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      The Overlooked Crisis in Congo: ‘We Live in War’

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      Artillery boomed, shaking the ground, as a couple scurried through the streets of Saké, their possessions balanced on their heads, in the embattled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.At a crossroads, they passed a giant poster of Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, who is standing for re-election on Dec. 20. “Unity, Security, Prosperity,” read the slogan. They hurried along.“Our children were born in war. We live in war,” Jean Bahati, his face beaded with sweat, said as he paused for breath. It was the fifth time that he and his wife had been forced to flee, he said. “We’re so sick of it.”They joined 6.5 million people displaced by war in eastern Congo, where a conflict that has dragged on for nearly three decades, stoking a vast humanitarian crisis that by some estimates has claiming over six million lives, is now lurching into a volatile new phase.Making sense of the mayhem is not easy. Over 100 armed groups and several national armies are vying for supremacy across a region of lakes, mountains and rainforests slightly bigger than Florida. Meddlesome foreign powers covet its vast reserves of gold, oil and coltan, a mineral used to make cellphones and electric vehicles. Corruption is endemic. Massacres and rape are common.For all that, aid groups struggle to draw attention to the suffering in a country of about 100 million people, even when the numbers affected dwarf those of other crises.“There’s a sense of fatalism about Congo,” said Cynthia Jones, the World Food Program head in eastern Congo. “People seem to think ‘that’s just the way it is’.”However this latest phase of the war, which began in earnest two years ago, is drawn in unusually clear lines.On one side is the M23, a well-organized but ruthless rebel group that the United States and the United Nations say is backed by Rwanda, Congo’s eastern neighbor, which is one-hundredth the size of Congo. (Rwanda denies any link.) Since October, the M23 has seized the main roads into Goma, the regional capital, as well as the hilltops overlooking Saké, 10 miles to the west.People fleeing fighting this month pass an election poster for Congo’s president, Felix Tshisekedi, in Saké. Parts of eastern Congo are so unstable that voting has been canceled there.An aerial view of the regional capital of Goma. Since October, the militia group known as M23 has seized the main roads into Goma.On the other side is Congo’s army, whose troops are notoriously ill-disciplined — even as fighting raged near Saké last week, drunken soldiers careened through its streets. But their strength is boosted by two new allies.One is the Wazalendo, Swahili for patriots, a coalition of once-rival militias that the government cobbled together to repel M23, despite the fighters’ reputation for factionalism and brutality.The second is a force of about 1,000 Romanian mercenaries, many formerly with the French Foreign Legion, deployed around Goma and Saké. If M23 tries to seize the city — as it briefly did once, in 2012 — the Romanians are charged with defending it. “They are the last line of defense,” Romuald, a retired French officer advising the Congolese military, said at a lakeside restaurant in Goma. He asked to omit his surname to protect his security.Amid all that, an election is taking place. More

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      Tracking Retirements in the House: Who Is Leaving Congress?

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      Dozens of members of Congress have announced plans to leave their seats in the House of Representatives, setting a rapid pace for congressional departures, with more expected as the 2024 election draws closer. Given Republicans’ razor-thin House majority, the wave of exits has the potential to lead to a significant shake-up next year. Pace of […] More

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      A Sweeping Climate Deal, and a U.N. Gaza Cease-Fire Vote

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about five minutes.Nearly 200 countries convened by the United Nations approved a plan to ramp up renewable energy and rapidly transition away from coal, oil and gas.Fadel Dawod/Getty ImagesOn Today’s Episode:In a First, Nations at Climate Summit Agree to Move Away From Fossil Fuels, by Brad PlumerU.N. General Assembly Votes for Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire, Countering U.S. Veto, by Farnaz FassihiCheating Fears Over Chatbots Were Overblown, New Research Suggests, by Natasha Singer‘Apollo 13’ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Join National Film Registry, by Sarah BahrJessica Metzger and More

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      ‘Couples Therapy,’ but for Politics

