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      ‘Nikki Haley Will Not Be the Next President’: Our Columnists Weigh In

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      With candidates entering the 2024 presidential race, Times columnists and Opinion writers are starting a scorecard assessing their strengths and weaknesses. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any actual caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of accepting the party’s nomination next summer. We begin with Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador in the Trump administration, who announced her bid for the Republican nomination on Tuesday.How seriously should we take Nikki Haley’s candidacy?David Brooks In a normal party, she would have to be taken seriously. She’s politically skilled, has never lost an election, has domestic and foreign policy experience, has been a popular governor, is about as conservative as the median G.O.P. voter and is running on an implicit platform: Let’s end the chaos and be populist but sensible. The question is, is the G.O.P. becoming once again a normal party?Jane Coaston To borrow a phrase, we should take it extremely literally but not seriously. She is indeed running for president. But Nikki Haley will not be the next president of the United States of America.Ross Douthat Much less seriously than the likely front-running candidacies of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, and somewhat less seriously than the likely also-ran candidacy of Mike Pence. Which means that barring a scenario where at least two of those three men don’t catch fire, not particularly seriously at all.David French The Republican race is best summed up as two individuals (Trump and DeSantis) and a field. Maybe a third candidate can emerge from the field, and maybe that person can be Haley — a decent reason to take her seriously — but we need to see evidence of independent traction.Michelle Goldberg Not very. I can’t imagine who she thinks her constituency is. A video teasing her candidacy starts with a spiel by the neocon Reagan official Jeane Kirkpatrick. Talk about nailing the zeitgeist!Rosie Gray Haley handled the Trump years more deftly than most. She never allowed herself to be dragged into anything too embarrassing or scandalous and didn’t fall victim to vicious Trump world back-stabbing. But she probably isn’t the kind of candidate who can get through a Republican presidential primary. Shrewd as she has been, she can’t plausibly reinvent herself as a 2023 outrage merchant.Liz Mair She could be the next vice president. That’s the reason to take her seriously.Mike Madrid I don’t see Haley as a serious candidate for the presidency or the vice presidency. She brings nothing demographically or ideologically to the G.O.P. that it doesn’t already have. But it is a serious attempt to maintain her relevance in the Republican hierarchy as a nonwhite woman willing to take a cabinet position or appointment to reassure primary voters that they aren’t actually a bunch of monolithic white people.Daniel McCarthy The interventionist foreign policy that Ambassador Haley has made her signature theme in recent years is unlikely to resonate in an America First party.Bret Stephens Seriously. Last month, Haley gave a speech to an association of auto dealers — the kind of audience any G.O.P. candidate needs to win over. Someone who was in attendance told me she got three thunderous standing ovations. It’s said of Ron DeSantis that the closer you get to him, the less you like him. Haley is the opposite. She still has work to do to win over other core Republican constituencies (above all, evangelicals and Trump sympathizers), but nobody should underestimate her appeal. She looks like a winner to a party that’s desperate to win.What matters most about her as a presidential candidate?Brooks If Trump and DeSantis compete in the Trumpy lane, there will be room for a normie candidate to oppose them. She’s more charismatic than Pence or Mike Pompeo, more conservative than Larry Hogan or Chris Sununu. Her problem is South Carolina. She’ll get no credit for winning that early primary, and it will be devastating to her campaign if she loses.Coaston Haley ought to be an interesting candidate — daughter of immigrants, former governor of a state experiencing big population shifts, a U.N. ambassador — but she seems to have no real basis to run for office. She’s not a populist, and she’s not a culture warrior.Douthat Her possible ability to split off a (small) piece of the non-Trump vote in early primaries, helping him to the nomination if those primaries are extremely close.French She’s a conventional Republican. If no one like her can gain traction, it will be a decisive signal that the Republican base has fundamentally transformed and traditional ideological conservatives are at best an imperfect fit for the G.O.P.Goldberg It will be interesting to see if Trump tries to destroy her right away as a warning to others, or holds off since he’s likely to fare best in a fractured field, with Haley pulling enough votes away from DeSantis to give the nomination to Trump. The more candidates there are, the more likely Trump is to win with a plurality.Gray Not so long ago, the Republican National Committee was predicting continued electoral doom unless the party expanded beyond its mostly white base. So Marco Rubio threw himself into the failed Gang of Eight immigration bill; Paul Ryan went on a listening tour of poor urban communities; and Haley had the Confederate flag removed from the State Capitol grounds. For a time, Trump seemed to upend any hope that these savvy rising stars had of one day reaching the White House. Haley’s candidacy will test that assumption, and that’s why she matters. Did Trump stamp out the ambitions of her generation for good, putting an end to the dream of a friendlier, more moderate Republican Party? Or did he merely put those ambitions on hold?Madrid Over 70 percent of Republican primary voters are white, so her candidacy will test the viability of a nonwhite candidate.Mair She has foreign policy and national security experience, which DeSantis does not. Trump can claim to have that kind of experience, but for many people, all it amounts to is keeping classified documents he shouldn’t have had, coddling up to dictators and autocrats, being softer on China than a lot of Republicans would like and other national security failures. Less substantively, she’s a woman of color, and Republican primary voters would love a chance to show that there are indeed nonwhite people and women who think just like they do (this is something a lot of primary voters are a bit neurotic about, and Haley knows it).McCarthy She’s the running mate they wish John McCain had in 2008, the kind of Republican the party thought it needed to appeal to a less white, more educated and firmly feminist America. But Trump changed the dream of the G.O.P.’s destiny: appealing to the working class, rather than to a wider ethnic profile within the class of educated professionals, is what Republicans voters now expect. Haley is too representative of the party elite’s desires to be seen as a plausible tribune of the working class.Stephens If the subtext of a DeSantis candidacy is that he is Trump shorn of the former president’s personal flaws, the subtext of Haley’s is that she is the Republican Party shorn of the former president. A woman, a minority, an immigrant background, a self-made person: Without having to say a word, she embodies everything Trump’s vision of America isn’t. She also would be less vulnerable to Democratic attack lines about Republican bigotry.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about her vision for America?Brooks Her immigrant story is a good one, her decision to get rid of the Confederate flag showed common decency. On the other hand, there was an awful lot of complicity and silence when she served under Trump.Coaston I would ask … what vision for America? What exactly is Haley offering that is distinctly different from the Generic Republican that Donald Trump (whom she reportedly asked first before deciding to announce her candidacy) became? She is selling the idea that she is somehow both distinct enough to separate herself from the former president she continues to support and similar enough to win the nomination with this Republican Party. I don’t buy it.Douthat She has generally offered herself as the candidate of Reaganite bromides and as a potential vehicle for members of the Republican gentry who wish the Trump era had never happened but don’t particularly want to have any unpleasant fights about it. That’s a vision that’s neither inspiring nor unsettling; it’s just dull and useless and unlikely to take her anywhere.French Haley is right about the most important issues facing the free world. The United States should aggressively support Ukraine, and it should aggressively compete with China and deter Chinese aggression. What’s unsettling about her is that, like many Republicans, she never seemed to figure out quite how to handle Trump and constantly flipped and flopped between confrontation and accommodation. Yet her vacillation may be the key to her potential viability. Her back-and-forth on Trump mirrors the back-and-forth of many rank-and-file Republicans. They could perhaps see themselves in her.Goldberg She’s such a hollow figure that it’s impossible to say what her vision is. “What I’ve heard again and again is that Haley’s raw skills obscure an absence of core beliefs and a lack of tactical thinking,” Tim Alberta wrote in a great profile of her in 2021. She’d most likely pursue a hawkish foreign policy, though, so she could be the candidate of those nostalgic for the George W. Bush administration.Gray Haley might be the last person in American politics still quoting Sheryl Sandberg. “We are leaning in,” Haley told Sean Hannity last month. “It is time for a new generation. It is time for more leadership.” But at 51, she’s part of a political generation that can hardly be considered “new.” Her candidacy feels trapped in the post-Tea Party, mid-Obama administration era when she rose to prominence.Madrid Haley will be the first of many candidates trying to connect with Trump’s populist base while also resurrecting the establishment infrastructure that capitulated to him. If she can explain that she was against him before she was for him and now is against him again in a way that wins over voters and reassures party leaders, it may be inspiring for the sliver of Republicans who still maintain the party can return to the Reagan-Bush days, and unsettling for everyone else.Mair It’s not clear to me what her vision is for America. She has alternated between praising and defending Trump and Trumpism and critiquing him and it.McCarthy What’s unsettling is that her vision is a prepackaged failure. She was a moderately conservative governor and something of a soft libertarian at a time when an aggressive neoconservatism was dominant in the G.O.P. But when she took to the national stage she proved unable to distinguish between the tough realism of Jeane Kirkpatrick and the tough-sounding but inept idealism of the George W. Bush administration. She imbibed Robert Kagan when she should have studied George Kennan.Stephens There are two dueling G.O.P. visions for America: the “Fortress America” vision, of a nation besieged by undesirable immigrants and undermined by undesirable globalists, and a “City on a Hill” vision, of a nation whose powers of attraction are its greatest strength. Haley strikes me as leaning much closer to the second vision, at least within the broader parameters of conservative thinking.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Haley candidacy?Brooks Every wing of the party would accept her, at least as its second choice, if the top choice falters. It’s not an inspiring strategy, but it has worked for others — not the least of which a certain A. Lincoln.Coaston Remember when Republicans seemed hinged? Nikki Haley remembers.Douthat A charismatic female candidate with a vague platform and banal record is all we need to take a time machine back to the politics of 1988.Goldberg She’s canny, poised and doesn’t come off as crazy, so could be formidable in the general election.French She can beat Joe Biden!Gray Haley has already been out there making her own elevator pitch for her candidacy: “We have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president,” she told Sean Hannity last month. “It is time that we get a Republican in there that can lead and that can win a general election.”Madrid Nikki Haley has the establishment experience to beat the establishment.Mair No one should underestimate the appeal of a nonwhite, female conservative candidate to old, conservative, white, die-hard G.O.P. primary voters, and she’s not another white conservative dude.McCarthy Did you ever wish Hillary Clinton was a Republican? Now she is!Stephens If she can win the nomination, she will win the general election.On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rank Nikki Haley’s potential as a presidential candidate? Share your ranking — and your reasoning for it — in the comments. (1 means she will drop out early; 10 means she has a strong chance of accepting the nomination.)David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French, Michelle Goldberg and Bret Stephens are Times columnists.Jane Coaston is a Times Opinion writer.Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) has covered the conservative movement for more than a decade as a political reporter for BuzzFeed News and The Atlantic.Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project.Liz Mair (@LizMair) has served as a campaign strategist for Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry. She is the founder and president of Mair Strategies.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Nigerian Election 2023: What to Know

