individuals by a singular characteristic is the definition of racism,” said Representative Judy Chu, a Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. Gibbons’s comments, she added, “betray his own lack of ‘critical thinking.’”Russell Jeung, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, a group that monitors incidents of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said Gibbons’s description of Asian intelligence was “part of the dehumanizing rhetoric around AAPIs that has contributed to the surge in racism that harms us today.”China has been an especially vexing topic for Republicans during this year’s campaigns, especially in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Candidates have accused one another of being “soft” on Beijing, which many primary voters hold responsible for everything from the coronavirus pandemic to lost manufacturing jobs.In July 2020, the Pew Research Center reported that 83 percent of Republicans held unfavorable views of China. And in a March 2021 Pew survey, 72 percent of Republicans said they supported getting tougher on China on economic issues, and 53 percent said that they viewed China as an enemy of the United States.The pandemic has also been accompanied by an alarming surge in attacks on Asian Americans across the United States. In the most recent example, in Yonkers, N.Y., a security camera captured a man assaulting a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent inside the entry to an apartment building. The video shows him hitting her more than 125 times, stomping on her crumpled body and spitting on her in what law enforcement officials said was a racially motivated incident.The pandemic has been accompanied by an alarming surge in attacks on Asian Americans across the United States.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesA Trump-like pitchOn the campaign trail, Gibbons casts himself as a self-made man, a political outsider and a job creator — in language that often sounds a lot like Trump’s 2016 campaign.His Cleveland-based investment banking and financial advisory firm, Brown Gibbons Lang & Company, has indeed made him wealthy and successful. According to his Senate campaign’s financial disclosure, Gibbons reported assets worth between $83 million and $286 million. He has already spent nearly $12 million in advertising alone, according to AdImpact, eclipsing his closest rivals.“I can’t be bought,” he said during a recent stop in Canton. “I’ve already lived my American dream. I’m not going there to get rich or make friends. I’m going there to restore American values.”The pitch seems to be paying off: Gibbons is leading the field, according to a recent Fox News poll of Ohio Republican primary voters, along with Josh Mandel. Twenty-two percent of those surveyed said they planned to vote for Gibbons in the May 5 primary, and 20 percent favored Mandel. Other candidates polled lower: J.D. Vance at 11 percent, Jane Timken at 9 percent and Matt Dolan at 7 percent.Senator Rob Portman, who is retiring, has endorsed Timken, a former state party chairwoman, as his preferred replacement.But the race is still wide open — 24 percent of voters remain undecided, and about two-thirds of the supporters of each of the top three contenders said they would consider another candidate.The world according to Mike GibbonsLike the other candidates in the Ohio race, Gibbons has played up his ties to Trump. He was a finance co-chair of Trump’s presidential campaign in Ohio in 2016, and, his website notes, he “gave even more money to the Trump re-election campaign in 2020.”But Gibbons does not always seem to have been in sync with one of the core elements of Trump’s political appeal: the former president’s trade policies, which were defined by an America-first agenda that included imposing tariffs on Chinese goods and promising to return manufacturing to the United States.Last year, Gibbons praised Trump’s handling of China during an interview with Jewish Insider.“I’ve done large financial transactions all over the world, and I can tell you I long ago noticed what was going on in how China was abusing their role,” he said. “But they don’t play by the rules, and I think Donald Trump was the first one with enough gumption to go out and say, ‘We’re gonna force you to play by the rules, and you’re not going to keep draining us of our intellectual property.’ I think he was the first one to stand up.”Years earlier, however, during an interview with Crain’s Cleveland Business in 2005, Gibbons expressed a different perspective. Asked what the “biggest challenge” Northeast Ohio was facing, he replied by discussing free-market capitalism, arguing that the region’s political leaders were clinging to an outdated understanding of global economic forces.The biggest challenge, Gibbons said, was “getting our politicians to understand the way the world works.”