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      As Johnson Draws a Happy Face, Britons Confront a Run of Bad News

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      There’s a cognitive dissonance between Mr. Johnson’s upbeat appraisal of British life and the ills facing its citizens, including gas and food shortages and fears of rising energy prices.LONDON — Britons are lining up for gas, staring at empty grocery shelves, paying higher taxes and worrying about spiraling prices as a grim winter approaches.But to visit the Conservative Party conference in Manchester this past week was to enter a kind of happy valley, where cabinet ministers danced, sang karaoke and drained flutes of champagne — Pol Roger, Winston Churchill’s favorite brand, naturally.Nobody captured the bonhomie better than Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who told a whooping crowd of party faithful, “You all represent the most jiving, hip, happening, and generally funkapolitan party in the world.”The cognitive dissonance extended beyond the Mardi Gras atmosphere. In his upbeat keynote speech, Mr. Johnson characterized the multiple ills afflicting Britain as a “function of growth and economic revival” — challenging but necessary post-Brexit adjustments on the way to a more prosperous future.It was at least his third explanation for the food and fuel shortages, which continued in some areas after three weeks. Initially, he denied there was a crisis. Then, he said the shortages were not about Brexit — contradicting analysts, union leaders, food producers and business owners — but were hitting every Western country as they emerged from the pandemic. And finally, he cited the stresses as evidence that Brexit was doing its job in shaking up the economy.“It is the ultimate in post-hoc rationalization — the idea that this is a well-thought-out plan, that we intended to do this all along,” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at the U.K. in a Changing Europe, a London think tank.Few politicians have either the indomitable cheer or the ideological flexibility of Mr. Johnson, so it was hardly surprising that he tried to put the best face on Britain’s run of bad news. He remains utterly in command of the Conservative Party, which has an 80-seat majority in the Parliament, and comfortably ahead of the opposition Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, in opinion polls.Cars lined up for gas in Slough, west of London, late last month.Mary Turner for The New York TimesYet political analysts and economists said there were risks in the Panglossian tone he struck in Manchester. With inflation projected to continue at a relatively high level, and the government admitting that shortages could continue until Christmas, voters could quickly sour on Mr. Johnson. Then next year come tax rises, after he broke his promise not to increase them last month.In hindsight, some said, the conference might be seen as a high-water mark for the prime minister.“A few days of disruption to fuel supplies makes the government look foolish,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London. “Much larger fuel bills are a much bigger deal.”Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, said Mr. Johnson could come to resemble James Callaghan, the Labour prime minister who was toppled in 1979 after a winter of fuel shortages and runaway inflation, when he did not appear sufficiently alarmed about the pileup of problems.When Mr. Johnson bounded into the auditorium at the conference last week, stopping to kiss his wife, Carrie, he looked anything but alarmed. Between jokes and jibes at the opposition, he presented a blueprint for a post-Brexit economy that he claimed would deliver high wages for skilled British workers, rather than lower-cost immigrants from the European Union, and put the onus on businesses to foot the bill.Companies and previous governments “reached for the same old lever of uncontrolled immigration to keep wages low,” Mr. Johnson said. “The answer is to control immigration, to allow people of talent to come to this country, but not to use immigration as an excuse for failure to invest in people, in skills and in the equipment, the facilities, the machinery they need to do their jobs.”That model is worlds away from Singapore-on-Thames, the catchphrase once used by the intellectual authors of Brexit to describe an open, lightly regulated, business-friendly hub that they said Britain would become once it cast off the labor laws and other shackles of Brussels. Nobody is talking about removing labor laws now (indeed, Mr. Johnson may soon move to raise Britain’s minimum wage).A shopper browsing empty shelves in a supermarket in London last month.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesContradictions between protectionists and free-marketeers have run through the Brexit movement from the start. “I describe it as Little England versus Global Britain,” Mr. Portes said, noting that Mr. Johnson, because of his lack of fixed convictions, was well-suited to hold this coalition together.Since Mr. Johnson’s landslide election victory in 2019, however, the gravity in the Conservative Party has shifted decisively toward protectionism and anti-immigration policies. That was the message that helped the Tories lure disenchanted, working-class, former Labour voters in the industrial Midlands and North of England.Many of these voters want the jobs that would come with the revival of British heavy industry, not better opportunities for hedge-fund managers in London. Conservative politicians who once championed the Singapore-on-Thames model now play it down.Mr. Johnson has embraced a blame-it-on-business message which, while at odds with his party’s traditional principles, is popular with his new base. He singled out the trucking industry, arguing that its failure to invest in better truck stops — “with basic facilities where you don’t have to urinate in the bushes,” he said — was one of the reasons young people did not aspire to becoming drivers.“It’s all of a piece with his move toward a much more populist style,” Mr. Bale said. “Johnson is pressing the right buttons, as far as these people are concerned.”His tough-on-business language has scrambled the traditional lines in British politics. On Friday, voters were treated to the curious spectacle of Mr. Starmer lashing out at Mr. Johnson for his attacks on business and presenting the Labour Party as the better partner for Britain’s corporations.For Mr. Johnson, critics said, the biggest risk is a lack of credibility. His initial claim that the food and fuel shortages were not caused by Brexit sounded unconvincing, given that his own government predicted rising prices and shortages of both in a 2019 report on the potential disruptions in the event of a “no-deal Brexit,” in which Britain would leave the European Union without a trade agreement.A station that ran out of gas in Slough last month.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe report, known as Operation Yellowhammer, laid out “reasonable worst-case planning assumptions,” among them that “certain types of fresh food supply will decrease” and that “customer behavior could lead to local shortages” of fuel. Though Britain negotiated a bare-bones trade deal with Brussels, its effect was similar to that of no deal.While it’s true that Mr. Johnson is indisputably setting his party’s agenda, it is not clear that the internal debates over the shape of a post-Brexit future are entirely settled. Rishi Sunak, the popular chancellor of the Exchequer, spoke at the conference about his years in California, and how he viewed Silicon Valley as a model for Britain.“I’m not sure that having a truck-driver shortage is part of that vision,” Ms. Rutter, the research fellow, said. More

