Elections

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Will Trump's Election Lies Become a Litmus Test for Republicans?

      by

      Upcoming primaries will test whether embracing Donald J. Trump’s election falsehoods is a litmus test for Republican voters.WASHINGTON — More than a year after the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump’s false claims of election fraud remain a destabilizing force for the Republican Party, dividing an activist base galvanized by a lie from elites in Washington who are hoping to hold the party together long enough to win back power in Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.The tension flared this week as Republicans were forced to either explain or denounce a party resolution characterizing the deadly events of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.” But the episode was a only a preview of the battles ahead, with a series of upcoming primary contests pitting candidates loyal to Mr. Trump against those who, to varying degrees, resist his distortions about the election.Those races, in Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, Wyoming and elsewhere, promise to amplify calls for election audits, claims of fraud and a recasting of events surrounding the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. That debate will test the extent to which embracing Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election — and attempts to downplay the violence that followed — has become a new litmus test for Republican voters.“It still is a burning ember of passion for the base,” said Matt Batzel, the national executive director of American Majority, an organization that trains conservative grass-roots activists. “If those in Washington try to move on, there is going to be even a greater disconnect and greater frustration with their leadership, resulting in more tension and arguments within the party.”That prospect is alarming for some Republicans who worry about the long-term consequences of embedding Mr. Trump’s false claims into the foundation of the party. Far more Republicans, however, expressed concern this week about the near-term consequences: With President Biden’s approval ratings falling well below half of voters, many Republicans fear that debate will be a distraction ahead of a 2022 midterm election in which they are otherwise well positioned to take back power.“The more we talk about Jan. 6, the less we talk about how Biden hasn’t been successful,” said Steven Frias, a Republican committeeman from Rhode Island.Mr. Frias was among the estimated two dozen of 168 Republican National Committee members who voted last week against the party’s resolution to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, the two Republicans working with congressional Democrats to investigate the Jan. 6 riot.Barriers around the Capitol have remained in place since the Jan. 6 riots in 2021.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesMr. Frias said he did not think the party should censure a member “unless that Republican has engaged in some kind of criminal or unethical conduct.” He also lamented the resolution’s “unforced error” declaring that Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger were participating in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, quickly tried to clarify the phrase, saying that the party did not intend to include the rioters in that description — though such a distinction was not in the adopted text.That explanation did not prevent a rare public fight between Republican elected officials in Washington and the leaders of their party apparatus. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and other Republicans at the Capitol publicly denounced the censure. “We saw it happen,” Mr. McConnell said of the Jan. 6 riot. “It was a violent insurrection.”The Trump era has shown repeatedly how Republican leaders, including Mr. McConnell, will briefly confront the Trump wing of the party, before ultimately realigning themselves with their voters, especially as elections near. Those who do not — such as former Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee — typically exit elected politics.“Mitch McConnell does not speak for the Republican Party, and does not represent the views of the vast majority of its voters,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Wednesday.More than 70 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was illegitimate, according to a Washington Post poll last month. And the Pew Research Center found in a poll released Tuesday that 57 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump bears no responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — a number 11 points higher than a year ago.Protesters demanding a forensic audit of the 2020 presidential election in front of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., on Tuesday.Emily Elconin/ReutersFalse beliefs about the 2020 election were most intense among those who consume conservative media, according to a Public Religion Research Institute survey conducted in the fall. The poll found that 82 percent of Fox News viewers and 97 percent of those who consume far-right channels such as OAN and Newsmax believe the election was stolen.In Washington, party strategists and senators have mostly been loath to discuss the growing election denialism in the party’s ranks, either hoping it would fade with time or not wanting to challenge their voters. Now, as midterm elections near, Republican leaders close to the activists, volunteers and local leaders who power the party say that this sentiment is impossible to ignore.“Some people are very supportive of what happened on Jan. 6 and angry at the government’s response. Some people are offended by what happened on Jan. 6,” said Jane Brady, the chairwoman of the state Republican Party in Delaware, who voted in favor of the censure resolution. “I’ve got to rally those individuals on both sides to vote for our local candidates.”Some of the strongest condemnations of the censure resolution came from senators who are farthest from needing to face the voters.“The Republican Party started this year with a decided advantage on the issues that will determine the outcome of the fall elections,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. “But every moment that is spent re-litigating a lost election or defending those who have been convicted of criminal behavior moves us further away from the goal of victory this fall.”Ms. Collins, like Mr. McConnell, won re-election in 2020 and will not be on the ballot again until 2026.Key Developments in the Jan. 6 InvestigationCard 1 of 3White House phone records. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      A Bellwether for Narendra Modi as India’s Largest State Goes to the Polls