“The battle is over between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won,” he told Crain’s Cleveland Business. “If our politicians want to keep fighting that battle we will end up looking like Youngstown,” an Ohio city that has been hit hard by job losses over the last few decades.He continued: “If you can have the same product on the shelf out of China, with the same level of risk as far as getting it there and development costs, invariably, in a free market, all those jobs [making that product] are going to move to China. And we better face it. No legislation in the world can stop it.”“That’s the way a free market works, and that will ultimately create more benefits for the people of the United States,” Gibbons said.Asked about those comments, Cotten, the senior communications adviser to the Gibbons campaign, said, “Mike was stating that free market capitalism is good for the U.S., not pushing American jobs overseas.”She added: “Unfortunately, because of decades of failed Democrat policies that included higher taxes and excessive regulations, good-paying, blue-collar jobs were driven to places like China. Mike believes in the America first agenda” and a need for “new leadership in Washington that will put our economy back on track like we experienced under President Trump.”What to readPresident Biden will attend a NATO summit in Brussels next week. The New York Times continues its live coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war.The crisis in Ukraine has empowered the political center, Jonathan Weisman reports.Sarah Bloom Raskin withdrew from consideration to serve as the Federal Reserve’s top regulator after Senator Joe Manchin III said he wouldn’t vote to confirm her, Jeanna Smialek reports.Closing segmentPresident Biden spoke in Philadelphia last week. He has argued that solving climate change is a way to create more jobs, and he repeated that theme at a fund-raiser on Monday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesA change in the political climate At his first in-person fund-raiser of his presidency Monday evening, President Biden focused his remarks on the threat of climate change, boasting that he had written the first climate bill in the 1980s and calling the issue “an existential threat to humanity.”For environmentalists who have long pushed to make climate change a salient political issue, it’s a major moment. While polling indicates that most Americans believe the United States should work to address climate change, the issue can get lost in campaigns.Biden has long argued that solving climate change is also a way to create more jobs. He repeated that theme last night in Washington, D.C. — but also added that addressing climate change was a timely national security issue.It would be a “different world,” Biden said, if the United States and Europe could rely on renewable energy rather than Russian oil.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Australia Asks: How Far Is Too Far in Making China a Campaign Weapon?

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      Australia’s conservative government has claimed, without evidence, that the political opposition would cozy up to Beijing. To many, it has crossed a red line.MELBOURNE, Australia — A group of middle-aged Chinese Australians logged onto Zoom to step, kick and punch through their regular exercise class one day late last month. Then they lingered online to despair at the government’s attempt to turn China into a campaign weapon.After years of deteriorating relations between the two countries, the seven men and women in Melbourne were resigned to the fact that China would become a political wedge in the federal election due by May. But when Prime Minister Scott Morrison questioned the allegiance of a leader of the opposition Labor Party by accusing him of being a “Manchurian candidate,” that felt like a step too far.“I was shocked and surprised that he would go so low,” said Anne Pang, 63, the class’s instructor, who runs the Barry Pang Kung Fu School with her husband and is a leader in the Chinese Australian community. “It was totally uncalled-for and totally un-Australian.”The concern across Melbourne and the rest of Australia’s large Chinese diaspora reflects the intense emotions and risks associated with the Morrison government’s attempt to exploit rising fears of China.For months, Australia’s governing conservative coalition has been trying to deflect from its domestic vulnerabilities by laying out a case for re-election that suggests its opponents will cozy up to a powerful and dangerous Chinese government.Prime Minister Scott Morrison, left, and the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Anthony Albanese.Sam Mooy/Getty ImagesRecent evidence says otherwise: Labor has been a partner in toughening foreign interference laws and joined the coalition in every recent standoff with China, over tariffs, detentions and human rights. The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, has said his party would deal with Beijing “in a mature way” but would not significantly alter the government’s approach.That has not stopped the coalition from issuing louder and more ominous claims about foreign threats and supposed domestic collusion as it has faced criticism over its handling of the Omicron outbreak and sexual harassment cases in Parliament.It’s led to whisper campaigns against Labor candidates of Chinese descent in Sydney, along with intense disappointment among those who generally support the government’s desire to stand up to Beijing, but want Australia to dig deeper into the policy challenges that Xi Jinping’s China represents.