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      The presidential election this month in Africa’s most populous country is completely unpredictable. An unexpected third candidate with a huge youth following may upend decades of traditional politics.Nigerians go to the polls next week to choose a new president — one of the most important elections happening anywhere in the world this year. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with about 220 million people, and what happens there reverberates across the continent and the globe.The Giant of Africa, as Nigeria is known, is at an inflection point. Nearly eight years of rule by an ailing president, Muhammadu Buhari — a military dictator turned reformed democrat — has seen the country lurch from one economic shock to the next. Over 60 percent of the people live in poverty, while security crises — including kidnapping, terrorism, militancy in oil-rich areas and clashes between herdsmen and farmers — have multiplied. Young, middle-class Nigerians are leaving the country in droves.Many Nigerians see the 2023 election as a chance to change course, and are planning to break with the two traditional parties to vote for a third candidate. Not since the rebirth of Nigeria’s democracy in 1999 has the country faced an election as nail-biting — and as wide open — as this one.When is the election?The vote is scheduled for Feb. 25, unless it is postponed, as it was in 2019, just five hours before polls were to open. The head of the Independent National Electoral Commission, or I.N.E.C., has warned that if the myriad security challenges Nigeria is facing are “not monitored and dealt with decisively,” elections could be postponed or canceled in many wards, causing a constitutional crisis.Who are the main candidates?There is Bola Ahmed Tinubu, 70, who as the candidate of the governing All Progressives Congress has serious political machinery behind him. A canny, multimillionaire former governor of Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, Mr. Tinubu is a Muslim from the southwest and boasts that he brought Mr. Buhari to power. His catchphrase, “Emi lo kan” — Yoruba for “It’s my turn” — speaks to his record as a kingmaker in Nigerian politics, but alienates many young voters.Officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission sort voter cards at a ward in Lagos, Nigeria, last month ahead of the presidential election in February.Pius Utomi Ekpei/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe former vice president and multimillionaire businessman Atiku Abubakar is the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, or P.D.P. Mr. Abubakar, 76, has run for the presidency five times since 1993, and this year could be his last shot. A Muslim from the north, he hopes to pick up far more votes there than he has in the past, now that he does not have to run against his old nemesis, Mr. Buhari, who had an ardent northern following.The surprise candidate is Peter Obi, 61. Hailed as a savior by a large chunk of Nigeria’s digitally savvy youth, Mr. Obi — a Christian and former governor from the southeast who has hitched his wagon to the lesser-known Labour Party — has thrown this election open. His fans — mostly young, southern Nigerians walloped by economic hardship, joblessness and insecurity — call themselves the Obidients.These are the three leading contenders among the 18 candidates in all. However, a fourth candidate worth mentioning is Rabiu Kwankwaso, 66. While unlikely to win the election, Mr. Kwankwaso, also a Muslim, could profoundly affect the result by splitting the vote in parts of Nigeria’s north, including the major state of Kano, where he has a huge base.Why does this election matter?Nearly 90 percent of Nigerians believe the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a recent survey by Afrobarometer — by far the worst perception it has ever recorded in Nigeria. For many, this election seems like a last-ditch chance to rescue their country.People waited at a bus stop with heavy traffic in Lagos last month. A recent survey found that nearly 90 percent of Nigerians believe the country is going in the wrong direction.Akintunde Akinleye/EPA, via ShutterstockA nation bursting with entrepreneurs and creative talent, Nigeria is held back by rampant insecurity, widespread unemployment, persistent corruption and a stagnating economy, which together mean that simply surviving can be a major struggle.What is different about this ballot?Recent changes in the voting system — using biometric data to ensure voters’ identities and sending results electronically rather than manually — were put in place to prevent the tampering and vote rigging that have undermined previous elections.There is no incumbent on the ballot, and for the first time in decades, there are major candidates from each of Nigeria’s three main ethnic groups: Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa-Fulani.All the usual, if unofficial, rules of Nigerian elections have been blown apart:1: It’s a battle between the two established parties. Mr. Obi broke this one when he lost the P.D.P. ticket to Mr. Abubakar but insisted on running anyway, and joined another party.2: The presidency is supposed to alternate between the north and the south, and so parties should field candidates accordingly. Mr. Buhari is a northerner, so Mr. Abubakar was expected to let a southerner helm his party. But he did not, and he may pay the price by losing the P.D.P.’s traditional southern strongholds.3: There should be a Muslim and a Christian on the ticket. Mr. Tinubu, a Muslim, bulldozed through this rule by picking a Muslim from the northeast as his running mate. That could cost him dearly in the south, too.Religious identity is a factor in Nigerian elections. Muslims celebrated the holiday of Eid al-Adha in Abuja, last year.Afolabi Sotunde/ReutersWhat does a candidate need to win?An absolute majority plus 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds of the nation’s 36 states are essential for victory. If no candidate achieves this, the election will go to a runoff — which has never happened since democracy returned but which analysts now say is a distinct possibility.Turnout is usually extremely low — around 35 percent of registered voters voted in the last election, because of insecurity, logistical problems and apathy. But this year, according to I.N.E.C., more than 12 million new voters have registered, most of them young people. The election result may hinge on whether those new voters turn out or not.Results are expected two or three days after the election.What does polling show (or not show)?Several recent polls put Mr. Obi ahead of his rivals — some by a wide margin. But what many of these surveys have in common is that a large proportion of people polled refuse to say who they are voting for or say they are undecided.One poll by the data and intelligence company Stears tried to solve this problem by making an informed guess about which way the “silent voters” would cast their ballots based on their profiles and how they responded to other questions.Stears found that if there is a high turnout on election day, Mr. Obi would most likely win by a large margin. But if, as in 2019, few people show up at the polls, Mr. Tinubu would be by far the more likely winner.Above the Ibadan expressway in Lagos, a campaign poster shows presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his running mate Kashim Shettima, of the governing All Progressives Congress party.Pius Utomi Ekpei/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images More

