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      Your Monday Briefing: The G7 Wraps

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      Also, Russia claims that it captured Bakhmut.President Volodymyr Zelensky during a speech at the G7. Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesG7 wraps with support for UkraineThe G7 summit concluded yesterday in Japan with leaders of the world’s major economies welcoming President Volodymyr Zelensky as an honored guest and reaffirming their support of Ukraine. But Russia claimed victory in Bakhmut, even though Ukraine says that it still holds a few blocks of the ruined city.Even though Moscow is trumpeting a “Mission Accomplished” moment, Ukraine still sees an opening to seize the initiative from the city’s outskirts if Russian forces are no longer pressing forward inside the city’s center.Russia’s capture of Bakhmut would be a powerful symbolic success. But controlling it would not necessarily help Russia toward its larger stated goal of conquering the eastern Donbas region. In fact, some analysts say that Russia’s ability to hold off a broader counteroffensive could be compromised if it continued to send reinforcements to defend Bakhmut.Comparison: Zelensky acknowledged there was little left of Bakhmut. He said he saw echoes of Ukraine’s pain in images of the 1945 devastation in Hiroshima, where the summit was held.Other updates from the G7:F-16s: President Biden reversed course, agreeing to let Ukrainians be trained on the American-made jets. He told allies that he is prepared to approve other countries’ transferring the jets to Ukraine.China: The G7 countries said they would focus on “de-risking, not decoupling” from Beijing. Japan: Critics say the U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, Rahm Emanuel, is pushing too hard for gay rights.Pita Limjaroenrat, 42, greeted supporters during a parade last week.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesA political fight looms in ThailandPita Limjaroenrat recently stunned Thailand’s political establishment by leading his progressive Move Forward Party to a momentous victory in last week’s elections. He seems poised to become the next prime minister — unless the military blocks him.Pita needs 376 votes from the 500-member House of Representatives to overcome the military-appointed Senate. So far, he only has 314.Several senators have said they would not support a candidate like Pita, who threatens the status quo. Now, Thais are waiting to see if their choice will be allowed to lead or if he will be blocked, an outcome that could plunge the country into political chaos.Pita’s policies: He has promised to undo the military’s grip on Thai politics and revise a law that criminalizes criticism of the monarchy. He is pressing for a return to democracy after nine years of military rule that was preceded by a coup. He also wants to take a strong foreign policy stance.A complaint: The Election Commission said Pita failed to disclose that he owned shares of a now-defunct media company that he inherited from his father. Pita said he reported the shares.An Afghan migrant who collapsed in the Darién Gap.Federico Rios for The New York TimesThe Afghans at the U.S. borderFor thousands of Afghans, the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul was just the beginning of a long search for safety. Many fled to South America — joining the vast human tide of desperation pressing toward the U.S. — to try to enter a nation that they feel left them behind.Some had partnered with the West for years. They were lawyers, human rights advocates or members of the Afghan government. During their journeys to the U.S., nearly all of them are robbed or extorted, while some are kidnapped or jailed. “I helped these Americans,” a former Afghan Air Force intelligence officer said from a detention center in Texas, sometimes near tears. “I am not understanding why they are not helping me.”A dangerous journey: Since the beginning of 2022, some 3,600 Afghans have crossed the treacherous Darién Gap, which connects North and South America, according to data from Panama.Reporting: My colleagues traveled with a group of 54 Afghans through the Darién Gap.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificJoint Typhoon Warning CenterTyphoon Mawar could hit Guam as soon as Wednesday.Police in Australia are investigating why an officer used a Taser on a 95-year-old woman with dementia last week.Late last year, a couple in New York sheltered a South Korean tour group who got stuck in a blizzard in Buffalo. They recently reunited in Seoul.Around the WorldWarring groups in Sudan agreed to a seven-day cease-fire to begin today, the first truce to be signed by both sides.Greece’s governing party leads in the election. But initial results show that it does not have a majority, setting the stage for another vote within weeks.A stampede at a soccer stadium in El Salvador killed at least 12 people.U.S. NewsKevin McCarthy sounded more sanguine yesterday than before about the prospects for a deal.Patrick Semansky/Associated PressPresident Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are planning to meet today to try to avert a looming debt default.Two Republicans are expected to enter the U.S. presidential race this week: Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.A Morning ReadMany are drawn to Zibo for the crowds, a relief after Covid lockdowns.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesZibo, a once-obscure city in China’s Shandong Province, is suddenly overrun with tourists. They arrived after hearing about its distinctive barbecue style on social media.Lives lived: Martin Amis’s bleakly comic novels changed British fiction. He died at 73.SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAA sketch from Sechaba Maape at the Architecture Biennale. Sechaba MaapeAfrican architecture on the cutting edgeThe Architecture Biennale that opened Saturday in Venice explores how cultures from Africa can shape the buildings of the future.For the first time, the exhibition will have a curator of African descent, Lesley Lokko, and more than half of the Biennale’s 89 participants are from Africa or the African diaspora.The work of Sechaba Maape, which is inspired by South Africa’s first nations and their connection to nature, is being shown in that country’s national pavilion. Globally, architecture has begun to trend toward biomimicry, in which the built environment emulates the natural one. African design, says Maape, has always done this through pattern and form. The response in Venice and on social media has been overwhelming, he said.“Architecture should be the thing that instead of separating us from our home, the Earth, should help us feel more mediated, more connected,” Maape told Lynsey Chutel, our Briefings writer in Johannesburg.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookChris Simpson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Sophia Pappas.A Rob Roy, which swaps out the rye for Scotch, is a muskier take on a classic manhattan.What to WatchIn “White Building,” a richly observed coming-of-age story from Cambodia, the tale of an apartment complex mirrors the country’s fraught recent history.What to Listen toHear new tracks by Bad Bunny, Sparks, Anohni and others in our weekly playlist.Where to GoSpend 36 hours in Buenos Aires.The News QuizTest your memory of last week’s headlines.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Furry aquatic mammal (five letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. Lynsey Chutel wrote today’s Spotlight on Africa. See you tomorrow. — AmeliaP.S. Our sister newsletter, The Australia Letter, wants to hear from its readers.“The Daily” is about the darker side of James Webb, for whom a famous telescope is named.I’m always available at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      Gloria Molina, Pioneering Latina Politician, Dies at 74

