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      Ending Bitter 3-Month Standoff, Samoa’s Leader Concedes Election Defeat

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      Fiame Naomi Mata’afa is scheduled to take office as the Pacific Island nation’s first female prime minister.A three-month constitutional crisis that had convulsed the Pacific Island nation of Samoa ended on Monday as its long-serving leader finally conceded an election defeat, making way for the first female prime minister in the country’s 56-year history.The incoming leader, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, is scheduled to take office on Tuesday. The critical breakthrough in Samoa’s political stalemate came four days earlier, when the Court of Appeals ruled that a makeshift swearing-in ceremony that Ms. Fiame’s party had held in May after being locked out of Parliament was constitutional.“FAST here is the government,” the departing prime minister, Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, said of Ms. Fiame’s party as he vowed to supporters on Monday that he would lead a worthy opposition. “We will be present in every Parliament sitting, so we can uphold the duties we were called to do by our constituencies.”Mr. Tuilaepa, 76, who has been the country’s leader for 22 years, had fought bitterly to hold on to his office since the April 9 election ended in a dead heat. After a final undecided lawmaker threw his support behind Ms. Fiame, giving her party a slim parliamentary majority, Mr. Tuilaepa refused to accept his loss, claiming that he had been “appointed by God” to lead the country.In the months of political back and forth that followed the election, both parties declared that a coup had taken place, dividing families and resulting in dozens of court challenges.At one point, the country’s election commission intervened, blocking the ascension of Ms. Fiame, paradoxically, by invoking a law meant to ensure greater female representation in Parliament.Under that law, women must hold at least 10 percent of the seats. The election had produced a count of 9.8 percent, and the commission refused to round up. So it appointed a female member of Mr. Tuilaepa’s party to Parliament, temporarily handing him a majority.The judiciary went on to deliver a series of victories to Ms. Fiame, reversing the election commission’s move and declaring her the winner. But the country’s head of state — who holds an ordinarily ceremonial position — absconded to a remote village rather than preside over her swearing-in ceremony. Ms. Fiame’s party held its own ceremony under a tent near the beehive-shaped Parliament.She took the oath of office as the sun descended, flanked by members of her party dressed in cardinal-red blazers and traditional men’s wraparound skirts known as ie faitaga.The departing prime minister, Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi, conceded defeat after fighting the election results for three months.Kevin Hagen/Associated PressMr. Tuilaepa emerged later that day, saying he would not recognize Ms. Fiame’s appointment and calling her swearing-in an act of “treason.”“Leave it to us to handle this situation,” he had said, promising action against what he called “the highest form of illegal conduct.”Samoa, a normally peaceful nation with no military of its own, has seldom known political volatility, albeit at the cost of being a virtual one-party state. Ms. Fiame, 64, formerly Mr. Tuilaepa’s deputy, was a well-established political figure in her own right before forming her own party last year.“We’ve never seen this kind of rift before in our country,” said Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson, a scholar and journalist based in Samoa. “I’ve never experienced this before in my whole life. Lines have been crossed. It’s very much akin to what happened in the U.S. with Trump.”After the months of political intrigue, analysts heralded the court’s ruling as a victory for the rule of law.“This situation has tested Samoa’s Constitution, its political system and especially the judiciary,” said Kerryn Baker, an expert on the region at the Australian National University. “I think Samoans will take heart in the fact that their systems are strong.”Ms. Fiame, making her first public appearance after the ruling, acknowledged the difficulty of the previous months.“It is a new day,” she said. “I offer my deepest gratitude to you, the people of Samoa, and in particular acknowledge the dignity with which you have waited with patience and forbearance, peacefully and respectfully, for the court process to be concluded.” More

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      Pulling Levers in Exile, Belarus Opposition Leader Works to Keep Her Influence Alive