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      Italy’s Hard-Right Leader Vexes Europe by Playing Nice, Mostly

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      Some still fear an authoritarian turn, but Giorgia Meloni has surprised many by showing a pragmatic streak since coming to power. Now Europe is not sure what to do.ROME — In the weeks before Italy elected the hard-right leader Giorgia Meloni, the left sounded “the alarm for Italian democracy.” The European Union braced for Italy to join ranks with members like Hungary and Poland who have challenged the bloc’s core values. International investors worried about spooked markets.But more than 100 days into her tenure, Ms. Meloni has proved to be less predictable. She has shown flashes of nationalist anger, prompting fears at home and abroad that an authoritarian turn remains just around the corner. But until now, she has also governed in a far less vitriolic and ideological and more practical way.The unexpected ordinariness of her early days has vexed the European establishment and her Italian critics, prompting relief but also raising a quandary as to what extent the toned-down firebrand should be embraced or still cautiously held at arm’s length.Ms. Meloni has made a case for herself. She has calmed international concerns over Italy’s ability to service its debts by passing a measured budget. She has had cordial meetings with European Union leaders and has muted her famously rapid-fire invective against the bloc, migrants and elites. She has followed in the footsteps of her predecessor, Mario Draghi, Mr. Europe himself, seeking to carry through on his blueprint to modernize the country with billions of euros in E.U. pandemic recovery funds.While her coalition partner Silvio Berlusconi went full Putin apologist this weekend — blaming President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine for the Russian invasion of his own country — her popularity has effectively minimized the damage from the loose cannons in her right-wing coalition.In the first electoral test for Ms. Meloni since she her coalition’s victory last September, the center-right crushed the left in regional elections on Monday.“Now we have to deal with reality,” she said on social media in a recent weekly video chat called “Giorgia’s Notes,” explaining why she had to delay a populist electoral promise to give tax breaks on fuel at the pump.Ms. Meloni has been “better than we expected” on economic and financial issues, said Enrico Letta, the center-left leader who had warned she would threaten Italian democracy. He said she had abandoned her clearly stated aggression toward the European Union by deciding “to follow the rules” and by avoiding “making any mistakes.”A gas station in January in Rome. Ms. Meloni has delayed a populist electoral promise to give tax breaks on fuel at the pump.Tiziana Fabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“The reality is she is strong,” said Mr. Letta, who is stepping down from the party leadership after failing to stop Ms. Meloni. “She’s in that full honeymoon, without an alternative within the majority and the opposition divided.”After Ms. Meloni was elected in September, she became the leader of Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini. Her party, the Brothers of Italy, was born from the wreckage of Italy’s failed experiment with Fascism. In the opposition, she made common cause with Europe’s other hard-right leaders who have challenged Europe’s democratic values, like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary.More on ItalyA Fast-Shrinking Nation: Italy’s population of elder Italians is soaring as its birthrate plummets, putting the country at the forefront of a global demographic trend that experts call the “silver tsunami.”Looted Art: Five dozen ancient artifacts that had been illegally looted from archaeological sites have been returned to Italy thanks to a collaboration with authorities in the United States.End of the Road: After 30 years on the lam as one of Italy’s most wanted fugitives, the mobster Matteo Messina Denaro was quietly arrested in Palermo.Truffle Wars: Truffles are big business in Italy. Some are trying to take out the competition by poisoning the dogs that accompany truffle hunters.But since coming to power, if Ms. Meloni has proved to be something less than an Orban in charge of the eurozone’s third largest economy, the difference, analysts say, may be that Italy’s deep dependency on Europe for billions of euros in relief funds and flexibility on its enormous debt has induced moderation.Her seeming willingness to play nice has put Europe’s leaders in the bind of having to decide whether to treat her like the migrant-baiting, verbal bomb thrower of the far right that she had been for decades or the more or less responsible prime minister that she has acted like for months.If she is embraced too closely, it risks legitimizing the hard right and illiberal currents in Europe. If she is rejected, it might seem like she is being punished for doing what was asked of her, creating a dangerous disincentive for the leader of a country large enough to destabilize the entire bloc and global economy.Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party emerged from the wreckage of Italy’s failed experiment with Fascism. Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesLast week, for example, President Emmanuel Macron of France excluded Ms. Meloni from a dinner in Paris with Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine and Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, a clear sign that Italy had been knocked down a notch from when Mr. Draghi was in office. But analysts said Mr. Macron also wanted to avoid indirectly legitimizing France’s own right-wing firebrand, Marine Le Pen.Ms. Meloni fumed, saying Italy sought more than “pats on the back,” and some interpreted her huddling in Brussels last week with leaders of the Czech Republic and Poland as a veiled warning. But on Friday, Ms. Meloni, a skillful politician well versed in the politics of victimization, spent a significant amount of time explaining that she did not care about not being invited to Paris.She seemed to try to speak for much of Europe, arguing that she would have counseled against the meeting even if she had been invited because having two, instead of all 27, European leaders in the room risked eroding the bloc’s unity and public support for Ukraine.“It is not easy for any of us to handle the Ukraine issue with public opinion,” she said, adding that the meeting did not help leaders do the “right thing.” European officials have warned that a combative approach only risks diminishing Italy’s influence. And at home, liberals fear that Ms. Meloni is beginning to show her true, authoritarian face.In recent days, her allies have called for the head of a top official at the country’s public television broadcaster after a pop star appeared on Italy’s widely popular Sanremo song contest and ripped up a photograph of a government official in Ms. Meloni’s party. In the photo he was dressed as a Nazi.Critics like Mr. Letta still say there is also plenty to worry about on issues like migration, justice and gay and abortion rights, though he acknowledged that in those areas, “until now, nothing spectacular, nothing dramatic has been done.”“Nothing of what she is doing makes us think that she is taking a fascist turn,” said Giovanni Orsina, the director of the school of government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome.Joking that the European establishment reacted to her election as if “someone had died,” Andrea De Bertoldi, a member of Parliament with Ms. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said that her government was “only surprising” to those who did not know her, or who had not followed the normalization of the Italian right in the past 30 years.Ms. Meloni has received only limited one-on-one face time with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.Pool photo by Johanna Geron“The fear,” he said, was provoked by political enemies, though he acknowledged that she perhaps sounded a little different during her years venting from the political margins. “To be heard in the opposition,” he said, “you always need to raise the tone.”For now, it seems, she has extinguished fears of burning down Italian democracy with the post-Fascist flame of her party emblem. But the left, searching for traction, has come up with a new critique: that Ms. Meloni might clumsily break the country.“The great problem of the center right in power is different, absolute incompetence,” Stefano Feltri, the editor of the leftist newspaper Domani, wrote in an editorial.One of the first things Ms. Meloni did upon coming to power was crack down on illegal rave parties. The initial draft of the measure targeted “gatherings” of 50 people or more, a law written so broadly as to potentially be used against political or union rallies, and even sporting events. She was forced to redo it. She also had to backtrack on a plan to put a 60 euro basement on credit card purchases, which raised fears of tax evasion.More ideologically, Ms. Meloni has sought to force ships run by nongovernmental organizations to rescue migrants to return to an Italian port after each mission, limiting time at sea. In November, her government tried to block a ship from disembarking migrants in Italy, and instead sought to send it to France, causing tensions with Mr. Macron.The Geo Barents migrant rescue ship docked in January at the port of La Spezia, Italy. Ms. Meloni has sought to force ships run by nongovernmental organizations to return to an Italian port after each rescue mission, limiting time at sea.Luca Zennaro/EPA, via ShutterstockLast week’s exclusion from the Paris dinner inflamed those tensions. Whereas last year, Mr. Draghi, an architect of Europe’s policy on Ukraine, accompanied the French and German leaders on a train to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, Ms. Meloni received one-on-one face time with Mr. Zelensky only on the margins of a large meeting in Brussels.“It is so clear that we had two pictures,” Mr. Letta said. “One last year on the train to Kyiv. And yesterday at the Élysée and the picture without Italy.”But Mr. Letta, already bested by Ms. Meloni, was wary of what else she had in store for Europe, including a more ambitious plan to move the continent to the right. He said that she had sought to build new alliances with right-wing forces at the European level to become a power center, with Mr. Orban, ahead of European elections next year.“This is not, of course, a Democratic alarm that I’m launching,” Mr. Letta said. “This is a political alarm.”Gaia Pianigiani More