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      Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s Chancellor, Faces Corruption Probe

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      The future of the chancellor’s coalition looked increasingly uncertain after prosecutors opened a criminal investigation on suspicion that he paid off pollsters and journalists.BERLIN — The government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of Austria teetered near collapse on Friday after federal prosecutors opened a criminal investigation against him this week on suspicion of using government funds to pay for favorable opinion polls and news articles.Mr. Kurz, who has been feted as the young face of European conservatism, vigorously denied the charges. But he is now facing calls to step aside as three opposition parties plan to introduce a vote of no-confidence against him at a special parliamentary session next week.President Alexander Van der Bellen addressed the nation on Friday evening, reassuring Austrians that while the latest crisis threatened the government, the country’s democratic institutions remained intact and functional. “We have a crisis of government, not a crisis of state,” Mr. Van der Bellen said. “Our democracy is prepared for all possible situations, including this one.”The future of Austria’s government will now depend on the left-leaning Greens, the junior coalition partners, who were always uncomfortable political bedfellows with Mr. Kurz and who had campaigned on a platform of “clean politics.” Prominent voices in the Greens party now see that position and their support for the government as untenable under a chancellor who is suspected of using funds from the finance ministry to pay for positive media coverage.They are now calling for another member of his People’s Party to take over the chancellorship. Short of that, they could pull out of the ruling coalition and try to form a new government with a combination of smaller opposition parties, though they lack the numbers in Parliament. If all fails, the country could face new elections. “Such a person is no longer capable of performing his duties, and of course the People’s Party has a responsibility here to nominate someone who is beyond reproach to lead this government,” Sigi Maurer, the Greens’ leader in Parliament, said of Mr. Kurz.Mr. Kurz, 35, says he is determined to hang on. He rose to prominence after seizing control of the conservative People’s Party and refashioned it by co-opting many of the messages of the far right at a time when anti-immigrant populism was surging in Europe.After an intense, social media-savvy campaign focused largely on patriotic themes and a hard line against migration, Mr. Kurz became Austria’s youngest chancellor after elections in 2017, when he forged a government that included the far-right Freedom Party. Less than two years later that government collapsed after the far right was itself engulfed in scandal when a video emerged showing the Freedom Party’s then leader promising government contracts in exchange for financial support from a woman claiming to be a wealthy Russian. In new elections in 2019 Mr. Kurz came out on top once again, but pivoted to form a government with the left-leaning Greens, demonstrating his skill as a political shape shifter.Now it is Mr. Kurz who is suspected of the ethical breach that may implode his latest government.Austria’s federal prosecutor said on Wednesday it had launched a criminal investigation against Mr. Kurz and nine others on suspicion of misusing government funds to pay for polls and articles in the news media that cast him in a favorable light in the months leading up to and just after his election to the chancellery.Mr. Kurz before a meeting with Austria’s president, Alexander van der Bellen, on Thursday in Vienna.Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty Images“Between the years 2016 and at least 2018, budgetary funds of the Federal Ministry of Finance were used to finance surveys conducted by a polling company in the interest of a political party and its top official that were exclusively motivated by party politics, and sometimes manipulated,” the prosecutor’s office said. The results of the polls were then published in media belonging to the Österreich Media Group, “without being declared as an advertisement,” the prosecutors said. In exchange for the favorable coverage, prosecutors said they suspected that “payments were made to the media conglomerate.”The chancellor denied it. “I know what I did and I know that the accusations are false,” Mr. Kurz told reporters in Vienna on Thursday, where he met with Mr. Van der Bellen. “Just as the independent judiciary is an important pillar of our democracy, so is the presumption of innocence essential to our rule of law,” Mr. Kurz said. “At least, that has been the case until now.”Mr. Kurz and the leaders of his conservative party have so far rejected calls for him to step aside, circling the wagons instead. “The leaders of the People’s Party today made very clear that they only want to stay in this government under the leadership of Sebastian Kurz,” Elisabeth Köstinger, a member of the party and minister for tourism in Mr. Kurz’s government, told reporters.Mr. Kurz after parliamentary elections in 2017, when he joined the far right in government. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesSince taking over leadership of the People’s Party, Mr. Kurz has been its unchallenged leader, said Alexandra Siegl, a political analyst with Peter Hajek Public Opinion Strategies in Vienna.“You could say that the People’s Party in the past few years has been Sebastian Kurz,” she said. “There is no one else in the party who is as well known across the country and there is no obvious successor.”But there is also no easy path for his opponents to take power. The three opposition parties lack the majority needed for their no-confidence vote to succeed, unless several lawmakers from the Greens join them in support. On Thursday the leaders of the Greens met with their counterparts from the Socialists, the largest opposition party in Parliament, to try to find a solution. Even if the two were to join forces with the smaller, liberal Neos party, they would still lack a majority and could only survive by securing the support of the far-right Freedom Party, itself an awkward and potentially unstable proposition.“It is imperative that Mr. Kurz step down,” the Freedom Party’s current leader, Herbert Kickl, told reporters on Friday. He gave no indication whether his party would be willing to support a three-way minority government led by the Socialists. Failing that, Austria could face new elections — territory where Mr. Kurz has shown twice he knows how to perform. The Greens, on the other hand, have seen their support dwindle since 2019 and such a move could jeopardize two of their signature bills, which have been worked out with the government, but not yet passed into law.The Chancellery in Vienna on Wednesday.Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty ImagesBut the ongoing criminal investigation into Mr. Kurz , which will determine whether there is sufficient evidence to press charges, may make it impossible for the Greens not to bolt. On Friday, the prosecutors’ office made available more documents showing the text message exchanges between Mr. Kurz and his advisers, which included disparaging remarks about the previous conservative party leader and insults about members of the government in which he once served as foreign minister and calls to “stir up” a region against then Chancellor Christian Kern.“This hardens the suspicions against him,” Ms. Siegl said. Nevertheless, it may not be enough to shatter Mr. Kurz’s popularity among Austrians, especially a core group of supporters who continue to support his hard line on migration, she said. “They just push it to the side and say that every politician has something to hide, if you look hard enough,” she said. “No one likes to admit that they have been taken for a ride.” More