      by

      While many voters say they are concerned about the economy, the prime minister’s party has placed a focus on religion, with often polarizing effects.MEERUT, India — An election now underway in India’s most populous state is being closely watched as a referendum on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s eight years in office, during which he has often pursued a Hindu-first agenda that observers say has empowered his supporters’ polarizing emphasis on religious identity.Voters in Uttar Pradesh, a largely impoverished state of 200 million people in northern India, say they are concerned about the pandemic-battered economy, with youth unemployment widespread, housing shortages, and the rising cost of food and fuel.But the governing Bharatiya Janata Party has focused on religion, and on reinforcing new coalitions that have formed around caste, even as tensions between the state’s majority-Hindu population and its minority Muslims have been rising.Supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Meerut, a city in Uttar Pradesh, in January.Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated PressThe party is apparently counting on that divisive tactic to resonate in Uttar Pradesh, a bastion of the Hindu right, preserving its hold on power in the state and putting it in a favorable position for a general election in two years.Here’s a look at the major issues as voters in Uttar Pradesh and four other states, from coastal Goa to Uttarakhand on the border with China, go to the polls. Voting takes place over a month; the first set of results are expected March 10.ReligionIn January, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk who is the top official in Uttar Pradesh, laid out in stark terms how his party hoped to define the coming election.During a TV news interview, Mr. Adityanath, an acolyte of Mr. Modi’s and a potential successor as prime minister, cast the election in terms of “80 versus 20” — a thinly veiled reference to the rough percentage of Hindus in the state compared with Muslims.Referring to three high-profile Hindu temple development projects in a subsequent interview on state television, Mr. Adityanath said that “these 20 percent are those who oppose Ram Janam Bhoomi, they oppose Kashi Vishwanath Dham, they oppose the magnificent development of Mathura Vrindawan.”In India, religious and caste identity has long played a part in voters’ political calculations, and Uttar Pradesh is a stronghold of the B.J.P.’s Hindu nationalist ideology.Still, the backlash to Mr. Adityanath’s remarks was swift. Within days, several high-profile B.J.P. members defected from the party, joining the Samajwadi Party. That party, which is widely seen as representing the interests of the Yadav caste and other disadvantaged castes, has formed an alliance with other, smaller caste-based parties that were historically rivals.Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, in a helicopter on Tuesday during an election rally. Prime Minister Modi appointed him to the post in 2017; voters will now decide if he gets to stay for five more years.Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated PressOne defector was Swami Prasad Maurya, who as a state cabinet minister focused on the interests of the state’s socially or educationally disadvantaged castes, known in India as “Other Backward Castes,” or O.B.C.s.“B.J.P. leaders, in the arrogance of power, did not listen, did not give any importance” to minorities’ concerns, Mr. Maurya said.Some of the smaller O.B.C. groups that helped propel the B.J.P. to power in the last state election, in 2017, also expressed disillusionment. If enough members of these groups vote for opposition parties this time, the B.J.P. may struggle to retain power.Harmeet Singh, a voter who runs a trucking business in Meerut, an industrial city in western Uttar Pradesh, disapproved of Mr. Adityanath’s framing of the vote in religious terms.“Why they ask votes in the name of Hindus and Muslims? Why not ask for votes on your performance?” he said.“We employ both Hindus and Muslims,” he added. “This polarization will hurt the country.”EconomyThe B.J.P.’s focus on religion may not be enough to take voters’ minds off their economic struggles, political analysts said.Across India, the pandemic has buffeted the economy and people’s confidence in the government. The unemployment rate, which was as low as 3.4 percent in 2017, stood at nearly 8 percent in December 2021, with rates far higher among young people. And even as incomes have fallen for many, inflation has sent prices soaring for staples like tea, meat, cooking oil and lentils.“There is a change of political discourse. It’s not about mandir and masjid,” said Zoya Hasan, a political commentator, using the Hindi words for temple and mosque. “Economic issues are far more important for people.”This new focus on the economy among voters in Uttar Pradesh could threaten the B.J.P.’s firm hold on the state, Ms. Hasan said.“The B.J.P. has all the resources and all the power, but this election seems to be showing that new majorities can be formed,” she said.Some voters in Uttar Pradesh said they were pleased with social welfare measures carried out by Mr. Modi’s party.Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated PressAs campaigning ended this week, economic issues were foremost on the minds of voters interviewed in western Uttar Pradesh.“What we want is better public service like good education, good health facilities and employment for our children,” said Surender Yadav, a sugar cane farmer and a member of an O.B.C. group who said he had voted for the B.J.P. in 2017 but would not again.“These are the basic issues, but there has been no improvement,” he said.In the city of Modinagar, an opposition candidate, Sudesh Sharma, was showered with flower petals and fed sweets while campaigning.“You give us employment,” one person in the crowd shouted, “we give you vote.”Still, many voters perceive the B.J.P. as less corrupt than the opposition parties that were previously in power. They say they are happy with the government’s signature welfare programs in the state, including the distribution of cooking gas cylinders to women, the expansion of food rations and the construction of modest houses of brick and cement.“B.J.P. is doing good work. Law and order is under control. Girls can go out, roads are good, poor people were given houses,” said Sachin Kumar, a 25-year-old mechanic on the outskirts of Meerut. “We will vote for Yogi and Modi.”Pandemic and ProtestThe elections in Uttar Pradesh and the four other states could also reflect public sentiment on the B.J.P.-led government’s response to the pandemic and to yearlong protests by farmers that extracted a big concession from the usually unyielding Mr. Modi.A catastrophic second wave of the coronavirus and a halting government response filled hospitals and crematories. At one point, dozens of bodies washed up on the banks of the Ganges River in Uttar Pradesh, presumably victims of Covid-19.Last March, the government stepped up its response, banning exports of Indian-made vaccines and funneling them into a vaccination campaign that has inoculated more than half of the country’s 1.4 billion people.A meeting of farmers in February 2021. Months of protests by farmers against an effort to overhaul the agricultural sector extracted a rare concession from Mr. Modi’s government.Saumya Khandelwal for The New York TimesBut another political challenge emerged when a protest by farmers against a government agricultural overhaul spilled into Uttar Pradesh after encircling India’s capital, New Delhi, for months.The son of a prominent B.J.P. lawmaker in the state was charged with mowing down a group of demonstrating farmers with his vehicle. Later, after months of deadlock in negotiations with the government, the protesters triumphed, forcing Mr. Modi to ask Parliament to repeal the agricultural measures.The farmers’ success showed a rare vulnerability in the B.J.P., which has been consolidating power since Mr. Modi first took office in 2014.The state elections in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere will reveal whether the party’s recent stumbles are just bumps in the road, or a larger obstacle to retaining power in the world’s largest democracy.Hari Kumar reported from Meerut, India, and Emily Schmall from New Delhi. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Haiti Opposition Group Calls on U.S. to End Support for Current Government