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      In three elections, she was a “first,” becoming one of the leading Latina politicians in California and the country.Gloria Molina, a groundbreaking Chicana politician at the city, county and state levels in California who was a fierce advocate for the communities she represented, even though that often meant defying entrenched political structures, died on May 14 at her home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 74.Her family announced her death, from cancer, on her Facebook page.Since she announced she had terminal cancer in March, colleagues, constituents and the California news media had been praising her achievements in articles and on social media. The Los Angeles Metro’s board of directors voted to name a train station in East Los Angeles after her. Casa 0101, a performing arts organization in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, designated its main stage theater as the Gloria Molina Auditorium. Grand Park, in downtown Los Angeles, which she helped bring into being in 2012, is now Gloria Molina Grand Park.“She championed for years to increase access to parks and green spaces,” the park’s overseeing body said in announcing the renaming, “as well as recreational opportunities that engage culture, support well-being and improve the quality of life for everyone in Los Angeles.”The accolades reflected her legacy as one of the leading Latina politicians in the country, with much of her more than three-decade career encompassing a time when few Latinas were in important positions.In 1982, after working on other politicians’ campaigns, including that of Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, who would later be elected to Congress, Ms. Molina became the first Latina elected to the California Assembly. She ran for that seat even though the political leadership of the Eastside area of Los Angeles County had already selected another candidate, Richard Polanco. She beat him in the Democratic primary and easily defeated a Republican opponent in the general election.A similar thing happened in 1987 when she ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council that had been created by redistricting. The political leadership had chosen Larry Gonzalez for the post, but she beat him and a third candidate to become the first Latina council member.Ms. Molina in 1984 campaigning with Walter Mondale, center, who was running for president, and Art Torres, a California state senator.Wally Fong/Associated PressIn 1991, she scored a political hat trick of sorts, becoming the first woman to be elected to the powerful Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. (In 1979, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke became the first woman on the board when she was appointed to fill out the term of a retiring member.) Some 1,000 supporters attended her swearing in.“We must look forward to a time when a person’s ethnic background or gender is no longer a historical footnote,” Ms. Molina said at the time. “And this election is another step in that positive path to the American promise.”Ms. Molina, who served on the board until term limits ended her tenure in 2014, was right that her victory was no token; today, all five supervisors are women.Roz Wyman, a groundbreaker herself — in 1953, at 22, she became the youngest person ever elected to the Los Angeles City Council — once reflected on Ms. Molina’s “firsts.”“We had a saying in those days: ‘Can a woman break the glass ceiling?’” she said. “Not only did she break it, she busted it in every way that you could possibly bust a glass ceiling.”Gloria Molina was born on May 31, 1948, in Montebello, a Los Angeles suburb. Her father, Leonardo, was a construction worker who was born in Los Angeles but raised in Casas Grandes, Mexico, and her mother, Concepción, was a homemaker from Mexico. The couple immigrated in the 1940s, and Gloria was the oldest of 10 children.“She was almost like a second mom in the family,” Ms. Molina’s daughter, Valentina Martinez, said in a video about her mother made in 2020 for the Mexican-American Cultural Education Foundation. “She did everything. She would tell me that she would come home from school every day and make tortillas for her brothers and sisters. She didn’t get to have fun or go to after-school programs. She was always kind of doing the hard work, making sure everyone was taken care of, changing diapers, cooking, doing all of that. So she was a tough lady from the very beginning.”She was, Ms. Molina said, “brought up in a very traditionally Chicano family.”“The expectations were that you were going to get married and have children,” she said in an oral history recorded in 1990 for the Online Archive of California. “You weren’t going to go on to be anything other than maybe what your mom was.”But she told her mother that she didn’t want to get married young; she wanted to travel and work and get her own place.“She thought I was sort of nuts,” Ms. Molina said.She studied fashion design at Rio Hondo College, in Whittier, Calif., and took courses at East Los Angeles College and California State University, Los Angeles, though she did not get a degree because for most of that period she was also working full time to support herself, including as a legal secretary for five years. She joined in the student activism of the 1960s and early ’70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War and for Chicano rights.One thing she realized, she said in the Cultural Education Foundation video, was that those activism movements were generally led by men and “really didn’t allow the women to have any role whatsoever.” She banded with other Chicana women try to change that culture.“We were Chicana feminists when there weren’t any around,” she said.She was drawn into politics, working for several prominent figures and, in 1982, deciding to seek the assembly seat over the objections of the male political hierarchy. She and her Chicana supporters knew it would be a difficult battle.“We wanted to destroy everything that they had said I could not do,” she recalled in the oral history. “Like I said, we always accepted the fact that we needed to work twice as hard; we really physically went out and did that.”In her career in the State Assembly, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, she prided herself on “being a fighter, one who doesn’t just go along with the program because that’s how the pressure is being applied.” That was certainly true for her signature issue during her assembly years — her opposition to a proposal to build a prison in her Eastside district, a plan whose proponents included Gov. George Deukmejian.She won that battle, a significant one.“She stopped the 100-year pattern of dumping negative land-use developments on the Eastside,” Fernando Guerra, the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said in a phone interview.In the process, she earned a reputation for being tough and uncompromising that stuck with her throughout her political career.“Just listen to her talk,” Sergio Munoz, then the executive editor of the Spanish language daily La Opinion, told The New York Times in 1991, shortly after Ms. Molina won election to the Board of Supervisors. “Listen to her answer questions. You are going to get a direct answer, whether it affects other interests or compromises someone else.”Ms. Molina’s last elected position was on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she served for more than two decades.Reed Saxon/Associated PressAfter leaving the Board of Supervisors, Ms. Molina made one more bid for political office, challenging José Huizar, an incumbent, for his Los Angeles City Council seat in 2015. She lost. Mr. Huizar later pleaded guilty to corruption charges.Though no longer in office, Ms. Molina remained active in various causes. In 2018, she was among a group protesting outside an Academy Awards luncheon in Beverly Hills, denouncing the scarcity of Hispanic characters in films.“The movie industry should be ashamed of itself,” she said then.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Molina is survived by her husband, Ron Martinez; her siblings, Gracie Molina, Irma Molina, Domingo Molina, Bertha Molina Mejia, Mario Molina, Sergio Molina, Danny Molina, Olga Molina Palacios and Lisa Molina Banuelos; and a grandson.Professor Guerra noted that Ms. Molina, in her various elections, faced the task of convincing voters to choose her over another Latino candidate.“What she had to show was, of the other Latinos that were running, she was the one who was going to represent them better,” he said. “Her secret sauce was that she came across as incredibly authentic, and she was a populist.”“Her only interest, and it came across,” he added, “was the community.” More