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      Lori Lightfoot Seeks a Second Term as Chicago Mayor

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      CHICAGO — Mayor Lori Lightfoot met recently with two dozen Chicagoans at a campaign event in a plush apartment building in the city’s affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood. Before long, she shifted into the rapid-fire mode that defined her career before City Hall, when she was a federal prosecutor known for her tenacity.She rattled off statistics, handpicked to show that Chicago was on the upswing: The number of shootings in the city had fallen 20 percent in 2022, after spiking during the pandemic. Homicides were down 14 percent. Carjackings decreased, too.“You know that crime is a complicated issue — you can’t just snap your fingers and make it disappear,” she said, adding: “If you don’t feel safe, none of the rest of it matters.”Whether Chicagoans believe that the city is getting safer could determine Ms. Lightfoot’s political future. Four years ago, after a politically battered Rahm Emanuel decided not to run for re-election, Ms. Lightfoot emerged from the back of a crowded pack to replace him. She ran as an anticorruption reformer who promised to do away with the old, clubby ways of governing in Chicago. She was elected in a landslide over more prominent, more experienced opponents, sweeping all 50 wards to become the city’s first Black woman mayor.Less than a year into her first term, though, Ms. Lightfoot, a Democrat, was hit with the Covid-19 pandemic and all its attendant crises — and she now governs a restless city that has yet to fully shake off its pandemic malaise.Chicagoans have a lot of gripes about the last several years, and many people have laid the blame at Ms. Lightfoot’s feet. Public transit has been shaky, with riders complaining of long waits for buses and “L” trains. Chicago’s school system has steadily lost enrollment, and in 2019, parents endured a teachers’ strike that shuttered schools for 11 days.The Willis Tower looms over the Chicago skyline and the north branch of the Chicago River.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesChicago’s public transit has been shaky, with riders complaining of long waits for buses and “L” trains.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMs. Lightfoot spoke to a small group in a North Side condominium building about her policies on education, crime and other issues.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesAbove all other issues, crime has unsettled Chicago. Though many kinds of violent crimes fell in 2022, robberies, thefts and burglaries increased from 2021, according to the Chicago Police Department. The North Side is “as safe as it’s been in a generation,” Crain’s Chicago Business wrote in October, but other parts of the city have visibly suffered.“The city is worse than it’s ever been,” said Pamela Wortham, 65, as she pushed her grocery cart out of a Jewel-Osco store. Her neighborhood, South Shore, has struggled with gun violence and poverty. “But with the right person,” she said, “we could come up again.”Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Union Support: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. Democrats hope it will lead to increased union strength.A Chaotic Majority: The defining dynamic for House Republicans, who have a slim majority, may be the push and pull between the far right and the rest of the conference. Here is a closer look at the fractious caucus.A New Kind of Welfare: In a post-Roe world, some conservative thinkers are pushing Republicans to move on from Reagan-era family policy and send cash to families. A few lawmakers are listening.Flipping the Pennsylvania House: Democrats swept three special elections in solidly blue House districts, putting the party in the majority for the first time in a dozen years by a single seat.Whether that person is Ms. Lightfoot, who is seeking a second term at City Hall, will be determined in the next few weeks. She is an unpopular mayor whose support has nose-dived in the last four years, in part because of her performance and in part because of the circumstances of the pandemic. Her own polling shows her leading an unwieldy pack of nine mayoral candidates, several of whom have run unsuccessfully before — but it shows her doing so with only 24 percent of the splintered vote.The mayoral election on Feb. 28 has attracted a long line of challengers, including Representative Jesús G. García, whose Congressional district includes parts of the city, and Paul Vallas, a former head of the Chicago Public Schools. Unless a candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote — an extremely unlikely scenario — there will be a runoff in April between the two top finishers.Mr. Vallas, who was endorsed by The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board, has made solving the city’s crime problem his signature campaign issue. Mr. García, the son of Mexican immigrants, would be Chicago’s first Latino mayor; he won enough votes in the 2015 mayoral race to force Mr. Emanuel into a runoff.Edwin Eisendrath, a businessman and former alderman who has endorsed Mr. García, said that he supported Ms. Lightfoot in 2019 but has been disappointed in her approach to governing.“We have great universities, we have fabulous neighborhoods, we have important transit infrastructure — in the world of climate change, we have water,” he said, referring to Lake Michigan. “But there’s an enormous leadership gap in Chicago that we all feel, particularly in the last three years.”Many people point to her temperament. Ms. Lightfoot has sparred with the City Council; the Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker; and legislators in Springfield, particularly over a law that created an elected school board.The city was focused on rooting out corruption when she was elected mayor four years ago, said David Axelrod, the Chicago-based political strategist.Red lanterns hung overhead in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood this month. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“The city is worse than it’s ever been,” said Pamela Wortham, 65, a resident of the South Shore neighborhood.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesA new condominium building sits among century-old houses in the Avondale neighborhood.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“She was the outsider prosecutor, the avenger who was going to come in and bring about change,” Mr. Axelrod said. “She’s a very pugnacious person. But the skill set that is required to run a city — you need some of that pugnaciousness, but you also need to cajole, recruit, compromise. The very qualities that made her appealing four years ago may have been a bit of an obstacle here.”In interviews around Chicago, many residents said they were frustrated with Ms. Lightfoot, bothered by a sense that the city has stagnated under her watch and unsure whether they wanted to give her another chance.Ms. Wortham said that her neighborhood, South Shore, had deteriorated while other areas of the city, especially on the North Side, have been thriving. She said that when she was a little girl, growing up in the house where she still lives, she could ride her bike to a nearby beach on Lake Michigan without any problems. Now she tells her 10-year-old granddaughter to stay inside, where she is safer.Ron Bailey, 57, a salesman from the South Side, said he was disappointed that the mayor had not lived up to her promises to overhaul the Chicago Police Department.“People are still suffering from the pandemic’s effects,” he said. “We see on the news every day what’s going on. There is a crisis of hope in our communities, and unless that crisis is addressed, we’re going to keep getting what we get.”Jens Ludwig, a professor and the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, said that though the numbers of violent crimes have declined, it was not yet clear whether that was the beginning of a longer trend.“We don’t quite appreciate the effect of the pandemic enough on the crime problem,” he said. “You can see, all sorts of behavior problems have really gone up in the pandemic and post-pandemic period — motor vehicle deaths, disciplinary problems with kids, people fighting on airplanes. All of that stuff is part and parcel of the underappreciated lingering mental health consequences of the pandemic.”Ms. Lightfoot’s supporters say that her achievements — under difficult conditions — have been understated. The unemployment rate in Chicago is 4.3 percent, down from 18.3 percent in April 2020. The city’s economy remains diverse, a hub of transportation, manufacturing and technology.Jesse Chacon, 35, who lives on the West Side, said he voted for Ms. Lightfoot once and would probably do so again. “The city’s been good for me and for my family,” he said as he entered an “L” station this month, naming at least four relatives who work in the city’s public schools, fire department or police department.Jesse Chacon, 35, who lives on the West Side, said he would probably vote for Ms. Lightfoot. “The city’s been good for me and for my family,” he said. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesA mural by a local artist in the Logan Square neighborhood on the North Side.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesCondominium towers in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesUnder Ms. Lightfoot, Chicago has made progress on improving its finances and has earned upgrades from credit rating agencies. The nonpartisan Civic Federation applauded Ms. Lightfoot last fall for including sizable supplemental payments to the city’s pension funds in her most recent budget, though it criticized her for a lack of transparency on police budgeting.“A lot of people have a very short memory of all that she accomplished,” said Tamar Newberger, a North Side resident who introduced Ms. Lightfoot at the campaign event on Monday. “The financial health of our city is greatly improved.”Anton Seals Jr., a founder and community organizer on the South Side, said he has seen a burst in Black entrepreneurship in Chicago in recent years, and praised Ms. Lightfoot for working on initiatives to invest in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.“I think, to her credit, what she’s attempted to do is to shine a light and send resources to communities that haven’t gotten it,” he said. “At least in this administration, you’ve had a commitment to try to do something.”Among the campaign promises that Ms. Lightfoot has yet to fulfill is a vow to draw more people to live in Chicago. Its population grew by nearly 2 percent between 2010 and 2020, to more than 2.7 million people, though the city then lost roughly 50,000 residents during the pandemic, erasing that growth, according to census data.Juliana Santamaria, 34, a paralegal, is one former Chicagoan who left the city for the suburbs in recent years, driven out of the Pilsen neighborhood when her rent jumped by $400 a month. As she waited for an Uber with a friend in Pilsen this month, she said she missed living in Chicago and was mulling what she would do when her teenage children graduate from high school.“It’s one of my goals, to move back,” she said. More