      by

      With tensions rising, many see Monday as a deadline for the government to step down.A powerful Haitian opposition group is demanding the United States withdraw its support for the government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry in Haiti, saying the administration’s legitimacy is tarnished by delayed elections and Mr. Henry’s potential connection to the assassination of the country’s president.The opposition group, called the Montana Accord, has called for the United States to act by Monday — the date on which President Jovenel Moïse had vowed to step down, before he was gunned down in his home last year. The government will be rendered unconstitutional by Monday, according to the Montana Accord and independent experts.The showdown has left the Biden administration in an increasingly uncomfortable position. Afraid that Haiti may slip further into chaos, the United States for now is supporting the status quo: a ruling party that has governed for about a decade and seen the power of gangs explode across the country and corruption run rampant.“When we look at the history of Haiti, it is replete with the international community reaching into Haitian politics and picking winners and losers,” Brian Nichols, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in January. “Our goal in terms of the U.S. government is to avoid that.”As doubts mount that the Henry administration can hold elections this year, anti-government demonstrations have erupted throughout Port-au-Prince, the capital, and local gangs have used the moment of rising uncertainty to expand their territory.Adding to the instability, gangs stormed the airport road on Friday, shutting down businesses and putting Haiti’s police force on high alert in anticipation of more violence on Monday.The Montana Accord has called for the formation of a transitional government, with its leader, Fritz Alphonse Jean, at the helm to restore security before ultimately holding elections. By continuing to support the current government, the group says, the United States is essentially choosing a side.“Insecurity is rampant, fear of kidnapping and rape are the everyday situation of the average Haitian,” Mr. Jean said in an interview on Friday. “This is a state of disarray and the Henry government is just sitting there unable to address those challenges.”A roadblock a day before the funeral of Jovenel Moise in Cap-Haitien last July.Federico Rios for The New York TimesAnalysts acknowledge that a transitional government led by the Montana Accord would also be unconstitutional. But they say it would have more legitimacy than the Henry government because the group — made up of civil society organizations and powerful political figures — represents a wider array of the population than the current government, which was voted in with an abysmally low turnout.“What’s the most constitutional government you can have at the moment? The short answer is zero,” said Alexandra Filippova, a senior staff attorney at the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, a think tank focused on improving the justice system.“So the next best question is, what moves you closer to a legitimate constitutional government? We see that the Montana group is a flawed process but is the best way forward to creating a path for a legitimate government.”Senior American officials have urged the Montana Accord to work with Mr. Henry’s government to chart a path forward, and acknowledge that the group is an important partner in achieving a broadly representative political system to help steer the country toward elections.Mr. Henry has said the next government must be formed through elections, not a transitional government.The Montana Accord contends, however, that Mr. Henry has not created a feasible blueprint to improve security and to hold free and fair elections safely amid widespread gang violence, surging corruption and a disillusioned Haitian population.Adding to the distrust, Mr. Henry may also be implicated in Mr. Moïse’s killing, opposition members say.In September, Haiti’s top prosecutor claimed the prime minister was in touch with the chief suspect in Mr. Moïse’s death in the days before and hours after the assassination. The prosecutor asked the justice minister to charge Mr. Henry formally in the assassination. Mr. Henry swiftly fired both officials.Phone records obtained by The New York Times and an exclusive interview with another suspect in the assassination also bolster those accusations. Mr. Henry has denied the allegations.“The whole system is not trustworthy,” Monique Clesca, a member of the Montana Accord, said. “There is no way you can go to elections with Ariel Henry; nobody trusts him after this assassination.”Electing a new transitional president for the Montana Accord in Port-au-Prince last month.Ralph Tedy Erol/ReutersSo far, American officials have dismissed the accusations against the prime minister while urging the government and the Montana Accord to achieve a consensus. Mr. Henry, a senior American official said in an interview this month, is viewed as a caretaker and does not have the United States’ unconditional support.Average Haitians are skeptical that either the government or the opposition can improve their lives.“There’s nothing to expect from the decision makers, they always look out for themselves,” said Vanessa Jacques, 29, an unemployed mother.Ms. Jacques described a feeling of insecurity so deep that it has paralyzed her life, preventing her from attending university or running errands.“Living in Haiti, you have to look out for yourself, or no one else will,” she said.Recent presidential elections in Haiti have been plagued with problems and unrepresentative of the population. Mr. Moïse was elected in 2016 with only 600,000 votes, of a population of nearly six million eligible voters. His predecessor, Michel Martelly, was elected in a controversial election in which the United States was accused of intervening on his behalf.Still, many Haitian leaders see elections as the only path forward.“Elections are a must,” said Edmond Bocchit, Haiti’s ambassador to the United States. “Now it’s a matter of when and how are we going to get together to get it done.”While some business leaders in Haiti say Mr. Henry has questions to answer regarding Mr. Moïse’s assassination, they add that he has been able to keep the situation from unraveling and also achieved an important goal: raising fuel prices. Fuel subsidies have nearly bankrupted the state, and the previous government was unable to remove them without setting off riots.A road intersection near a street market in Pétionville last September amid insecurity and gas shortages.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times“The country has to keep moving,” said Wilhelm Lemke, the president of the​​ Haitian Manufacturers Association. “And they’ve kept it from unraveling,” he said, but Mr. Henry needs to reach out to the opposition to form a more representative government. He stressed that Mr. Henry had to sit down with the opposition to reach a broader political accord.But “the prime minister should address the inferences that he may be part of the assassination and all that. By not addressing it, you’re bringing water to your detractors,” he said. “And you’re diluting your moral authority.”Chris Cameron More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Germany’s ‘Invisible’ Chancellor Heads to Washington Amid Fierce Criticism

