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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

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      Draghi Says He’ll Stay as Italy’s Prime Minister, if Parties Unite

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      Days after he tendered his resignation, the Italian leader offered a way out of political crisis. Now it depends on the parties to accept or reject it.ROME — Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy, who offered to resign last week after a rebellion in his broad national unity government, challenged the country’s fractious parties on Wednesday to stick together for the good of the country as a condition of him staying on.“The only way forward, if we want to stay together, is to rebuild from the top this pact, with courage, altruism and credibility,” Mr. Draghi said in a speech to the Italian Senate, throwing down a gauntlet ahead of confidence votes in the upper and lower chambers of Parliament on Wednesday and Thursday that will determine the fate of his government, along with the stability of Italy and much of Europe at an especially tenuous time.Mr. Draghi, speaking to long applause but also to some heckling, said that the public outcries for the government to continue were “impossible to ignore.”“Italy is strong when it knows how to be united,” he said, calling the period a “miracle” for Italy, but adding that political motivations had “unfortunately” led parties to seek to distinguish themselves, weakening “the desire to move forward together.”That politicking has left Italy teetering on the brink of instability once again after a period of relative calm, progress and expanding influence under Mr. Draghi’s leadership, which has made Italy an essential part of Europe’s united front against Russia in response to its war in Ukraine and its efforts to rebuild its economies amid the pandemic.Now, much will depend on whether Italy’s political parties take up Mr. Draghi’s offer, especially the Five Star Movement, which set off the current crisis by withholding its support last week in a key vote on the government’s spending priorities.That rebellion prompted the offer to resign by Mr. Draghi. Sergio Mattarella, Italy’s president, rejected the resignation and asked Mr. Draghi to address Parliament, where confidence votes will force all of the parties to take responsibility for their decisions.Mr. Draghi told the Parliament on Wednesday that Five Star’s revolt signified “the end” of the pact of trust that had fueled his government, and that it was unacceptable. If one party could do it, anyone “could repeat it,” he warned, adding that ransom demands on the government to suit narrow political interests could become the norm.He said that because he was appointed as a caretaker prime minister and not directly elected, his legitimacy was contingent on “as ample support as possible.”Giuseppe Conte, the leader of the Five Star Movement, this month in Rome. Mr. Draghi told the Parliament on Wednesday that Five Star’s revolt signified “the end” of the pact of trust that had fueled his government, and that it was unacceptable.Massimo Percossi/EPA, via Shutterstock“Are you ready to rebuild this pact?” Mr. Draghi repeated several times, concluding that the answer to this question was owed not to him, but to the Italian people.If Mr. Draghi does not receive the support he asked for on Wednesday, he will resign for good, and many analysts believe that Mr. Mattarella will call for early elections, as soon as September.Mr. Draghi’s speech was an effort to avoid the chaos that such a crisis would most likely bring.On the one hand, he tried to remind Parliament, and the country, all that Italy had been able to achieve since he took power in February 2021 in a government crisis caused by the forced removal of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, now the leader of Five Star, which stirred the insurrection against Mr. Draghi. He repeated that the efficacy of the government, its ability to move fast and make quick decisions was rooted in a national unity that “was the best guarantee for a legitimate democracy.”Mr. Draghi said that unity had allowed Italy to get out of the worst phase of the pandemic, funnel financial assistance quickly to those who needed it, cut “useless bureaucracy” that slowed the country, and aided the growth of the economy in a deeply challenging time.He listed key overhauls in a variety of sectors, including increased energy independence from Russia, which he called “essential for the modernization of Italy,” and noted that Italy had already received 45.9 billion euros (about $47 billion) from the European Commission in recovery funds, with €21 billion more on the way. “If we can’t show that we can spend this money well,” he said, Italy would not receive more.Mr. Draghi also attributed Italy’s greater footprint in Europe, and its strong position backing Ukraine with arms and condemning Russian aggression, to the period of political unity.“The merit of these accomplishments was yours,” he told Parliament, adding to long applause, “I have never been as proud to be an Italian as I have been in these moments.”But many analysts believe that they are actually creditable to Mr. Draghi and his reputation as a senior European statesman who saved the euro as the president of the European Central Bank. Without him, they say, the period of stability, and potentially Italy’s support for Ukraine and relevance in Europe, would be imperiled.The Italian government held a confidence vote on Wednesday in the Senate. If Mr. Draghi does not receive the support he asked for, he will resign for good, and many analysts believe that President Sergio Mattarella will call for early elections.