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      Iraqi Parliament Approves New Government After Yearlong Delay

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      The installation of a new prime minister and cabinet ends a long-running political deadlock, but perpetuates a system plagued by corruption and dysfunction.Iraq’s Parliament approved a new government on Thursday that was more than a year in the making but that perpetuates an almost two-decade-old political system that has been blamed for endemic corruption and dysfunction since being ushered in after the U.S.-led invasion.The new prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, presented his list of cabinet ministers to Parliament more than a year after elections last October that were meant to produce a new, reformist government in response to sweeping protests.The new government embodies a system put in place after the 2003 invasion, which allots key roles for specific sects and ethnic groups, and allocates government ministries to the most powerful political parties, which have routinely used those ministries to enrich themselves.The parties once again negotiated among themselves to divide up important posts, and once again Nouri al-Maliki, a former prime minister, played a prominent role in the process. Lawmakers approved Mr. Sudani and his cabinet choices in a closed session.The new cabinet retains the Kurdish politician Fuad Hussein as foreign minister but replaces 16 of the 21 cabinet members named so far. At least two positions were left unfilled, including for the environment ministry, which would have a key role in combating climate change.The influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi nationalist who has resisted Iranian influence, emerged from elections last year with the biggest single bloc in Parliament. But after months of negotiations failed to form a coalition government, he ordered the resignation of his 73 members and in August announced he was withdrawing entirely from politics.Mr. Sadr’s withdrawal opened the way for a rival political bloc made up mostly of Iran-backed Shiite parties to take control in a coalition with Kurdish and Sunni political parties. The bloc includes Mr. Sadr’s archrival, Mr. Maliki, who was backed by the United States in his first term as prime minister, and was blamed in his second term for sectarian policies that fueled the rise of the Islamic State.Nouri al-Maliki, a former prime minister, has remained a power broker within the Iraqi government.Hadi Mizban/Associated PressParliament earlier this month elected Abdul Latif Rashid as president, as part of a power-sharing agreement among the parties to make Mr. Sudani, a former human rights and labor minister, the new prime minister. That voting took place just after rockets targeted the green zone and central Baghdad, in a sign of Iraq’s continued security instability.On Thursday, as he presented his cabinet nominees to Parliament, Mr. Sudani pledged to fight corruption that has devastated the country, work to repair ties with the government of the semiautonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, and build an economy that would create jobs and improve public services.“Corruption that has affected all aspects of life is more deadly than the corona pandemic and has been the cause of many economic problems, weakening the state’s authority, increasing poverty, unemployment and poor public services,” he told Parliament. He did not set out specific measures his government planned to take.Iraq has become one of the most corrupt and nontransparent countries in the world, according to independent watchdog groups. In the most recent scandal, $2.5 billion has gone missing from government funds in a scheme involving tax checks issued to companies submitting fake documents. The Interior Ministry this week said it had arrested a key suspect as he tried to flee the country.The endemic corruption and lack of basic public services and jobs sparked protests three years ago that led to the resignation of the government and the holding of early elections last year. Security forces that included Iran-backed militia fighters responded to the protests by killing hundreds of unarmed demonstrators.In Parliament on Thursday, one of the political leaders to emerge from the protest movement, Alaa al-Rikabi, was ejected from the session for disrupting proceedings by objecting to the system by which the ministers were chosen.Some analysts said Mr. Sudani stood little chance of carrying out the sweeping reforms he promised on Thursday.A photo released by the Iraqi government shows Parliament Speaker Muhammad al-Halbousi on Thursday announcing the vote approving Iraq’s new government.Iraqi Parliament“At the end of the day, even if he’s 100 percent committed to fighting corruption, his constituency is not the Iraqis calling for anti-corruption, his constituency is the parties that put him in power,” said Renad Mansour, director of the Iraq Initiative program at Chatham House, a policy research center.Sajad Jiyad, an Iraq-based fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said the cabinet, with some technocrats among the political appointees, might find it easier than the previous government to enact programs.Mr. Sudani, a former mayor and provincial governor in southern Iraq before he entered federal politics, is an experienced politician and a former member of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa party. Every previous prime minister since the U.S. invasion had lived in exile when Saddam Hussein held power and then had returned after he was toppled, but Mr. Sudani remained in Iraq.His predecessor as prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, is a former intelligence chief who took office in 2020 with a pledge to hold early elections, which took place last year. Mr. Sudani said he would also aim to hold elections within the next year.Although Mr. Sadr is not in government, he remains a potent political force with the power to mobilize supporters in the streets and create instability for any government. He has been clear that he expects early elections.“Having elections within a year is ambitious and obviously unlikely to happen, but I think that condition is in there as a way of placating Sadr,” said Mr. Jiyad.Nermeen al-Mufti and More

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      How Tumultuous Forces of Brexit Divided U.K.’s Conservative Party