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      Growing political polarization is a problem that keeps me up at night. Not because I think it’s bad to have strong opinions, but because of what social scientists call affective polarization: polarization beyond political disagreement, when “ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.” At its worst, affective polarization can lead to hate and dehumanization.When my colleague Thomas Edsall wrote about affective polarization earlier this year, he quoted Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, who said that part of what’s behind today’s intense partisan divide is that “Politicians, instead of focusing on the large list of issues where there is broad agreement in the American public, endlessly re-litigate social divides like gay rights and abortion to mobilize a base they fear will stay home if they focus on the mundane details of pragmatic governance.”I see this play out when I hear activists suggest that you can’t talk to them about climate change if you don’t agree with their stance on the Israel-Hamas war, or when I see politicians tying approval of military appointments to abortion access. The attitude seems to be: You have to agree with me about everything or you’re my enemy and we can’t work together on anything. It leads to a whole lot of nothing.Because I cover family policy, the lack of movement on areas of “pragmatic governance” where there is “broad agreement” drives me bonkers. A prime example is federal paid leave, which is popular among voters across the spectrum, yet remains in legislative purgatory, and has for decades. Though there’s a bipartisan working group in Congress on the issue, we’re still a long way from any change, leaving us out of step with most wealthy nations and creating a lot of stress and economic hardship for people just trying to make ends meet while also caring for children or sick family members.But there’s a group of people of all ideological backgrounds — social conservatives, progressive activists, budget wonks and lots of people in between — that’s been convening over the past year, and that gives me a bit of hope for family policy’s future. It also offers a road map for people who disagree vehemently on issues to have productive conversations and find points of connection. If nothing else, the group’s participants agree that too many American families are struggling, that families should be more of a political priority and that something needs to be done to help them.The convocation has the somewhat jargony name Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, and its members let me sit in on one of their guided discussions with the understanding that I would follow the Chatham House Rule — I can report on what was said during the session but not reveal “the identity nor the affiliation” of any speaker.The group consists of around 30 people and it has met monthly since April. It is directed by Abby McCloskey, who runs a research and consulting firm and was a policy adviser for Jeb Bush’s and Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaigns and Howard Schultz’s exploratory 2020 presidential run. The collaborative is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. With permission, after the meeting I reached out to some of the individuals involved to see if they’d be comfortable talking in general terms about their experiences in the group.During the initial meetings, the members came up with set of family policy principles they could mostly agree on. The discussion I observed involved them delivering feedback on a draft of a report outlining those principles. At first, I feared this was going to be an absolutely mind-numbing way to spend three hours of my life and that I would have to gently pinch myself to stay awake while listening to a discussion of the budgetary implications of the earned-income tax credit.Instead, the conversation was spicy while still being respectful, and full of fundamental disagreements that did not seem completely papered over simply for the sake of congeniality. McCloskey described it to me more than once as feeling like “couples therapy,” and it did.For example, a few people objected to wording in the report about center-based child care that they felt put a thumb on the scale against stay-at-home parents. Others disagreed with that objection, and there was an impassioned back-and-forth about it. Ultimately, the moderator stepped in, restated everyone’s point of view in a neutral way and advised that everyone needn’t agree on every detail to move forward.I give a lot of credit to that moderator, the aptly named David Fairman, who is a senior mediator at the Consensus Building Institute, for the structure and tone of the discussion. When we spoke on the phone afterward, he explained that C.B.I. is one of “roughly a dozen” similar organizations that help conduct mediation on public issues. His job is to help find common ground among people with different backgrounds and belief systems.There are three main things Fairman does to facilitate these discussions. The first is to build relationships among participants, so that “they discover that there’s more to them than the battle of tweets that they’ve had or the countering publications or testimony and the identities that they carry with their businesses, with their advocacy groups or whoever.” That kind of humanizing is done partly through guided conversations in breakout groups, and some of it is done more organically through events like in-person cocktail hours.The second is by getting people to “listen openly” during discussions, which means calming down their “rebuttal minds, the hamster wheel that is almost always turning as we listen to someone with whom we disagree, coming up with the counterarguments,” Fairman explained. Instead, he urges people to ask “clarifying questions, not rhetorical questions, not debating questions.” And he gave this example: “What do you mean by saying that ‘you really feel strongly that the child tax credit should remain universal’? Is it that the most important thing about it is that it’s for everyone? Or is it that you are worried that the political support for it will not be there if it is not universal, or is it something else? I just want to know.”The third, and I would argue the most difficult component, is trying to get beyond people’s stated positions to their underlying interests, values and principles, to create space “to explore new ways of thinking about the options,” Fairman said. He referred to a disagreement over how generous a child care tax credit or other allowance could be. The group was at an impasse. While they couldn’t agree on the appropriate size of the credit, a new idea emerged: that more flexibility for parents to choose how to spend the credit “over the life cycle of their child would be a win, even if it doesn’t address the question of the absolute amount of funding.”I also interviewed several members of the group about their experiences. My takeaway was that overall, people were happy to be in conversation with one another, to meet basically agreeable people with totally different ways of framing the problems at hand and to think hard about their own biases. “I think the level of candor was surprising,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I think everybody committed to coming in with a willingness to critique their own side where necessary and to say frankly where their red lines were.”But the process was certainly not a cure-all. Many said that they wished they had even more time to work through the document they were creating. Some felt that some fundamental concerns — particularly with regard to race and immigration — weren’t aired thoroughly enough before moving on to the particulars of policymaking. More than one person expressed frustration that systemic racism was not more explicitly addressed and that barriers to accessing currently available benefits weren’t fully interrogated.While all the participants thought they would have a document at the end of the process that they would be willing to put their names to, some wondered if it would wind up being so watered down that it wouldn’t have “truly moved the needle,” as Lina Guzman, the chief strategy officer at Child Trends, put it, to get more people fired up about these issues.Even if they come up with something that isn’t earth-shattering, every person I spoke to felt that the process was worthwhile because of the relationships they built. “I think that having created the space to do this is valuable in and of itself, even if what we come out with falls short of what some people might have hoped,” said Katharine Stevens, the founder and chief executive of the Center on Child and Family Policy.We don’t know what unexpected alliances and priorities might arise in national politics in the coming years. But because these professionals have spent a lot of hours together talking about their deepest values, giving and getting clarity about their beliefs, they may find unexpected sources of support for specific ideas that aren’t yet mainstream.I came out of observing the discussion mostly wishing that we could all have mediators like Fairman at our holiday tables. We can’t simply wish away the profound disagreements many of us have. But I’ll certainly be trying to ask more clarifying questions of people I don’t agree with. Quieting my rebuttal mind, as a professional opinion haver, will be a rough one, but I’m going to do my best, and I’m going to try to maintain as much good faith as I can muster. We’ll need it in 2024. More