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      In Iraqi Elections, Guns and Money Still Dominate Politics

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      Iraqis vote Sunday in parliamentary elections called a year early, after huge anti-government protests. Most parties are appealing to voters on the basis of religious, ethnic or tribal loyalty.BAGHDAD — Outside the headquarters of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, one of the main Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, fighters have posted a giant banner showing the U.S. Capitol building swallowed up by red tents, symbols of a defining event in Shiite history.It’s election time in Iraq, and Asaib Ahl al-Haq — blamed for attacks on American forces and listed by the United States as a terrorist organization — is just one of the paramilitary factions whose political wings are likely to win Parliament seats in Sunday’s voting. The banner’s imagery of the 7th century Battle of Karbala and a contemporaneous quote pledging revenge sends a message to all who pass: militant defense of Shiite Islam.Seventeen years after the United States invaded Iraq and toppled a dictator, the run-up to the country’s fifth general election highlights a political system dominated by guns and money, and still largely divided along sectarian and ethnic lines.The contest is likely to return the same main players to power, including a movement loyal to the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a coalition connected to militias backed by Iran, and the dominant Kurdish party in the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Other leading figures include a Sunni businessman under U.S. sanctions for corruption.A poster for the Sadrist Movement on display at the entrance to Sadr City, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad. Posters for a candidate from another party hang nearby. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesIn between are glimmers of hope that a reformed election law and a protest movement that prompted these elections a year early could bring some candidates who are not tied to traditional political parties into Iraq’s dysfunctional Parliament.But persuading disillusioned voters that it is worth casting their ballots will be a challenge in a country where corruption is so rampant that many government ministries are more focused on bribes than providing public services. Militias and their political wings are often seen as serving Iran’s interests more than Iraq’s.Almost no parties have put forth any political platforms. Instead they are appealing to voters on the basis of religious, ethnic or tribal loyalty.“I voted in the first elections and it did not meet our goals and then I voted in the second election and the same faces remained,” said Wissam Ali, walking along a downtown street carrying the bumper of a car he had just bought at a market. “The third time I decided not to vote.”Mr. Ali, from Babil province south of Baghdad, said he taught for the last 14 years in public schools as a temporary lecturer and has been unable to get a government teaching position because he does not belong to a political party.Anti-government protestors at a demonstration in Bagdad’s Tahrir Square this month commemorating activists killed by security forces and militia gunmen.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesStarting in October 2019, protests intensified, sweeping through Baghdad and the southern provinces demanding jobs and basic public services such as electricity and clean water. The mostly young and mostly Shiite protesters demanded change in a political system where government ministries are awarded as prizes to the biggest political blocs.The protesters called for an end to Iranian influence in Iraq through proxy militias that now are officially part of Iraq’s security forces, but only nominally under government control.In response, security forces killed almost 600 unarmed protesters, according to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights. Other estimates place the toll at 800. Militia fighters are blamed for many of the deaths and are accused of killing dozens more activists in targeted assassinations.The current prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, came to power last year after the previous government was forced by the protests to step down.While early elections were a key campaign promise, Mr. Kadhimi has been unable to fulfill most of the rest of his pledges — bringing to justice those behind the killings of activists, making a serious dent in corruption and reining in Iranian-backed militias.While the parties already in power are expected to dominate the new Parliament, changes in Iraq’s electoral law will make it easier for small parties and independent candidates to be elected. That could make this vote the most representative in the country’s postwar history. Despite faults in the election process including, in previous years, widespread fraud, Iraq is still far ahead of most Arab countries in holding national and provincial polls.A poster for an independent candidate hung on the fence of a soccer field in Sadr City. Changes in election rules have made it easier for independent candidates to win seats. Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times“It’s not a perfect system but it’s much better than the old one,” said Mohanad Adnan, an Iraqi political analyst.He said he believed the protests — and the bloody suppression of them — had resulted in some established parties losing part of their support. Some candidates are hoping to capitalize on a backlash against traditional political blocs.Fatin Muhi, a history professor at al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, said she was encouraged by her students to run for office. Ms. Muhi, who is running with a party affiliated with the anti-government protests, said many people in her middle-class constituency had planned to boycott the elections but changed their minds.“When they found out we were candidates for the protest movement they said ‘we will give you our votes,’” Ms. Muhi said. “We will be an opposition bloc to any decision issued by corrupt political parties.”In addition to anger and apathy, serious fraud in the last parliamentary election has fueled the boycott campaign.To counter voter distrust that led to a record low turnout in the 2018 polls, election workers have been going to people’s doors in some neighborhoods with voter registration cards. Election authorities “wanted to make it as easy as possible for voters who don’t have trust in the system,” said Mr. Adnan, the political analyst. “They are not motivated to register or pick up their cards.”Customers at a cafe in Sadr City with the lights switched off. State electricity provides the cafe with only two hours of power at a time before it must rely on a generator.  Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesThe country’s 21 million registered voters include an estimated one million old enough to vote for the first time. Despite TikTok campaign spots and other tactics aimed at reaching young voters, many of them are boycotting the election.“Our country is for us and not for them,” said Helen Alaa, 19, referring to the political parties and the militias. Ms. Alaa, a first-year college student who said she would not vote, was at a demonstration commemorating slain protesters. “We tried so hard to explain to them but they always try to kill us. Now they try to calm down the situation so they can win in the election and bring back the same faces.”Ahmed Adnan, 19, said, “Every election there is a candidate who comes to a mosque near our house and promises to build schools and pave streets.” The candidate keeps being elected, he said, but none of those things have been done.To help support his family, Mr. Adnan, who is unrelated to Mohanad Adnan, works at a shop selling ice, making about $8 a day. He is trying to finish high school by studying at home and going in only to take exams.His friend, Sajad Fahil, 18, said a candidate came to his door and offered to buy his vote for $300.“Every election there is a candidate who comes to a mosque near our house and promises to build schools and pave streets,” said Ahmed Adnan, center. He wants to finish high school but needs to work to help support his family.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York Times“He refused to say which party he was running for,” said Mr. Fadhil, who studies at a technical institute and is also boycotting the vote.In some areas where there is more money and races are more hotly contested, the going price for buying a vote is up to $1,000, according to several tribal officials.Sheikh Hameed al-Shoka, head of the Anbar Tribal Leaders Council, said groups commissioned by some political blocs were buying up people’s biometric voting cards by the thousands. Under that scheme, voters agree to relinquish their cards and later retrieve them outside polling sites — ensuring that they actually do turn out — where they then vote as directed.In a race between the powerful Sunni speaker of Parliament, Mohammad al-Halbousi, and Iraqi businessman Khamis al-Khanjar, Sheikh Hammeed said he had told his followers to support Mr. Khanjar. The tribal leader said both political figures were suspected of corruption, including Mr. Khanjar whom he acknowledged having “corrupt friends.”“But his friends have worked in the government and offered something for people,” said the tribal leader. “The others did not offer anything. They only provided for themselves.”Fishing on the banks of the Tigris river in Baghdad.Andrea DiCenzo for The New York TimesFalah Hassan and Sura Ali contributed reporting from Baghdad. Nermeen al-Mufti contributed reporting from Kirkuk, Iraq. More