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      Hazel McCallion, No-Nonsense Canadian Mayor for 36 Years, Dies at 101

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      Tough, pragmatic and brusque when she had to be, she helped transform Mississauga from a sleepy Toronto suburb into one of the country’s largest and most dynamic cities.Hazel McCallion, who as the longest-serving mayor in Canadian history transformed the sleepy Toronto suburb of Mississauga into a multicultural dynamo and the country’s sixth-largest city, died at her home there on Jan. 29, nine years after she ended her 36-year run. She was 101.Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and a close friend of Mrs. McCallion’s, said she died from pancreatic cancer.When Mrs. McCallion first won office, in 1978, Mississauga was a sprawling centerless community of about 250,000 people, little more than an extension of Toronto, its much larger neighbor to the east. Today it has a dense downtown core of skyscrapers, robust arts institutions and 750,000 people.And while Mississauga in the 1970s was overwhelmingly white, the city is now one of Canada’s most diverse, drawing immigrants from East and South Asia.Mrs. McCallion did not just survive but thrive through 12 terms by blending thrifty pragmatism with open-armed populism.Though she leaned slightly to the political left, she did not hew to a party platform or ideology. Her singular goal was to bring prosperity to Mississauga, which she did by keeping budgets trim — the city rarely carried debt or raised property taxes — and being unafraid to assert her city’s interests against its neighbors or in the Ontario provincial government.A copy of The Streetsville Booster, a community newspaper founded by Hazel and Sam McCallion, from 1978, the first year she ran for mayor of Mississauga. She won that election and went on to serve 12 terms.Cole Burston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Hazel McCallion does not caution,” the magazine Toronto Life wrote in 2003. “She berates. She harangues. She, well, bites off people’s heads.”But if politicians and bureaucrats feared her, voters loved her.After she decided not to run for re-election in 2014, she picked her successor, Bonnie Crombie, who won handily. No one was surprised: Mrs. McCallion left office with an 85 percent approval rating. They called her Hurricane Hazel, a tribute to her brash style more than a reference to the weather disaster that killed 80 people in Toronto in 1954.Her reputation was cemented just months after she took office, when a train carrying tons of toxic and flammable chemicals overturned near the middle of Mississauga. She immediately ordered most of the town, some 220,000 residents, to evacuate. Over several days she was there alongside the police and firefighters, ushering people to safety, undeterred by an ankle sprained along the way.And when it was over, she was fierce in her demand for damages.“It will be an astronomical sum,” she told reporters, “and somebody is going to get the bill.”Mrs. McCallion played professional hockey in the 1930s, and she remained the picture of ruddy health through her time as mayor, a fact that endeared her to voters. Even into her 80s, she carried a hockey stick in her car trunk, in case she came across a game. She fished, hiked and once, when she was 87, biked five miles to work to promote alternatives to driving.Mrs. McCallion in an undated photo. She won re-election repeatedly without campaigning or fund-raising, and she never faced serious opposition. Tara Walton for The New York TimesShe had come to politics from a career with an engineering company, starting in 1964 as a candidate for a municipal office in Streetsville, a village within Mississauga’s borders. After the two entities, along with a few others, combined to create the city of Mississauga, she moved effortlessly into the mayor’s office after defeating the incumbent by just 3,000 votes in her 1978 race.She never faced another serious opponent, and in two of her elections she didn’t face one at all, winning by acclamation. She did this without campaigning or fund-raising; she encouraged supporters eager to open their wallets to give to charity instead.“I don’t run a campaign, as you know,” she told the Canadian Press news agency in 2010. “I’m there with them four years. I don’t wait for an election to come along to campaign.”She was Mississauga’s chief booster, promoting it as a dynamic place that welcomed the businesses and the influx of immigrants entering Canada in the 1970s and ’80s.She was not without critics, who considered her imperious and even dictatorial. And she conceded that she kept a tight grip on the Mississauga City Council, allowing little dissent, at least in public.In 1982 and again in 2009, she was accused of failing to disclose conflicts of interest: first when land she and her husband owned was included in a possible development project, and later when she lobbied for a hotel project in which one of her sons was an investor.The first instance was not illegal at the time, and the second, which did go to court, was thrown out by a judge in 2013. Taken together, it was a record her defenders considered remarkably clean for a political career that began before most of her voters were born.A selection of McCallion memorabilia at the 2022 exhibition. “Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she once said when asked if she thought about leaving office.Tara Walton for The New York TimesHazel Journeaux was born on Feb. 14, 1921, in Port-Daniel, a small town on the Gaspé Peninsula in southeast Quebec. Her father, Herbert, ran a fishing and processing company, and her mother, Amanda (Travers) Journeaux, was a nurse.The family moved to Montreal when Hazel was still a child, and after high school she took secretarial and business classes before being hired by M.W. Kellogg, an engineering company.She spent several years as a professional hockey player in Montreal, cementing a lifelong love for the sport. She played center for a team sponsored by Kick, a cola brand, and made $5 a game, the equivalent of about $65 in U.S. dollars today. In 1987 the Women’s World Hockey Championship named its trophy the Hazel McCallion World Cup.Her hockey career ended in 1940, when Kellogg opened an office in Toronto and she was sent to manage it.She married Sam McCallion in 1951. He died in 1997. She is survived by her sons, Peter and Paul; her daughter, Linda Burgess; and a granddaughter.Mrs. McCallion spent more than two decades as a manager with Kellogg before leaving to work with her husband and his printing business, and to get involved in politics in Streetsville. After three years on the village council, she was elected mayor of Streetsville in 1970.After the creation of the city of Mississauga, she served on its council for four years before being elected mayor in 1978 at age 57.Before, during and after her time as mayor, she led a backbreaking workday, rising at 5:30 and starting meetings at 7. She swatted away questions about leaving office, even long after most people her age would have retired.“Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she told The Toronto Star in 2001, when she was 80. “If I quit, I’d have to find something very challenging to do. And what could be more challenging than being mayor?”After she finally did end her run as mayor in 2014, at 93, she continued to work. She served as the first chancellor of the Hazel McCallion Campus of Sheridan College, a Toronto-area technical school; she advised Mr. Ford, the Ontario premier; and she oversaw the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, a job that in 2019 took her on a tour of the world’s busiest airports.In a 2022 interview with the newspaper The National Post, she summed up her philosophy by recalling something her mother would ask her when she was young: “What do you want to accomplish in life? Do you want to be a follower or do you want to take advantage of opportunities to be a leader?” More