      by

      Olaf Scholz will try to repair Germany’s credibility in the Ukraine crisis when he meets President Biden on Monday. Next on his agenda: Kyiv and Moscow.BERLIN — One headline asked, “Where is Olaf Scholz?” A popular magazine mocked the German chancellor’s “art of disappearance.” And his ambassador in Washington wrote home that Germany was increasingly seen as an unreliable ally in a leaked memo that was all the buzz this past week and began with the words: “Berlin, we have a problem.”With the threat of war hanging over Europe and rising tensions in the standoff with Russia over Ukraine, Mr. Scholz is headed to Washington on Monday for his first meeting with President Biden since taking over as chancellor in December. Foremost on his agenda: Show the world that Berlin is committed to the Western alliance — and, well, show his face.Less than two months after taking over from Angela Merkel, his towering and long-serving predecessor, Mr. Scholz is drawing sharp criticism at home and abroad for his lack of leadership in one of the most serious security crises in Europe since the end of the Cold War.His Social Democrat-led government, an untested three-way coalition with the Greens and Free Democrats, has refused to send arms to Ukraine, most recently offering 5,000 helmets instead. And it has been cagey about the type of sanctions that could be imposed in the event of a Russian invasion.As for the chancellor, he has made himself conspicuously scarce in recent weeks — so scarce that the newsmagazine Der Spiegel described him as “nearly invisible, inaudible.”While President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy have been busy calling President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Scholz has so far neither picked up the phone to Moscow nor visited. He has not gone to Kyiv, Ukraine, yet, either, and his visit to Washington, some note, took almost two months to organize.Ukrainian soldiers on Saturday on the front line in eastern Ukraine. While the United States and other NATO countries rushed military aid to Ukraine, Germany offered 5,000 helmets.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesLast week, Emily Haber, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, sent a memo to Berlin, warning of “immense” damage to Germany’s reputation. It was not just the news media but many in the U.S. Congress who questioned Germany’s reliability, she reported. In the view of many Republicans, she wrote, Berlin is “in bed with Putin” in order to keep the gas flowing.It has not helped that since then, Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor from Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats, accused Ukraine of “saber rattling” and just on Friday announced that he would join the board of Gazprom, Russia’s most prominent energy company.“Scholz’s central mission for his Washington visit has to be restoring German credibility,” said Thorsten Benner, a founder and the director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.“It’s not how Mr. Scholz envisaged his first U.S. trip as chancellor,” Mr. Benner added. “But international security was never near the top of his agenda.”Mr. Scholz, 63, has been a familiar figure in German politics for more than two decades. He was general secretary of his party and mayor of the northern port city of Hamburg before serving in two governments led by Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, most recently as her finance minister.A labor lawyer and lifelong Social Democrat, Mr. Scholz narrowly won the election last fall on a platform promising workers “respect” and a higher minimum wage, while nudging Germany on a path to a carbon-neutral future.Foreign policy barely featured in his election campaign, but it has come to dominate the first weeks of the new administration. Rarely has a German leader come into office with so many burning crises. As soon as Mr. Scholz took over from Ms. Merkel in early December, he had to deal not just with a resurgent pandemic but with a Russian president mobilizing troops on Ukraine’s borders.Russian infantry vehicles during drills in January in the Rostov region of Russia. The standoff with Russia over Ukraine has proved particularly vexing for Mr. Scholz.Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters“It wasn’t the plan,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, the vice president of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund. “This is a government that has huddled around an ambitious plan of industrial transformation, but the reality of a crisis-ridden world has interfered with their plans.”Of all of the crises, the standoff with Russia has proved particularly uncomfortable for Mr. Scholz. His Social Democrats have traditionally favored a policy of working with Moscow. During the Cold War, Chancellor Willy Brandt engineered “Ostpolitik,” a policy of rapprochement with Russia.The last Social Democratic chancellor, Mr. Schröder, is not just a close friend of Mr. Putin’s, he has also been on the payroll of various Russian energy companies since 2005, notably Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, the two gas pipelines connecting Russia directly with Germany under the Baltic Sea.It was not until last week, after Mr. Schröder’s comments about Ukraine, that Mr. Scholz felt compelled to publicly distance himself from the former chancellor.