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      As a crackdown widens in her country, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is trying to build a broad phalanx of Western opposition to a dictatorship that she says is on its “last breaths.”VILNIUS, Lithuania — She has met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and President Emmanuel Macron of France. Just this week, she was feted in Washington, where she was received by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.But while Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the unlikely pro-democracy leader from Belarus, may have little trouble getting a meeting, her high-flying company only underscores her predicament.It’s been almost a year since Ms. Tikhanovskaya was forced to flee Belarus after claiming victory in presidential elections. Now the challenge she faces is how to maintain influence in Belarus from abroad. The support of Western leaders may help, but goes only so far.Still, the meetings are part Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s strategy to build a broad Western phalanx against the Belarus dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who has limited her ability to challenge him inside the country, where her return would mean certain imprisonment.Only months ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand that Mr. Lukashenko resign. It was a rare democratic outburst in an eastern European country — outside the European Union and NATO — that has carefully tried to maneuver between Russia and the West, but has turned to Moscow as a primary source of support.But now opposition figures are disappearing into prisons, and protests are dwindling.“Now it’s impossible to fight openly,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya said. “It’s difficult to ask people to go out for demonstrations because of a sense of fear. They see the brutality of the regime, that the most outstanding leaders and prominent figures are in jail. It’s really scary.”An opposition rally protesting the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus, in October, 2020.Associated PressUnable to encourage protests inside Belarus, and with Moscow supporting Mr. Lukashenko, Ms. Tikhanovskaya is using the primary tool available to her in exile: Western support.This week, she had meetings at the State Department, the White House, the Senate and attended the launch of the Friends of Belarus Caucus in the House of Representatives.“I asked the U.S. to be the guarantors of our independence,” she told the Voice of America on Tuesday after meeting with Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.In a series of meetings, she sought more comprehensive sanctions on Belarus’s elites and businesses, to show them that it was “becoming more costly for them to support Lukashenko.”Though there were statements of support and admiration from members of Congress and the Washington elite, no new measures were announced.She and her team also sought to postpone a nearly $1 billion planned disbursement by the International Monetary Fund to Belarus, but have so far been unable to convince the institution to cancel the payment.Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s trip will continue in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, underscoring the value of Western support — and its limits.Her task, she said in an interview in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she and her team have made their base, was to convince her international supporters that change can come to Belarus with their assistance.“We can’t postpone this aim because we postpone freedom of our prisoners and we have to convince other countries in this as well,” she said before leaving for the United States.Supporters of Ms. Tikhanovskaya rallied in June in Warsaw, Poland, where they held up posters of prominent opposition bloggers who are in detention.Omar Marques/Getty Images“And with these detentions, with this violence, they show that they don’t have other methods of persuading people that they are strong, except violence,” she said. “It can’t last long, really. This is like the last breaths before death, because you can’t tighten the screws endlessly.”Some who support Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s movement worry about how it can remain relevant inside Belarus with its leader abroad.“When you are abroad in a safe situation, then all your calls to action will be very skeptically accepted in Belarus,” said Pavel Slunkin, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former Belarusian diplomat.Ms. Tikhanovskaya was clear that local actors make the decisions, and that when she sought funding, it was for supporters in Belarus. “When they are ready, it’s they who decide, not us,” she said.Mr. Slunkin acknowledged that Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been a tireless and effective advocate for her country internationally. Even so, the repression in Belarus is widening.This month, the Belarus Supreme Court sentenced Viktor Babariko, a former bank chief who was barred from running for president in elections last August, to 14 years in prison for bribery and money laundering in a verdict widely seen as politically motivated.On July 14, Belarusian law enforcement officers conducted what Amnesty International called an “unprecedented wave of searches and detentions,” raiding the offices of at least a dozen civil society and human rights organizations and opposition groups.In the past year, more than 35,000 people have been detained, according to the United Nations. Tens of thousands of Belarusians have fled abroad. The list of political prisoners kept by the human rights organization Viasna, itself raided recently, includes 577 individuals.In May, a European plane traveling through Belarus’ airspace was forced to land in Minsk, where Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian dissident aboard, was seized.Belarus riot police detaining a demonstrator during an opposition rally in Minsk, Belarus, in 2020.Associated PressThe environment was “very dangerous,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya acknowledged, but she insisted she and her supporters could still be effective.