“It’s unhealthy and unhelpful,” said Wai Ling Yeung, a former head of Chinese studies at Curtin University in Perth who contributed to a new report about Chinese influence. “The kind of reflection we need to have is about how much have we in Australia made our economy reliant on China? How did we not diversify, and what are the lessons we could learn now from this experience?”Mr. Morrison — often celebrated by American officials for his handling of Beijing — “has lost control of any prudent or rational dimension in his approach to China,” said James Curran, a history professor at the University of Sydney who is writing a book about Australia’s China debate.“What’s going on here is a mark of sheer desperation,” he added. “He’s on the political back foot, and he’s looking for anything that will work.”Mr. Morrison’s rush down what Mr. Curran called “the new Cold Warrior’s path” has mostly involved following the hawks within his own center-right and often divided Liberal Party. Peter Dutton, Australia’s defense minister and a rival of Mr. Morrison’s, has led the charge, warning that Chinese missiles could reach Australia, then declaring in Parliament in February that Chinese officials see Mr. Albanese, the Labor Party leader, “as their pick.”Mongolian construction workers last week at Wentworth Point in Sydney, an area with a significant Asian population.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesMr. Morrison, after previously resisting such language, seemed eager to outdo Mr. Dutton, tossing out the “Manchurian candidate” line, which he later retracted, only to repeat his claim (without evidence) that the Chinese government wants Labor to win.In an isolated country with a history of xenophobia, the political gambit is built on a mix of tried-and-true scare tactics and cherry-picked facts.The Australian authorities, in public statements and leaks, reported last month that China was behind a recent plot to influence the election. But the officials also said that the plot had been foiled before any politicians or parties knew about it, and that foreign interference efforts had targeted both parties in the past.Mr. Morrison and his coalition are nonetheless seeking to make voters skeptical of Mr. Albanese, who has little international experience, and focus on their own efforts to counter China — including a partnership with Britain and the United States for nuclear submarines.The Morrison-Dutton pitch arrives at a moment of deep unease, with Russia invading Ukraine after announcing a closer partnership with Beijing. (This week, the prime minister accused China of abetting the bloodshed through its “chilling silence.”) And it builds on polls showing that Australians’ distrust of China has increasingly blurred the line between the Chinese government and anyone with links to the country.Australians in recent years have — often unfairly — blamed Chinese investors for rising property prices. And after Covid first spread from China, racist abuse against Asian Australians followed.In Melbourne, the men and women from the kung fu group told of receiving cold stares from strangers. Others who hadn’t personally had negative experiences pointed to stories from friends and in the media. They worried that the government’s heated language could embolden those who are not interested in distinguishing between the Chinese Communist Party and anyone who looks Chinese.Sally Sitou, second from right, a Labor candidate, meeting with local councillors and residents in Wentworth Point.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesIn Sydney, too, Chinese Australians said they saw perceptions change, hurting their sense of belonging.Sally Sitou, 39, a Labor candidate who is running for the federal Parliament, said that when Mr. Dutton and Mr. Morrison linked her party to Chinese Communists, her greatest fears about running for office had come to life.She was heartbroken again when conservative media outlets started attacking Mr. Albanese with a video of him at an event in 2018 speaking a few words of Mandarin, a language she wishes she spoke better and wants her young son to respect and learn.