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Draghi’s willingness to step back, at least momentarily, from the breach overcame the day’s first hurdle for Italians hoping that the current government will continue. But the Senate had five hours of dramatic debate ahead of it, and no one was quite sure what any of the parties would do as they all weighed their personal interests.Five Star, riddled with warring factions, was in a particularly delicate situation, as a decision to back or bolt from the government both seemed likely to splinter the movement and cause defections.It was also unclear if Mr. Draghi would continue or resign without the support of Five Star if many of its members left to support him. Another confidence vote is scheduled for Thursday in the Lower House of Parliament, where more Five Star defections are likely.“What was supposed to be Conte’s vengeance against Draghi became the self-sinking of the former prime minister, whose political limitations have emerged,” wrote Stefano Folli, a political commentator with La Repubblica. “However it ends,” Mr. Folli added, “Five Star is doomed to a marginal role.”As the Senate began its debate on Wednesday, no one was sure what would happen.“It’s all uncertain,” said Giovanni Orsina, a political scientist at Luiss Guido Carli, a university in Rome. “We’ll need to see whether the parties want to play along and still support him.”Mr. Draghi, left, visited Irpin, Ukraine, in June with other European leaders, like President Emmanuel Macron of France.Viacheslav Ratynskyi/ReutersMany of the parties were concerned about an upcoming budget bill, which Mr. Draghi also emphasized in his speech, but there were also excruciating political calculations for each of the individual parties.Five Star, which won 33 percent of the vote in 2018 and is, as a result, still the largest party in the government, has since cratered. It has dreaded elections for years, but as the country’s next scheduled elections approach in early 2023, the downside of early elections has decreased.Still, the party, which has lost about two-thirds of its national support, would stand to be decimated at the ballot box. Mr. Conte’s decision to take a stand last week was widely seen as an effort to regain some of the party’s long lost anti-establishment identity. Instead, it seems to have backfired.Mr. Draghi on Wednesday made it clear that his government would not cave in to Five Star’s demands. He held firm on military support for Ukraine, which Five Star opposes, and for the building of new gas facilities to give Italy energy independence from Russia as a matter of national security, something Five Star has also opposed.He said that Italy’s universal income benefit for its poorest citizens, Five Star’s trademark achievement, was a positive development, but that it needed to be improved so that it actually helped those who needed it and did not become an incentive not to work. For now, it is loathed by the business sector and considered by many to be a drag on employment.Matteo Salvini, center, the leader the League party, on Wednesday in the Senate. The right-wing coalition of which the League is part, with Forza Italia and the hard-right Brothers of Italy, is currently leading in polls.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockThat hard line was met by heckling and disapproval from parts of the chamber.The center-left Democratic Party, which is most supportive of Mr. Draghi, was also in a difficult position because it was counting on an alliance with Five Star, or what is left of it, to bolster its own electoral fortunes in the next elections. But now an alliance with Five Star — the party that prematurely ended the Draghi era — was itself laden with danger, and fractures had emerged in the left over its wisdom.The right-wing coalition of the League party, led by the nationalist Matteo Salvini; Forza Italia, led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi; and the hard-right Brothers of Italy, led by Giorgia Meloni, was currently leading in polls, though it was not clear how eager they were to govern at such a delicate time.Mr. Salvini and Mr. Berlusconi have vowed to no longer sit in the same government with Five Star, but they also do not want to risk their credibility — especially with a business community that likes Mr. Draghi — by being seen as the ones who brought down the government. Italy’s political observers were paying especially close attention to what Mr. Salvini would do.In his speech, Mr. Draghi mentioned as part of his government’s program the priorities of powerful League governors in the country’s north who want the prime minister to stay on, potentially driving a wedge between them and Mr. Salvini were he to consider bolting.“Politically, Italians do not love the parties who rip up the government and lead them to elections,” Mr. Orsina said. But a main member of the alliance, Ms. Meloni has skyrocketed in the polls as she stayed in the opposition, and wants elections as soon as possible. More