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      Donald Tusk, a Man of Eclectic Identities, Returns to Power in Poland

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      The opposition leader was endorsed by Parliament as the country’s next prime minister, unseating the right-wing Law and Justice party that had long denounced him as unfit to rule.It was just minutes after Donald Tusk made his triumphant return as Poland’s leader that his archenemy stepped to the podium in Parliament to rain acid on his parade.“I don’t know who your grandfathers were but I know one thing: You are a German agent, just a German agent,” growled Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Law and Justice, the right-wing party that, until Monday, had held all the reins of power.The accusation, one of many smears aimed at Mr. Tusk over a political career stretching back to the 1980s, came after Parliament endorsed Mr. Tusk as prime minister, stirring joy and relief among Polish liberals and pro-European centrists.The attack reflected the no-holds-barred approach to Polish politics after eight years of Law and Justice rule. But it also highlighted the difficulties for many in Poland of pinning down who their country’s next leader is and where he stands.In a country that has been largely mono-ethnic and monolingual since the end of World War II, Mr. Tusk stands out as a man of eclectic identities, interests and linguistic talents.As Parliament on Tuesday debated whether to endorse a cabinet proposed by Mr. Tusk, one of his most strident critics, the far-right legislator Grzegorz Braun, used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles during an event with members of the Jewish community.The new government lineup later won a vote of confidence as expected.Mr. Tusk has described himself as having four parallel identities: a proud son of Gdansk, the formerly German port city of Danzig on the Baltic Sea; a Kashubian, an ethnic minority native to northern Poland with its own language and traditions; a Pole and a European.He speaks Polish, Kashubian, German and English, a language he barely knew when he took a break from Polish politics in 2014, to take a senior job in Brussels, but mastered quickly.Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party, left the plenary hall of the Parliament as Mr. Tusk spoke on Tuesday.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeing Polish, Mr. Tusk said in 2014, when he became president of the European Council is “my main identity” but the others matter, too — a position that baffles Mr. Kaczynski and other Polish nationalists, who see allegiance to the Polish state as indivisible.Riina Kionka, a diplomat from Estonia who advised Mr. Tusk in Brussels, remembers him as both a “passionate European” and a “proud Pole determined to lead his country.”Mr. Tusk always had “his two feet firmly on the ground” and sought compromise rather than total victory, she said. “He always told us: ‘It is better to have part of something than all of nothing.’”This distaste for all-or-nothing dogmatism led some to question the convictions of a politician who began his career in a circle of radical free-market believers but who, in Poland’s recent campaign, promised to preserve a raft of welfare payments introduced by Law and Justice.Asked in 2013 whether he had changed his earlier views, he quoted the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a former Marxist who, after leaving Poland, became a trenchant critic of communism and described himself as a “liberal conservative socialist.” That, Mr. Tusk said, described his own views.“He is a political cherry picker,” said Jarolaw Kuisz, the author of a recent book, “The New Politics of Poland.” He added, “He takes what he sees as the best bits from every part of the spectrum.”Active in politics for more than 40 years, Mr. Tusk started out as a youth activist and journalist with Solidarity in Gdansk. After communism’s collapse, he went on to win two consecutive terms as prime minister, though he cut short the second to take the Brussels position.Mr. Tusk, when he was president of the European Council, in Gdansk in 2019.Adam Warzawa/EPA, via ShutterstockThe job that perhaps prepared him best for his current role, juggling implacable hostility from Law and Justice and tensions within his diverse alliance of supporters, however, was one he took in the 1980s in Gdansk, after communist authorities imposed martial law.Unable to find regular work after being briefly arrested, he took a job scaling chimneys and high buildings with mountaineering gear so as to paint or repair them.This “high-altitude work,” Mr. Tusk later recalled, involved being a “crazy alpinist” and equipped him to calibrate results and risk, a useful political skill. Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, leader of the Polish Peasants Party and Mr. Tusk’s candidate for defense minister, praised him Monday for taking the risk of leaving Brussels to return to Polish politics in 2021, starting what seemed a long-shot effort to beat Law and Justice.“He showed courage when he abandoned a comfortable life,” he said. “He abandoned lucrative posts and came back here.”Mr. Tusk’s flexibility has alarmed some progressives. They loathe Law and Justice but complain that Mr. Tusk has not rallied more forcefully to their side on issues like abortion, on which the outgoing government imposed a near total ban and which Mr. Tusk did nothing to liberalize when he was prime minister.A pro-European Union demonstration following a ruling of the Constitutional Court against the primacy of E.U. law in Poland, in Warsaw on October. Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Tusk declared women’s rights the “No. 1 issue” in Poland this year but, ahead of the general election, removed from his party’s list of candidates an activist who called for allowing for abortion at any stage of pregnancy, a position that risked alienating voters.His party, Civic Coalition, wants to liberalize Poland’s harsh abortion law but only to allow termination up to the 12th week of pregnancy.Zuzanna Dąbrowska, a veteran political journalist, said Mr. Tusk deserved credit for addressing an issue that most politicians avoided. “The majority in Poland has the same opinion that policy on abortion should be more liberal. But politicians have done everything to avoid this reality.”To become prime minister, Mr. Tusk stitched together an array of diverse opposition parties that together won a clear majority of seats in Parliament, and joined forces on Monday to reject Law and Justice’s nominee as prime minister and select Mr. Tusk. They include a leftist grouping, the center-right Polish Peasants Party and hard-line free-market liberals.“To be a good prime minister you must be everything but sometimes you can’t combine water and fire,” said Bartosz Rydlinski, a political scientist at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. “You cannot have low taxes and an effective welfare state. This is Tusk’s biggest challenge.”A fan of Miles Davis who studied history at university, Mr. Tusk has sometimes alienated potential voters, particularly more traditional-minded ones in small rural towns and villages.Mr. Tusk offended millions of Poles in 2005 by dismissing conservatives as a “mohair coalition” — a reference to the berets many older women wear to church. Mr. Tusk apologized but struggled for years to shake off an image of haughty contempt.The candidates Lech Kaczynski of Law and Justice and Mr. Tusk of Civic Platform during a TV debate three days ahead of the first round of presidential elections, in 2005.Tomasz Gzell/European Pressphoto AgencyHe has since talked about his youth in what he describes as “poverty” in Gdansk, particularly after his father, a carpenter, died when he was 14, and how he used to hang out with street toughs. His older sister, he says, helped set him straight.As a university student and then a journalist and youth activist with Solidarity, he embraced free-market economics. He helped found the Liberal Democratic Congress, a group of anti-communist free-marketeers. After the 1990 election of the Solidarity leader Lech Walesa as president, he was involved in managing the privatization of state assets.Widespread public discontent with economic “shock therapy” crushed his early political ambitions. His party’s defeat in a 1993 election dampened his faith in free-market orthodoxy.“He realized he had to follow political currents and adjust to reality,” said Ms. Dąbrowska. “He has been doing this ever since — adjusting his views and himself to political reality.”After retreating from politics for four years to write books, he won a seat in the Polish senate and then helped set up Civic Platform, a liberal party. He became prime minister after the party won a 2007 election, and served a second time after another victory in 2011.He boasted after his second triumph, “we have no one left to lose to” and, to the dismay of many supporters, decamped to Brussels before finishing his second term.A year after his departure, Law and Justice defeated his party in a parliamentary election and won an upset in a presidential race. “He was arrogant and misjudged the situation,” said Mr. Kuisz.But Law and Justice recently made the same mistake, misjudging Mr. Tusk’s ability to reach out to voters after seven years in Brussels.“He was presented as a lofty liberal and came back unsure of his success but determined to fight,” said Mr. Kuisz. “From Brussels he was suddenly everywhere in small towns and villages doing basic grass-roots politics.”Mr. Tusk addressing the Polish Parliament on Tuesday.Pawel Supernak/EPA, via Shutterstock More

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      Egypt’s Presidential Election Ends, With el-Sisi Expected to Win