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      Some experts link Liz Truss’s downfall to the ripple effect of Britain’s departure from the European Union and the bitter, ideologically opposed factions it created in her party.LONDON — When Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain resigned on Thursday after only 44 days in office, she spoke almost wistfully about how the collapse of her economic plans meant she would never achieve her goal of creating a “low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.”Her nostalgia for Britain’s exit from the European Union might be misplaced, at least when it comes to her Conservative Party. Brexit is the fault line that runs through Ms. Truss’s ill-fated attempt to transform Britain’s economy, just as it ran through Prime Minister Theresa May’s doomed government, and David Cameron’s before hers.Except for Boris Johnson, who was forced out because of scandals related to his personal conduct, the forces unleashed by Brexit have undone every Conservative prime minister since 2016. They have also severely divided the party, creating bitter, ideologically opposed factions seemingly more interested in warring with each other than in governing a country with the world’s sixth-largest economy.Ms. Truss’s calamitous tenure, critics said, is the most extreme example of post-Brexit politics that have now brought the Conservatives to crisis. In the process, it has damaged Britain’s economic standing, its credibility in the markets, and its reputation with the public, which is watching a leadership contest that may return Mr. Johnson to the helm of a party that tossed him out only three months ago.Prime Minister Liz Truss after announcing her resignation on Thursday at Downing Street in London.Daniel Leal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“The Conservatives are never going to recover the coherence that will make for good governance,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University. “This is a party that is tearing itself apart.”He traced the party’s unraveling from the 2016 referendum, called by Mr. Cameron, through Mrs. May’s futile efforts to craft a softer form of Brexit, to the uncompromising “hard Brexit” of Mr. Johnson, and finally to Ms. Truss’s experiment in trickle-down economics, which he said bore all of the hallmarks of Brexit thinking, from the derision of expert opinion to the disregard of Britain’s neighbors and the market.“It’s taking the logic of Brexit to the absurd,” said Professor Garton Ash, who has long lamented the vote to leave.Ms. Truss’s tax cuts made Britain an outlier among Western countries, but the factionalism of post-Brexit Britain plagues other European countries, from Italy to Germany, as well as the United States, where some may view the potential return of Mr. Johnson as a harbinger for another restless populist, Donald J. Trump.In announcing her trickle-down policies, Ms. Truss was an evangelist for a particular model of Brexit, an agile, fast-growing, lightly regulated Britain that its backers once branded Singapore-on-Thames. Whether that is a viable economic construct was never tested. Her policies were swiftly rejected by the markets because they were judged to be reckless at a time of double-digit inflation.More on the Situation in BritainA Rapid Downfall: Liz Truss is about to become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. How did she get there?Lifelong Allowance: The departing prime minister is eligible for a taxpayer-funded annual payout for the rest of her life. Some say she shouldn’t be allowed to receive it.Staging a Comeback?: When Boris Johnson left his role as prime minister in September, he hinted he might return. He is now being mentioned as a successor to Ms. Truss.But Ms. Truss faced equally hostile forces within her own cabinet, which are fueled by the same nationalistic passions that drove Brexit.Suella Braverman, the home secretary whom Ms. Truss fired last week ostensibly for violating security rules, attacked Ms. Truss for abandoning the party’s promise to cut down immigration numbers. The prime minister talks tough about illegal immigrants, too, but her policies were shaping up to be more moderate because she believes new arrivals are needed to accelerate Britain’s growth.The clash between Ms. Truss and Ms. Braverman was part of a bigger clash between rival camps in the party — a free-market, libertarian wing, exemplified by the prime minister, and a hard-line anti-immigration wing, represented by Ms. Braverman. Those views, Ms. Braverman argues, are critical to retaining the loyalty of working-class voters in the north of England, who used to back the Labour Party but who propelled the Conservatives to a landslide general election victory in 2019.Suella Braverman, a Conservative Party hard-liner on immigration.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockThe party also has a centrist faction — personified by Ms. Truss’s chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt — which embraces small-government, business-friendly policies that predate Brexit. The centrists regained some influence after the market’s repudiation of Ms. Truss, when she was forced to hand over the Treasury to Mr. Hunt and the home office to one of his allies, Grant Shapps.Some major party figures, like Rishi Sunak, who served as chancellor under Mr. Johnson and is expected to run in next week’s leadership contest, do not fit neatly into a single group. He voted in favor of Brexit but opposed Ms. Truss’s tax cuts, warning that they would cause havoc in the markets.Quarrels over Britain’s relationship with Europe date back decades in the Conservative Party, of course. Mr. Cameron had little choice but to resign after failing to persuade voters to reject a motion to leave in his referendum. Mrs. May was forced out by her party’s lawmakers after trying to strike compromises with the European Union that made her look, to some, as too conciliatory.With Mr. Johnson having led Britain out of the European Union in 2020, the battles are now over how to shape its post-Brexit society. But they still revolve to a great degree around Europe-related issues, like the flow of asylum seekers across the English Channel or trade rules in Northern Ireland. Pressure from the party’s hard-liners forced Mr. Johnson and Ms. Truss to toughen their approach to Northern Ireland, for example.“The factions are on display in this leadership campaign,” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “But this is now on a bigger scale and profoundly affects what was once the incredible adherence of the Conservative Party to common-sense and pragmatism.”It also helps explain why Mr. Johnson, who only six weeks ago left Downing Street under a wreath of scandal that prompted a wholesale mutiny of Conservative lawmakers and a mass walkout of his ministers, suddenly finds himself a plausible candidate to retake control of the party. He returned on Saturday from a vacation in the Dominican Republic to lobby lawmakers for votes.Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is one of three top contenders to replace Ms. Truss as prime minister.Alberto Pezzali/Associated PressMany Conservative lawmakers, fearful of losing their seats in the next general election, yearn for the political magic of “Get Brexit Done,” the upbeat slogan that Mr. Johnson used to unite the party’s affluent southeastern suburbanites with the so-called red wall voters in the Midlands and north. They are willing to accept Mr. Johnson, even with his ethical flaws, for the big-tent appeal he once commanded.“The advantage that Boris has is that he’s not interested in these factions,” Professor Travers said. “He’s not interested in ideology but in power. And the reason the members want him back is because they think he can help them stay in power.”As prime minister, Mr. Johnson did not hesitate to exploit populist passions. His government began the practice of putting asylum seekers on flights to Rwanda, drawing condemnation from human-rights lawyers and activists.But Mr. Johnson also oversaw a costly state intervention in the economy to insulate people from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. And his signature program involved spending hundreds of billions of pounds on high-speed trains and other projects to “level up” corroded cities in the north with more prosperous London.Ms. Truss said comparatively little about leveling up. One of the first moves made by her first choice as chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, was to scrap a limit on bonuses paid to bankers, a move intended to appease London’s financial district.The problem for Mr. Johnson, if he were to run and win, is that he would have far fewer financial resources this time around to govern as a big-state Conservative. Mr. Hunt has warned that the government will have to make “eye-wateringly difficult” decisions about which programs to cut. Britain’s need to rebuild its shattered credibility with investors will require strict fiscal discipline.Jeremy Hunt represents a centrist faction of the Conservative Party.Henry Nicholls/ReutersBritain’s economic troubles, experts say, cannot be blamed wholly or even mainly on Brexit. While its departure from the European Union has tightened the labor market and hampered trade, Britain’s growth never recovered after the financial crisis of 2008. Its depleted public services are a legacy of the austerity of Mr. Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, which predated Brexit.Still, the often-ruthless tactics of the “Vote Leave” campaign, critics say, planted the seeds for the Truss government’s mishandling of economic policy. Campaigners for Brexit famously argued that the country should ignore experts who warned that leaving the European Union would exact a high cost. They brandished spurious figures about the cost for Britain of remaining in the bloc.This experts-be-damned philosophy was the underpinning of Ms. Truss’s economic plan. When Mr. Kwarteng announced the tax cuts, he refused to submit them to scrutiny by the government’s independent watchdog. He fired the most senior civil servant at the Treasury, Tom Scholar, a sign of his disdain for economic orthodoxy.“It wasn’t so much the fact of Brexit, or even the referendum itself, but the dishonesty of the referendum campaign,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London. “They took a lesson from that, which was that dishonesty and trashing institutions was a way to success.” More