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      As Greece Votes, Leader Says Blocking Migrants Built ‘Good Will’ With Europe

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      Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has taken a tough line on migrants as he turns around the country’s economy. It’s a trade-off that voters and the European Union seem more than willing to abide.Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece has been accused of illegally pushing asylum seekers back at sea. He has acknowledged that the state’s intelligence service wiretapped an opposition leader. He has consolidated media control as press freedom in Greece has dropped to the lowest in Europe.It is the sort of thing that the guardians of European Union values often scorn in right-wing populist leaders, whether it be Giorgia Meloni of Italy or Viktor Orban of Hungary. But with Greece holding national elections on Sunday, Brussels has instead lauded Mr. Mitsotakis, a pro-Europe conservative, for bringing stability to the Greek economy, for sending military aid to Ukraine and for providing regional stability in a time of potential upheaval in Turkey.Above all, European Union leaders appear to have cut Mr. Mitsotakis slack for doing the continent’s unpleasant work of keeping migrants at bay, a development that shows just how much Europe has shifted, with crackdowns formerly associated with the right wing drifting into the mainstream.“I’m helping Europe on numerous fronts,” Mr. Mitsotakis said in a brief interview on Tuesday in the port city of Piraeus, where, in his trademark blue dress shirt and slacks, the 55-year-old rallied adoring voters on crowded streets. “It’s bought us reasonable good will.”With Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, calling Greece’s border enforcement Europe’s “shield,” Mr. Mitsotakis argued that after the arrival of more than a million migrants and asylum seekers destabilized the continent’s politics by entering through Greece during the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016, Europe had come around to Greece’s tougher approach.Migrants on a dinghy accompanied by a Frontex vessel at the village of Skala Sikaminias, on the Greek island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey in 2020.Michael Varaklas/Associated Press“We’ve been able to sort of change, I think, the European approach vis-à-vis migration,” said Mr. Mitsotakis, a self-described progressive, disputing the notion that the policy — which critics say includes illegally pushing asylum seekers back — was hard-right.“Right-wing or a central policy,” said Mr. Mitsotakis, the leader of the nominally center-right New Democracy party, “I don’t know what it is, but I have to protect my borders.”In turn, Europe seems to have protected Mr. Mitsotakis.“It’s the Mitsotakis exception,” said Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Union law at the HEC Paris business school. Mr. Mitsotakis’ special treatment has derived from his political closeness to Ms. von der Leyen, Mr. Alemanno said, and his willingness to build — with funding from the bloc — a vast network of migrant centers that have proved politically popular in Greece.Mr. Mitsotakis argued that some “leftist Illuminati in Brussels” failed to see that he was saving lives with his policy, something that he said Europe’s leaders appreciated.“We’re no longer sort of the poster child for problems in Europe,” he said, adding that what he had done “offers a lot of people relief.”Greeks included. Before Sunday’s elections, Mr. Mitsotakis held a comfortable lead in the polls against his main rival, Alexis Tsipras, of the left-wing Syriza party, even if the prime minister still appeared to lack enough support to win outright. A second round of elections looks probable in July.Alexis Tsipras, left, and Mr. Mitsotakis taking part in a televised debate at the headquarters of the state broadcaster ERT this month.Alexandros Avramidis/ReutersAround the neighborhood where Mr. Mitsotakis campaigned, people talked about how he had made their native Greek islands that were once overrun with migrants livable again, how he had been the first Greek prime minister invited to speak to a joint session of Congress in Washington, and how he had stood up to Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who himself faces an election runoff next weekend.Greeks around the country appreciate how Mr. Mitsotakis has cut taxes and debt and increased digitization, minimum wages and pensions.For a decade, Greece was Europe’s thumping migraine. The country’s catastrophic 2010 debt crisis nearly sank the European Union. Humiliating bailouts followed, and a decade of stark austerity policies — directed by Germany — cut pensions and public services, shrank economic output by a quarter, inflated unemployment and prompted thousands of young and professional Greeks to flee.In 2015, under the leadership of Mr. Tsipras, Greeks voted to reject Europe’s many-strings-attached aid package, and the country was nearly ejected from the eurozone. Social unrest and talk of “Grexit” mounted, but Mr. Tsipras ended up carrying out the required overhauls and moderated in the following years, arguing that Greece had started on the road to recovery.But in 2019 he lost to Mr. Mitsotakis — the son of a former prime minister, trained at Harvard and Stanford, at ease in Washington — who seemed the personification of the establishment. He promised to right the Greek ship.“This was always my bet,” Mr. Mitsotakis said. “And I think that we delivered.”His government has spurred growth at twice the eurozone average. Big multinational corporations and start-ups have invested. Tourism is skyrocketing.Tourists visiting the Acropolis in Athens in October.Petros Giannakouris/Associated PressThe country is paying back creditors ahead of schedule, and Mr. Mitsotakis expects, if he wins, international rating agencies to lift Greece’s bonds out of junk status. The number of migrant arrivals has dropped off 90 percent since the crisis in 2015, but also significantly since Mr. Mitsotakis took office four years ago.“A European success story,” The Economist called Greece under Mr. Mitsotakis.But he argues that he needs another four years to finish the job. Greece, which still has the European Union’s highest national debt, is also the bloc’s second-poorest nation, after Bulgaria. Tax evasion is still common, and the country’s judicial system is so slow that it scares off investors.Critics of Mr. Mitsotakis say that, apart from the economy, he represents a danger to Greece’s values, and that Europe is diverting its eyes as it focuses on the financials and the declining number of migrants.Humanitarian groups have accused Mr. Mitsotakis of illegally pushing back migrants by land and sea. He has hardly run away from the issue, recently visiting Lesbos, the Greek island that became synonymous with the abominable conditions of its Moria camp, which was crammed with 20,000 refugees before burning down.“Moria is no more,” Mr. Mitsotakis said in the interview. “It simply doesn’t exist. I mean, you have olive groves and we have an ultramodern reception facility that’s been built with European money.” Critics have denounced the new camp’s prisonlike conditions, but Greeks overwhelmingly support his tough line.Mr. Mitsotakis during a campaign event on the island of Lesbos last week.Elias Marcou/ReutersEurope is “less on top of Greece for doing pushbacks and all the sort of things,” said Camino Mortera-Martinez, who heads the Brussels office for the Center for European Reform, a think tank.The latitude given Greece, she said, was in part recognition that the country had lived through a decade of brutal austerity. But it also reflected that Europe as a whole is “basically unable to help” Greece and other nations at the front line of the migration crisis, and therefore lets “these governments do what they do.”Migration aside, there are other more immediate concerns at home. In February, a train crash killed 57 people, exposing Greece’s rickety infrastructure and the limits of Mr. Mitsotakis’ talk of modernization. Reporters Without Borders deemed Greece the worst country in the European Union for press freedom in its 2023 index.Destroyed train cars at the site of a crash where two trains collided near the Greek city of Larissa in March.Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York TimesOver the summer, Mr. Mitsotakis’ top intelligence official got caught wiretapping journalists and politicians, including Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the opposition Pasok party and member of European Parliament. Mr. Mitsotakis denied, to the incredulity of many, knowing anything about it. Some of the people his intelligence services listened in on were also found to have illegal malware on their devices. The government has denied putting it there.But Mr. Mitsotakis, in a televised debate this month, conceded that Mr. Androulakis should not have been wiretapped. The spying was an especially bad idea, it turns out, because Mr. Androulakis’s support may prove pivotal to the election’s ultimate outcome.Yet the scandal is way down on voters’ list of priorities, as is Mr. Mitsotakis’ treatment of migrants.John Vrakas, 66, who was handing out fliers for Mr. Tsipras across from the square where Mr. Mitsotakis was due to speak, shrugged that Europe didn’t seem particularly bothered as long as the prime minister assuaged their concerns on the economy and Ukraine. “It’s a kind of trade,” he said.It is one that Greek voters seem happy to make.As Mr. Mitsotakis walked the streets, a bus driver reached out the window and clasped his hand. “Supporters until the end,” chanted a group of men in front of a cafe. “We trust you,” a woman shouted from her jewelry shop.What “resonates in Europe,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, was that his was an “anti-populist government” that had brought much-appreciated stability back to Greece in a rough region.He got up from the interview in a small and otherwise empty restaurant, and shook more hands on the way to the square, where he launched into a short stump speech interrupted by chiming church bells.“I’m not sure who they are tolling for,” Mr. Mitsotakis exclaimed, “but not for us.”In Athens this month.Orestis Panagiotou/EPA, via ShutterstockNiki Kitsantonis More

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      Alberta Fires Rage While Election Ignores Global Warming

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      For politicians, discussing climate change in a province enriched by oil money is fraught.When I arrived in Alberta recently to report an upcoming political story, there was no shortage of people wanting to talk about politics and the provincial election on May 29. But, even as wildfires flared earlier than usual and raged across an unusually wide swath of forest, discussions about climate change were largely absent.Destruction left behind by wildfires in Drayton Valley, Alberta.Jen Osborne for The New York TimesThe smoke that enveloped Calgary this week briefly gave the city one of the worst air-quality ratings in the world, as the fires to the north and west led to the evacuation of roughly 29,000 people across the province.[Read: A ‘Canadian Armageddon’ Sets Parts of Western Canada on Fire][Read: Canada’s Wildfires Have Been Disrupting Lives. Now, Oil and Gas Take a Hit.][Read from Opinion: There’s No Escape From Wildfire Smoke][Read: 12 Million People Are Under a Heat Advisory in the Pacific Northwest]Smoke from wildfires has blotted out the sun in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver several times in recent years and kept runners, cyclists and walkers indoors. Charred forests, already burned in previous wildfire seasons, lined the roads I drove in Alberta’s mountains.I had been to Alberta in 2016 to cover the fires sweeping through Fort McMurray, but that blaze, almost miraculously, took no lives except in a traffic accident. But fires in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have become bigger and stronger, and research suggests that heat and drought associated with global warming are major reasons. When the town of Lytton, British Columbia, was consumed by wildfires in 2021, temperatures reached a staggering 49.6 degrees Celsius.Poll after poll has shown that Albertans are more or less in line with other Canadians on the need to take steps to reduce carbon emissions. But the candidates aren’t talking much about it.During Thursday’s debate between Danielle Smith, the premier and leader of the United Conservative Party, and Rachel Notley, the former premier and leader of the New Democratic Party, the subject of climate came up only in an economic context.Ms. Smith repeatedly accused Ms. Notley of springing a “surprise” carbon tax on the province, and warned that any attempt to cap emissions would inevitably lead to reduced oil production and reduced revenues for the province, (an assessment not universally shared by experts).A layer of dense smoke spread through much of Alberta this week.Jen Osborne for The New York TimesI asked Feodor Snagovsky, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta, about this apparent disconnect in Alberta between public opinion about climate change and campaign discourse.“It’s very tough to talk about oil and gas in Alberta because it’s sort of the goose that lays the golden egg,” he said. “It’s the source of a remarkable level of prosperity that the province has enjoyed for a long time.”This year oil and gas revenues will account for about 36 percent of all the money the province takes in. And during the oil embargo of the late 1970s, those revenues were more than 70 percent of the province’s budget. Among other things, that has allowed Alberta to be the only province without a sales tax and it has kept income and corporate taxes generally low relative to other provinces.But oil and gas production account for 28 percent of Canada’s carbon emissions, the country’s largest source. While the amount of carbon that’s released for each barrel produced has been reduced, increases in total production have more than offset those gains.The energy industry is also an important source of high-paying jobs, though. So the suggestion that production might have to be limited in order for Canada to meet its climate targets raises alarms.“People hear that and they think: my job’s going to go away,” Professor Snagovsky said. “It hits people really close to home.”He told me that he had lived in Australia in 2020 when that country was plagued by extreme heat and wildfires. At the time, Professor Snagovsky said, not only was there very little discussion there about climate change, but politicians and others argued that it was not an appropriate time for such talks.Professor Snagovsky said he hoped that the fires and smoke will prompt Albertans to start thinking about the climate effects that caused them, but he’s not confident that will happen.“I think it’s unlikely, but you can always hope,” he said.Trans CanadaImages made from the scan of the Titanic wreck clearly show small details.Atlantic/Magellan, via Associated PressA hyper detailed 3-D scan of the Titanic’s wreckage off Canada’s coastline has produced evocative images of the doomed steamship.A dilapidated farmhouse near Palmyra, Ontario, which is a favorite of photographers, may face demolition.Canadian Tire is among the companies picking over the ruins of Bed Bath & Beyond.A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.How are we doing?We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More

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      Why the Leaders of Turkey and Thailand Have an Interest in Elections