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      President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is all but certain to come out on top after a three-day vote, with the war in Gaza turning the country’s focus from economic calamity to security.There were four men on the ballot when Egyptians voted in this week’s presidential election, but with rare exception, only one of their faces gazed out from billboards, banners, buses and lampposts across Egypt: that of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.According to the government, Mr. el-Sisi won 97 percent of the vote in his last two electoral bids, in 2014 and 2018. “All of us are with you,” many of the pro-Sisi banners read, as if anticipating a similar result this time.At voting stations, which closed on Tuesday at the end of a three-day vote, “Oh Egypt, My Love” and other patriotic songs played at nightclub-worthy volumes, while glowing newspaper headlines told of newlyweds so dedicated to the nation that they showed up to the polls still in tuxedos and white gowns.In a country with almost no space for dissent, a tightly leashed media and a lamed opposition, Mr. el-Sisi’s victory is not a matter of great suspense. Official energy appeared to be channeled instead into boosting turnout — a measure of Mr. el-Sisi’s popularity that an economic crisis, and the deep resentment and despair it has generated, was otherwise likely to depress.The get-out-the-vote effort appeared to involve some unsubtle encouragement.Four people in Cairo, the capital, said they had received 200 Egyptian pounds each — the equivalent of about $6.67 — after voting. Several others said they had voted only because they had heard they would be fined for failing to do so or because their employers had given them time off with explicit instructions to use it to cast ballots.The thought of selecting any of the other three candidates, all unknowns, did not seem to cross anyone’s mind. A few said they had deliberately spoiled their ballots by checking all four boxes; the rest said they had voted Sisi.Diaa Rashwan, head of Egypt’s State Information Service, said in a statement that while there was a fine for not voting on the books, in practice it had never been applied. He said that providing money or goods in exchange for votes was a criminal offense, but dismissed allegations of such offers as “hearsay.”Voters who said they had taken payments explained that they needed the money. Others, disdaining the election, said they had skipped voting altogether.A Cairo street in September.Mauricio Lima for The New York Times“I used to like Sisi a lot, but now I’m fed up,” said Nadia Assran, 63, who on Sunday, rather than voting, was having coffee with her sister in the lower-middle-class Cairo neighborhood of Shubra.Such coffee breaks are increasingly expensive, and therefore increasingly rare. Then there was the problem of paying for her daughter’s marriage expenses, or of simply finding affordable sugar and onions amid soaring inflation.Ms. Assran mentioned the roads, bridges and shiny new cities Mr. el-Sisi has built around Egypt, which officials and state media have hailed as a major presidential accomplishment.“This is good for our sons and our grandsons,” said Ms. Assran, a widow who survives on the pension from her husband’s job as a police officer. “But how does it help me now?”Her sister, Hana Assran, 50, flicked a hand at some nearby Sisi banners.“Why would we vote? He’s going to make it anyway,” she said, reflecting widespread cynicism about the outcome. “And why are you spending so much on election propaganda when we’re struggling so much with the prices?”Though it dipped slightly in November, annual inflation hit record highs of nearly 40 percent this year as Egypt grapples with an economic crisis in which the currency’s value has plummeted and basic items have disappeared from grocery shelves.The 200 pounds voters said they had received for casting their ballots was worth about $12.50 in 2019, when a constitutional referendum granted Mr. el-Sisi the right to run for a third term, lengthened presidential terms to six years from four and handed him greater powers. Now it is worth about half that.Economists say Egypt’s economic implosion stemmed from mismanagement, most notably Mr. el-Sisi’s lavish spending on weapons and megaprojects such as new cities, a spree that piled unsustainable debt on what had already been a structurally unsound economy.Construction at an administrative megaproject,some 30 miles east of Cairo, in 2020.Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe country managed to dodge a reckoning until Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Egyptian officials have attributed Egypt’s problems to outside causes such as the war and the coronavirus pandemic.Egypt says it is opening up its politics, pointing to initiatives such as a much-publicized dialogue between government and opposition figures.But Mr. el-Sisi, a former general who rose to power in a 2013 military takeover, has also succeeded in persuading many Egyptians that they need a strong leader like him to fend off the war, chaos and destruction that have swallowed many of Egypt’s neighbors in recent years, including Libya, Sudan and now the Gaza Strip.“At least we’re guaranteed to have safety and security,” said Nadia Negm, 28, a housewife in Shubra al-Khaima, a working-class area northeast of Cairo, who said she had proudly voted for Mr. el-Sisi. “Yes, it’s hard, but at least we’re better off than other countries.”Ms. Negm, like other Sisi supporters interviewed, pointed out that many other countries were also staring down high inflation and shortages, a common refrain in the state-controlled media.But for others who declined to vote or said they voted only because they had heard they would be fined if they did not, the humiliation of not knowing how they would pay for next week’s meals, of having to break off a child’s engagement for lack of funds to cover marriage expenses or of being in constant debt outweighed their fear of instability.“Security and safety should be applied to food and jobs, too,” said Mahmoud Mohamed, 65, a coffeehouse waiter in Banha, a small city in Egypt’s Nile Delta region, who said he had fallen into a cycle of borrowing each month just to pay back the previous month’s debts. “He promised us so much, and none of it was achieved.”The war in next-door Gaza, however, has shifted some Egyptians’ focus back to other threats such as terrorism, which Mr. el-Sisi says he has successfully battled in northern Sinai, and what many Egyptians see as Israel’s drive to push Gazans across the border into Egypt.Yasmine Fouad, 39, who owns a cellphone accessories shop in Banha, said she had initially planned to sit out the election as a quiet protest of Mr. el-Sisi and the inflation he has presided over.The crisis in Gaza changed her mind.“At this moment, we all have to be behind the president, because anything could happen,” she said. “That makes us accept the current situation.”Hanging a campaign banner for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Cairo this month.Khaled Desouki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      What Is the Real Meaning of ‘Pro-Life’?