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      Could Boris Johnson Make a Comeback as U.K. Prime Minister?

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      A comeback by Mr. Johnson is viewed as a very real possibility, delighting some Conservative Party lawmakers and repelling others.LONDON — It seemed at once incredible and inevitable.No sooner had Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain announced her sudden resignation on Thursday afternoon than a familiar name surfaced as a candidate to succeed her: Boris Johnson, the prime minister she replaced a mere 45 days ago.Mr. Johnson, who is vacationing in the Caribbean, has said nothing publicly about a bid for his old job. But the prospect of Boris redux has riveted Conservative Party lawmakers and cabinet ministers — delighting some, repelling others, and dominating the conversation in a way that Mr. Johnson has for his entire political career.Nor is the idea of his return merely notional: Among those who are keeping tallies of the voting intentions of lawmakers, including some London news organizations, Mr. Johnson is only slightly behind his chief rival, Rishi Sunak. On Friday morning, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is currently the business secretary and served under Mr. Johnson, became the first cabinet minister to endorse his former boss.But the prospect of Mr. Johnson back in 10 Downing Street appalls many Conservatives, who cite the serial scandals that brought him down in July and argue that voters would never forgive the party for rehabilitating him. Embracing such a polarizing figure, they say, would splinter the Tory ranks, perhaps irrevocably.“Only a nation which was gripped by pessimistic despair and no longer believed that there could be a serious response to its unfolding tragedies would want to take refuge in the leadership of a clown,” Rory Stewart, who ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Johnson in 2019, wrote on Friday on Twitter.Rishi Sunak on Friday in London. Mr. Sunak lost to Liz Truss in the contest to replace Boris Johnson, but now he may get another shot at the job.Beresford Hodge/Press Association, via Associated PressAnd yet, as Mr. Johnson’s supporters never tire of pointing out, he delivered a landslide Conservative victory in the general election of 2019. After the calamitous tenure of Ms. Truss, in which she tried to engineer a radical economic agenda with the support of only a third of the Tories in Parliament, some say that mandate gives him — and him alone — the capacity to restore the party’s depleted electoral fortunes.More on the Situation in BritainA Rapid Downfall: Liz Truss is about to become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. How did she get there?Lifelong Allowance: The departing prime minister is eligible for a taxpayer-funded annual payout for the rest of her life. Some say she shouldn’t be allowed to receive it.Staging a Comeback?: When Boris Johnson left his role as prime minister in September, he hinted he might return. He is now being mentioned as a successor to Ms. Truss.“One person was elected by the British public with a manifesto and a mandate until January ‘25,” Nadine Dorries, a former cabinet minister who is one of Mr. Johnson’s most outspoken backers, wrote on Thursday on Twitter.Under election rules laid out by the party on Thursday, candidates need 100 nominations from lawmakers to appear on the ballot next week. According to the informal tallies, neither Mr. Johnson nor Mr. Sunak is close yet, though in one spreadsheet, which includes unnamed supporters, Mr. Johnson is at 52.Setting a threshold of 100 nominations was intended to winnow the field to a handful of candidates and keep the race brief, thus avoiding the drawn-out, divisive campaign that was won by Ms. Truss. Given that there are only 357 Conservative lawmakers, there can be, at most, three names.There is a lively debate in political circles about whether Mr. Johnson can clear that hurdle, but with several more lawmakers coming out in his favor on Friday, it no longer seems implausible. Asked who was likely to be the next prime minister, a member of the government texted in reply, “Boris?”Andrew Gimson, who wrote a biography of Mr. Johnson, said, “I think he’s got a very good chance of coming back. He’s got real momentum.” For a demoralized party trailing in the polls, Mr. Gimson said, “It would be a much better story if Boris came back. There would be a sense of incredulity — the sheer spectacle of it.”If Mr. Johnson were to emerge from the ballot as one of two surviving candidates, the odds of his winning could rise considerably. The choice would then go to the party’s 160,000 or so members, among whom Mr. Johnson remains enduringly popular. Mr. Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor of the Exchequer in July helped set in motion Mr. Johnson’s downfall, is viewed with suspicion by many party members, even if he has solid support among the lawmakers.Parliament in London. Mr. Johnson is under investigation by a parliamentary committee over whether he misled the House of Commons about parties held in Downing Street that broke pandemic rules.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThat is why some political analysts expect the party’s elders to lean on the candidate with fewer votes to withdraw before that stage.There are other significant hurdles to Mr. Johnson’s return: He is under investigation by a parliamentary committee over whether he misled the House of Commons about parties held in Downing Street that broke pandemic rules. It could recommend Mr. Johnson’s expulsion or suspension from Parliament.For all of his charisma, it is also not clear that Mr. Johnson retains the same power to turn out voters that he did three years ago. The scandals that brought him down eroded his popularity with many Britons, and it was under his watch that the polls began to tilt heavily toward the opposition Labour Party.Finally, there is the question of whether Mr. Johnson is actually ready to return. In his farewell speech to Parliament, he signed off with, “Hasta la vista, baby,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous line from the movie “Terminator 2.” He later compared himself to Cincinnatus, a fifth-century Roman politician who saved the state from an invasion, retired to his farm, then subsequently returned to Rome as leader.Still, as a highly visible former prime minister, Mr. Johnson is in line to take in millions of dollars on the after-dinner speaking circuit. He is expected to write another newspaper column, a gig that could bring him several hundred thousand pounds a year.Mr. Johnson could also receive a lucrative advance for his memoirs, though that is complicated by the fact that he already owes the Hachette Book Group a biography of Shakespeare. Publishing executives said that if he sold the memoir to Hachette, it could allow him to set aside the Shakespeare book.With two young children with his wife, Carrie, and several other children by his former wife, Marina, people who know Mr. Johnson say he is keen to make big money — something he cannot do as a serving prime minister, even if the job comes with housing and a comfortable salary of £164,080, or about $182,400. More