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      Democracy, or Something Like It

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      No one is fooled when authoritarian leaders carry out fake elections. So why do they bother?This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section that examines global policy and affairs, and is published in conjunction with the annual Athens Democracy Forum.The Nicaraguan president, Daniel Ortega, who has most recently been in power since 2007, is running for a fourth consecutive term this year. Virtually all of his potential challengers have disappeared, been detained, or pushed into exile, while the independent media has been silenced and the main opposition party has been formally disqualified from running.Yet Mr. Ortega continues to keep up the illusion of holding free elections, imitating the tactics of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Last year, Mr. Maduro’s administration cracked down on dissident leaders, journalists and activists in Venezuela ahead of December’s parliamentary elections, which were eventually boycotted by the opposition. Mr. Maduro’s governing majority and allies won 91 percent of the seats in the National Assembly.Nicaragua is not alone in constructing a democratic facade, but Mr. Ortega’s methods have been exceptionally striking. “This is a dramatic escalation of systemic repression which we haven’t seen in Latin America since the 1980s,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank.“There is still a desire on the part of regimes to have a fig leaf of democracy, however not credible that is,” Mr. Shifter said. He noted that the pretense might have been the excuse Mexico and Argentina needed to avoid joining in a recent Organization of American States vote denouncing the crackdown against Mr. Ortega’s political rivals in Nicaragua.These days, governments like those in Nicaragua, Venezuela and elsewhere that reject political pluralism are ready to go to great lengths to pretend to embrace democracy — primarily by imitating the crucial rituals of periodic elections.When election time comes around, authoritarians allow a certain amount of political campaigning, vet candidates (barring or even arresting those deemed too critical of the government), then make a show of counting ballots, all the while intending to hold on to power.A polling agent with ballot boxes in Lusaka, Zambia, in August. A challenger managed to win the presidency in Zambia by more than a million votes despite the incumbent’s attempts at voter intimidation.Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated PressBut faking elections can be a tricky business. Too big a victory can draw suspicion and encourage an angry populace to gather on the streets, as happened after the 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Too big a loss can be difficult to falsify, as was the case in Zambia in August when, despite the incumbent’s overt attempts at voter intimidation, the challenger, Hakainde Hichilema, managed to win the presidency by more than a million votes.Authoritarians have learned that they must carefully weigh how and when to interfere. Too much pre-election excitement can encourage too big a turnout, drawing more votes for the opposition. A low turnout is safer, because authoritarians have ways of making sure their voters get to the polls.Such intrigues require preparation, skill and money, all for an exercise that most citizens know is a sham.So why bother to pretend?Elections, even flawed ones, serve a purpose. The goal for autocrat and democrat alike is legitimacy — a right to rule that, in the views of most citizens in the 21st century, can be bestowed only by a popular vote, or at least the semblance of one.In other eras, and even now in some parts of the world, the right to rule could be inherited by a monarch, blessed by religious faith or sustained by an iron-fisted ideology like Communism. But where those options have been exhausted, democracy — or something resembling it — seems to be the best, and maybe the only, option for maintaining a monopoly on power short of outright dictatorship.“In the contemporary world, there are, practically speaking, no alternative ideologies,” Dmitri Furman, a Russian political scientist, wrote in New Left Review in 2008. He used the term “imitation democracy” to describe the combination of democratic forms and authoritarian reality then in place across most of the former Soviet Union.This formula was recently perfected in Russia, 20 years into Vladimir V. Putin’s rule, ahead of parliamentary elections last month.A woman voting in Moscow during elections last month. President Vladimir V. Putin and his allies deployed heavy-handed measures to keep critics off the ballot and to sway apathetic voters.Maxim Shipenkov/EPA, via ShutterstockThere never was any doubt that United Russia, the party backed by Mr. Putin, would come out on top. And indeed, the final vote gave the party 324 of the Duma’s 450 seats, more than enough to guarantee a constitutional, or two-thirds, majority (but fewer than the 343 seats United Russia took in 2016).Still, Mr. Putin and his allies took no chances, deploying heavy-handed measures to keep his critics off the ballot, while giving generous handouts to sway apathetic voters. Pensioners and military personnel, two crucial constituencies, received