“God bless the internet,” she said. “I am in constant dialogue with people who are on the ground. I don’t feel like I am in exile.”There are complications as she tries to coordinate the opposition from Lithuania, which borders Belarus and where she and her team were give special diplomatic status in early July.“The more time you spend abroad, the more time you are detached from the public you represent,” Artyom Shraibman, founder of Sense Analytics and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said by phone from his self-imposed exile from Belarus in Ukraine.“If we are honest, spending a year outside of the country where the society is changing and you have not been observing it — you are only communicating with the part of society that is as engaged as you are.”Many experts, like Mr. Slunkin, believe the key way to resolve the crisis is to increase the price of Russian support for Belarus. Ms. Tikhanovskaya has been careful not to criticize Moscow openly, but neither have they succeeded in reaching out to Russian officials.“She is being perceived by many as being pro-Western, and unacceptable to Moscow, which is true,” Mr. Shraibman said. “And this is not her choice.”President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus with his primary backer, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in May.Pool photo by Sergei IlyinWith everything she does, Ms. Tikhanovskaya said, she is mindful of how her actions can affect people behind bars in Belarus, including her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, who ran a popular YouTube channel before announcing his own candidacy for president.He, like Mr. Babariko, and a prominent opposition politician, Valery Tsepkalo, was barred from running and jailed ahead of the ballot. Ms. Tikhanovskaya collected signatures for her candidacy and ran in the place of her husband.In detention since May 2020, he is currently on trial, accused of organizing riots and “inciting social hatred.”“I’m always keeping in mind that my husband is a hostage, the same as thousands of people,” Ms. Tikhanovskaya said.But she was adamant that she wants to keep the promise she campaigned on last August: new elections in which she is not necessarily on the ballot.“I’m the same woman, already with experience, already with more braveness than I had before. But look, I’m not I’m not making my career here. After elections, I will step away from all this with ease.” More

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      German Candidates Fail to Find Footing in Flood Response

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      So far, none of the main contenders to replace Angela Merkel have come across as strong leaders in the aftermath of floods that killed 170 people and caused billions in damages.BERLIN — Floods have had a way of reshaping German politics.Helmut Schmidt made a name for himself responding to deadly floods in Hamburg in 1962, and went on to become chancellor in the 1970s. Images of Gerhard Schröder wading through muddy water along the Elbe River in 2002 are credited with helping him win another term.The floods that ravaged Germany last week — more severe than any in centuries — are already doing their work in this election year. But the striking thing they have revealed, political analysts say, is that none of the major candidates has been able to demonstrate the level of leadership in a crisis the public has grown accustomed to under Chancellor Angela Merkel.While the deadly flash floods have offered the candidates a chance to show their stuff, political experts said that each has struggled to communicate competence and reassurance. Voters seem to agree.The first poll since the flooding showed a drop in popularity for the two leading candidates — the conservative Armin Laschet and his Green party rival, Annalena Baerbock — after what political experts say have been lackluster performances by both this week.