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      Rightist Party in Sweden Gets No Formal Role but Big Say in Government

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      The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats will have a say over new policies for the incoming government under a complicated leadership agreement.STOCKHOLM — Sweden’s Parliament approved a new right-wing government Monday that includes the Liberal and Christian Democrat parties but no formal role for the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, without whom the right-wing bloc would not have achieved its narrow victory last month.Despite being the largest party in the bloc after capturing a fifth of the national vote on Sept. 11, the Sweden Democrats will have only a supporting role in the new government, which will be led by the incoming prime minister, Ulf Kristersson of the Moderate Party.Normally, the party with the most votes would be included in the government, but because of ideological differences and the Sweden Democrats’ neo-Nazi roots and anti-liberal policies, the other parties did not want to give them a formal role in the governing coalition, Jonas Hinnfors, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg, said.“It’s realpolitik,” Mr. Hinnfors said.The Liberal Party conditioned its support for the coalition on excluding the Sweden Democrats from a seat in the government.The price for the Sweden Democrats’ support of the new government, hammered out in a 62-page pact, is high, analysts said, and includes the parties’ cooperation in seven policy areas, including criminal justice and immigration.The document focuses heavily on the areas of crime and immigration, priorities for the Sweden Democrats, and is “very short and rather vague” on other key issues — including tax reform, medical care and education, Mr. Hinnfors said.“There’s nothing about foreign policy, the E.U., NATO or defense spending,” he added, alluding to Russia’s war on Ukraine and the security situation in Europe and the Baltic region, in particular.The pact does call for an inquiry into a ban on begging, driven by the Sweden Democrats and widely criticized by the Liberals.Jimmie Akesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, touted the pact as a victory that will broadly fulfill his party’s campaign promises.Jimmie Akesson, second from right, the leader of the Sweden Democrats, in Parliament in Stockholm on Monday.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“A change in government must also entail a paradigm shift when it comes to immigration and integration policy — and for me there is no doubt that this agreement means just that,” he told reporters.The pact covers mostly Sweden Democrats’ policy priorities, including doubling sentences for gang-related crimes, expanding police powers in certain neighborhoods to stop and search people for weapons without probable cause, and restricting immigration to the absolute minimum required by E.U. rules.The agreement also calls for the creation of committees composed of members of the Sweden Democrats and the other three parties to hammer out new government policies.“If there are differences of opinion, they can veto a measure,” said Sverker Gustavsson, a political scientist at Uppsala University, of the Sweden Democrats. The agreement gives the Sweden Democrats exactly what they wanted — the strongest possible influence without the accountability of sitting in the new government, Mr. Gustavsson said. “This gives them a lot of informal power,” he said. “It is an ideal solution for them.”Sweden’s Parliament meeting in Stockholm on Monday.Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Liberal Party appears to have made the most concessions — on criminal justice and individual freedoms. Observers said some of these concessions crossed previous red lines for the party.“We are at the brink of something very different in key respects in Swedish society: how we relate to each other, the forces of the state in relation to individual freedoms and what it is to be a foreigner in this country,” Mr. Hinnfors said.The Sweden Democrats might be more comfortable outside the government, he added. “They are in the ultimate blackmailing position. The government needs them, and they can withdraw support at any moment.”This isn’t the first time a strong far right anti-immigration has held a supporting role in a Scandinavian government without a seat in the cabinet. The Danish People’s Party supported the governing liberal-conservative parties for 10 years until 2011. “They had huge reach over and really dominated Danish politics in immigration policies,” Mr. Hinnfors said. The Parliament voted 176 to 173 in favor of Mr. Kristersson taking the reins as prime minister. He will succeed Magdalena Andersson, who has been prime minister since last November.Amid criticism leveled at the Liberal Party, which many see as going against its own ideology by supporting the governing coalition, Ms. Andersson, said that the Social Democrats were still open to cooperate “with all good forces that want Sweden to become more like Sweden. That goes for the Liberals, too.” More