“There is only one chancellor, and that is me,” he told the public broadcaster ZDF.His party’s divisions over Russia are one way to explain why Mr. Scholz has shrunk away from taking a bolder lead in the standoff with Russia, prompting some to lament the loss of leadership of his conservative predecessor.Mr. Scholz won the election last year primarily by convincing voters that he would be very much like Ms. Merkel. Terse, well briefed and abstaining from any gesture of triumph, he not only learned to sound like the former chancellor, he even emulated her body language, holding his hands together in her signature diamond shape.But now that he is running the country, that is no longer enough. German voters are hungry for Mr. Scholz to reveal himself and increasingly impatient to learn who he is and what he actually stands for.The receiving station for the $10 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which connects Russia directly with Germany. If Russia invades Ukraine, Mr. Scholz will be under enormous pressure to close it down. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesAs the current crisis unfolds, Mr. Scholz’s imitation of Ms. Merkel is also less and less convincing. She was understated and studious, and often kept her work behind the scenes, but she was not invisible.In the spring of 2014, after Mr. Putin invaded Crimea, Ms. Merkel was on the phone to him almost every day. It was Berlin that united reluctant European neighbors behind costly sanctions and persuaded President Barack Obama, distracted by domestic affairs, to focus on a faraway conflict.At that point, of course, Ms. Merkel had already been chancellor for nine years and knew all of the protagonists well.“The crisis came very soon for Scholz,” said Christoph Heusgen, a veteran diplomat and Ms. Merkel’s foreign policy adviser during the last Ukraine crisis.Mr. Scholz’s advisers have been taken aback by the level of criticism, arguing that Mr. Scholz was merely doing what Ms. Merkel had so often done: Make yourself scarce and keep people guessing while engaging in quiet diplomacy until you have a result.When Mr. Scholz has spoken up on the current crisis — referring to the Russia-owned gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 as a “private-sector project” before pivoting to saying that “everything” was on the table — he has conspicuously recycled language that Ms. Merkel used before.President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Deauville, France, in June 2014. In the spring of 2014, after Mr. Putin first invaded Ukraine, Ms. Merkel was on the phone to him almost every day.Sasha Mordovets/Getty ImagesBut given the escalation in the current crisis, that language is long outdated, analysts say.“He’s overlearned the Merkel style,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund said. “He’s Merkel-plus, and that doesn’t work in a crisis.”After facing mounting criticism from Kyiv and other Eastern European capitals, Mr. Scholz’s leadership is increasingly being questioned at home, too.In a recent Infratest Dimap poll, Mr. Scholz’s personal approval rating plummeted by 17 percentage points, to 43 percent from 60 percent in early January, the sharpest decline for a chancellor in postwar history, the firm says. Support for his Social Democrats fell to 22 percent, lagging the conservatives for the first time since last year’s surprise election victory.Mr. Scholz’s team announced that after returning from Washington, the chancellor will pivot to a full schedule that he hopes will shift German diplomacy into high gear. Following his meeting with Mr. Biden, he will meet with Mr. Macron; the Polish prime minister, Andrzej Duda; and the three leaders of the Baltic States. The week after, he will travel to Kyiv and Moscow, in that order.Senior diplomats say it is high time for such a pivot, starting with Monday’s visit to the White House.Mr. Scholz has a seeming center-left ally in Mr. Biden, who has so far refrained from publicly criticizing Berlin. Not since President Bill Clinton’s second term have both the White House and the German chancellery been in the hands of center-left leaders, and for all of the wavering on the German side, the two administrations have been in close contact throughout.Mr Scholz, right, listening to President Biden, left, at the start of the virtual Summit for Democracy in December. Mr. Biden has so far held off on publicly criticizing Berlin.Michele TantussiBut patience is running thin, and Mr. Scholz will have to bring something to the table.“There has to be a visible sign of commitment to the alliance,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said. “That’s what other allies are doing: The Spanish, the Baltic countries, the Poles, the Brits — everyone has offered something to strengthen deterrence on the eastern flank.”German lawmakers have started preliminary conversations about beefing up their troop presence in Lithuania, officials say. Other options include more naval patrols in the Baltic Sea and more air patrols in Bulgaria and Romania.As important as any material commitment may be the words Mr. Scholz uses — or does not use — to publicly communicate that commitment.“Maybe for the first time he could mention Nord Stream 2 by name when talking about possible sanctions,” Mr. Kleine-Brockhoff said. “He needs to make a clear statement that Germany gets the situation and will stand with its allies in a language that appeals to people in the U.S. and ideally not in his usual flat language,” he added. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      Facing Tough Election, Orban Turns to Putin for Support