“This will not be an election in which the candidates play a deciding role,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at the University of Trier. “None of the candidates have the kind of overwhelming charisma that is able to fully convince voters.”The floods have killed 170 people, with more than 150 still unaccounted for, the police said on Wednesday. The number of missing is significantly lower than figures announced last week, when downed communication networks and blocked roads rendered many people unreachable.In the latest polling, which was carried out from Tuesday to Sunday, Mr. Laschet’s leading Christian Democratic Union dipped below 30 percent support, to 28 percent, while their main rivals, the second-place Greens, held steady at 19 percent.When asked if they could vote for an individual candidate (Germans cast votes only for parties), which one would receive their endorsement, only 23 percent said Mr. Laschet, according to the survey by the Forsa polling group.On Saturday, Mr. Laschet came under fierce public criticism after he was caught on camera chatting and laughing with colleagues, while President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was giving a solemn statement to reporters after the two had met with flood victims in the city of Erftstadt.Mr. Laschet, 60, who is the governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, was forced to apologize. On Tuesday he visited another devastated town alongside the chancellor.Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party’s chancellor candidate, Armin Laschet, behind her, visiting the flood-ravaged city of Iversheim on Tuesday. The town is in North Rhine-Westphalia, where Mr. Laschet is governor.Pool photo by Wolfgang RattayIf there is one thing Ms. Merkel has learned in her four terms in offices, it is how to be calm in the face of calamity — whether pledging to keep Germans’ savings safe in 2008, or wading through the flooded streets of eastern Germany five years later.Standing beside her Tuesday after meeting with volunteers in the city of Bad Münstereifel, Mr. Laschet tried a more statesmanlike tone. He offered an open ear and a supportive clap on the shoulder to people cleaning the mud and debris from their homes, as well as condolences for victims.“Nothing we can do can bring them back, and we barely have words for the suffering of those who survived,” he said, pledging to double his state’s contribution to emergency aid. “So that we, too, are doing our part,” he said.Ms. Merkel’s government on Wednesday approved a 200 million euro, or $235 million, package of emergency assistance to be paid out to flood victims immediately. That figure will be matched by the affected states.An estimated 6 billion euros, $7 billion, will be needed to repair the infrastructure that has been damaged, including roads, bridges, homes and buildings.Much of that money will flow through the finance ministry run by Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, who is also running for chancellor. Getting financial aid to people quickly could give him an edge, but so far he has failed to translate his position into a political advantage, experts say.“If we need more money, then we will make it available,” Mr. Scholz, 63, told reporters in Berlin, “We will do what we have to do to help everyone who needs it.”Markus Söder, Bavaria’s governor, right, and Olaf Scholz, the country’s finance minister and another chancellor candidate, visited the municipality of Schoenau am Koenigssee on Sunday.Lukas Barth-Tuttas/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Scholz visited stricken communities in Rhineland-Palatinate last week and then headed to the southern state of Bavaria just days after the heavy rains stopped there. But he has failed to connect with voters in a meaningful way, experts said. His party gained only 1 percentage point in the most recent survey and Mr. Scholz’s personal popularity remained unchanged.“He is a candidate that people just can’t really warm up to,” Mr. Jun said.But if any party should be in a position to find a political advantage in the events of the past week, it should be the Greens, who have been pushing for Germany to speed up its transformation to a green economy for decades.Especially popular among the country’s younger voters, climate issues have helped the Greens to replace the Social Democrats as the second most popular party in recent years. But after their candidate for chancellor, Ms. Baerbock, 40, stumbled over accusations of plagiarism in a recently published book and inaccuracies on her résumé, even a deadly weather catastrophe appeared unable to lift the party’s standing significantly.The Greens remained firmly in second place, according to the most recent poll, with 19 percent support — enough to create a majority if they were to agree to join forces in a government led by Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, in a tie-up that many observers believe would be the most likely coalition.Making Ms. Baerbock’s position more difficult is the fact that she currently does not hold a political office that would give her the opportunity to make a public visit to the stricken regions, as do both of her competitors. Last week she decided against taking members of the news media with her when she visited communities in Rhineland-Palatinate afflicted by the severe weather.In several interviews afterward, Ms. Baerbock called for Germany to move more quickly on its exit from coal, currently planned for 2030, and to increase spending to better prepare communities for the dangers posed by extreme weather. She also laid out a three-point plan that included adapting to the changing climate, amid attempts to halt it.