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      Italy May Get a Leader With Post-Fascist Roots

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      With the hard-right candidate Giorgia Meloni ahead before Sunday’s election, Italy could get its first leader whose party traces its roots to the wreckage of Fascism.ROME — Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-right leader, resents having to talk about Fascism. She has publicly, and in multiple languages, said that the Italian right has “handed Fascism over to history for decades now.” She argued that “the problem with Fascism in Italy always begins with the electoral campaign,” when the Italian left, she said, wheels out “the black wave” to smear its opponents.But none of that matters now, she insisted in an interview this month, because Italians do not care. “Italians don’t believe anymore in this garbage,” she said with a shrug.Ms. Meloni may be proved right on Sunday, when she is expected to be the top vote-getter in Italian elections, a breakthrough far-right parties in Europe have anticipated for decades.More than 70 years after Nazis and Fascists nearly destroyed Europe, formerly taboo parties with Nazi or Fascist heritages that were long marginalized have elbowed their way into the mainstream. Some are even winning. A page of European history seems to be turning.Last week, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. The far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of French presidential elections this year.But it is Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, that looks likely to be led not only by its first female prime minister in Ms. Meloni but the first Italian leader whose party can trace its roots back to the wreckage of Italian Fascism.“People have become used to them,” said John Foot, a historian of Fascism and the author of a new book, “Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism.” “The taboo is long gone.”A supporter of the Brothers of Italy party, which Ms. Meloni leads, this month in Cagliari, Sardinia.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThe indifference of Italian voters to the past, however, may have less to do with Ms. Meloni’s own personal appeal or policies than with Italy’s perennial hunger for change. But there is another force at work: Italy’s long postwar process — even policy — of deliberate amnesia to unify the nation that began essentially as soon as World War II ended.Today that process has culminated in Ms. Meloni’s arrival on the precipice of power, after several decades in which hard-right elements were gradually brought into the political fold, legitimized and made familiar to Italian voters.“The country has not moved to the right at all,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, who said that voters had little sense or interest in Ms. Meloni’s history and simply saw her as the new face of the center right. “They don’t see her as a threat.”But in having long preferred to forget their past are Italians setting themselves up to repeat it? The concern is not academic at a moment when war again rages in Europe and democracy appears embattled in many nations around the globe.Unlike Germany, which was clearly on the wrong side of history and made facing and remembering its Nazi past a national project woven inextricably into the postwar fabric of its institutions and society, Italy had one foot on each side, and so had a claim to victimization by Fascism, having switched allegiances during the war.After Rome fell to the Allies, a civil war raged between the resistance and a Nazi puppet state of Mussolini loyalists in the north. When the war ended, Italy adopted an explicitly antifascist Constitution, but the political emphasis was on ensuring national cohesion in a country that had succeeded in unifying only a century earlier.There was a belief, the Italian writer Umberto Eco wrote in his classic 1995 essay “Ur Fascism,” or “Eternal Fascism,” that the “memory of those terrible years should be repressed.” But repression “causes neurosis,” he argued, and even if real reconciliation took place, “to forgive does not mean to forget.”Italian civilians lined the streets as Allied soldiers entered Rome in June 1944. In the years that followed, Italy adopted an antifascist Constitution.FPG/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesItaly had ignored much of that advice during its postwar amnesty program that soughtto incorporate post-Fascist elements. But it also kept the party established by the former Fascists, the Italian Social Movement — which pushed for a strong state, tough on crime and opposed to abortion and divorce — away from power in the following decades.Meanwhile, Italy’s left, dominated by the largest Communist Party in Western Europe, had the advantage of being anti-Fascist, which allowed its leaders to have institutional roles, political influence and cultural dominance, which they used to wield the “Fascist” label against any range of political enemies until the term was drained of much of its meaning.That wobbly status quo came crashing down after a sprawling bribery scandal in the early 1990s toppled Italy’s power structure — and with it the barriers that had kept the post-Fascists out of power.It was around that time that Ms. Meloni entered politics, becoming active in the Youth Front of the Italian Social Movement, the heirs to Italy’s post-Fascist legacy.She sought new symbols and heroes to distance the party from its unapologetically Fascist forbearers, but also to correct what she considered politicized history.Memory was a political priority.In her memoir, Ms. Meloni proudly tells of going into bookstores and stamping pages of books that she considered “biased” with left-wing propaganda: “Fake. Do not buy.” She helped persuade the party’s members of Parliament to buy out of circulation all of the books they had stamped, but insisted that they never “burned those books.”