“It made me realize the depths to which they’re willing to go,” she said, “and how nasty this campaign is likely to get.”Craig Chung, a former Sydney city councilor and Liberal Party member whose family moved to Australia from China in 1882, said it had been “a difficult couple of years” for Chinese Australians. What people often forget, he added, is that “there’s a difference between sticking it to the Chinese people and sticking it to the Chinese government.”Mr. Dutton and Mr. Morrison have at times tried to make that distinction clear. About 5 percent of Australia’s population — 1.2 million people — claim Chinese heritage, and it’s a diverse group. It includes those who fled China after Tiananmen Square, others from Hong Kong, Taiwan or Vietnam, along with recent arrivals who came to Australia for college.But as Australia has challenged China and it has responded with punishing tariffs on Australian products including coal and wine, that complexity has been ironed flat.Jason Yat-sen Li, 50, a Labor candidate for the New South Wales state legislature, said his campaign saw the impact firsthand in his by-election victory last month. Volunteers for his Liberal Party opponent were overheard telling voters to question his loyalty to Australia even though he’d been born and educated in Sydney.“It wasn’t overt. It was done quietly,” Mr. Li said. “They were picking who they thought would be receptive to that message, and they would whisper things like ‘If you vote for Jason, you might be voting for the Chinese government.’”Chinese Australians say they have seen perceptions change in Sydney, hurting their sense of belonging.Matthew Abbott for The New York TimesCriticism of the government’s tone extends beyond the political opposition.Dennis Richardson, a retired intelligence official who led several federal departments, said in an interview that by falsely suggesting that Labor favored appeasement, the government had crossed a “red line.”“China would like to see division, and it’s important that we not have that division,” he said.Whether the effort will work at the polls, no one yet knows.In the Melbourne kung fu group, some thought the situation might improve under a new government, but others worried that the ugly language could be dredged up again if either side needed help in the polls.Ms. Pang recalled the hostility she experienced when her family migrated to Australia from Taiwan in 1970, an era when policies that had restricted nonwhite immigration for decades were ending. Australia has become much more multicultural since then, but recently, she said, it has started to feel as if it is slipping backward.“I thought the times of the 1970s was gone in terms of racial discrimination,” she said. “But now I can see it quite vividly.”Yan Zhuang reported from Melbourne, and Damien Cave from Sydney. Chris Buckley contributed reporting from Sydney. More

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      Will Asian Americans Bolt From the Democratic Party?

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      Over the past three decades, Asian American voters — according to Pew, the fastest growing group in the country — have shifted from decisively supporting Republicans to becoming a reliably Democratic bloc, anchored by firmly liberal views on key national issues.The question now is whether this party loyalty will withstand politically divisive developments that appear to pit Asian Americans against other key Democratic constituencies — as controversies emerge, for example, over progressive education policies that show signs of decreasing access to top schools for Asian Americans in order to increase access for Black and Hispanic students.There is little question of the depth of liberal commitments among Asian Americans.“Do Asian Americans, a group marked by crosscutting demographic cleavages and distinct settlement histories, constitute a meaningful political category with shared policy views?” ask Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, and Sono Shah, a computer scientist at the Pew Research Center, in their 2021 paper “Convergence Across Difference: Understanding the Political Ties That Bind with the 2016 National Asian American Survey.”Their answer: “Political differences within the Asian American community are between those who are progressive and those who are even more so.”Wong and Shah cite a 2016 New York Times article by my news-side colleague Jeremy W. Peters, “Donald Trump Is Seen as Helping Push Asian Americans Into Democratic Arms”:In 1992, the year national exit polls started reporting Asian American sentiment, the group leaned Republican, supporting George Bush over Bill Clinton 55 percent to 31 percent. But by 2012, that had reversed. Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported President Obama over Mitt Romney — 73 percent to 26 percent.In their paper, Wong and Shah note that “despite critical differences in national origin, generation, class, and even partisanship, Asian Americans demonstrate a surprising degree of political commonality.”With regard to taxes, for example, “More than 75 percent of both Asian American Democrats and Republicans support increasing taxes on the rich to provide a tax cut for the middle class.”Or take support for strong emissions regulations to address environmental concerns. This has 78.3 percent support among Asian American Democrats and 76.9 percent among Asian American Republicans.In a 2021 paper, “Fault Lines Among Asian Americans,” Sunmin Kim — a sociologist at Dartmouth — found that Asian Americans took decisively liberal stands on Obamacare, admission of Syrian refugees, free college tuition, opposition to the Muslim immigration ban, environmental restrictions on power plants and government assistance to Black Americans. The only exception was legalization of marijuana, which received less support from Asian Americans than from any other group.In an email, Kim cited the declining importance of communism as a key factor in the changing partisan allegiance of Asian American voters. In the 1970s and 80s, he said, “Taiwanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese chose the party that had a reputation of being tougher on communism. Obviously, it was the Republican Party. Chinese immigrants, many of whom retained the memory of the Cultural Revolution, were not too different.” After the 1990s, he continued, “the children of immigrants who grew up and received education in the United States replace the first generation, and their outlook on politics is much different from their parents. They see themselves as a racial minority, and their high education level pushes them towards liberalism on many issues.”In short, Kim wrote: “the Cold War ended and a generational shift occurred.”Despite many shared values, there are divergences of opinion among Asian Americans on a number of issues, in part depending on the country of origin. These differences are clear in the results of the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey, which was released in September 2020.Asked for their preference for Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 54 percent of all Asian Americans chose Biden to 30 percent for Trump. Biden had majority support from Indian (65-28), Japanese (61-24), Korean (57-26), Chinese (56-20) and Filipino Americans (52-34). Vietnamese Americans were the lone exception, supporting Trump 48-36.At the moment, affirmative action admissions policies are a key issue testing Asian American support for the Democratic Party. In educational institutions as diverse as Harvard, San Francisco’s Lowell High School, Loudon County’s Thomas Jefferson High School and the most prestigious selective high schools in New York and Boston, conflict over educational resources between Asian American students and parents on one side and Black and Hispanic students and parents on the other has become endemic. Policies designed to increase Black and Hispanic access to high quality schools often result in a reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted.Despite this, the 2020 Asian American Voter Survey cited above found that 70 percent of Asian Americans said they “favor affirmative action programs designed to help Blacks, women and other minorities,” with 16 percent opposed. Indian Americans were strongest in their support, 86-9, while Chinese Americans were lowest, 56-25.These numbers appear to mask considerable ambivalence over affirmative action among Asian Americans when the question was posed not in the abstract but in the real world. In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209 prohibiting government from implementing affirmative action policies, declaring that “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”In 2020, California voters were asked to support or oppose repeal of the anti-affirmative action measure — that is, to restore affirmative action. 36 percent of all Asian American voters said they would support restoration of affirmative action, 22 percent were opposed and 36 percent were undecided. A plurality of Chinese Americans, 38 percent, on the other hand, opposed restoration of affirmative action, 30 percent were in favor, and 28 percent were undecided.The debate over affirmative action admission policies has deep roots. In 2009, Thomas J. Espenshade, a sociologist at Princeton, and Alexandria Walton Radford, of the Center for Applied Research in Postsecondary Education, wrote in their paper. “A New Manhattan Project” thatCompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis. The boost for Hispanic candidates is equal on average to 130 SAT points. Asian applicants face a 140 point SAT disadvantage.In 2018, the Harvard Crimson studied the average SAT scores of students admitted to Harvard from 1995 to 2013. It found that Asian Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections, while whites averaged 745 across all sections, Hispanic American 718, Native-American and Native-Hawaiian 712 and African-American 704.Scholars of Asian American politics have found that Asian American voters have remained relatively strong supporters of affirmative action policies, with one exception: Chinese Americans, who constitute nearly a quarter of all Asian Americans.In “Asian Americans and Race-Conscious Admissions: Understanding the Conservative