one-off pre-election bonuses, at an estimated cost of $6.7 billion to the federal government.Followers of the jailed opposition figure Alexei Navalny, now legally labeled “extremists,” were barred from running, and some were put in jail or forced to flee the country. Popular candidates from Russia’s legal parliamentary parties — including the liberal centrist party Yabloko and the Communist Party — were pushed off the ballot under thinly veiled pretenses, ranging from faulty paperwork to allegations of criminal offenses. In St. Petersburg, a well-known Yabloko candidate found himself running against two people who had recently adopted not only his name but also his appearance.The Kremlin also took on independent media outlets, declaring that many journalists were foreign agents. And yet news still leaked about local officials who went to great lengths to gin up the vote for United Russia. Election officials were reportedly caught on tape discussing vote targets of 42 percent to 45 percent, presumably for United Russia, and government officials complained of being pressured by their employers to vote. In today’s Russia, these advantages are called “administrative resources,” all of which tipped the scales in United Russia’s favor.Similar tactics have worked in the past. In Russia’s 2016 parliamentary elections, officials in the city of Saratov did not take any risks. In about 100 of the city’s 373 electoral districts, the results were exactly the same: 62.2 percent for United Russia, 11.8 percent for the Communist Party, and on down the list. A local electoral commission official dismissed the suspicious results as a mere coincidence.Much has changed in the last five years. Unpopular pension reforms in 2018 have hurt both Mr. Putin and United Russia in opinion polls. Ahead of the September elections, the party’s popularity hit a record low, falling below 30 percent nationally, and even lower in the big cities.“United Russia’s polling is bad, but it doesn’t really matter,” Aleksei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow think tank, told The Moscow Times in an interview in early September. A recycled Soviet-era joke made the rounds after the elections: “You pretend to hold elections, and we pretend to vote,” a retooled version of the old quip “You pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”But elections benefit the Putin government, according to an analysis by the political scientists Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes in their book “The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy,” published last year. Elections have been turned into national rituals, spectacles that create the illusion that Russian voters can play a role in politics. They can also test the national mood, district by district, and allow the Kremlin to measure the loyalty and competence of their local officials.“You had a hard time in post-Communist Russia finding out how local officials were behaving, figuring out who was reliable, who could turn out the vote,” Mr. Holmes said in an interview. “It is not just about loyalty, but also about who is effective. Elections give you new tools to measure performance.”Paradoxically, “a managed democracy,” a term often used to describe the Putin system of government, is not so much about pretending to be democratic, but rather about pretending to manage, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Krastev said in their book. “Rigging an election also allowed the government to mimic the authoritarian power that it did not actually possess,” they wrote. “In Putin’s first decade in power, organizing a pseudo-election was like wearing sheep’s clothing to prove that you are a wolf.”But most pseudo-democrats these days are reluctant to assume their inner autocratic selves: They are not sure how to be wolves. In Nicaragua, where Mr. Ortega lost an election in 1990 after five years in power, today’s government seems to have gone further than others toward becoming a police state, but most other authoritarian rulers are careful not to cross the line, at times at the risk of seeming ineffective.Typically, they promote their hold on power as a guarantee of stability, and a protection of the nation in a hostile, unstable world. And in some cases, such leaders do in fact enjoy broad support: Mr. Putin’s popularity rating in Russia is down from a high point of 88 percent after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but it still hovers above 60 percent, well above the ratings of leaders in Western democracies.These days, elections may be a necessary tool for authoritarian systems to hold power, but they remain risky, as was the case in Zambia, where the opposition managed against all odds to score a victory that was too big to deny, and in Belarus where the falsification of the results was so obvious that protesters came out to the streets.“Politics is about promising and disappointing and managing the disappointment,” Mr. Holmes said. “The special magic of democracy is that, although a lot of people may be disappointed, they have a hope that at the next election, they can bring in another group. By giving up the idea that another group can come to power, a lot of pressure builds up.”Celestine Bohlen is a former New York Times Moscow correspondent who covered the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. More