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      More from our inbox:The Texas Abortion RulingThe Campus Clash of Free Speech and AntisemitismThe Undemocratic Electoral CollegeTrump and NATO Illustration by Alicia Tatone; Photographs by Yiming Chen, SDI Productions, Joshua Roberts/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Republicans Are Finding Out That ‘Pro-Life’ Has Too Many Meanings,” by Liz Mair (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 6):Ms. Mair, a G.O.P. campaign strategist, writes about all the desperate ways Republican politicians are trying to explain their stance on abortion now that their decades-long fight to make it illegal has taken a step forward.It seems her clients are scrambling, surprised to find that “rank-and-file G.O.P. voters are not as pro-life as we might have thought.”The medical community is not surprised. You see, there are no party affiliation requirements for unplanned or medically doomed pregnancies. Doctors have seen staunch Republicans obtain safe and legal abortions for decades. I’m sure that every single white male Republican legislator who signs “heartbeat” laws, piously claims he is pro-life and rails against Planned Parenthood knows a woman who has had an abortion. And he may have caused one himself.Instead of spinning the message on their terrible policies, her advice to her G.O.P. clients should be to stop blocking funding for reliable contraception, stop interfering with medical decisions between women and their doctors and start writing laws that support women who can’t afford another pregnancy because of poverty, a lack of postpartum job security or abusive partners.You know, “pro-life” stuff.Cheryl BaileySt. Paul, Minn.The writer is a retired gynecologic oncologist.To the Editor:In recommending that Republicans finesse the abortion issue, Liz Mair doesn’t mention one point. Pro-choice advocates are not anti-life, but we disagree with those who call themselves pro-life in two fundamental ways. We do not believe that humans can claim to know what God — who certainly allows miscarriages — wants, and we do not believe that humans claiming to have this knowledge have a right to impose their religious beliefs on others.Republicans may continue to succeed politically by demagoguing the abortion issue, but most Americans, religious or not, do not believe that the law should forbid women from obtaining a safe abortion.Jamie BaldwinRedding, Conn.To the Editor:Liz Mair is absolutely correct that “pro-life” has many meanings, but she mistakenly focuses only on abortion.Being “pro-life” also means things like good pre- and post-natal care for all mothers; good health care for everyone, including babies born to the poorest among us; accessible and affordable child care and preschool for all; gun safety laws to ensure that bullets are no longer the biggest cause of accidental death among U.S. children, and, not least, more commitment to combating climate change.Republicans need to consider these matters when they (or if they) decide to come up with a better, more marketable definition of “pro-life.”Nadine GodwinNew YorkThe Texas Abortion Ruling Kate Cox, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Texas Supreme Court Rules Against Woman Who Sought Abortion” (news article, Dec. 12):I hope the women of Texas go on strike and march to the state capital. Women, especially mothers, all over the country will stand with them.Eve Rumpf-SternbergSeattleTo the Editor:Is there no end to these people’s cruelty?Linda GrunbaumNew YorkThe Campus Clash of Free Speech and Antisemitism Adam Glanzman for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Censorship Can’t Help University Presidents,” by David French (column, Dec. 11):Mr. French argues that what American campuses need is more viewpoint diversity and true freedom of speech — not the current hypocrisy of some speech being favored and other speech censored.But what Mr. French does not mention at all is the need for morality and truth to be part of the curriculum. President John F. Kennedy, a Harvard alumnus, said “the goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.”The university presidents’ failure before Congress to unambiguously repudiate calls for “the genocide of Jews” reflected how far these schools have strayed from that purpose. Allowing more speech on campus without a moral compass will yield only more noise and little else.Nathan J. DiamentWashingtonThe writer is the executive director for public policy of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.The Undemocratic Electoral College Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “‘The Exploding Cigar of American Politics,’” by Gail Collins (column, Nov. 30):Ms. Collins’s excellent column about the Electoral College should have commented more on the U.S. Senate, which is even more unrepresentative and undemocratic.Two out of three of our elected national arms of government are unrepresentative. (The third “arm,” the House, is roughly representative, but tainted by gerrymandering, “dark” money and increasing voter suppression.)The Electoral College has overturned the national popular vote five times in America’s nearly 250-year history, but twice already in this still young century. It’s likely to happen again, probably soon (’24?).One reason the founding fathers decided not to have direct elections to the presidency was a fear of a mostly uneducated and ill-informed electorate voting in either a fraudster or a populist demagogue as president. Some would say we got two for the price of one in 2016.We should abolish the Electoral College and directly vote for the president (as we do for the Senate and the House). Failing that, embrace the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, by which states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.I dread the day when many more Americans despair of the ballot box and instead choose far more dangerous ways of expressing their will — i.e., more Capitol insurrections, but successful ones.The founding fathers must be spinning in their graves at our inability to modernize our now dangerously outdated Constitution.Michael NorthmoreStaten IslandTrump and NATOFormer President Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he primarily sees NATO as a drain on American resources.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump’s Stance Toward NATO Alarms Europe” (front page, Dec. 10):I’m 73 years old and frightened. So many things I have taken for granted my entire life are threatened. My dad fought overseas in World War II. He, and I, always assumed that the things he fought for would remain protected.I never contemplated that the coalitions we established with our allies after the war would be threatened. I came to believe that the isolationism thriving before the war had been essentially put to rest.But now Donald Trump and his disciples have awakened the blind nationalism that raises the specter of totalitarianism. That menace should strike terror in all who treasure our democracy.And we can’t allow a feeling of helplessness or a belief that such things could never happen here prevent us from protecting what we can no longer take for granted.Stephen F. GladstoneShaker Heights, Ohio More