Opposition’s Strategy of Misinformation, Intimidation & Racial Division,” Liliana M. Garces and OiYan Poon, professors of educational leadership at the University of Texas-Austin and Colorado State University, give the following reasons for the concentration of anti-affirmative action sentiment among Chinese Americans.Garces and Poon write that 1990 changes in the U.S. Immigration Act “increased by threefold the number of visas for highly skilled, professional-class immigrants, privileging highly educated and skilled immigrants” while “migration policy changes in China advantaged more structurally-privileged Chinese to emigrate.”Second, “growing up in mainland China, many of these more recent Chinese American immigrants were systemically and culturally socialized to strongly believe that a single examination is a valid measure of merit for elite college access.”Third, “The residential and employment patterns among more recent immigrants suggest that their social lives remain limited to middle and upper-middle class Chinese American immigrants and whites.”And finally,The social media platform, WeChat, plays an important role in fostering opposition to affirmative action among some Chinese American immigrants. Some studies have found that WeChat plays a central role in the distribution of information among the Chinese diasporic community, including fake news, to politically motivate and organize Chinese immigrants for conservative causes, especially against affirmative action and ethnic data disaggregation.Another issue with the potential to push Asian American voters to the right is crime.The 2018 Crime Victimization report issued in September 2019 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Department of Justice found that a total of 182,230 violent crimes were committed against Asian Americans in 2018. 27.5 percent were committed by African Americans, 24.1 percent by whites, 24.1 percent by Asian Americans, 7.0 percent by Hispanics, and the rest undetermined.The New York City police report on 2021 hate crime arrestees shows that 30 of the 56 men and women charged with hate crimes against Asian Americans were Black, 14 were Hispanic, 7 were white and five were Asian American/Pacific Islanders.While most of the experts on Asian American politics I contacted voiced confidence in the continued commitment of Asian Americans to the Democratic Party and its candidates, there were some danger signals — for example, in the 2021 New York City mayoral election.That year, Eric Adams, the Democrat, decisively beat Curtis Sliwa, the Republican, 65.5 to 27.1, but support for Sliwa — an anti-crime stalwart who pledged to take on “the spineless politicians who vote to defund police” — shot up to 44 percent “in precincts where more than half of residents are Asian,” according to The City.The story was headlined “Chinese voters came out in force for the GOP in NYC, shaking up politics” and the subhead read “From Sunset Park in Brooklyn to Elmhurst and Flushing in Queens, frustrations over Democratic stances on schools and crime helped mobilize votes for Republican Curtis Sliwa for mayor and conservative Council candidates.”A crucial catalyst in the surge of support for Sliwa, according to The City, was his “proposed reforms to specialized high school admissions and gifted and talented programs” — ignoring the fact that Adams had also pledged to do this. More generally, the City reported,A wave of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans during the pandemic has heightened a sense of urgency about public safety and law enforcement. Asian anger and frustration have, for the first time, left a visible dent in a city election.Grace Meng, a Democratic congresswoman from Queens, tweeted on Nov. 4, 2021:Pending paper ballot counts, the assembly districts of @nily, @edbraunstein, @Barnwell30, @Rontkim and @Stacey23AD all went Republican. Our party better start giving more of a sh*t about #aapi (Asian American-Pacific Island) voters and communities. No other community turned out at a faster pace than AAPIs in 2020.Similarly, Asian Americans led the drive to oust three San Francisco School Board members — all progressive Democrats — last month. As Times colleague Amelia Nierenberg wrote on Feb. 16:The recall also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power. In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed when the school board changed the admission system for the district’s most prestigious institution, Lowell High School. It abolished requirements based primarily on grades and test scores, instead implementing a lottery system.In their March 2021 paper, “Why the trope of Black-Asian conflict in the face of anti-Asian violence dismisses solidarity,” Jennifer Lee and Tiffany Huang, sociologists at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania, point out that “there have been over 3,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian violence from 47 states and the District of Columbia, ranging from