“I could never stand those who use history for political purposes,” Ms. Meloni wrote in her memoir. But it was not until 1994, when the conservative media mogul Silvio Berlusconi entered politics, that Ms. Meloni and her fellows in the post-Fascist milieu got their real breakthrough.Silvio Berlusconi voting in Italy’s general elections in 1994. He would go on to be the country’s prime minister for four governments. Massimo Sambucetti/Associated PressAn early innovator of the now-common practice of center-right parties forming politically convenient alliances with the far right, Mr. Berlusconi turned to the support of the marginalized parties.He formed a governing coalition with the secessionist Northern League, now led by the populist firebrand Matteo Salvini, and the National Alliance, which eventually made Ms. Meloni the vice president of the Lower House of Parliament and then the country’s youngest government minister. The party eventually collapsed and was reborn in 2012 as the Brothers of Italy, with Ms. Meloni as its leader.“We let them in,” Mr. Berlusconi explained during a political rally in 2019. “We legitimized them.”Nearly 30 years later, Ms. Meloni is poised to take charge.Her proposals, characterized by protectionism, tough-on-crime measures and protecting the traditional family, have a continuity with the post-Fascist parties, though updated to excoriate L.G.B.T. “lobbies” and migrants.Many liberals are now worried that she will erode the country’s norms, and that if she and her coalition partners win with a sufficient enough of landslide, they would have the ability to change the Constitution to increase government powers. On Sunday, during one of Ms. Meloni’s final rallies before the election, she exclaimed that “if the Italians give us the numbers to do it, we will.”“The Constitution was born of resistance and anti-Fascism,” the leader of the left, Enrico Letta, responded, saying that Ms. Meloni had revealed her true face, and that the Constitution “must not be touched.”The left sees in her crescendoing rhetoric, cult of personality style and hard-right positions many of the hallmarks of an ideology that Eco famously sought to pin down despite Fascism’s “fuzziness.”She evinces what Eco called an “obsession with a plot, possibly an international one” against Italians, which she expresses in fears of international bankers using mass migration to replace native Italians and weaken Italian workers.She is bathed in the current of traditionalism that traces at least back to Catholic revulsion of the French Revolution. And her use of social media fulfilled Eco’s prediction of an “internet populism” to replace Mussolini’s speeches from the balcony of Piazza Venezia in Rome.Ms. Meloni appeared at a rally on Thursday in Rome with her right-wing coalition partners Matteo Salvini, left, Mr. Berlusconi and Maurizio Lupi.Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse, via Associated PressJust this week, one of the party’s top leaders was caught giving a fascist salute and one of its candidates was suspended for flatteringly comparing Ms. Meloni with Hitler. In the past, members have held a dinner celebrating the March on Rome that brought Mussolini to power 100 years ago.Ms. Meloni has tried to distance herself from what she calls those “nostalgic” elements of her party, and chalks the fears up to the usual electoral scaremongering. “I’ve sworn on the Constitution,” she said, and she has consistently called for elections, saying technocrats had hijacked Italian democracy.Ms. Meloni has also apparently shed a deep suspicion of the United States, rampant in post-Fascism, and staunchly aligned herself with the West against Russia in support of Ukraine.Whereas she used to admire Vladimir V. Putin’s defense of Christian values, she now calls Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, an anti-Western aggressor and, in contrast with her coalition allies, who are Putin apologists, said she would “totally” continue as prime minister to send offensive arms to Ukraine.To reassure Europe that she was no extremist, she has also distanced herself from her previous fawning over Viktor Orban of Hungary, Ms. Le Pen of France and the illiberal democracies in Eastern Europe.The Italian establishment is in fact more worried about her party’s lack of competence than an authoritarian takeover.They are confident that a system built with numerous checks to stop another Mussolini — even at the cost of paralysis — will constrain Ms. Meloni, as will the realities of governing, especially when backsliding could cost Italy hundreds of billions of euros in pandemic recovery funds from the European Union.Ms. Meloni’s biggest imprint may be in a less concrete battlefield, what Mr. Foot, the historian, called Italy’s “long-term memory war.”She has refused to remove as her party symbol the tricolor flame that many historians say evokes the torch over the tomb of Mussolini, and historians wonder if she, as prime minister, would condemn the anniversary of the March on Rome on Oct. 28, or if she would on April 25 celebrate Liberation Day, which commemorates the victory of the resistance against the Nazis and its Italian Social Republic puppet state. Italian democracy might be safe, but what about the past?“A historical judgment,” of Mussolini and Fascism, Ms. Meloni said in an interview last month, could be done only by “putting everything on the table — and then you decide.” More

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      How Was Britain’s Prime Minister Elected?