      by

      The Hungarian leader made his name by defying Moscow. But he has increasingly turned toward Russia in an effort to secure the natural gas he needs to keep energy prices low and voters happy.BUDAPEST — Facing a tough election in two months, Hungary’s far-right populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, last week opened the centerpiece of a new state-funded museum district celebrating his country’s role as an anchor of European culture and identity.A shrine in the newly opened “House of Music” honors Hungarian champions of democracy routed by Austrian and Russian troops in 1848, anti-communist rebels crushed by Soviet soldiers in 1956 and, on a happier note, Hungary’s successful defiance of Moscow in 1989, when Mr. Orban made his name by demanding that 80,000 Soviet troops go home.On Tuesday, just days after the museum opening, a celebration of the national pride that Mr. Orban has long used to rev up his voters, the Hungarian prime minister swerved in the opposite direction to shore up another vital if contradictory pillar of his support — Russia.Meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir V. Putin, he signaled sympathy for Russia in its standoff with the West over Ukraine, and pleaded for more deliveries of the natural gas he needs to keep energy prices low and voters happy.Mr. Orban has long been seen as a political chameleon — and reviled by foes as a brazen opportunist — but he is now pushing his shape-shifting talents to a new level. He has broken ranks not only with Hungary’s allies over Ukraine but also with his country’s own long history of wariness toward Russia as he seeks to reconcile economic populism with the nationalism that underpins his political brand.Hungary, according to the European Union’s statistical agency, has the lowest electricity prices and third lowest gas prices for consumers in the 27-member European bloc. While prices elsewhere have doubled or tripled over the past year, Hungary has kept them steady, a feat that Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party is hoping will help it defeat an unusually united opposition in elections on April 3.A basilica in Budapest last September. A recent poll found that Hungary views Russia and China as more important strategic partners than the United States.Akos Stiller for The New York TimesAnalysts question whether Hungary can keep prices low for consumers indefinitely without crippling the finances of a huge state-owned electricity provider. But Mr. Orban has turned to Moscow to help convince voters he has their economic interests in hand.Hungary has sided unequivocally with Mr. Putin as fellow members of the European Union and NATO have voiced growing alarm over what they see as Russian bullying of Ukraine, on whose borders Moscow has massed more than 100,000 troops.Speaking on Hungarian radio Friday, Mr. Orban brushed off criticism of his cozying up to the Kremlin, saying that Hungary wanted to act as an “icebreaker” by pursuing a policy that he acknowledged “deviates entirely from most E.U. and NATO ally countries.”Understand Russia’s Relationship With the WestThe tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.Competing for Influence: For months, the threat of confrontation has been growing in a stretch of Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Threat of Invasion: As the Russian military builds its presence near Ukraine, Western nations are seeking to avert a worsening of the situation.Energy Politics: Europe is a huge customer of Russia’s fossil fuels. The rising tensions in Ukraine are driving fears of a midwinter cutoff.Migrant Crisis: As people gathered on the eastern border of the European Union, Russia’s uneasy alliance with Belarus triggered additional friction.Militarizing Society: With a “youth army” and initiatives promoting patriotism, the Russian government is pushing the idea that a fight might be coming.At a news conference Tuesday in the Kremlin with Mr. Putin, Mr. Orban left no doubt about the main reason for this deviation.“If we have Russian gas, we can provide a cheap supply of it to Hungarian households. If there is no Russian gas then we cannot do this,” he explained.Peter Kreko, the director of Political Capital in Budapest, said cheap energy was one of Fidesz’s main selling points to voters. “The party says that while people in the rest of Europe are freezing or becoming impoverished because of energy prices, Hungary has no problems.”Mr. Orban’s Moscow trip, he said, could therefore be a “big win — so long as the war does not escalate in Ukraine.” But if Russia invades, he added, Mr. Orban, who described his trip to Mr. Putin as a “mission of peace,” will be “in serious trouble internationally and also domestically. His whole narrative crumbles.”At a joint news conference with Mr. Orban in Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Putin effectively endorsed the Hungarian leader.Pool photo by Yuri KochetkovMr. Orban is not the first Hungarian leader to go cap in hand to Moscow in pursuit of energy. But when a predecessor did so in 2007 and reached a gas deal with Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled energy behemoth, Mr. Orban lambasted the arrangement as evidence his country was slipping back into Moscow’s orbit.Since then, however, Mr. Orban has dropped the anti-Moscow sentiments that catapulted him to prominence in 1989, and instead developed a form of far-right populism more focused on stoking contemporary cultural wars by targeting the European Union as a menacing threat to Hungarian sovereignty and values.Nationalist leaders in other European countries like Poland share Mr. Orban’s hostility toward Brussels but reject his outreach to Mr. Putin, a rift that has hobbled a yearslong effort by Europe’s far right to form a united front.“We had a bad relationship with the Soviet Union for many reasons that I do not need to list here,” Mr. Orban told radio listeners on Friday. “But that era is over, and now we are trying to have a system of relations with this new Russia that is different from what we had with the Soviet Union.”Mr. Putin has returned the favor.After blasting NATO for “ignoring” Russia’s security concerns as Mr. Orban stood at his side in the Kremlin, the Russian president effectively endorsed the Hungarian leader.“As we usually say when our partners are having elections, we will work with any elected leader,” Mr. Putin said, adding: “But I must note that you have done so much in your work on the Russian track in both the interest of Hungary and Russia. I hope our cooperation will continue.”A station for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, owned by the Russian energy company Gazprom, in Lumbin, Germany. Around 80 percent of the gas used in Hungary is imported from Gazprom.Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesMore important, he offered Mr. Orban a helping hand with energy, noting that underground storage facilities for gas in Europe are just 40 percent full and “our European partners in Europe will probably face problems next year.” But Hungary, Mr. Putin promised, “will have no problems because we will coordinate additional volumes.”Around 80 percent of the gas used in Hungary is imported from Gazprom, more than double the European Union’s average level of Russian imports. Then there is nuclear energy. The biggest producer of electricity in Hungary is the Paks Nuclear Power Plant, a Soviet-designed facility whose expansion Mr. Orban also discussed with Mr. Putin. It generates around half of Hungary’s electricity. Russia has provided loans of $10 billion to fund the plant’s expansion, a project led by Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom.“It should be clear for everyone that as long as this government is in power, energy prices will be reduced,” Mr. Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, declared last year.Hungary’s dependence on Russia for energy helps explain why, when the Biden administration announced this week that it would send more American troops to the region, Hungary said it didn’t need them. Poland and Romania welcomed the American offer.Hungary has a long history of animosity toward Russia, but this has faded as media outlets controlled by Mr. Orban and his supporters have praised Mr. Putin and steadily eroded trust in the Western alliance.Mr. Putin on TV during his meeting with Mr. Orban in Moscow on Tuesday. Hungary’s long history of animosity toward Russia has faded in recent years.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesA survey of public opinion across East and Central Europe last year by Globsec, a research group in Slovakia, found that Hungary, alone among countries in the region, views Russia and China as more important strategic partners than the United States.Some analysts believe Mr. Putin’s pledges of support for Hungary in Moscow were largely symbolic and won’t help Mr. Orban keep utility prices in check.“The era of cheap Russian gas has ended,” said Attila Weinhardt, an energy analyst at Portfolio, an online financial journal. The government’s hope that it can keep fixed energy prices for households, he said, is probably unsustainable.Mr. Orban’s Moscow visit secured no written commitment of additional supplies and mostly just reaffirmed a 15-year deal signed last September. That deal, which advanced Russian efforts to reduce gas deliveries to Europe through Ukraine by using alternative pipelines, was condemned by Ukraine as a “purely political, economically unreasonable decision.”Mr. Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, responded that Hungary was not playing politics but simply securing its own economic and security interests. “You cannot heat homes with political statements,” he said.Valerie Hopkins More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Apathy and Anger in France’s Election Everytown