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      in Elections

      Donald Tusk Chosen as Poland’s Prime Minister After Rival Is Rejected

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      Parliament shot down a new government proposed by the caretaker prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, whose party, Law and Justice, lost its parliamentary majority in an October election.Poland’s newly elected Parliament torpedoed a long-shot effort by right-wing forces to stay in power and chose the opposition leader Donald Tusk as the nation’s new prime minister on Monday. The decision ushers the biggest and most populous country on the European Union’s formerly communist eastern flank into a new era.Legislators, as expected, rejected a new government proposed by the caretaker prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, whose party, Law and Justice, lost its parliamentary majority in an October election.As Parliament shot down Law and Justice’s effort to keep power, opposition legislators taunted Mr. Morawiecki and his supporters over their defeat, chanting “Donald Tusk, Donald Tusk.”Later on Monday, Parliament nominated and confirmed Mr. Tusk, 66, as Poland’s new leader, drawing cheers and applause from his allies and a sour denunciation of the new prime minister as a “German agent” from Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of Law and Justice and Poland’s de facto leader since 2015. Mr. Tusk, a veteran centrist politician who led Poland from 2007 to 2014, is expected to be sworn in on Wednesday by President Andrzej Duda, an ally of Law and Justice.“This is a truly wonderful day, not only for me, but for all those who have deeply believed for many years that things will get better, that we will chase away the darkness, that we will chase away evil,” Mr. Tusk said after being confirmed as prime minister by the Sejm, the more important lower house of the Polish Parliament.The return to power of Mr. Tusk, endorsed as Poland’s new leader with 248 votes for and 201 against in the Sejm, completed an ill-tempered period of political transition that Law and Justice had sought to prolong as long as possible, despite losing its majority in the October election.Mr. Morawiecki, who led Poland’s previous right-wing government, resigned after the election but was asked by Mr. Duda to stay on in a caretaker capacity and to try to form a new government.Critics of Law and Justice denounced Mr. Duda’s move as a last-gasp attempt by the defeated party to prolong its rule and appoint allies to positions in state institutions and companies.In a final, desperate effort to keep the opposition from taking over, a commission formed by the outgoing government to investigate Russian influence recommended on Nov. 29 that Mr. Tusk and other leading opposition figures not be allowed to hold positions responsible for state security.Votes in Parliament on Monday, however, ended the defeated party’s efforts to remain in office and elevated Mr. Tusk, the leader of the main opposition party, Civic Coalition, to leadership of a new government. He is expected to announce his cabinet on Tuesday.After a day of often raucous debate, 266 legislators voted against the government proposed by Mr. Morawiecki and 190 voted for, far short of the majority it needed in the 460-member Sejm to hang on.Delegates listened as Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the Law and Justice party, addressed Parliament on Monday.Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy rejecting Mr. Morawiecki’s proposed government, doomed to fail because of Law and Justice’s electoral defeat, Parliament delivered a humiliating blow to Mr. Kaczynski, a bitter political and personal enemy of Mr. Tusk.Mr. Kaczynski warned that the vote against Mr. Morawiecki and the return to power of Mr. Tusk, whom he has repeatedly reviled as an agent for German and Russian interests, “look like the end of Polish democracy but we hope this will not be the case.”Many others, however, cheered the end of the deeply conservative party’s rule, including Lech Walesa, a former Polish president and leader in the 1980s of the anti-communist Solidarity trade union movement. A longtime foe of Mr. Kaczynski, who has accused him of collaborating with the communist-era secret police, Mr. Walesa was so eager to witness the demise of Law and Justice that, despite a recent struggle with Covid, he traveled to Warsaw from his home in the port city of Gdansk to witness the vote. He stood in the spectators’ gallery beaming with delight as Mr. Tusk was confirmed as prime minister.The installation of a new government