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      It may come as a surprise, particularly to those less familiar with parliamentary systems of government, that the decision on Britain’s new leader has been made by just a small (and not very representative) fraction of the country’s 67 million people.Around 160,000 people had the final say in choosing the new leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore the next prime minister. Here’s what to know about those people, how the process played out and what happens next.How did the leadership vote work?Since Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned while his party still holds an overall majority in Parliament, the Conservatives could decide on his successor through a party leadership contest.The initial stages of a Conservative leadership race take place among the party’s members of Parliament, from whom all the potential candidates are drawn. Each needed the nomination of 20 fellow lawmakers to reach the first ballot in July, a threshold met by eight of the 11 who sought to run.Then Conservative lawmakers, through five rounds of voting, narrowed the candidates to two: Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. After that, it was up to the rest of the party’s dues-paying members to decide.The Fall of Boris Johnson, ExplainedCard 1 of 5The Fall of Boris Johnson, ExplainedTurmoil at Downing Street. More

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      Iraq Power Struggle Intensifies as Protesters Block Parliament

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      BAGHDAD — Iraqi political leaders spent the last 10 months struggling unsuccessfully to form a government, their country sinking deeper and deeper into political paralysis in the face of growing drought, crippling corruption and crumbling infrastructure.Then in June, those talks imploded. And now, there is a scramble for power as Iraq’s main political factions vie for the upper hand.The powerful Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who leads the largest bloc in Parliament, quit the negotiations in frustration, then urged his followers to take to the streets to get what they wanted. Heeding his call, they set up a tent encampment that has blocked access to Parliament for more than two weeks to prevent any government from being voted in.It is not the first time that Mr. al-Sadr has resorted to the threat of violence to get what he wants politically. He led the armed Shiite revolt against the American occupation of Iraq from 2003-2009, and U.S. officials say they now worry that Iraq could plunge again into violence and instability.Equally alarming, despite years of American efforts to shape Iraq into an alternative Shiite power center that would be more Western-oriented than Iran, ‌Mr. Sadr and his Shiite political rivals favor a political system that would confer more power on religious clerics along the lines of an Iranian-style theocracy.“We’re looking at the beginning of the end of the American-backed political order in Iraq,” said Robert Ford, a former American diplomat in Iraq and now a fellow at Yale University and the Middle East Institute.For decades, Iraq has reeled from crisis to crisis — a cycle that shows no signs of abating. Following the 2003 U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, there was a civil war, and then the takeover of large parts of the country by the Islamic State.As a result, Iraq, despite vast oil reserves, has remain remained mired in political chaos with a stagnant economy that has left its unemployed youth vulnerable to recruiters for extremist movements and made investors leery. At the same time, Gulf States led by the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with Israel and forged ahead politically and economically to become the new center of gravity of the Middle East.Supporters of the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr gathered for Friday prayers outside the Parliament in Baghdad on Friday. Saba Kareem/ReutersAnd the U.S. vision for Iraq’s future has seemed to slip further and further away.When President George W. Bush invaded in 2003, his government tried to encourage Iraqi political leaders to set up a representative system that would share power more equitably among the country’s three main groups — the Shiite majority, and the Sunni Muslim and Kurdish minorities.“The Americans were kind of hoping that there would be these cross-sectarian and more policy-centered alliances between the political factions, but the sectarian and ethnic divisions won out,” Mr. Ford said. “Instead, we have this squabbling between and within sectarian and ethnic communities about how to divide Iraq’s oil money.”About 85 percent of the Iraqi government is funded by oil income, according to the World Bank. And under the current political system, each major political faction in Parliament gets control over at least one government ministry, and with it, patronage jobs and the opportunity to skim money and pocket kickbacks.As politicians have focused more on their own power than national interests, Iran has found it easier to persuade a number of Sunni, Kurd, and Shiite leaders to support the policies it cares most about; the cross-border movement of Iranian arms, people, and goods.The crisis now enveloping Iraq pits Mr. Sadr, and his mostly Shiite supporters against a coalition of Shiite parties with militias linked to Iran in a bitter power struggle. The caretaker government, fearing violence, has been reluctant to disrupt Mr. Sadr’s blockade, allowing him to hold the country hostage to a sweeping list of demands:the dissolution of Parliament, new elections, and changes in election law and possibly the Constitution.“It looks like a peaceful coup d’état, a peaceful revolution,” Mahmoud Othman, a former Parliament member who was not affiliated with any political party, said of the Sadrists’ blockade of Parliament. “I say peaceful because his followers are not carrying guns. Sadr is stronger than guns. He is now the strongman on the street and he is imposing his will on others.”So far the blockade has not been violent.Several thousand Sadrists occupy the tent encampment, working in shifts. They wander about, listening to clerics denounce government corruption and eating shawarma, grapes and watermelon donated by sympathizers. They rest in tents in the heat of the day, waiting for Mr. Sadr’s next instructions via tweet — his favored means of communication.Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, supporters of the Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told The New York Times that they would remain there as long as he tells them to.Sunnis and Kurds have remained on the sidelines.Many Sunnis say they feel disenfranchised and see no role for themselves in the future Iraq, and many wonder whether it would be better to divide the country and have a separate Sunni enclave, said Moayed Jubeir Al-Mahmoud, a political scientist at the University of Anbar in the city of Ramadi, a Sunni stronghold.“Unfortunately I do not see a secure and prosperous future for my country,” he said, describing Iraq as a failed state controlled by Iran-linked militias. “We are concerned that the state will just go from being dominated by militias to being dominated by al-Sadr.”For now, the tent city blockading Iraq’s Parliament seems a relaxed place. Thousands of Sadrists maintain it at any given time, working in shifts.Ahmed Jalil/EPA, via ShutterstockThe United States and most neighboring countries have stayed largely silent about the chaos in Iraq. Only Iran has tried to intervene, meeting with Mr. Sadr’s Shiite opponents and encouraging negotiations even though Mr. Sadr, a nationalist, has taken a strongly anti-Iranian stance in recent years.The last thing Iran wants is for Shiites to fight one another and risk weakening their grip on power, which could end up undercutting Tehran’s influence in Iraq.A number of Mr. Sadr’s positions align with Tehran. Both want to force the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops to leave Iraq, oppose any interactions with Israel and favor criminalizing homosexuality.This is not the first time Mr. Sadr has resorted to mass demonstrations. But this time, he is using street protests to force the country to ignore last October’s election results and to hold a new vote that could return his legislators to power.The parliamentary election 10 months ago went well for Mr. Sadr. Legislators who supported him won the most seats of any faction and had almost forged a governing coalition supported by Kurdish and Sunni partners. The next step would have been to bring it to a vote for approval.Mr. Sadr’s Shiite rivals, however, refused to attend the Parliament session, denying him the quorum needed for a vote. Frustrated, Mr. Sadr asked his legislators to resign in protest.Portraits of Muqtada al-Sadr and his father, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, outside the Parliament building.Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe parties who had gotten fewer votes, primarily his Shiite rivals, then filled the seats that Mr. Sadr’s followers had vacated potentially giving them control over ministries and government offices and leaving Mr. Sadr out.He responded by calling for the blockade of Parliament to prevent a vote on a new government.“So this is when Muqtada al-Sadr decided that if the democratic procedures are not allowed to play themselves out, then the response is revolution,” said Rend Al-Rahim, a former Iraqi ambassador to the United States and the president of the Iraq Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy.At the tent encampment, the atmosphere is decidedly Shiite. Last week, Mr. Sadr’s followers marked Ashura, which commemorates the death of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. His death is often depicted as the start of the division between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.Everywhere there were signs of support for Mr. Sadr’s cause: Even some of the poorest chipped in to pay for a tent or meals. A water company donated enough every day to fill the large tanks that supply the tent dwellers. The markets in Sadr City — a poorer area of Baghdad filled with Sadr loyalists — sent crates of tomatoes, onions, dates, grapes and apples.To cope with the 115 degree heat in daytime, some protesters installed large fans or air coolers hooked up to Parliament’s 24-hour electricity supply.Protesters cooled down in a fountain outside the Iraqi Parliament in Baghdad. Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“It’s the first time we have had electricity 24 hours a day,” said Faiz Qasim, an enthusiastic Sadr organizer who usually works as a day laborer. Much of Baghdad suffers from daily electricity cuts.Sadr supporters from the south of Iraq prepared large caldrons of stews daily. One day it was a rich curried chicken, while nearby, the next day’s meal — a black-and-white cow tethered to a cellphone tower — placidly masticated some watermelon. A little further down the same street, another cow was being slaughtered for dinner that night.Clerics periodically rallied groups of men — there are almost no women in the tents — with chants against the current political leaders:“Many people suffered from those who were here in this swamp.They climbed to power on the backs of the innocent and Iraq suffered because of them.There are many people holding out their hands, begging in the streets and going through the garbage.Al-Sadr says America and Israel have the money and the weapons. But what do we have?Allah almighty.”Falah Hassan contributed reporting. More