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      Repeat Election in Berlin Speaks to the ‘Chaos’ Many Residents Feel

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      The do-over vote on Sunday is only the tip of the iceberg for a city some see as in crisis: short on housing, schools and efficient governance.BERLIN — The city’s airport came in more than $4 billion over budget and nine years late. Then there is the chronic housing shortage, the overcrowded schools and the crumbling subway system. If all of that is not enough to dispel any notion that Berlin is a model of efficiency, then maybe this Sunday’s court-ordered repeat election is.The vote is meant to make right the many things that went wrong in September 2021, when city and district governments were up for election but there were too few ballots and polling booths, leading to long lines at polling stations, amid the confusion of roads closed because of the Berlin Marathon.That election was annulled last year, and a panel of judges ordered a new vote, a first in modern German history. (Federal elections, also held that day, will not be done over on Sunday.) When the ballots are cast this time, there will be outside observers from the European Council, the top human rights panel on the continent — the sort of monitoring more typically done in places where there is fear of vote tampering or intimidation.“Berlin is unfortunately turning into a ‘chaos city’ — starting with politics,” Markus Söder, the belligerent governor of Bavaria, who appears to relish attacking the politics of the German capital, said recently.The disputed 2021 election was a win for the Social Democrats, the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which has been running Berlin’s government for 22 years. Franziska Giffey became the first woman elected the city’s mayor, and she formed a coalition with the Greens and the far-left Die Linke party.A crowded evening commute on Thursday at the Alexanderplatz stop.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesTrain access cut off because of construction repairs at the Nordbahnhof station.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesBut current polls have the conservative party in the lead ahead of Sunday’s election, and 68 percent of Berliners say their trust in their political institutions has declined since the last vote, according to a recent poll.Facing a major housing crisis, the city of 3.8 million is short about 125,000 apartments. Schools are understaffed, and parts of the public transportation system are offline for extensive repairs. Construction sites can snarl busy streets for months, if not longer. Major building permits can take years to process. And city services can be glacially slow, with some Berliners complaining that it can take months to get appointments for something as simple as registering a new address.“What I hate is the chaos, especially when it comes to the bureaucracy,” said Silvia Scheerer, 64, dressed in an elegant black fur-trimmed winter coat and waiting patiently for the subway, at a spot where since October trains have been running on a reduced schedule.Labor Organizing and Union DrivesApple: After a yearlong investigation, the National Labor Relations Board determined that the tech giant’s strictly enforced culture of secrecy interferes with employees’ right to organize.N.Y.C. Nurses’ Strike: Nurses at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Mount Sinai in Manhattan ended a three-day strike after the hospitals agreed to add staffing and improve working conditions.Amazon: A federal labor official rejected the company’s attempt to overturn a union victory at a warehouse on Staten Island, removing a key obstacle to contract negotiations between the union and the company.Electric Vehicles: In a milestone for the sector, employees at an E.V. battery plant in Ohio voted to join the United Automobile Workers union, citing pay and safety issues as key reasons.A social worker who regularly deals with city workers in her job, she says she sees how swamped they are.“It’s worse than it’s ever been,” said Ms. Scheerer, who spent half of her life in Communist East Germany, where she said the city bureaucracy and transportation actually worked quite well.A construction site in Berlin on Thursday. It’s not uncommon for such work to disrupt busy streets for months at a time.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesMorning traffic on the A100 highway on a recent weekday.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesPart of the problem is how city government is structured. At the top level, the city is run by a mayor and senators who are elected by a city Parliament, similar to a state house in other German states. Below that are 12 district councils, each headed by a district mayor.“‘I am not in charge of that, I am not responsible for this’ and always pointing to somewhere else — that’s a classic in Berlin,” said Lorenz Maroldt, the editor in chief of the Berlin daily newspaper Tagesspiegel and a longtime chronicler of city politics and their dysfunction.This complex approach to governing makes building a single bike path that crosses several districts a nightmare, says Stefanie Remlinger, the district mayor of Mitte, in Central Berlin, which has nearly 388,000 citizens and 2,000 district staff members to handle their needs.A factor in both the housing and school crises: Berlin has absorbed thousands of new residents and refugees in recent years. Ms. Remlinger’s district currently has 55 schools; it needs five additional ones, she said, just to accommodate all of the newly arriving children.Stefanie Remlinger, the district mayor of Mitte, in her office.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesA visualization of the movement of rental bicycles in Berlin. The city’s complex system of governing makes it hard to do something like build a single bike path across several districts.Ingmar Nolting for The New York Times“Since 2015 we’ve been in crisis mode,” Ms. Remlinger said. “We’ve had a major refugee crisis to deal with, corona, the war, and with it another refugee crisis and inflation.” As in many other countries, workers are striking for better wages. This past week, both educators and other public-sector workers walked off their jobs over several days, meaning garbage piled up, medical procedures were rescheduled and students were not taught.Jochen Christiansen, 59, a sanitation worker, moved to West Berlin in the 1980s to avoid military service, as men living in the city were exempt from West Germany’s draft. Four decades ago, he said, the city worked: Rent was affordable, the schools were fully staffed and the bureaucracy was efficient.During a recent protest of city workers demanding a pay raise of 10.5 percent, he showed little sympathy for the city’s history of undertaking big-budget projects, like the beleaguered new airport, while neglecting its salaried public-sector workers.“I think it’s important to show that we’ll defend ourselves,” he said as he marched with a crowd of 2,500 public workers through central Berlin.A protest by public-sector workers in Berlin on Thursday.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesRalf Kleindiek is Berlin’s first chief digital officer.Ingmar Nolting for The New York TimesBut if many of Berlin’s challenges seem not unexpected for a European capital city dealing with new arrivals, inflation and a shortage of skilled workers, the failure to run an election crystallized the feeling that the administration could do better.“The vote itself might be one of the most instructive lessons on how this city doesn’t work,” said Ralf Kleindiek, who has taken on the formidable task of trying to bring the administration into the 21st century as its first chief digital officer.But luckily, says Mr. Maroldt, the newspaper editor, the city’s many problems have not robbed it of its many charms.“Despite its best efforts,” he said, “politics has not managed to spoil the fun of Berlin for most people.”Closed streets and construction work have become common sights in Berlin.Ingmar Nolting for The New York Times More

