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    ‘New York City Is a World Unto Itself.’ But It May Tell Us Where Democrats Are Headed.

    On the Democratic side of the New York mayoral contest, Eric Adams, the African-American former police captain and Brooklyn borough president, continues to hold a lead over Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley. From a national vantage point, the most significant element of Adams’s campaign so far lies in his across-the-board success with working class voters of all races and ethnicities.Before we turn to the possible national implications of the race, we have to understand the extent of Adams’s victory, at least as far as first-choice balloting went. In census tracts with a majority or plurality of whites without college degrees, Adams — who repeatedly declared on the campaign trail that “the prerequisite for prosperity is public safety” — led after stage one of the New York City Democratic primary last week, according to data provided to The Times by John Mollenkopf, director of the Graduate Center for Urban Research at C.U.N.Y.Adams took 28.5 percent of the first-choice ballots among these white voters, compared with the 17.1 percent that went to Garcia, who is white and has served as both sanitation commissioner and interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, and the 15.4 percent that went to Wiley, an African- American who has been both legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a New York Police Department watchdog.Adams’s strength in non-college white tracts shows that his campaign made substantially larger inroads than either Garcia or Wiley among white working class voters, a constituency in which the national Democratic Party has suffered sustained losses.On Staten Island, the most conservative of the five boroughs, Adams led the first-choice voting with 31 percent to Garcia’s 20 percent and Wiley’s 17 percent. In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Staten Island with 61.6 percent of the vote.Adams’s biggest margins were in Black majority non-college tracts, where he won with 59.2 percent to Wiley’s 24.4 percent and Garcia’s 4.7 percent. In Black majority college-educated tracts, Adams won a plurality, 37.5 percent, to Wiley’s 32.5 percent and Garcia’s 13.0 percent.Counting all the census tracts with a majority or plurality of adult voters who do not have college degrees, Adams won decisively with 42.1 percent — compared with Wiley’s 19.7 percent and Garcia’s 10.3 percent. Both Wiley and Garcia continue to pose a threat to Adams because they have more support among college educated voters, who make up roughly 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. According to Mollenkopf’s data, in census tracts with a majority of college-educated adults, Adams’s support fell to 14.7 percent, Wiley’s rose to 26.2 percent and Garcia won a plurality at 34.9 percent.If elected in November, either Garcia or Wiley would be the first woman to serve as mayor of New York — the first Black woman in Wiley’s case. In the first round, Garcia was strongest among college-educated whites, among whom she was the biggest vote-getter, while Wiley’s winning constituencies were college-educated Black and Hispanic voters.Mark Peterson/ReduxGrowing public anxiety over the sharp increase in gun violence in New York proved crucial to Adams’s success, although it was not the whole story. A May Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos NYC Mayoral Primary Poll of 3,249 New Yorkers found that crime and violence topped the list of concerns, outpacing affordable housing, Covid and racial injustice. Through June 6 of this year, 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire in the city, the highest number for that period since 2000.The results in the mayoral primary so far are evidence of the continuing power of Black voters to act as a moderating force in a Democratic Party that has seen growing numbers of white voters shift decisively to the left. The results also suggest that Adams’s strategy of taking a strong stand on public safety in support of the police, combined with a call to end abusive police practices, is an effective way for the party to counter the small but significant Black and Hispanic defections to the Republican Party that began to emerge in the 2020 presidential election.I posed a series of questions about the implications of the still-unresolved New York City Democratic Primary to a group of scholars and analysts.Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, argues that the initial tally affirmed a basic but often overlooked truth about the Democratic Party nationwide:The outcomes are more evidence of an innumerate punditry that conflates the share of educated, professional voters who support the Democratic Party with their electoral clout. It remains true that a majority of Democratic voters are working class without college degrees. So it is the same dynamic in New York that played out in the presidential race. While other candidates battled over of the support of the highly educated segments (of all races), Biden understood where the votes were.While most of the national attention has focused on levels of education in shaping the partisanship of white voters — with the more educated moving left and the less well educated moving right — a parallel split has been quietly developing within the multiracial Democratic coalition. Ray La Raja, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, elaborated in his reply to my email:There has been a growing education and age divide in the Democratic Party beyond racial divisions. Additionally, Adams tapped into an N.Y.C. pattern of politicians winning with strong “outer borough” ethnic support. In the past it was white ethnics — Italians, Irish and Poles living in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — who supported the Tammany-style politicians. Today it is Hispanics and Blacks from different parts of the diaspora supporting Adams, who leveraged his shared background with voters, with ties to powerful political institutions (e.g., municipal unions) much like Tammany.Older Black voters, La Raja continued,will continue to be a moderating force in the Democratic Party. They deliver votes and they are pragmatic in their vote choices. They bear the traces of New Deal liberalism with bread-and-butter concerns about jobs, education and safe neighborhoods to raise families.There are significant differences between the values and agendas that shape the voting decisions of the Garcia constituency, of the Wiley electorate, and of those Black voters who were the core of Adams’s support, La Raja notes:Garcia won the good government progressives and liberals south of 110th street in Manhattan, who are more likely to be executives at major institutions of finance, technology, entertainment and fashion. These voters want a livable city to support their institutions. They — like The New York Times editorial board — believe Garcia is the most credible on managing city operations. Wiley, in contrast, gets the young progressives just across the river in Brooklyn and Queens who haven’t quite made it up the career ladder yet. They have fewer institutional responsibilities. They are less likely to vote out of a desire to get well-functioning government and more based on their personal values.Jonathan Rieder, a sociologist at Barnard and the author of “Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism,” had more to say in his reply:The local discussion of crime gets entangled in the national culture war within the Democratic Party and within “liberalism.” As with “limousine liberalism” before it, what some dub “woke” liberalism flourishes in the zones of the educated and often affluent whose lives, neighborhoods and moral understandings differ from those of working and middle class people.Because of this, Rieder contends, the party remains caught in what has become a 50-year “battle between what used to be called ‘lunch-pail’ Democrats and more righteous ones, between James Clyburn and AOC.”Rieder argues thatFor all the gradual shrinkage of white non-college voters, the Democrats still require a