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      Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Enters Philippine Presidential Race

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      Ferdinand Marcos Jr. joins the former boxing champion Manny Pacquiao in seeking to succeed Rodrigo Duterte in next year’s election.MANILA — The son and namesake of the dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos formally announced his plan to run for president of the Philippines on Tuesday, more than three decades after a popular uprising toppled his father’s brutal regime and restored democracy to the country.Ferdinand Marcos Jr. joins the former boxing champion Manny Pacquiao and Francisco Domagoso, the mayor of Manila, in seeking the presidency in next year’s election. Leni Robredo, the vice president, and Sara Duterte-Carpio, the mayor of Davao City and daughter of President Rodrigo Duterte, are also expected to enter the race.Mr. Marcos, 64, once served as a governor and a senator. He lost his bid as vice president to Ms. Robredo in 2016, and sought to overturn that vote by accusing her of cheating. In his announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Marcos said he would focus on helping the public overcome the coronavirus pandemic, and vowed to lift the economy out of crisis.“That is why I am announcing here today my intention to run for the presidency of the Philippines in the coming May 2022 elections,” Mr. Marcos said. “I will bring that form of unifying leadership back to our country. Join me in this noblest of causes and we will succeed.”He also took an oath as a member of the Partido Federal ng Pilipinas, the political party he would be representing in the election. The party founded by his father, the New Society Movement, also recently endorsed him as a candidate.Ferdinand Marcos ruled the country with an iron fist for two decades. He was defeated by a popular uprising in 1986 and went into exile in Hawaii, where he died three years later. He was accused of stealing up to $10 billion from state coffers and leaving thousands of activists dead or missing.His widow, Imelda R. Marcos, and children were later allowed to return to the Philippines, where they worked to rehabilitate the family name. Mrs. Marcos was found guilty of corruption in 2018, but has eluded jail time.Mr. Duterte, who announced his retirement last week, often publicly thanked the Marcos family for backing his candidacy in the 2016 presidential election. Just months into office, he allowed the dictator’s remains to be transferred to a national cemetery in Manila.Judy Taguiwalo, an activist with the Campaign Against the Return of the Marcoses and Martial Law, said the announcement from Mr. Marcos was a “brazen show of disregard and contempt for the thousands of Filipinos killed, disappeared, tortured, displaced and violated” during his father’s brutal regime.“Bongbong Marcos and his family have long been seeking to reclaim the highest seat of power after they were kicked out of the country by the people,” she said, referring to Mr. Marcos by his nickname, “and today, their shameless gall to return to the highest office in government is in full display.”Mr. Marcos, she said, was “spitting on the graves of the dead.” More

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      A Pillar of the European Order Has Collapsed

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

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      Skateboards, Climate Change and Freedom: Germany’s Next-Generation Parliament

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

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      Texas’ Redistricting Map Makes House Districts Redder

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      2020 presidential vote margin Current congressional districts Fort Worth San Antonio Proposed districts for this decade Fort Worth San Antonio 2020 presidential vote margin Current congressional districts Proposed districts for this decade Fort Worth Fort Worth San Antonio San Antonio Current congressional districts Proposed districts for this decade Fort Worth Fort Worth San Antonio San […] More