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      Turkey and Thailand held two huge elections this week, both with uncertain outcomes. Each shows some of the benefits that elections can hold for leaders who have amassed power with the tools of the state.Two important elections happened this week. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed to win an outright victory so he now faces a runoff election that could be the most significant political challenge of his career. And in Thailand, ruled by military leaders who took power in a 2014 coup, voters overwhelmingly backed opposition parties, delivering a stinging rebuke to the military establishment. It remains to be seen how much power the junta will actually hand over.Both countries have me thinking about the type of government that is sometimes called a “competitive authoritarian” regime. Their leaders use the tools of state, such as purging foes from the bureaucracy and curtailing civil liberties, to consolidate their own power. But they regularly hold elections, and when they do, the votes are not shams. Voters can cast ballots with the expectation that they will be fairly counted, and that leaders will abide by the result.And yet the fact that those governments embrace elections can tell us something important about the nature of democratic backsliding, and perhaps something even more important about its opposite. Most people call it democratization, but I prefer to think of it, for the sake of verbal and conceptual symmetry, as democratic forwardsliding.Turkey has for years been sliding into a competitive authoritarian government, analysts say. Thailand isn’t one, at least not yet — its military leaders came to power in a coup, not an election — but its vote provides a useful point of comparison.After all, at first blush it’s a little odd that competitive authoritarian leaders hold real elections! In the usual story we tell about democracy, one of elections’ chief virtues is that they allow the public to check leaders’ power. Too much repression, the theory goes, will lead to a reckoning at the ballot box.That doesn’t seem like a prospect that would be popular with leaders who otherwise go to remarkable lengths to dismantle checks and balances. Competitive authoritarians often stack courts with friendly judges, undermine judicial review of their power, weaken legislative branches, jail journalists and try in various ways to stifle opponents.But that view misses out something else that elections can do: validate an authoritarian leader’s power by showing that the public supports the regime. And that validation, it turns out, is valuable enough to outweigh the risks inherent in elections — especially when the incumbent can take steps to manipulate the contest in his favor.In Turkey, Erdogan draws his claim to power, and his justification for his harsh and repressive treatment of the opposition, from public approval, said Turkuler Isiksel, a Columbia University political scientist. Like other populists, he claims to represent the interests of the people. Elections, which provide hard numbers on public support, are a powerful tool to support that claim.And conversely, rejecting election results can damage public support for the regime. Milan Svolik, a Yale political scientist who studies authoritarianism and democratic backsliding, pointed to the example of Istanbul’s 2019 mayoral elections, which were seen as an important test of the popularity of Erdogan’s A.K.P. party. When that contest was initially held, the opposition candidate won by a narrow margin, but the race was invalidated by the courts, leading to public outrage at the perceived refusal to honor the results. When it was re-run a few months later, the opposition candidate won by a landslide — suggesting that for a substantial minority of voters, the failure to respect the initial result was enough to make them abandon Erdogan’s party.“They decided, ‘I’m changing my vote,’” Svolik said. “That suggests a high cost to being perceived as not abiding by the results of an election.” And while such precise natural experiments are rare, Svolik has found similar results when he ran experiments in other countries using hypothetical scenarios of candidates engaging in similar behavior.Which brings me to Thailand. At present, its leaders do not derive their legitimacy from public support — their 2014 coup ousted the democratically elected government by force after an extended period of political unrest.“Thailand is a very divided country that has a conservative establishment that keeps trying to find a way to write a constitution that allows it to win, but can’t do it because it’s not that popular,” said Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell political scientist who studies authoritarianism and democratization with a focus on Southeast Asia. The current government has tried to hedge the results of last weekend’s election by granting Thailand’s military-appointed Senate one-third of the votes to select the prime minister, effectively reserving veto power over any government that doesn’t win a supermajority. But, as Svolik’s research shows, overriding the results of the election risks public backlash.So why hold elections at all?It’s impossible to be sure of the junta members’ true motivations — such personal decisions are, ultimately, unknowable. It may be that the junta members see the risk of losing power in an election as less damaging than what could happen if they held onto power without one.There are real costs to holding power by force, for leaders themselves and their countries. If public outrage has no outlet in elections, that increases the likelihood of mass protests, uprisings, and violence. For years, Thailand has been trapped in a cycle of “protests and putsches,” as my Times colleagues Sui-Lee Wee and Muktita Suhartono memorably described it — a loop that has only increased voters’ anger and support for opposition parties.Such cycles can be difficult to break. In Thailand, “they’re sort of in a coup trap, where the existence of a precedent for military intervention in politics makes people act as if that’s going to be possible, which makes it then possible,” Pepinsky said. “It’s a very bad equilibrium to be in.” Holding an election isn’t always a solution to that problem. Svolik pointed to the example of Myanmar, whose ruling junta cautiously handed over some power after semi-democratic elections in 2015 and 2020, but staged another coup in 2021. But it can still be a way to shift political disputes away from costly and damaging political violence. “Why don’t we just have a battle that’s called an election? It is much less costly,” Svolik said.That has benefits for the public as well as for leaders. Even though the legitimacy conferred by elections can help authoritarian leaders in the short term, Isiksel said, in the longer term it can aid democratization by strengthening democratic institutions, political parties, and the “civic habits” of voting and campaigning.Over time, those can build and reinforce on each other in ways that go beyond elections — a slow and incremental process of forwardsliding toward a more secure democracy.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

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      Two Theories for Beating Trump in the Primary

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      A successful campaign will probably need the traits of both Trumpism and an alternative to Trumpism.Ronald Reagan rode the issues of 1979, some similar to today’s, to the Oval Office. George Tames/The New York TimesThere are two basic theories for how Donald J. Trump might be defeated in a Republican primary. It’s possible that neither, both or some combination of the two can actually work in practice. But by considering them in depth, it becomes easier to think about and judge the various efforts to beat him — and why so many haven’t pulled it off.In our next article, we’ll consider whether and how Ron DeSantis fits into the picture — and why his campaign has struggled to meet the very real challenge of defeating a former president.Theory One: Trumpism Without TrumpThis type of candidacy assumes that Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism reoriented the Republican Party in irreversible and advantageous ways, but that his personal conduct has been a disaster for conservatives.In this view, his poor hires and lack of experience and focus prevented him from being an effective president. His coarse remarks, tweets, election denialism and ultimately Jan. 6 not only cost Republicans the White House and the Senate, but also the opportunity for a truly decisive victory — like the one Mr. DeSantis won in 2022 in Florida.According to this theory, these same personal weaknesses are his vulnerability in a Republican primary in 2024. A challenger to Mr. Trump, therefore, ought to hew as close as possible to him on the issues, while distinguishing himself or herself on electability, competence and character.If you imagine yourself in a hypothetical brainstorming session for the Trumpism Without Trump campaign, you can imagine the kinds of attacks that might add up to a critique of a hapless, weak president who wasn’t up to the job of making America great again. In this view, Mr. Trump presided over rising crime, a strengthening China, growing trade deficits, rising drug overdose deaths and a stronger Democratic