multicultural middle to include non-affluent and lesser educated whites in their majority coalition. And that will be hard to secure if the party is identified with ceding the border, lawlessness, ignoring less privileged whites, exclusionary versions of anti-racist diversity that smack of thought reform, phrasing like Latinx that large numbers of Latinos find off-putting, esoteric or perplexing, and so much more.Taking a more optimistic stance, Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, acknowledges that the primary “reflected these intraparty divisions along lines of race, income and education,” but, he argues,What was more surprising was the level of cohesion. Candidates from a wide range of backgrounds ran and, overall, there was remarkably little race-baiting rhetoric. In the final high-pressure days of the campaign, calls to vote along racial or ethnic lines did increase but, given the high level of diversity in the candidate pool and in New York City more broadly, the relatively limited presence of appeals to in-group solidarity or out-group antipathy was remarkable. While some of this behavior is specific to New York, it also likely reflects a strong norm among elite Democrats more generally that certain kinds of ethnic threat and resentment politics are off-limits.Wasow agrees that Black voters have become a moderating force in Democratic politics:Put simply, direct experiences of racism and dreams deferred appears to have forged a more moderate or pragmatic politics among African Americans. Where the whiter, more liberal wing of the Democratic Party was considerably more optimistic about the country’s willingness to elect a woman, a democratic socialist or a person of color, African Americans exhibited far more skepticism. Given the narrow margins with which President Biden won, the Black assessment of national white voting behavior does seem to have been more accurate.For two generations, Wasow continued, “Democrats have struggled to articulate a response to attacks that they’re ‘soft on crime.’ Some candidates co-opted toughness and others emphasized ‘root causes’ but ‘law and order’ kept winning.”In this context, according to Wasow, “Adams’s activism as a cop against police abuse is a powerful embodiment of the position that recognizes both demand for reform and desire for public safety.”Adams affirmed this two-pronged stance toward policing and crime on his website:Our city faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens to undo the progress we have made against crime. Gun arrests, shootings and hate crimes are up; people do not feel safe in their homes or on the street. As a police officer who patrolled the streets in a bulletproof vest in the 1990s, I watched lawlessness spread through our city, infecting communities with the same terrible swiftness of Covid-19.At the same time, Adams declared,We face a crisis of confidence in our police. I understand that mistrust because as a young man, police beat my brother and I at a precinct house — and we still carry the pain of that. I called out racism in the NYPD as an officer and helped push through reforms, including the successful effort to stop the unlawful use of Stop-and-Frisk. The debate around policing has been reduced to a false choice: You are either with police, or you are against them. That is simply wrong because we are all for safety. We need the NYPD — we just need them to be better.The strong appeal to Black voters of a candidate like Adams who combines calls to reform police behavior while simultaneously pushing for aggressive enforcement to increase public safety can be seen in the results of a survey Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, conducted with colleagues during the week after George Floyd’s murder.Specifically, Weaver found that:40.5 percent of Black respondents (compared to just 16.7 percent of whites) strongly agreed with this statement: “I have rights as a matter of law, but not in reality.” 60 percent of Black Americans agreed ‘The Constitution doesn’t really protect us from the police’ (compared to 32 percent of whites). Similar breakdowns occurred on “the official rules say the police can’t do certain things but in reality, they can do whatever they want.”Weaver summed up her findings:The responses show some alarming divergences in how Americans of different racial positions understand their citizenship, the logic of governing authority, and whether the law applies to everyone equally.Jim Sleeper, the author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York,” wrote me (citing his friend Curtis Arluck, a Democratic district leader in Manhattan):Garcia ran better than Wylie among older white voters, even those who skew pretty far left. So she did much better on the Upper West Side, the West Village, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope than in the East Village, Astoria or Williamsburg. And Wylie performed much better among younger and more affluent Black voters than those who were older and more working class. Both older white liberal voters and older less affluent Black voters saw Wiley as too “woke.”If Garcia has more second place votes to be allocated from lesser candidates, Sleeper notes, she “could well overtake Wylie for second place.” That may not be enough for Garcia to capture first place, according to Sleeper’s reckoning. If Wiley is dropped reducing the final count to Adams versus Garcia, “enough Wylie votes will go for Adams second, so that Adams should prevail.”Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, who founded the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture with her husband Peter Steinfels, argues that Adams’s lead rests on four factors:(A) the “crime wave” that became the hot issue in the campaign; (B) on Adams’s story of experiencing police abuse and then being in the police; (C) on the emerging sense that Black voters are “moderates” — pace the views of progressives and young B.L.M. advocates (Black and white) — that N.Y.C. is a union city and that Adams had important endorsements; (D) Adams was pretty clearly the “working class” candidate and he campaigned in relevant districts. Defunding the police, which Adams opposes, is not a winning policy as Biden’s announcements on crime this past week underlined.Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, wrote to me to say that:The New York voting clearly undermines progressives’ claims that a bold agenda on issues like policing is the best way to bring out the Democratic base. That certainly was not the case with New York Latinos and Blacks.Recognition of these patterns is crucial for Democrats seeking to maintain high levels of minority support, Suro continued:The same differences among Latinos in New York plays out nationally. Older, working class Latinos shifted to the Republicans across the country last November amid Trump’s claims that Democrats are dangerously radical. The New York results suggests that segment of the Latino electorate might be susceptible to Republican campaigns next year, painting Democrats as anti-police.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, put it succinctly: “Black voters are a moderating force and should tell the party to focus on economic, health care, and equality issues, and less on culture war issues.”Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, disputed the argument that Black voters have become a moderating force within the Democratic Party:The pre-election polling data suggests that Maya Wiley is the second choice candidate among African-American voters, despite having a political message that is far more progressive on the issues than a number of other candidates, notably on police reform. That ought to push back against a narrative that Black voters are necessarily more moderate than the rest of the party. Wiley is a very progressive candidate and has ample support from African- Americans, losing only to a more moderate Democrat, and outdistancing a number of more conservative Democrats.“New York City is a world unto itself, making it hard to discern national trends from its voting patterns,” cautioned Doug Massey, a Princeton sociologist who has written extensively about urban America.