headed by Mr. Tusk could be a drastic shift away from Poland’s direction during eight years of Law and Justice rule, a period marked by close relations between the governing party and the Roman Catholic Church and frequent quarrels with the European Union.Scope for change, however, will be crimped by the grip of Law and Justice appointees on the judiciary, powerful state bodies like the central bank, the national prosecutor’s office, the national broadcasting system and large state-controlled corporations like the energy giant PKN Orlen. Many of those appointments will be hard to reverse.Mr. Tusk’s room for maneuver will also be constrained by Mr. Duda, who is closely aligned with Law and Justice and has veto power over new legislation. Mr. Duda’s presidential term ends in 2025.The outgoing government made clear it had no intention of cutting Mr. Tusk any slack, with former ministers recycling wild election campaign smears of the man now set to govern Poland.Speaking in Parliament on Monday evening, Mariusz Blaszczak, defense minister in the previous government, responded to Mr. Tusk’s nomination as prime minister by denouncing him as a threat to national security who, “completely obedient to Brussels and Berlin,” will “weaken our security and push us to the periphery of Europe.” He also vowed to “defend” public media, drawing jeers from Mr. Tusk’s supporters.People watching a live screening showing the session of Parliament on Monday.Omar Marques/Getty ImagesThe public broadcasting system, a network of national and local radio and television stations, is stacked with Law and Justice loyalists. TVP, the main state television station, has so far clung to its role as propaganda bullhorn for Law and Justice. Its news coverage is heavily slanted in favor of the former governing party, though it has now curbed somewhat previously incessant denunciations of Mr. Tusk as a traitor. During a debate before the votes in Parliament rejecting Mr. Morawiecki and approving Mr. Tusk, opponents of Law and Justice reviled the former governing party as sore losers who had needlessly dragged out the transfer of power.“These entire two months were built on the foundation of bitterness and non-acceptance of the sovereign’s judgment, which removed Law and Justice from power,” said Wladyslaw Kosniak-Kamusz, the leader of a centrist party allied with Mr. Tusk. “This is the end of this bad stage for Poland,” he added.Law and Justice’s defeat came less than a month after a far-right party performed far better than expected in Dutch national elections. Though it fell well short of winning a majority and is having trouble forming a government, the Dutch party’s result sent shock waves across Europe since the Netherlands had long been seen as one the continent’s most liberal countries.In Poland, Mr. Tusk and his allies are divided on the issue of abortion, which was almost completely banned by the previous government, but they share a desire to restore the independence of the Polish judiciary, which was heavily politicized under Law and Justice, and to repair relations with the European Union.A long and often-vicious election campaign cast a shadow over Poland’s previously robust support for Ukraine as Law and Justice sought to avoid losing votes to a far-right party strongly opposed to helping Kyiv. A new centrist government headed by Mr. Tusk would most likely try to put relations between Warsaw and Kyiv back on track, though issues like cheap Ukrainian grain and a blockade of the border by protesting Polish truckers could obstruct a quick return to more harmonious relations.Law and Justice won more votes than any other single party in the October election and proclaimed victory. But its opponents — Mr. Tusk’s Civic Coalition; a leftist grouping, New Left; and a centrist alliance, Third Way — won a clear majority in the Sejm. The opposition also expanded a majority it had in the Senate, the upper house of Parliament.That simple arithmetic was running against Law and Justice was clear when the new Parliament convened for the first time on Nov. 13 and selected Szymon Holownia, a leader of Third Way, as speaker of the Sejm and rejected a candidate put forward by the previous governing party.The selection of Mr. Holownia, a former television celebrity, as speaker quickly boosted public interest in previously dull legislative sessions, with subscribers to the Parliament’s livestream of debates on YouTube rising 10 times to nearly half a million. “Stock up on popcorn because I suspect there will be a lot of excitement,” Mr. Holownia recommended.Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting. More