Party. He talked a big game, but didn’t accomplish much. He failed to build a wall. He lost to sleepy Joe Biden. He’s old. The election was stolen from under his nose. He let the Deep State drag him down and did nothing to dismantle it. He let Dr. Fauci into our lives, and the vaccine into our bodies. He didn’t command the respect of the military and hired countless people he now considers disloyal. Not every one of these attacks is ready for prime time, but some combination could work, and you could undoubtedly come up with other examples.The logic of Trumpism Without Trump has merit, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Indeed, it suffers from an obvious and fundamental problem: It doesn’t work if Republicans still want Mr. Trump.There’s another, less obvious issue: It’s hard for this type of candidate to unite the various skeptical-of-Trump factions. After all, many of the most vocal opponents of Mr. Trump oppose both Trumpism and the man himself. This sets up routine clashes between a Trumpism Without Trump candidate and his or her likeliest own supporters. It could even lead many of those supporters to seek an explicitly anti-Trump candidate.Theory Two: An alternative to TrumpismThis theory is a little more complicated. It describes something that doesn’t yet exist. But the case for this theory picks up with the last critique of Trumpism Without Trump.An anti-Trump candidate will probably need to be something more than Trumpism Without Trump: A reinvigorated brand of conservatism would be needed to pull off the challenging task of unifying everyone from the Trumpist types to the supporters of Mitt Romney’s Reaganism to the Ted Cruz Tea Partiers.Needless to say, this would be challenging. To do it, a conservative would need to find a message that at once checks the boxes and wins the hearts of various factions — without alienating the rest. This is not easy, given the many disagreements between the different factions of the Republican Party. But something like this has happened before under circumstances that in some ways resemble today’s.Recall the conditions that brought about the last great renewal of conservatism, in the 1970s. The parallels to today are striking. In both 1979 and 2023, conservatives could say inflation and crime was high; the Kremlin had decided to invade a neighbor; and a new class of young, highly educated activists was at once driving some old-school liberals to the right and sparking a full-blown conservative reaction. In each case, it was 15 years after an epochal breakthrough for Black Americans (the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008).As with today, the right was fractured. The politicians who embodied the different wings of a possible Republican coalition — Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Gerald Ford — were every bit as ideologically diverse as Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump and Mr. Romney. But the events of the 1960s and 1970s created conditions that allowed these groups to come together around a reinvigorated conservatism that dominated the Republican Party for the next 30 years.The reaction against the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s was strong enough to bring some once-liberal intellectuals and the religious right together against the excesses of the counterculture. The backlash against the civil rights era, rising crime and the failings of the Great Society brought blue-collar, urban, white ethnic Reagan Democrats together with Sun Belt suburbanites. High inflation and a growing tax burden offered a way for neoliberal economics to align big business, working-class economic interests and white resentment.The conditions for a rejuvenated conservatism today aren’t nearly as favorable as they were in 1979. They don’t even seem as favorable as they were in 2021. But it’s not 2015 anymore, either. Many of the conditions that helped lead to Trumpian populism are gone. Fear of economic stagnation, high unemployment and low interest rates have been replaced by inflation and high interest rates. Globalization is unequivocally in retreat. The Forever Wars are gone, and Great Power politics is back. Meanwhile, the rise of a new “woke” left and lingering resentment over coronavirus restrictions have brought a new set of issues that didn’t exist a decade ago.If you look in the right corners of the internet, you can see these changes congealing into new kinds of conservatives. You can spot neo-neo-cons on Substack, where Obama-era liberals who insist they aren’t conservatives rail against “woke” and forge unusual alliances with longtime conservatives. There’s even a neo-neoliberalism of sorts, as a small corner of the right mulls deregulation to contain costs, and even progressives find themselves mulling “supply side” policies. Many of the people dabbling in these ideas were also skeptics of coronavirus restrictions, especially school closings. Rising concern about Russia and China needs no explanation.If you put all of these various strands together, you can imagine the outlines of a reinvigorated conservatism tied to the challenges of 2023, not 2015 or 1979. Compared with 2015, it would be distinguished by anti-woke cultural politics, a stronger approach to Russia or China, and deregulation aiming to tackle inflation and promote “freedom.” It also fulfills the most important element for the Alternative to Trumpism theory: Moderate elites and Obama-era Tea Partiers can find common ground on all of these issues or at least tolerate the other side.But like Trumpism Without Trump, this approach faces a fundamental problem: It’s not obvious whether these new issues are strong enough to hold the disparate elements of the anti-Trump coalition together through a primary campaign.Over the last year or so, new developments have tended to weaken the punch of the new issues. The pandemic is past, at least politically. “Wokeness” may be fading somewhat as an issue. Meanwhile, the old issues are making a comeback. Inflation is edging down, but the end of pandemic-era restrictions has renewed focus on the border. The end of Roe v. Wade has thrust abortion back to the center of American life. Nothing similar could be said in 1979, when older divisive fights over civil rights or Medicare had plainly given way to a new set of more acute challenges. Imagine how much harder it would have been for Ronald Reagan to balance winning the South and the rest of the country in the Republican primary if Brown v. Board had been overturned by conservative judges in 1978.There’s another reason the new issues might not be enough: They don’t always offer easy avenues for attack against Mr. Trump. There are a few obvious but fundamentally limited opportunities, like Russia and China. But after that, it gets tougher. Inflation could be a plausible path: The argument would go that Mr. Trump’s tariffs, push for lower interest rates, immigration restrictions, government spending, stimulus checks and big tax cuts all contributed to supply chain issues, labor shortages and excess demand. This would even allow for a natural comparison lumping him in with Mr. Biden. But this attack is complicated to pull off, and it doesn’t seem to be political gold.Importantly, it is hard to attack Mr. Trump on “woke,” which is probably still the single new issue with the most resonance across the Republican Party, even if it isn’t quite as salient as it was a year or two ago. The attack on woke does offer some opportunity for a contrast with Mr. Trump, by embracing American Greatness as an explicit critique of woke anti-Americanism and an implicit critique of dystopian MAGA-ism. Nikki Haley has taken this tack. But it is not at all obvious whether this sunnier brand has any resonance with conservative voters.Realistically, a successful campaign will need the traits of both Trumpism Without Trump and an Alternative to Trumpism. Alone, neither quite seems like enough. The strongest candidacy will benefit a bit from some aspects of the other. Done right, perhaps no one would be quite sure which category it falls into.Next, we’ll consider why Mr. DeSantis is a distinct candidate who comes close to pulling off both, but so far hasn’t done either — with poll numbers to show for it. More

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      He Promised Change in Thailand. But Will He Be Allowed to Lead?