“That said,” Massey continued,The election results would seem to confirm that Black and Hispanic voters form the core of the Democratic Party’s base. They appear to be strongly motivated by racial justice and progressive economics as well as public safety, but lean toward candidates who have experience and insider knowledge rather than flashy liberals from outside the system who are proclaiming dreamy agendas.Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, in Massey’s view,are insiders to N.Y.C. politics and the bureaucracy with reputations for getting things done, and Wiley appealed to better educated young people and Blacks in Brooklyn, while Garcia appealed to better educated white and Latino Manhattanites. But it was the strong support of working class voters across all the boroughs that has carried the day so far for Adams, with particular strength among Blacks and Latinos but seemingly with some popularity even among blue-collar whites on Staten Island.For all the potential embodied in Adams’ candidacy, there are deep concerns that, if he wins, he could disappoint.Adams is a hardened player in the rough and tumble of New York. I asked Rieder if Adams represents a resolution of the difficulty of developing a credible but nonracist approach to crime and public safety. Rieder replied: “I think he’s such a flawed incarnation of the stance — his history of corruption, his race-baiting — it’s too early to say. Alas.”Adams himself is not given to false modesty. “I am the face of the new Democratic Party,” he declared last week. “If the Democratic Party fails to recognize what we did here in New York, they’re going to have a problem in the midterm elections and they’re going to have a problem in the presidential elections.”While the unresolved primary fight has come down to a contest between Adams, Garcia and Wiley, it is effectively the contest for mayor because the Republican Party has shrunk to insignificance in the city, despite holding the mayoralty for decades not that long ago. Whichever one of the trio comes out ahead, he or she is very likely to run far ahead of the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Ranked-choice voting — which despite its virtues remains poorly understood by many voters — means we won’t know who the next mayor will be for some time. What we do know is that whoever wins will have a very tough row to hoe.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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    Macron and Le Pen Parties Both Battered in French Regional Elections

    The returns suggest the presidential election next year may be more wide open than it seemed.PARIS — It had seemed inevitable: another face-off in next year’s French presidential election between President Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the leader of the rightist, anti-immigrant National Rally Party.But after nationwide regional elections on Sunday, a rerun of the second round of the 2017 election appeared far less certain as both Mr. Macron’s centrist party, La République en Marche, and Ms. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single one of France’s 13 mainland regions.The defeat was particularly crushing for Ms. Le Pen. She had portrayed the regional elections as a bellwether of her rise to power.In the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, the one region where the National Rally led in the first round of voting a week ago, a center-right candidate, Renaud Muselier, defeated the National Rally candidate by a comfortable margin, taking about 57 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results.The National Rally has never governed a French region, and on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen accused every other party of forming “unnatural alliances” and “doing everything to prevent us from showing the French people our capacity to run a regional executive.”Marine Le Pen casting her vote.Michel Spingler/Associated PressStanislas Guerini, the director general of Mr. Macron’s party, said the results were “a disappointment for the presidential majority.”They were also no surprise.Since cobbling together his party as the vehicle for his ascent in 2017, Mr. Macron has shown little interest in its fortunes, relying instead on his personal authority and the aura of the presidency. The party, often known simply as En Marche, has never managed to establish itself on the regional or local level, despite controlling Parliament.Turnout for the election was very low. Only about 33 percent of French people voted, compared with 55.6 percent as recently as 2015, a clear sign of disgruntlement with politics as usual and weariness after the country’s long battle with the coronavirus pandemic.This low participation, and the fact the presidential election is still 10 months away, makes extrapolating from the regional results hazardous. Still, it marked a shift. A headline in the left-wing Libération newspaper above an image of Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen said: “2022: What if it wasn’t them?”President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, voting on Sunday.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinIf it is not them, it could be Xavier Bertrand, a center-right presidential candidate who emerged as the chief winner today.A no-nonsense former insurance agent in the northern town of Saint-Quentin, Mr. Bertrand, who has already announced he will run for president next year, won the Hauts-de-France region handily, with about 53 percent of the vote.His victory came despite strenuous efforts by Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen to make an impression in the region, which is Mr. Bertrand’s stronghold.“This result gives me the force to go out and meet all French people,” Mr. Bertrand said. “There is one necessary condition for the recovery of our country: the re-establishment of order and respect.”Mr. Bertrand, who served as health and then labor minister in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, did not go to one of France’s elite schools and likes to portray himself as a man of the people sensitive to the concerns of the French working class. He is widely seen as an effective politician of consuming ambition. Another former minister in the Sarkozy government, Rachida Dati, once said of Mr. Bertrand: “He is the one with the most hunger.”Xavier Bertrand could capitalize on weak showings by both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen. Pascal Rossignol/ReutersAlthough he left the main center-right party, Les Républicains, a few years ago, Mr. Bertrand remains part of their conservative family and has a visceral hatred for Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally, which he insists on calling by its former name, the National Front.In a sense the election marked the revival of traditional parties: Les Républicains on the right and the Socialists on the left. Left-wing coalitions, usually including the Socialists, hung onto power in five regions they already governed.Security has emerged as a primary concern of French people ahead of next year’s election, after a series of Islamist terrorist attacks over the past nine months. This has posed difficulties for a fragmented French left, which has appeared to have few answers to security concerns and no presidential candidate it can unite around. But the regional elections suggested it is far too early to dismiss the left entirely.For Mr. Macron, who has embarked on a nationwide tour to reconnect with the French people after the worst of the pandemic, the results suggest that his recent focus on winning right-wing votes that might have gone to Ms. Le Pen may need to be reconsidered.The presidential election is more wide open than it looked. The French people are more disgruntled than they appeared. More of the same — and a 2022 contest between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen would be just that — may not be what they are looking for after all.Aurelien Breeden and Daphné Anglès contributed reporting. More

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    How Did a Socialist Triumph in Buffalo?