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      Gentle Into That Good Night? Not Boris Johnson.

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      The British prime minister may be leaving Downing Street, but few expect him to cede the spotlight, or abandon the prospect of one day regaining his position.LONDON — Less than three weeks after he announced his resignation, and with rumors already swirling that he plans a comeback, Britain’s scandal-scarred prime minister, Boris Johnson, received the sort of self-care advice best dispensed by a family member.“If you ask me,” Rachel Johnson, the prime minister’s sister, said recently on LBC Radio, where she hosts a talk show, “I would like to see my brother rest and write and paint and just regroup and just, you know, see what happens.”Not much chance of that.Still serving as caretaker prime minister, Mr. Johnson has hardly retreated to the background. He recently posed in a fighter jet, then at a military base where he hurled a hand grenade, used a machine gun and held a rocket launcher during a training exercise with Ukrainian troops.According to one media report, he stoked speculation that somehow he might try to reverse his resignation, lunching recently with a prominent supporter of a petition for a rule change that could allow him to remain in his job.And at his final appearance in Parliament as prime minister, Mr. Johnson’s verdict on his three tumultuous years in Downing Street was “mission largely accomplished — for now,” before he signed off with words from a “Terminator” movie: “Hasta la vista, baby.”Mr. Johnson, 58, lost his job when a succession of scandals prompted dozens of resignations from his government but he remains prime minister until early September when one of the two remaining candidates — Foreign Secretary Liz Truss or the former chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak — will take over. In politics the media caravan moves swiftly on, and a vicious battle for the succession is now the big news story.Mr. Johnson visiting the Francis Crick Institute, four days after announcing his resignation. He has continued to make high-profile appearances.Leon Neal/Agence France-Presse Via Getty ImagesYet as a devotee of the Terminator franchise, Mr. Johnson knows about sequels.“He’s not the kind of person who gives up and goes away to live a quiet life in some nice house in the country and does good work for the local church,” said Andrew Gimson, who is soon to publish a second volume of his biography of Mr. Johnson.“You don’t really get to the top unless you are already quite unnaturally competitive, so it would be very astonishing if he just subsided into private life.”The Fall of Boris Johnson, ExplainedCard 1 of 5Turmoil at Downing Street. More