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      Pita Limjaroenrat led his party to victory in the Thai election and seems poised to become the next prime minister, unless the military blocks him.When Pita Limjaroenrat was a student at Harvard in 2008, he shadowed his American classmates who were campaigning at the time for former President Barack Obama. The experience gave him a window into electoral politics, from phone banks and polling data to knocking on doors and putting campaign flags on front lawns.Fifteen years later, Mr. Pita said he used what he learned in Massachusetts to help his recent campaign in Thailand, where he stunned the country’s political establishment by leading his progressive Move Forward Party to a momentous victory.For decades, Thai voters had known only two dominant political forces: one led by conservative royalists and militarists and the other by a populist billionaire living in exile. Supporters saw Mr. Pita, 42, as the candidate who represented change and a return to democracy after nine years of military rule that was preceded by a coup. On the stump, he promised to undo the military’s grip on Thai politics and revise a law that criminalizes criticism of the monarchy.But his path to prime minister remains uncertain.Mr. Pita greeting supporters during a voter thank you parade culminating in Owl Market in Nonthaburi, on Thursday.Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times“What I need to do now is to find a road-map that bridges that gap between a functioning democracy and half-baked democracy at the very end of nine-year rule by a military coup,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.In order to take the role, Mr. Pita needs to gather enough support in the 500-member House of Representatives to overcome a 250-member, military-appointed Senate. To be precise, he needs 376 votes. So far, he only has 314.Already, several senators have said they would not support a candidate who so threatens the status quo. Now, Thais are waiting to see if their choice will be allowed to lead or if he will be blocked from becoming prime minister by prevailing powers, an outcome that could plunge the country into political chaos.Thai generals rewrote the Constitution in 2017 so a Senate stacked with military allies could jointly determine the top leader. Conservatives are counting on an Election Commission complaint that has been filed against Mr. Pita for failing to disclose that he owned shares of a now-defunct media company that he inherited from his father.So far, Mr. Pita has brushed off the petition to investigate him, saying he had already reported the shares to the authorities. He also said he believed there was a group of senators who had “felt their conscience” and understood the consequences of going against the 25 million Thais who voted for change. Only 14 senators have indicated that they would vote for him.Mr. Pita said that watching friends at Harvard campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008 helped inform his campaign this year.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Pita graduated with a joint degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ Sloan School of Management. From his time in the United States, he learned how to map out a campaign strategy, which he put to use in this election by using data to reach voters in 160 districts.Most of Mr. Pita’s career was in consulting and business, as a managing director of the rice-bran oil business that his father started, and then as a senior executive for Grab, the ride-hailing company that acquired Uber in Southeast Asia.As a candidate, Mr. Pita developed a reputation for being a clear orator, winning the public over with his speeches and polished looks.He said he admires José Alberto “Pepe” Mujica Cordano, the former president of Uruguay, who was tortured and imprisoned during the country’s military dictatorship. He is reading “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism” by Senator Bernie Sanders. Some of his favorite bands are Metallica, The Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine. One viral video on TikTok shows a Thai woman holding a mock marriage ceremony with a cutout of Mr. Pita, who is divorced and has a young daughter.Supporters cheer for Mr. Pita and his Move Forward Party during the rally in Nonthaburi on Thursday.Lauren DeCicca for The New York Times“For a lot of the middle class, especially upper-middle class Thais, he’s like the ideal son-in law that you’d like to have — very educated, accomplished, good-looking, poised,” said Duncan McCargo, a political science professor at the University of Copenhagen.Mr. Pita was drawn to the ideas of the founder of the Future Forward party, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, in 2018, and within a few months was asked to join. He became the leader of Move Forward after Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved Future Forward in 2020 and barred its senior executives from politics for 10 years.If his bid for prime minister is successful, Mr. Pita has promised to reset Thailand’s foreign policy, saying the country would “not be part of the Chinese umbrella or the American umbrella,” but will have the ability to determine its own destiny, Mr. Pita said. In March 2022, after Moscow invaded Ukraine, he wrote on Twitter that the Russians must “retrieve” their troops immediately.“A lot of it is personal,” said Fuadi Pitsuwan, a fellow at Chiang Mai University and foreign policy adviser to Mr. Pita, referring to the candidate’s strong reaction to the invasion. “He will be a foreign policy leader, which, in Thailand, is rare.”Mr. Pita takes a moment for an iced latte in Bangkok before heading to Nonthaburi Province on Thursday.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesMr. Pita’s reputation has not gone unscathed. His ex-wife, Chutima Teepanart, an actress with whom he shares a daughter, accused him of domestic violence in 2019. A family court found Mr. Pita not guilty of the charge. Ms. Chutima did not respond to multiple requests for comment.In an interview, Mr. Pita said “there was no domestic violence, whether it’s physical abuse or emotional abuse, ever in my family.”Mr. Pita was born to a wealthy, well-connected family. His late father served as an adviser to the agriculture minister, and his uncle was once a close aide to Thaksin Shinawatra, the populist billionaire whose youngest daughter was one of Mr. Pita’s rivals in the election.His uncle was a former commerce minister in the early 1980s but was later jailed for misconduct when he was a banker, a case that Mr. Pita described as politically motivated. A salient childhood memory includes visiting his uncle in prison, which made him see “how dirty or how brutal politics could be,” he said.Over the years, Mr. Pita said he was struck by how Thailand seemed constantly trapped in a cycle of political