      by

      Auxerre has backed the winner in every French presidential race for 40 years. This time, the town’s politics are drifting right, and many struggling residents see little to vote for.AUXERRE, France — With its magnificent 13th-century Gothic cathedral and its prominent statue of Paul Bert, one of the founders of France’s secular school system, Auxerre seems to encapsulate French history. Half-timbered houses line picturesque riverbanks. Vines roll across the surrounding countryside.“Auxerre is the typical French provincial town,” said Crescent Marault, the mayor.So typical, in fact, that for the past 40 years the Burgundy town has consistently voted for the winning presidential candidate, mirroring results at the national level and making the town a political bellwether of sorts.Today, like much of France, Auxerre has experienced a shift to the right, the result of a malaise that stems in part from the difficulties of getting a job in the provincial town, and stagnant earnings for those who are employed — as well as from less tangible fears over immigration and crime.Mr. Marault, the right-wing mayor, came to office in 2020 by beating the former socialist mayor of 19 years. He said insecurity was a growing concern for his constituents.Walking along the Yonne River in Auxerre. The town’s mayor said insecurity was a growing concern for his constituents.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“It’s as if some people let themselves be intoxicated by the comments on a national scale,” he said. “But frankly, we cannot consider that Auxerre is a city where there is insecurity.” The crime rate in Auxerre is higher than the national average but far below that in Paris.This drift rightward has been accompanied by growing disillusionment with politics as a whole. Many people seem to have given up on the idea that political change can make any difference to their lives.“The presidential election is a moment of polarization of media attention, but is not found in people’s daily lives,” said Benoît Coquard, a sociologist who specializes in rural life. “It’s important to see this gap between the media bubble and what is actually happening in the lives of people who are uninterested in it.”Valentine Souyri, 38, a bus driver who was watching her children at a playground, said that “the problem is not immigration.”“The problem is that the people who want power don’t know what it’s like to be down here,” said Ms. Souyri, who never fails to vote in elections. But this time, she’s unsure.“Nothing is changing for us here, for the people” Kader Djemaa, an unemployed father of three, said.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“None of them talks about what we are really interested in,” she said. “I’ve been looking for an ophthalmologist for my son for a year, I haven’t had a dentist for two years. Here we have nothing, it’s a desert.”“My parents were minimum-wage earners too, but they got by more,” Ms. Souyri added, echoing persistent concerns in France that social mobility is broken and social protections are diminishing.She once told her son, who wanted to become a member of the National Assembly, that “you are a child of a minimum-wage earner, you will be one, your children and grandchildren will too. Welcome to France!”Such frustration over a future perceived as bleak explains some of the shift toward political extremes. In the 2020 first round of regional elections, the far-right National Rally party was second in Auxerre, with 20 percent of the votes — up from 9.3 percent in the first round of the 2007 presidential election.Some businesses in the center of Auxerre have closed.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesÉmilie Pauron, 37, also a bus driver in Auxerre, has voted for Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s leader, in every presidential election since 2012.“The state has no money, and there are French people in the countryside who are starving,” Ms. Pauron said as she watched over her daughter — whose father is Congolese — at the same playground on the outskirts of town. “And those who arrive,” she added, alluding to immigrants, “we give them everything. We must stop.”Many in Auxerre mentioned the rising cost of living as their main concern. A recent poll shows a similar feeling at the national level, with 51 percent of French rating purchasing power as their main source of concern, well before immigration.Like in many medium-sized towns of so-called “peripheral France,” Auxerre suffered from the closing of a factory in 1990s — in this case, one that made woodworking tools and used to be among the area’s main employers. Now cut off from the main centers of population and employment, the town is experiencing the disconnect from the governing elite in Paris that drove the Yellow Vest movement three years ago.Many in Auxerre mentioned the rising cost of living as their main concern.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesWith less than three months to go before the April vote, the presidential campaign is feverishly discussed in the French media.On the right, polls show between 12 and 18 percent support for Ms. Le Pen; a far-right rival, Éric Zemmour; and Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of France’s established conservative party, Les Républicains. They are fighting to unseat President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, who is leading the polls with 24 percent. The left, hopelessly splintered, has no candidate with more than 10 percent.In the 2007 presidential election, a majority in Auxerre voted for Nicolas Sarkozy — 31 percent in the first round and around 52 percent in the second one, matching the nationwide figures.In the first round of the 2012 election, too, Auxerre voted in the same proportions for the main candidates as at the national level. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, from the hard left, won 11 percent, Ms. Le Pen 17 percent and François Hollande, the socialist who would be elected, roughly 30. In 2017, Mr. Macron came out on top in Auxerre in the first round with 25 percent.A teenager waiting on the street near a high school. Frustration over a future perceived as bleak explains some of the shift toward political extremes in the town.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesIf Auxerre is a bellwether, it seem curiously detached in this election. For many people, the vote seems to feel as distant and irrelevant as Paris and the elites who live there.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

    • 50 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Who Believes in Democracy?