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      Anger Over Quake Response Challenges Erdogan Ahead of Election

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      A furor is building among some survivors over the government’s handling of the crisis. “I have been voting for this government for 20 years, and I’m telling everyone about my anger,” said one. “I will never forgive them.”GAZIANTEP, Turkey — A powerful earthquake struck northwestern Turkey in 1999, killing more than 17,000 people, exposing government incompetence and fueling an economic crisis. Amid the turmoil, a young, charismatic politician rode a wave of public anger to become prime minister in 2003.That politician was Recep Tayyip Erdogan.Now, as president, Mr. Erdogan faces challenges similar to those that brought down his predecessors — posing what is perhaps the greatest threat of his two decades in power to his political future.The deadliest earthquake to strike Turkey in almost a century killed at least 20,000 people this past week, with the bodies of countless others still buried in the rubble. It hit after a year of persistently high inflation that has impoverished Turkish families, leaving many with scarce resources to bounce back.The quake’s aftermath has highlighted how much Mr. Erdogan has reshaped the Turkish state, analysts said. Critics accuse him of pushing the country toward autocracy by weakening civil rights and eroding the independence of state institutions, like the Foreign Ministry and the central bank. And in a series of moves aimed at undercutting his rivals and centralizing control, he has restricted institutions like the army that could have helped with the earthquake response while stocking others with loyalists.Mr. Erdogan acknowledged on Friday that his government’s initial response to the disaster had been slow, and anger was building among some survivors, a sentiment that could hamper his bid to remain in power in elections expected on May 14.“I have been voting for this government for 20 years, and I’m telling everyone about my anger,” said Mikail Gul, 53, who lost five family members in a building collapse. “I will never forgive them.”Residents searched for their relatives in a collapsed building in Kahramanmaras, near the epicenter of the quake, on Friday.Emin Ozmen for The New York TimesMr. Erdogan assessed the earthquake damage in Kahramanmaras on Wednesday.Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe president, who faced harsh criticism in 2021 over his government’s failure to control disastrous wildfires, has long portrayed himself as a leader in touch with the common citizen. He visited communities hit hard by the quake in recent days. Dressed in black, his face grim, he visited the wounded and comforted people who had lost their homes and emphasized the magnitude of the crisis.“We are face to face with one of the greatest disasters in our history,” he said on Friday during a visit to Adiyaman Province. “It is a reality that we could not intervene as fast as we wished.”The 7.8 magnitude earthquake — the most powerful in Turkey in decades — and hundreds of aftershocks toppled buildings along a 250-mile-long swath in the south, destroying thousands of buildings and causing billions of dollars in damage. Across the border in Syria, nearly 4,000 dead have been counted, a toll that is expected to rise significantly.“This is the largest-scale disaster that Turkey has to manage, and, inevitably, this will create a backlash against the government,” said Sinan Ulgen, the director of Edam, an Istanbul-based think tank. “But much will depend on how effectively it can address the needs of the affected population.”A man mourning the death of his father in Kahramanmaras on Friday.Emin Ozmen for The New York TimesMany residents of the disaster zone have expressed frustration with the government’s response, saying that in some areas, the state was nowhere to be seen during the initial aftermath.Emin Ozmen for The New York TimesThe Turkish government has begun an extensive aid operation, dispatching 141,000 aid and rescue workers to search for the dead and wounded, to distribute food, blankets and diapers and to erect tents for the tens of thousands of homeless, many of them sleeping in cars to avoid the subzero winter chill.Deadly Quake in Turkey and SyriaA 7.8-magnitude earthquake on Feb. 6, with its epicenter in Gaziantep, Turkey, has become one of the deadliest natural disasters of the century.A Devastating Event: The quake, one of the deadliest since 2000, rippled through neighboring countries; an area along the Syrian-Turkish border was hit particularly hard.From the Scene: Thousands of people have been killed, and dozens of cities have been gutted. Here is how witnesses described the disaster.A Desperate Search: When buildings fell in Antakya, Turkey, families poured in from all over to help. Videos capture the dig for survivors.Syrian Refugees: Millions of people fled the war in Syria for the safety of neighboring Turkey. Now, those killed in the quake are being returned home.Nevertheless, many survivors have expressed frustration with the government’s response, saying the state was nowhere to be found during the initial aftermath, leaving residents alone to find shelter and free trapped loved ones from collapsed buildings.The scarcity of trained rescue squads and heavy machinery during the critical first days most likely increased the death toll because many people who could have been saved were not.When government agencies arrived, residents said, their equipment seemed insufficient and they failed to coordinate the efforts of volunteers who were already struggling to help survivors.For two days after the quake, Mr. Gul said his family lacked food and water and felt helpless amid the destruction.“The house next to us collapsed and there was a girl inside saying, ‘Save me! save me!’” he said.The girl was saved, but Mr. Gul and his relatives had to dig out their five dead family members, he said.He had worked in Germany for 20 years, funneling his savings into 10 apartments in the city of Kahramanmaras, near the quake’s epicenter, so he could live off the rent. But all of the apartments were destroyed, and he has to start over.“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.Distributing aid in the southern city of Antakya on Wednesday.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesTurkish soldiers joined a rescue operation in Kahramanmaras on Friday.Emin Ozmen for The New York TimesDuring his two decades as prime minister and president, Mr. Erdogan has argued that changes to the way Turkey was run were necessary to protect it from a range of domestic and foreign threats, including military coups and terrorist groups.He has also restricted the army, which played a key role in the government’s response to the 1999 earthquake.Turker Erturk, a former Navy admiral who was a commander in the crisis center set up after that quake, said in an interview that the army had swiftly intervened. But in the years since, Mr. Erdogan’s government had limited that ability and the army had stopped planning and training for it, he said.After Monday’s quake, the government called on the army only after public criticism, according to Mr. Erturk.“It is because of one-man rule,” he said. “In authoritarian governments, those decisions are made at the very top, and they wait for his commands.”On Friday, the army said in a tweet that its soldiers had been helping “from the first day” and now had more than 25,000 soldiers deployed. But their presence has not been obvious in many of the hardest-hit areas.Leading the government’s earthquake response is the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, or AFAD, which critics say Mr. Erdogan has stocked with loyalists and empowered at the expense of other organizations, like the Turkish Red Crescent.AFAD, the agency leading the government’s earthquake response, set up shelters for the homeless on the edge of Antakya on Thursday.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesA family gathered around a fire to stay warm in Antakya on Wednesday.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThe earthquake has also led to increased scrutiny of the government’s use of construction codes aimed at preventing buildings from collapsing, according to analystsAlthough no one can predict the precise timing of an earthquake, seismologists have been warning for years that a big one was expected in this region.Three days before the quake, a prominent geologist, Naci Gorur, wrote on Twitter that he was concerned that other seismic activity in Turkey had put pressure on the faults near the epicenter of Monday’s tremor. He even posted a map pinning some of the locations that would be the hardest hit if his predictions came to pass.After the quake, he tweeted again, saying: “As geologists, we grew exhausted of repeating that this earthquake was coming. No one even cared what we were saying.”Following the 1999 quake, Turkey strengthened its construction codes to make buildings more earthquake resistant.But the zone devastated by the recent quakes is dotted with areas where some buildings survived while others nearby — some relatively new — completely collapsed, raising questions about whether some contractors had cut corners.A damaged artist’s studio in Antakya.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesThe body of an earthquake victim at the entrance to a mosque in Antakya.Emily Garthwaite for The New York TimesAt one collapsed apartment block this week, volunteer construction workers spotted what they said was inferior rebar and they broke up chunks of concrete with their hands, saying it was poor quality.In the days since, a lawyers’ association has asked prosecutors in Kahramanmaras to identify contractors who built buildings that collapsed and inspectors who checked them so they can be investigated for possible criminal violations. Prosectors in Gaziantep have started collecting rubble samples for their own investigation.The earthquake left behind billions of dollars in damage, and government plans will require billions more at a time when the state budget is already strained.Before the quake, Mr. Erdogan’s government unleashed billions of dollars in new spending aimed at cushioning the blow of high inflation to citizens before the election, a cash injection that some economists predicted could tip the country into recession this year.On top of economic hardship, the earthquake will deepen Turks’ distress, and not in a way that makes them feel that they are contributing to a greater cause, said Selim Koru, an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey.“This, by its nature, comes out of nowhere, and it makes people even more miserable, and not just in the earthquake zone,” he said. “The economy is going to suffer, and I’m not sure it gives that suffering any meaning.”Searching for clothing in a donation pile in Antakya.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesWatching the search and rescue operation in Antakya.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesThe earthquake’s proximity to the presidential and parliamentary elections that must be held on or before June 18 could lead to other challenges.The Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed Turkish official on Thursday as saying the earthquake’s devastation posed “serious difficulties” for the vote. It was the first hint that the government could seek to postpone it.Trying to unseat Mr. Erdogan is a coalition of six opposition parties that want to bolster the economy and restore independence to state institutions. They have already started trying to turn the quake response into an election issue.But even some angry voters still trust Mr. Erdogan.“We failed this test,” said Ismail Ozaslan, 58, a long-haul truck driver in a park in Gaziantep where part of his family was cramped inside a tent. “We are like patients left to die. There is no management here.”But his criticism of local and national officials, whom he accused of corruption and neglect, stopped short of Mr. Erdogan.“It’s like a building where the roof is strong but the pillars are rotten,” he said. “We don’t have a chance other than Erdogan. May God grant him a long life.”The damaged Kurtulus mosque in Gaziantep.Emin Ozmen for The New York TimesSafak Timur More