turmoil, precipitated either by people “using the king to destroy a political opponent or using the monarchy as an excuse to fight for something.”He started studying other countries with constitutional monarchies including England, Japan and Norway, and said he began to see why the relationship between the Thai monarchy and the people was “going downhill” with each passing decade.Mr. Pita entering a news conference on Thursday, to speak with journalists about forming a coalition with other political parties.Lauren DeCicca for The New York TimesWith Move Forward, he wants “to have a comprehensive discussion in Parliament about what the role of the monarchy in a constitutional democracy should be in modern Thailand,” an idea that was once considered taboo among many Thais for whom the royal family has become a fixture in daily life.In a response to calls for checks on the monarchy’s power — precipitated by protests in 2020 — the military and royalists have come together to defend the institution.In the aftermath of the protests, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the general who led the previous coup and whose party was trounced in the election, ordered a crackdown. More than 200 protesters, including 17 minors, have since been detained for criticizing the monarchy.During a final rally before the vote, Mr. Pita reminded the crowd that even a 15-year-old girl had been among those detained for violating the royal criticism law. On Monday, he spoke in front of thousands of his supporters as they celebrated his election victory.Standing in front of a giant portrait of the king in the center of Bangkok, he addressed the crowd, telling them “a new day for the people has arrived.”Ryn Jirenuwat More

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      The Earthquake Changed Turkey, but Change Is Complicated

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      ADIYAMAN, Turkey — Adiyaman is a southern province of Turkey that a lot of people miss on a map. Too small, too poor, too pious. Too Kurdish, yet not Kurdish enough. Its neighboring provinces carry the weight of history; Adiyaman is mostly known for its loose tobacco.In the 2014 presidential election, Recep Tayyip Erdogan won 69 percent of the vote in Adiyaman. In 2018, he won 67 percent there.The earthquakes that struck on Feb. 6 left more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria dead. More than 6,000 died in Adiyaman alone, where more than 1,200 buildings collapsed and thousands more were heavily damaged. In those first essential hours, the state was nowhere to be seen. Victims lay under the rubble waiting for rescue teams for days.That failure was supposed to jolt places like Adiyaman out of their long alliance with Mr. Erdogan. Heading into the election on Sunday, the opposition, led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu and the Republican People’s Party, the C.H.P., expected a wave of protest votes.That election was one of the closest of Mr. Erdogan’s career. Neither party managed to claim an outright majority in the first round, and a runoff is planned for May 28. If Mr. Erdogan is confident that he’ll succeed in the second round, it might be because of places like Adiyaman, where he won 66 percent of the vote.For some voters in Ankara and Istanbul, it seemed as if people in the southern provinces blindly voted for a president and a party that abandoned them when their need was dire. The truth is more complicated.I spent a week in Adiyaman following the work of Oy ve Otesi (Vote and Beyond), a group that monitors elections, and talking to survivors of the earthquakes about this election. People in Adiyaman are getting by again, but things are fragile. Many lost their jobs and Turkey’s hyperinflation has hit the region hard. But for now the government is paying attention. Families that were made homeless by the earthquakes are starting to settle into temporary housing. In one camp, container houses sent from Qatar overheat in the sun, but the road is freshly paved. A huge poster of Mr. Erdogan nearby promised free natural gas for a year. Mr. Kilicdaroglu pledged free housing for earthquake victims on another poster, but that one was a three-and-a-half-mile drive away.Zeynep, a mother of four children whose husband was in the army, told me that supplies from the disaster relief ministry and her husband’s recent raise in wages, courtesy of Mr. Erdogan’s government, were what allowed her to feed her family. Zeynep asked me not to use her full name for her husband’s sake. She favored Mr. Kilicdaroglu and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, the H.D.P. Her husband is in the special operation forces, fighting Kurdish insurgents. She wasn’t going to vote in the first round. Maybe, she said, she’d vote in the second.Sevgi, also a housewife, planned to vote but kept changing her mind. She didn’t like Mr. Erdogan, at least not anymore, but she was afraid of what her family would do if they found out she voted for the C.H.P.: the party of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and secularism; the party that once supported a ban against the head scarf in public institutions. Who knows, her family might say, what the C.H.P. would do next.On the other side of town, near the local university, Ekrem Abaci, a muhtar — a sort of neighborhood representative — ordered people around in his office. Men unloaded water jugs from the trucks that kept arriving. The disaster response ministry was sending daily deliveries of water that the muhtar could distribute among his constituency. He and the men around him all told me the same thing: Our government took care of us. It may have come late, but any country would have been the same in such a disaster. The government is not to blame.“Vote for Papa Tayyip tomorrow,” the muhtar called out to Hakan, a graduate student with a broken arm who had come in to collect some papers. Hakan was quiet for a moment, then he told me I could restart the voice recorder that I’d paused when he came in. He said that he’d voted his whole life for Mr. Erdogan and his party, but he wouldn’t this time. He’d vote against the nepotism that has left so many graduates like him unemployed, and the bureaucratic rot that means he gets fined when he shouldn’t and can’t get access to benefits he’s entitled to. Then he left.It’s not that nothing in Adiyaman and neighboring provinces has changed: Many of the areas hit hardest by the earthquakes, which have historically supported Mr. Erdogan, shifted away from him in the first round. But when the sidewalk still crunches with leftover debris; when neighborhoods are still a mix of empty lots, where buildings once stood, and scattered tents; and when life is still a question of today, not tomorrow, a vote for change can feel like a big gamble.Naomi Cohen (@naomireneecohen) is a freelance journalist in Istanbul.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