      by

      “There is no sense in avoiding or diluting the magnitude of this turn in our story: One major political party no longer accepts democracy.”The author of this sentence is the former Obama White House speechwriter Ben Rhodes, writing recently in The Atlantic, but it could have flowed from the keyboard of a hundred different writers in the post-Trump, post-Jan. 6 era. That conservatism and the Republican Party have turned against government by the people, that only the Democratic Party still stands for democratic rule, is an important organizing thought of political commentary these days.So let’s subject it to some scrutiny — and with it, the current liberal relationship to democracy as well.First, there’s a sense in which conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies.Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power have raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.And that idea and self-image has remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grassroots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”Against this complicated backdrop, Donald Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.So seen from within the right, the challenge of getting out from under Trump’s deceptions isn’t just a simple matter of reviving a conservative commitment to democracy. Trump has succeeded precisely because he has exploited the right’s more democratic impulses, speaking to them and co-opting them and claiming them for himself. Which means a conservative rival can’t defeat or replace him by simply accusing him of being anti-democratic. Instead the only plausible pitch would argue that his populism is self-limiting, and that a post-Trump G.O.P. could potentially win a more sweeping majority than the one his supporters want to believe he won already — one that would hold up no matter what the liberal enemy gets up to.But if that argument is challenging to make amid the smog of Trumpenkampf, so is the anti-Trump argument that casts American liberalism as the force to which anyone who believes in American democracy must rally. Because however much the right’s populists get wrong about their claim to represent a true American majority, they get this much right: Contemporary liberalism is fundamentally miscast as a defender of popular self-rule.To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters.But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who’s currently threatening to cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless they reverse course.Whereas the recent wave of right-wing populism, even when it doesn’t command governing majorities, still tends to champion the basic idea of popular power — the belief that more areas of Western life should be subject to popular control and fewer removed into the purview of unelected mandarins. And even if this is not a wise idea in every case, it is democratic idea, whose widespread appeal reflects the fact that modern liberalism really does suffer from a democratic deficit.Which is a serious problem, to put it mildly, for a movement that aspires to fight and win a struggle on behalf of democratic values. So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Portugal’s Socialists Win the Most Seats in Parliament, but Not the Majority

      by

      The governing party emerged victorious from a snap election, but without the majority needed to avoid forming a coalition in the fractious parliament.LISBON — Portugal’s governing Socialist Party was victorious in snap elections on Sunday, winning the most seats in parliament, though it didn’t secure the majority it had sought to govern without forming a coalition.The result brought relief to Prime Minister António Costa, Portugal’s leader of the last six years, who has been popular for managing the country’s response to the pandemic but also faced questions about his stewardship of the economy.Mr. Costa — who is expected to be tasked by Portugal’s president to form a government — would still need to create a coalition in a fractious parliament which only last November would not pass a budget, setting the stage for Sunday’s snap election.“It will be necessary to wait and see how the coalitions emerge — whether on the left or on the right — and this may be more important,” said Marina Costa Lobo, a political scientist at the University of Lisbon.With 98 percent of the vote counted, Portugal’s Socialist Party had taken 42 percent of ballots, slightly lower than its share in the last election in 2019. The center-right Social Democratic Party, or P.S.D., had roughly 28 percent of the votes.The snap election was called in November after the budget dispute, which involved defections from Mr. Costa’s left-wing partners.At first, Mr. Costa bet on the possibility of increasing his party’s seats in Parliament — saying at one point he sought an absolute majority there — and polls at the start of the campaign showed the Socialists gaining. As Election Day neared, however, their prospects began to dim, and some polls showed their lead slipping, only to make a turnaround Sunday.For Maria Júlia Boanova and António Boanova, a retired couple in their 80s, Mr. Costa’s management of the health crisis was the key factor in their vote on Sunday. Both became ill with Covid-19, and Mr. Boanova was at one point hospitalized in the public health system, something that shored up his support of the government.“Everything was spot on — doctors, nurses, everything,” he said. “Politicians never gave me much, but the ones who at least gave me something were the Socialists.”Mr. Costa was depending on good will from his management of the pandemic, which has often been the envy of other European nations.Though Portugal was devastated by early waves of the coronavirus in 2020, the country embarked on an aggressive vaccination campaign that left more than 90 percent of the population vaccinated, among the highest rates in the world. To make that happen, the government enlisted Henrique Gouveia e Melo, a former submarine squadron commander who ultimately became the highly popular face of the government’s vaccination effort.Portugal’s Prime Minister, Antonio Costa, arrives for the electoral night in Lisbon on Sunday.Miguel A Lopes/EPA, via ShutterstockMany Portuguese also applauded Mr. Costa for avoiding austerity measures that were adopted by his conservative predecessors after the 2008 financial crisis, like tax increases and public sector wage cuts. Popular backlash to the belt-tightening paved the way for Mr. Costa’s rise to power in 2015.Still, Ms. Costa Lobo, the political scientist, said public opinion research showed that Portuguese voters remain concerned about the economy in addition to the pandemic.“There is also fear and declining economic expectations for the near future and some economic pessimism,” she said.In the upscale Lisbon neighborhood of Lapa, Vladym Pocherenyuk, 49, who works at an embassy in the capital, said he had soured on the Socialists after watching them in power for the past six years. He cast his vote for a small libertarian party called Liberal Initiative.“We still see many young and qualified people having to go abroad to earn a decent salary, like my daughter who is working in Dubai,” he said. “I struggle just to get to the end of the month with what I’m paid, and that is the situation for most people.”Experts agree that the new government’s chief concern will be passing the budget again.Portugal is awaiting a new infusion of recovery funds from the European Union worth roughly 16.6 billion euros, or about $18.5 billion, and seen as crucial to stabilizing the country’s economy as it recovers from the pandemic. But the money is contingent on Portugal meeting a variety of targets, including lowering its budget deficit.Sunday’s election also brought good news for Portugal’s right-wing party, Chega, which won at least 7 seats, on track to be parliament’s third largest party.Supporters of the center-right Social Democratic Party monitoring their phones in Lisbon on Sunday.Ana Brigida/Associated PressThe party, which was founded in 2019 by defectors from the P.S.D., secured its first seat in Parliament that year. It has since become a fixture in Portuguese politics, supporting candidates known for provocative statements about race relations and expressing nostalgia for Portugal’s former dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar.Experts say it remains unclear how much influence the party will have, however. The center-right P.S.D. has said it isn’t interested in joining forces with the party, limiting the influence that Chega could have in a future government.Cátia Bruno contributed reporting from Lisbon. More