    On Tuesday night, just after the polls closed, The Buffalo News ran an update about the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, which pit the four-term incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, against a socialist challenger, India Walton. “Those handicapping the race are not betting whether Brown will win, but by how much,” the paper said. “Will a 10-point landslide suffice? Or could he post a larger tally?” More

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    Fluid NYC Mayoral Race Heads to a Close as Voters Cast Ballots

    .s-carousel{margin:0;padding:0;max-width:600px;margin:auto}.s-carousel__slides{position:relative;padding-top:min(600px,100%);background:#000}.s-carousel img,.s-carousel video{margin:0;padding:0;width:100%;height:100%;object-fit:contain}.s-carousel figure{margin:0;padding:0;position:relative}.s-carousel__credit{z-index:10;position:absolute;bottom:15px;left:15px;text-align:left;font-family:nyt-franklin,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:.75rem;color:#fff;opacity:.6}.s-carousel figcaption{z-index:10;top:15px;left:15px;width:75%;letter-spacing:.01em;position:absolute;text-align:left;font-family:nyt-franklin,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-weight:700;text-shadow:0 0 10px rgba(0,0,0,.25),1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,.35),-1px -1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,.35);font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#fff}.s-carousel li,.s-carousel ol{list-style:none;margin:0;padding:0}.s-carousel__viewport{width:100%;position:absolute;top:0;left:0;bottom:0;display:flex;overflow-x:scroll;overflow-y:hidden;scroll-behavior:smooth;scroll-snap-type:x mandatory}@media (prefers-reduced-motion){.s-carousel__viewport{scroll-behavior:auto}}.s-carousel__viewport{-ms-overflow-style:none;scrollbar-width:none;scrollbar-color:transparent transparent;-webkit-user-select:none;user-select:none}.s-carousel__viewport::-webkit-scrollbar{width:0;display:none}.s-carousel__viewport::-webkit-scrollbar-track{background:0 0}.s-carousel__viewport::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb{background:0 0;border:none}.s-carousel figure:focus,.s-carousel image:focus,.s-carousel video:focus{outline:0;box-shadow:none}.s-carousel__slide{width:100%;height:100%;position:relative;flex:0 0 100%;scroll-snap-align:start}.s-carousel__slide figure{width:100%;height:100%;display:flex;align-items:center}.s-carousel__tap-to-unmute-overlay{height:100%;width:100%;position:absolute;z-index:100;animation:fade-in .5s ease-out forwards;background-color:transparent;border:none}.s-carousel__tap-to-unmute-icon{pointer-events:none;background-color:#00000099;padding:10px;border-radius:50%;position:absolute;top:15px;right:15px}.s-carousel__tap-to-unmute-icon svg{display:block;fill:#fff;width:20px;height:20px}.s-carousel__tap-to-unmute-icon svg path{stroke:#fff}.s-carousel__kebob{display:flex;justify-content:center;margin-top:15px}.s-carousel__bob{display:inline-block;width:6px;height:6px;background:#121212;opacity:.3;background-clip:content-box;border:3px solid transparent;border-radius:50%;font-size:0;transition:transform .4s}.s-carousel__bob[data-active=true]{opacity:.8}.s-carousel__navigation{margin-top:15px;display:flex;justify-content:space-between;align-items:center}.s-carousel__arrows{width:50px;display:flex;justify-content:space-between;align-items:center}@media (hover:none){.s-carousel__arrows{visibility:hidden}}.s-carousel__arrow{all:unset;cursor:pointer}.s-carousel__arrow svg{pointer-events:none;fill:#333;transition:fill .15s}.s-carousel__arrow:hover svg{fill:#ccc}.s-carousel__closed-captions-container{position:absolute;z-index:11;bottom:35px;margin:0 auto;left:0;right:0;text-align:center}.s-carousel__closed-captions{font-size:1rem;color:#fff;background-color:rgba(0,0,0,.9);padding:5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;visibility:hidden}@media (max-width:600px){.s-carousel figcaption{width:75%;letter-spacing:.01em}.s-carousel__closed-captions{font-size:.8125rem}}Maya Wiley in HarlemHilary Swift for The New York TimesAndrew Yang on the Upper West SideGabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesEric Adams in Crown HeightsJames Estrin/The New York TimesKathryn Garcia in Co-Op CityMichelle V. Agins/The New York TimesScott Stringer on the Upper East SideAndrew Seng for The New York Timesslide 1slide 2slide 3slide 4slide 5 As far as the eye could see, New York City was covered with Democratic candidates for mayor on Tuesday. Maya Wiley rode on the back of a scooter through Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Andrew Yang interrupted a brunch on the Upper West Side. Eric Adams, by turns triumphant and tearful, basked in the sound of supporters chanting his name after he voted in Bedford-Stuyvesant.From the Bronx to Staten Island, voters also turned out, heading to the polls to choose the Democrat who will almost certainly become the next mayor of the nation’s biggest city as it charts a still-tentative course toward recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.The fractious primary, with more than a dozen candidates, has been filled with unknowns and is in some ways unprecedented. It is New York’s first citywide experience with ranked-choice voting, in which voters can choose up to five candidates in many of the races on this year’s ballot. Under the system, the candidate with the most first-place votes after the initial count might not be the ultimate winner, and the final results may not be known for weeks. The devastation wrought by the pandemic, which claimed the lives of more than 30,000 city residents and wiped out over a million jobs, has raised the importance of the race, even as the scope of the losses sometimes made it hard for candidates to get the electorate’s attention.Voters casting their ballots at a community center in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, at least, they had it.“You have to win,” a voter in the Bronx told Kathryn Garcia. “I’m working on it,” she replied. Cindy Schreibman, a Manhattan voter who said she had ranked Mr. Adams first and Ms. Garcia second, spelled out the stakes.“This city’s on the precipice — it could go down, it could go up, it could stay the same,” Ms. Schreibman, 64, said. “What I’m very, very passionate about is as a lifelong New Yorker, making sure that this city is safe, clean, and fair.”The race remained fluid. Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and a retired police captain whose emphasis on public safety during a spring marked by a spike in gun violence seemed to gain traction, has led narrowly in recent polls. But Mr. Yang, the exuberant former presidential candidate; Ms. Wiley, a former City Hall counsel and MSNBC legal analyst; and Ms. Garcia, a no-nonsense former sanitation commissioner, all have a shot. A city that boasts of its diversity seems likely to have its first Asian, first female or second Black mayor.New Yorkers were also voting in primaries for Manhattan district attorney, one of the most influential elected law-enforcement posts in the nation; comptroller and public advocate, two citywide offices that often function as government watchdogs; and City Council and borough president. Registered Democrats make up two thirds of the city’s 5.6 million voters, and with no broadly popular Republican candidate, the victor in the Democratic mayoral primary is all but certain to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio, a two-term Democrat being forced to leave office by term limits.Turnout seemed relatively light early in the day, with some polling places nearly empty and few snaking lines. That, too, might have had something to do with another new wrinkle: early voting for the first time in a mayoral primary. Almost 200,000 voters cast ballots in person before Tuesday. Another 220,000 requested absentee ballots. An alliance between Mr. Yang and Ms. Garcia in the campaign’s closing days — he urged his supporters to rank her No. 2 on their ballots, and the two campaigned side by side — provided some last-minute drama. Mr. Adams and some of his allies suggested that the two had teamed up to prevent a Black or Latino candidate from becoming mayor (Mr. Adams is Black; Ms. Garcia, despite her surname, is white). Several of Mr. Adams’s opponents denounced the criticism as unfounded and cynical.On Tuesday, a calm seemed to have settled over the race. “We need to turn the page from the politics of attack and division,” Mr. Yang said at a morning appearance in the Bronx. Mr. Adams, likewise, dismissed what he called efforts “to create a crisis on the day of the election” at a campaign stop in Midtown Manhattan.Katie Glueck, Alexandra E. Petri and Sean Piccoli contributed reporting. More

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    Iran Bets on Religion, Repression and Revolution

    In the summer of 1988, Iran’s supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered the secret executions of thousands of political prisoners. Iran then denied reports of the slaughter, calling them “nothing but propaganda” based on “forgeries.” It also ruthlessly suppressed efforts by the families of the disappeared to find out what had happened to their relatives, including the location of their burial sites. More

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    Populist Leaders in Eastern Europe Run Into a Little Problem: Unpopularity

    The leaders of Slovenia, Hungary and Poland, who rode to power on waves of anti-elitism anger, face rising opposition over their pandemic responses and heavy-handed policies.LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — A right-wing populist wave in Eastern Europe, lifted by Donald J. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, has not crashed as a result of his defeat last November. But it has collided with a serious obstacle: Its leaders are not very popular.After winning elections by railing against widely disliked elites, right-wing populists on Europe’s formerly communist eastern flank, it turns out, are themselves not much liked. That is due in large part to unpopular coronavirus lockdowns, and, like other leaders no matter their political complexion, their stumbling responses to the health crisis. But they are also under pressure from growing fatigue with their divisive tactics.In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is being countered by an uncharacteristically united opposition. In Poland, the deeply conservative government has made an abrupt shift to the left in economic policy to win back support. And in Slovenia, the hard-right governing party of the Trump-loving prime minister is slumping disastrously in the polls.Slovenia’s leader, Janez Jansa, who made international headlines by congratulating Mr. Trump on his “victory” in November and is a self-declared scourge of liberal, or what he calls communist, elites, is perhaps the most at risk of the region’s unpopular populists.Propelled by nationalist promises to bar asylum seekers from the Middle East and “ensure the survival of the Slovenian nation,” Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party won the most votes in a 2018 election. Last year, a new coalition government led by the party had an approval rating of 65 percent.Prime Minister Janez Jansa of Slovenia, left, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary in Kidricevo, Slovenia, last year.Jure Makovec/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis has since plunged to 26 percent and Mr. Jansa is so unpopular that allies are jumping ship. Street protests against him have attracted as many as tens of thousands of people, huge turnouts in a normally placid Alpine nation with a population of just two million.Mr. Jansa has staggered on, narrowly surviving a no-confidence vote in Parliament and a recent impeachment attempt by opposition legislators and defectors from his coalition.But he has been so weakened “he does not have the power to do anything” other than curse foes on Twitter, said Ziga Turk, a university professor and cabinet minister in an earlier government headed by Mr. Jansa, who quit the governing party in 2019.An admirer of Hungary’s Mr. Orban, Mr. Jansa has sought to bring the news media to heel, as nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland have largely succeeded in doing, at least with television.But the only television station that consistently supports him, a bombastic and partly Hungarian-funded outfit called Nova24TV, has so few viewers — less than one percent of the television audience on most days — that it does not even figure in ratings charts.Slavoj Zizek, a celebrity philosopher and self-declared “moderately conservative Marxist” — one of the few Slovenians well-known outside the country, along with Melania Trump — said it was too early to write off leaders like Mr. Jansa, Mr. Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski of Poland, whose three countries he described as a “new axis of evil.”Nationalist populists, he said, have rarely won popularity contests. Their most important asset, he said, has been the disarray of their opponents, many of whom the philosopher sees as too focused on “excessive moralism” and issues that do not interest most voters instead of addressing economic concerns.“The impotence of the left is terrifying,” Mr. Zizek said.Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, says it is too early to write off the leaders of Slovenia, Hungary and Poland.Manca Juvan for The New York TimesThat nationalist populism remains a force is demonstrated by Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader. Her party fared poorly in regional elections over the weekend but opinion polls indicate she could still be a strong contender in France’s presidential election next year. She has done this by softening her image as a populist firebrand, ditching overt race-baiting and her previous and very unpopular opposition to the European Union and its common currency, the euro.Having never held high office, Ms. Le Pen has also avoided the pitfalls encountered by populists in East and Central Europe who have been running governments during the pandemic.Hungary, Europe’s self-proclaimed standard-bearer of “illiberal democracy” under Mr. Orban, has had the world’s highest per capita death rate from Covid-19 after Peru.Poland and Slovenia have fared better but their right-wing governing parties, Law and Justice and Mr. Jansa’s Slovenian Democratic Party, have both faced public anger over their handling of the pandemic.The biggest danger to leaders like Mr. Jansa and Mr. Orban, however, are signs that their quarrelsome opponents are finally getting their act together. In Hungary, a diverse and previously feuding array of opposition parties has united to compete against Mr. Orban’s ruling Fidesz party in elections next year. If they stick together, according to opinion polls, they could well win.In Slovenia, Mr. Jansa has rallied a loyal base of around 25 percent of the electorate but has been “even more successful at mobilizing his many opponents,” said Luka Lisjak Gabrijelcic, a Slovenian historian and a disenchanted former supporter. “His base supports him but lots of people really hate him.”This includes the speaker of Parliament, Igor Zorcic, who recently bailed from Mr. Jansa’s coalition. “I do not want my country to follow the model from Hungary,” he said.Mr. Gabrijelcic said he quit Mr. Jansa’s party because it “turned too nasty,” moving away from what he had viewed as a healthy response to stale center-left orthodoxy to become a haven for paranoiacs and nationalist hatemongers.Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader whose party fared poorly in regional elections last weekend, in May. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesAcross the region, he added, “The whole wave has lost its momentum.”Mr. Trump’s defeat has added to its malaise, along with the recent toppling of Israel’s longtime leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose pugnacious tactics have long been admired by nationalist leaders in Europe, despite the anti-Semitism that infects parts of their base.Mr. Trump’s presidency was never the trigger for Europe’s populist surge, whose leaders had been around and winning votes for years before the New York real estate developer announced his candidacy.But Mr. Trump did give cover and confidence to like-minded politicians in Europe, justifying their verbal excesses and placing their struggles in small, inward-looking countries into what seemed an irresistible global movement.The danger now that Mr. Trump has gone, said Ivan Krastev, an expert on East and Central Europe at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, is that the once “confident populism” of leaders like Mr. Jansa and Mr. Orban morphs into a more dangerous “apocalyptic populism” of the kind that has gripped segments of the right in the United States.But America’s political convulsions, he added, are less relevant to Eastern Europe than the fall of Mr. Netanyahu in Israel, a country that he described as the “true dream of European nationalists” — an “ethnic democracy” with a strong economy, capable military and an ability to resist outside pressure. The “negative coalition against Netanyahu,” he said, deeply shocked Europe’s right-wing populist leaders “because Israel was their model.”Mr. Turk, the former Slovenian minister, said liberals had exaggerated the menace posed by Europe’s nationalist tilt but that the polarization is very real. “The hatred is even more extreme than in the United States,” he lamented.Eager to present an image of calm respectability for Europe’s cantankerous illiberal movement, Mr. Orban in April hosted a meeting in Budapest of like-minded leaders committed to creating a “European renaissance based on Christian values.”Only two people showed up: Matteo Salvini, a fading far-right star in Italy who crashed out of government in 2019, and Poland’s beleaguered prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.Intended to signal the strength of Europe’s right-wing populist insurgency, the Budapest conclave “was more a desperate step to hide that they are in decline,” said Peter Kreko, the director of Political Capital, a Budapest research group.Faced with the prospect of losing next year’s election, Mr. Orban has focused on revving up his base with issues like L.G.B.T.Q. rights and migration, just as the Law and Justice party did in Poland last year during its successful presidential election campaign.A gay pride parade in Warsaw in June. Poland’s government has taken aim at L.G.B.T.Q. rights in the past, and Hungary’s leader seems to be following suit.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Poland, the Law and Justice party has since taken another tack, apparently deciding that it needs more than divisive cultural and historical issues to win future elections.In May it embraced measures traditionally associated with the left like higher taxes on the rich and lower levies on the less well-off, and support for home buyers. That came after its popularity ratings fell from around 55 percent last summer to just over 30 percent in May, due in part to the pandemic but also because of anger, particularly in large towns, over the tightening of already strict laws against abortion.When it comes to alienating voters, however, nobody rivals Mr. Jansa of Slovenia, who has made scant efforts to reach beyond his most loyal supporters, casting critics as communists and stirring up enmities that date back to World War II.Damir Crncec, the former head of Slovenia’s intelligence agency and once a vocal supporter, said he was mystified by Mr. Jansa’s penchant for unpopularity. “Everyone here is looking for a rationale: How can you win in politics if you are constantly fighting with everyone?” he asked. More

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    Ethiopia's Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, Is Tearing the Country Apart

    Ahead of Ethiopia’s general election on Monday, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been laying out his grand ambitions for the country. He wants it to be “comfortable for all Ethiopians,” he recently told a TV interviewer, “where every Ethiopian moves around relaxed, works and prospers.” The country, he said, should be one whose “sovereignty is respected and feared, and whose territorial integrity is preserved.”He’s going about it in a horrifying way. For eight months, Mr. Abiy’s government has been waging brutal war on one of its regions, Tigray, killing thousands of people, displacing over two million and creating a disastrous famine. Comfort, relaxation, work and prosperity could not be farther away. Far from respect, the act has brought international outcry. And as for territorial integrity, the war effort has relied on Eritrean soldiers, whom Isaias Afwerki, the country’s leader, refuses to withdraw.But the war in Tigray, though exceptional in its brutality, is not an isolated case. Since he came to power on a wave of enthusiasm in 2018, Mr. Abiy has consistently demonstrated his tendency to ruthlessly centralize power. Political opponents, set against the creation of a new ruling party in Mr. Abiy’s image, have been sidelined, even jailed. Many have been shocked by this behavior — after all, Mr. Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 — but in fact, he’s following a coherent philosophy and strategy. Elaborately explained in his book “Medemer,” a word coined by the prime minister to mean togetherness, the approach seeks unity among the people of Ethiopia and cohesion in its state.And it’s tearing the country apart.For the disasters he’s unleashed, look no further than Tigray. Since Mr. Abiy announced the assault in November as a “law enforcement” mission, it has metastasized into all-out war. Numerous corroborated reports have revealed the horrific scale of violence, including massacres, endemic sexual violence and a famine that threatens the lives of more than 350,000 Tigrayans. While the world has yet to learn the real death toll, the region, with a population of more than six million, has been decimated. And there is no end in sight.Eduardo Soteras/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe war, which has become a gruesome byword for ethnic cleansing, is Mr. Abiy’s punishment for Tigray’s refusal to accept his authority. (The precursor to the assault was the region’s decision, in defiance of the government, to hold an election in September.) But Tigray is not alone in paying the price for challenging Mr. Abiy’s centralizing moves. In Oromia, where he’s from, Mr. Abiy has overseen a brutal crackdown — responsible, in 2019 alone, for over 10,000 arrests and a number of extrajudicial executions — in the name of countering a rebellion led by the Oromo Liberation Army, an armed opposition group.After the assassination of a popular Oromo musician, Hachalu Hundessa, in June of last year, repression became yet more violent. In protests against the killing, whose perpetrators are still unknown, at least 123 people were killed, including 76 by security forces. In the aftermath, numerous opposition politicians — including Mr. Abiy’s former ally, Jawar Mohammed — were jailed. In response, the two main opposition parties withdrew from Monday’s election, leaving Mr. Abiy’s party to run the country’s largest region all but uncontested.Against this baleful backdrop, the election — which is expected to coronate Mr. Abiy and his party, cementing his power — is distinctly underwhelming. Not only is Tigray completely excluded, but logistical difficulties have also hampered the voting process. After problems with security, voter registration, defective ballots and legal challenges, the election has been postponed to September in two other regions as well as in dozens of constituencies. And about half a million internally displaced Ethiopians are unlikely to be able to vote.It’s a far cry from the free and fair election Mr. Abiy promised when he became leader three years ago: The much-vaunted transition to democracy is not very evident. Far from supplying legitimacy to the government and stability to the country, the election — boycotted by opposition parties and undertaken amid a war — is likely to pull Ethiopia further apart, to calamitous effect.But that doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Abiy. Ignoring international entreaties to end the war in Tigray and agree to an inclusive political settlement, he is instead determinedly preparing to govern an Ethiopia neither respected nor whole. His legacy, at least, is secure. Mr. Abiy will forever be the Nobel Peace laureate who refused to give peace a chance.Tsedale Lemma (@TsedaleLemma) is the founder of the Addis Standard, an English-language monthly magazine based in Ethiopia.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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    From Nobel Hero to Driver of War, Ethiopia’s Leader Faces Voters in Election

    Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed plunged Ethiopia into a war in the Tigray region that spawned atrocities and famine. On Monday, his country goes to the polls.ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — As war raged in northern Ethiopia, and the region barreled toward its worst famine in decades, a senior American envoy flew to the Ethiopian capital last month in the hope of persuading Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to pull his country out of a destructive spiral that many fear is tearing it apart.Mr. Abiy, though, wanted to go for a drive.Taking the wheel, the Ethiopian leader took his American guest, the Biden administration’s Horn of Africa envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, on an impromptu four-hour tour of Addis Ababa, American officials said. The prime minister drove him past smart new city parks and a refurbished central plaza and even crashed a wedding where the two men posed for photos with the bride and groom.Mr. Abiy’s attempt to change the channel, showcasing economic progress while parts of his country burned, was just the latest sign of a troubled trajectory that has baffled international observers who wonder how they got him so wrong.Not long ago Mr. Abiy, who faces Ethiopian voters on Monday in long-delayed parliamentary elections, was a shining hope for country and continent. After coming to power in 2018 he embarked on a whirlwind of ambitious reforms:  freeing political prisoners, welcoming exiles home from abroad and, most impressively, striking a landmark peace deal with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s old foe, in a matter of months.A light rail and rapid transit train, the first in sub-Saharan Africa, traveling past skyscrapers under construction in Addis Ababa in 2019. Mr. Abiy is pushing his vision of a modernized, economically vibrant Ethiopia.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA worker with the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia explaining ballots last week in Addis Ababa before Monday’s general election.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe West, eager for a glittering success story in Africa, was wowed, and within 18 months Mr. Abiy, a one-time intelligence officer, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.But in just nine months Mr. Abiy’s halo has been brutally shattered. The civil war that erupted in the northern region of Tigray in November has become a byword for atrocities against Ethiopian citizens.Mr. Abiy’s forces have been accused of massacres, sexual assault and ethnic cleansing. Last week a senior United Nations official declared that Tigray was in the throes of a famine — the world’s worst since 250,000 people died in Somalia a decade ago, he said.Elsewhere in Ethiopia, ethnic violence has killed hundreds and forced two million people to flee their homes. A smoldering border dispute with Sudan has flared into a major military standoff.Even the election on Monday, once billed as the country’s first free vote and a chance to turn the page on decades of autocratic rule, has only highlighted its divisions and fueled grim warnings that Ethiopia’s very future is in doubt.“These elections are a distraction,” said Abadir M. Ibrahim, an adjunct law professor at Addis Ababa University. “The state is on a cliff edge, and it’s not clear if it can pull back. We just need to get past this vote so we can focus on averting a calamity.”The prime minister’s office did not respond to questions and an interview request.An October 2019 street scene in Badme, the disputed town over which the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea was fought from 1998 to 2000. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesAn Afar militiaman on the salt flats of the Danakil Depression in 2019. In the past month, 400,000 people have been forced from their homes in the Amhara and Afar regions.