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      in Elections

      What Liberals Can Learn From Ron DeSantis

      by

      Is there anything liberals can do about Ron DeSantis other than quietly seethe, loudly condemn him every time he makes headlines and hope that his political flaws — his distaste for glad-handing, his less-than-inspiring public-speaking style, his conspicuous unlikability — will take him down before he gets anywhere close to the presidency? It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.We’ve made that mistake before.It’s reliably depressing to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. We’ve already cataloged the mistakes in media coverage and dissected what we missed that somehow made Trump a viable, let alone a desirable, candidate to occupy the Oval Office. But here we go again. As the Democratic political strategist Lis Smith has remarked, the left’s reaction to DeSantis looks just like its reaction to Trump: “He’s picking these fights. He’s saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters — whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is — have the same freakout.”Let’s pay closer attention this time.First, we shouldn’t underestimate DeSantis. He may resemble Trump in his politics — but not in his intellect or resolve. Compare their respective backgrounds: Whereas Trump’s acceptance into the University of Pennsylvania, after an academic record notable only for its mediocrity, was an egregious example of leveraging personal connections to get into a prestigious university, DeSantis, the son of a TV ratings box installer and a nurse, actually earned his way into the Ivy League. People bent over backward to ascribe some accidental form of grifter street smarts to Trump. But DeSantis is demonstrably intelligent and industrious. He worked his way through Yale while playing baseball and graduated magna cum laude.Whereas Trump skirted military service with a convenient discovery of bone spurs, DeSantis was a commissioned officer in the Navy. He graduated from Harvard Law School. He may share Trump’s taste for bluster, but this is not someone who bumbled his way into public office. As Dexter Filkins observed last year in a New Yorker profile, “DeSantis has an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence and a granular understanding of policy.”Because we can assume DeSantis knows what he’s doing, we should make careful note of his record in Florida, where he has been governor since 2019. His approval rating in Florida is consistently over 50 percent and includes high ratings among Latinos and in former liberal strongholds like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties.The jury is still out on whether DeSantis’s unorthodox response to Covid-19 was a colossal error or an unexpected success or, more likely, something in between, but the fact that he took an aggressive approach to avoid the pains of lockdown on small businesses and families wasn’t lost on Florida voters. While other politicians prevaricated and dithered, DeSantis spoke with conviction and seemed to be doing something, and to many working families in Florida, that mattered.When I visited Miami from Covid-conscious New York in 2021, the vibe in bars and restaurants in the Wynwood art district — where nobody asked for proof of vaccination and I was the only person in a mask — was euphoric. In that young, overwhelmingly liberal corner of the city, people weren’t faulting DeSantis for his pandemic policies. He also acted decisively last year during Hurricane Ian, a response that won strong bipartisan approval.In a country where government often looks sclerotic, DeSantis’s knack for action bears notice. We can decry his stunt in shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but we should also be attending to the real concerns of people living in areas of heavy immigration. Lest we forget, Hispanic voters in Florida preferred DeSantis to his Democratic opponent in last year’s election for governor; they also supported his Martha’s Vineyard escapade, according to a Telemundo/LX News poll. “There are lots of Hispanic voters in this state who really like the governor’s style, this strongman who won’t back down,” one pollster explained at the time.Democrats need to grapple with this appeal. It would be easy to write DeSantis off as a cartoon culture warrior or as racist, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. He may well be all those things, and so may some of his constituents. But he may not be, and either way, it would be foolish to characterize all his followers as such. Assuming a stance of moral superiority will do us no good. (See: Hillary Clinton, “deplorables.”)Finally, we shouldn’t let DeSantis co-opt positions on which Democrats have historical strength and a natural advantage: education, health care, jobs. There are reasons so many Americans are relocating to the Sunshine State beyond the balmy weather. This month, DeSantis released a budget plan that featured targeted tax cuts aimed at parents, salary increases for state employees, including teachers, and significant investments in schools, including programs in civic education.DeSantis’s maverick approach to primary, secondary and higher education has brought widespread condemnation from Democrats, particularly from their more progressive wing. But we should pay attention to why his policies land better with voters than with progressive critics. A law like the Stop WOKE Act of 2021 (later partly blocked by a federal court), which limited the discussion of certain racial issues during diversity training sessions offered by private employers and in the classroom, may come with an incendiary name and some egregious efforts to curtail free speech. But it’s important to recognize that aspects of it appeal to Floridians tired of racial and ethnic divisiveness and the overt politicization of what’s taught in the classroom.As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school. Democratic leadership should worry, too. Keeping quiet or pretending those concerns aren’t real won’t make them go away.Then there’s college. The challenges of higher education have never been a strength for the Republican Party, which has long ignored the myriad needs of indebted students and the financial and existential pressures on academic institutions. If ideological conformity has taken root in American universities, long a bastion of liberal ideals, then Democrats are the ones with the knowledge, experience and record to attend to the problem. It’s on liberals to check the excesses of illiberal orthodoxies rampant among those on its far-left wing. It’s on us to ensure academic freedom and the kind of educational system parents can trust.It should be cause for alarm that recent polls show Republicans holding an advantage on educational issues. Rather than dismiss parents’ concerns as somehow unfounded or wrongheaded, we should be listening to them and finding better solutions to their grievances. Telling parents they’re bigots or are unenlightened for not embracing the latest faddish orthodoxy is not a winning message.Which brings us back to Trump. We know that he takes DeSantis seriously because Trump has shown signs that he’s scared of DeSantis as a competitor. If even Trump knows that much, Democrats are capable of knowing more. Trump may think the best way to defang DeSantis — whom he calls “DeSanctimonious” — is to mock and belittle him. Democrats should recognize it will take far more than that.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More