stabbings and beatings, to verbal harassment and bullying, to being spit on and shunned.”While “these senseless acts of anti-Asian violence have finally garnered the national attention they deserve,” Lee and Huang continue, “they have also invoked anti-Black sentiment and reignited the trope of Black-Asian conflict. Because some of the videotaped perpetrators appear to have been Black, some observers immediately reduced anti-Asian violence to Black-Asian conflict.”Working against such Black-Asian conflict, the two authors argue, is a besieged but “real-world solidarity” demonstrated instudies showing that Black Americans are more likely than white or Hispanic Americans to recognize racism toward Asian Americans, and that Asian Americans who experience discrimination are more likely to recognize political commonality with Black Americans. Covid-related anti-Asian bias is not inevitable. While “China virus” rhetoric has been linked to violence and hostility, new research shows that priming Americans about the coronavirus did not increase anger among the majority of Americans toward Asian Americans.Lee and Huang warn, however, that “anger among a minority has invoked fear among the majority of Asian Americans.”In “Asian Americans, Affirmative Action & the Rise in Anti-Asian Hate,” published in the Spring 2021 issue of Daedalus, a journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lee makes the case that Asian American are at a political tipping point. She argues that:The changing selectivity of contemporary U.S. Asian immigration has recast Asian Americans from ‘unassimilable to exceptional,’ resulting in their rapid racial mobility. This mobility combined with their minoritized status places them in a unique group position in the U.S. racial hierarchy, conveniently wedged between underrepresented minorities who stand to gain most from the policy (affirmative action) and the advantaged majority who stands to lose most because of it. It also marks Asians as compelling victims of affirmative action who are penalized because of their race.In recent years, “a new brand of Asian immigrants has entered the political sphere whose attitudes depart from the Asian American college student activists of the 1960s,” Lee writes. “This faction of politically conservative Asian immigrants has no intention of following their liberal-leaning predecessors, nor do they intend to stay silent.”The issue is “whether more Asian Americans will choose to side with conservatives,” Lee writes, “or whether they will choose to forge a collective Asian American alliance will depend on whether U.S. Asians recognize and embrace their ethnic and class diversity. Will they forge a sense of linked fate akin to that which has guided the political attitudes and voting behavior of Black Americans?”The outcome may well have a major impact on the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans.Catalyst, the liberal voter analysis firm, found that from 2016 to 2020, Asian Americans increased their voter turnout by 39 percent, more than any other racial or ethnic constituency, including Hispanic Americans (up 31 percent) and African Americans (up 14 percent). This turnout increase worked decisively in favor of the Democratic Party as Asian Americans voted two to one for the party in both elections.The April 2021 Pew Research report cited above found that from 2000 to 2019, “The Asian population in the U.S. grew 81 percent from roughly 10.5 million to a record 18.9 million, surpassing the 70 percent growth rate of the nation’s Hispanic population. Furthermore, by 2060, the number of U.S. Asians is projected to rise to 35.8 million, more than triple their 2000 population.”What this means is that Republicans are certain to intensify their use affirmative action, crime, especially hate crime, and the movement away from merit testing to lotteries for admission to high caliber public schools as wedge issues to try to pry Asian American voters away from the Democratic Party. Indeed, they are already at it. For its part, the Democratic Party will need to add significant muscle to Jennifer Lee’s call for a “linked fate” among Asian and African Americans to fend off the challenge.The strong commitment of Asian Americans to education has been a source of allegiance to a Democratic Party that has become the preferred home for voters with college and advanced degrees. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is, at the same time, testing the strength of that allegiance by supporting education policies that reduce opportunities for Asian Americans at elite schools while increasing opportunity for two larger Democratic constituencies, made up of Black and Hispanic voters. This is the kind of problem inherent in a diverse coalition comprising a segmented electorate with competing agendas. For the foreseeable future, the ability of the party to manage these conflicts will be a key factor in its success or failure.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