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMr. Abiy’s Prosperity Party, formed in 2019 from the rump of a former governing coalition, is widely expected to win the election easily. But there will be no voting in 102 of Ethiopia’s 547 constituencies because of war, civil unrest and logistical failures.Senior opposition leaders are in jail and their parties are boycotting the vote in Oromia, a sprawling region of about 40 million people that is more populous than many African countries.Mr. Abiy has put a brave face on his nation’s problems, repeatedly downplaying the Tigray conflict as a “law and order operation” and pushing his vision for a modernized, economically vibrant Ethiopia. The United States, which gave Ethiopia $1 billion in aid last year, is pressuring him to shift focus immediately.After being chauffeured around Addis Ababa by Mr. Abiy in May, Mr. Feltman wrote a detailed analysis of his trip for President Biden and other leaders in Washington, even mentioning a sudden jolt by the vehicle that sent coffee spilling on the envoy’s shirt.Weeks later, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken imposed visa bans on unnamed Ethiopian officials.Other foreigners have left Ethiopia concerned that ethnic cleansing was underway. Pekka Haavisto, a European Union envoy who visited in February, told the European Parliament last week that Ethiopian leaders had told him “they are going to destroy the Tigrayans, that they are going to wipe out the Tigrayans for 100 years.”Ethiopia’s foreign ministry dismissed Mr. Haavisto’s comments as “ludicrous” and a “hallucination of sorts.”Global condemnation of Mr. Abiy, 44, most recently at last week’s Group of 7 summit, represents a dizzying fall for a young leader who until recently was globally celebrated.The whirl of reforms he instituted after being appointed prime minister in 2018 were a sharp rebuke to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a party of rebels turned rulers who had dominated Ethiopia since 1991 in an authoritarian system that achieved impressive economic growth at the cost of basic civil rights.After coming to power in 2018, Mr. Abiy freed political prisoners and welcomed exiles home.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesJawar Mohammed, a media baron, is  one of Ethiopia’s most prominent opposition figures.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMr. Abiy promised a new way. He allowed once-banned opposition parties, appointed women to half the positions in his cabinet and struck the peace with Eritrea that earned him a Nobel Prize.But in moving swiftly, Mr. Abiy also unleashed pent-up frustrations among ethnic groups that had been marginalized from power for decades — most notably his own group, the Oromo, who account for one-third of Ethiopia’s 110 million people. When mass protests erupted, he reverted to the old playbook: arrests, repression and police brutality.At the same time, tensions escalated with the T.P.L.F., which resented Mr. Abiy’s swaggering reforms. The party leadership retreated to Tigray where, last September, it defied Mr. Abiy by proceeding with regional elections that had been postponed across the country because of the pandemic.By early last November, word reached Washington that war was looming in Tigray. Senator Chris Coons, who has a longstanding interest in Africa, phoned Mr. Abiy to warn about the perils of resorting to military force.Mr. Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, said he reminded the Ethiopian leader that the American Civil War and World War I had started with promises of swift military victory, only to drag on for years and cost millions of lives.Mr. Abiy was undeterred. “He was confident it would be over in six weeks,” Mr. Coons said. Days later, on the evening of the American presidential election, fighting erupted in Tigray.Mr. Abiy has given few interviews. But people who have dealt with him describe a man brimming with self-confidence, even “messianic” — a description encouraged by Mr. Abiy’s own accounts that his ascent to power was preordained. When he was 7, Mr. Abiy told The New York Times in 2018, his mother whispered into his ear that he was “unique” and predicted that he would “end up in the palace.”Watching a television newscast showing Mr. Abiy shortly after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, at a roadside restaurant in the northern Afar region in 2019.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesRiot police officers, in a show of force, marching Saturday in a parade in Addis Ababa.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesA former adviser said that a strong Christian faith also guides Mr. Abiy. He is a Pentecostal Christian, a faith that has soared in popularity in Ethiopia, and is a staunch believer in the “prosperity gospel” — a theology that regards material success as God’s reward — said the former adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. It is not a coincidence, the adviser added, that the party founded by Mr. Abiy in 2019 is called the Prosperity Party.Mr. Abiy’s evangelical faith has attracted influential supporters in Washington, including Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who told the Senate in 2018 how he first met Mr. Abiy at a prayer meeting where “he told the story of his journey and faith in Jesus.”Last month, Mr. Inhofe traveled to Ethiopia to show his support for Mr. Abiy against the American sanctions.Another crucial relationship for Mr. Abiy is with the dictatorial leader of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki. Eritrean troops who flooded into Tigray to support Mr. Abiy’s campaign have been accused by the United Nations and rights groups of the worst atrocities of the conflict. Now they are a major factor in the region’s famine.Eritrean soldiers “using starvation as a weapon of war” are blocking aid shipments headed for the most vulnerable parts of Tigray, Mark Lowcock, the top U.N. humanitarian official, told the Security Council last week.The Eritrean issue is Mr. Abiy’s largest international liability, and some analysts describe him as being manipulated by Mr. Isaias, a veteran fighter with a reputation for ruthless strategic maneuvering. By other accounts, Mr. Abiy has little choice — were the Eritreans to leave suddenly, he could lose control of Tigray entirely.The election is likely to highlight the mounting challenges in the rest of Ethiopia. In the past month alone, 400,000 people have been forced from their homes in the Amhara and Afar regions, Mr. Lowcock said. The military has taken control in several parts of Oromia, where an armed rebellion has erupted.Weighing sheet metal at a recycling depot in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia is grappling with daunting economic and social challenges.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesDowntime at a coffee kiosk in a market in Addis Ababa. Washington said last month that it was cutting security and economic assistance to Ethiopia.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesMr. Coons, sent by Mr. Biden to reason with Mr. Abiy in February, warned the Ethiopian leader that the explosion of ethnic hatred could shatter the country, much as it did the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.Mr. Abiy responded that Ethiopia is “a great nation with a great history,” Mr. Coons said.Mr. Abiy’s transformation from Nobel Peace Prize laureate to wartime leader has prompted quiet soul-searching among some of his allies. The glitter of the Nobel Prize, and a burning desire for a success story in Africa, blinded many Western countries to his evident faults, said Judd Devermont, a former U.S. national intelligence officer for Africa, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.With limited interest in Africa, the West too readily categorizes the continent’s leaders as “good” or “bad” with little room for nuance, he added.“We have to acknowledge that we helped to contribute to Abiy’s view of himself,” he said. “We papered over these challenges very early. We gave him a blank check. When it went wrong, we initially turned a blind eye. And now it may be too late.”An urban park where letters spell “Addis Ababa” in Amharic.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times More