“This is not an either-or between climate precaution, climate adaptation and climate protection, but a triad that is actually decided in the same way in all the climate protection treaties worldwide,” Ms. Baerbock told ARD public television.In the wake of last week’s flooding, the Greens are no longer the only party making such calls, but as the images of devastation retreat from the headlines, her party remains in the strongest position to gain voters from the renewed focus on the threat posed by changes to the world’s climate.“I assume that the weather events will indeed raise the issue of climate change to the top of the electorate’s agenda, which will help the Greens,” said Ursula Münch, director of the Academy of Political Education in Tützing, but added that it would not be enough of an advantage to close the gap with the leading conservatives. “It still won’t help Ms. Baerbock into the chancellor’s office.” More

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      Pedro Castillo es declarado ganador en las elecciones presidenciales de Perú

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      El líder de izquierda, quien ha prometido renovar el sistema político y económico para abordar la pobreza y la desigualdad, derrotó por muy pocos votos a la hija de un expresidente encarcelado.LIMA, Perú — Sus padres eran campesinos que no aprendieron a leer. Cuando era niño, y antes de convertirse en maestro, caminaba durante horas para asistir a la escuela. Después, hace dos meses, irrumpió en la escena política de Perú como un candidato antisistema con un cautivador llamado a las urnas: “No más pobres en un país rico”.Y el lunes en la noche, casi un mes después de la segunda vuelta de las elecciones presidenciales, los funcionarios declararon a Pedro Castillo, de 51 años, como el próximo presidente de Perú. Con una votación muy cerrada, Castillo venció a Keiko Fujimori, la hija de un expresidente de derecha que se ha convertido en un símbolo prominente de la élite peruana.La victoria de Castillo, pese a haberse producido por un margen muy estrecho, es el repudio más claro a las clases dirigentes del país en 30 años. También fue la tercera derrota consecutiva para Fujimori.Castillo, un socialista, se convertirá en el primer presidente de izquierda de Perú en más de una generación, y el primero en haber vivido la mayor parte de su vida como campesino en una región andina pobre.En su discurso de victoria, desde un balcón en el centro de Lima mientras sus simpatizantes gritaban “sí se pudo”, Castillo prometió trabajar para todos los peruanos.“Llamo a la más amplia unidad del pueblo peruano, llamo a la unidad”, dijo Castillo. “Compartiremos juntos esta lucha, este emprendimiento y este esfuerzo para hacer un Perú más justo, más soberano, más digno, más humano y más unido”.Dirigiéndose a Keiko Fujimori, agregó: “No pongamos más barreras en esta travesía y no pongamos más obstáculos para sacar adelante este país”.El anuncio de su victoria se produjo después de un mes de esfuerzos por parte de Fujimori para anular unos 200.000 votos en áreas donde Castillo ganó de manera abrumadora, una medida que habría privado de sus derechos a muchos peruanos pobres e indígenas.Poco antes de que las autoridades declararan a Castillo como el presidente electo, Fujimori dijo en un discurso televisado el lunes por la noche que reconocería los resultados por respeto a la ley, pero calificó la proclamación de su contrincante como “ilegítima” e insistió de nuevo en que el partido de Castillo le había robado miles de votos.Hizo un llamado a sus simpatizantes para entrar en “una nueva etapa” en la que se mantendrán políticamente activos porque “el comunismo no llega al poder para soltarlo. Es por eso que quieren imponernos ahora una nueva Constitución”. Y añadió: “Me siento en la obligación de dejar claro que no podemos caer en ningún tipo de violencia. Tenemos derecho a movilizarnos, pero de manera pacífica”.Keiko Fujimori mientras subía al escenario poco antes de pronunciar su discurso televisado, el lunes por la noche.Sebastian Castaneda/ReutersFujimori acusó a los partidarios de Castillo de alterar las actas en todo el país. Pero en las semanas que siguieron a la votación, nadie se presentó para corroborar su afirmación central: que las identidades de cientos de trabajadores electorales habían sido robadas y sus firmas fueron falsificadas.La disputa llevó a miles de simpatizantes de los dos candidatos a las calles de Lima en un duelo de protestas cerca de la sede de la junta electoral. Muchos de los partidarios de Castillo de las regiones rurales pasaron semanas acampando para esperar su proclamación oficial como ganador.Al final, las autoridades electorales rechazaron todas las solicitudes del partido de Fujimori que exigía descontar las boletas de un recuento oficial que ubicaba a Castillo con una ventaja de 40.000 votos.“El voto del ciudadano que está en La Molina, en Miraflores, en San Isidro, tiene el mismo peso ciudadano y cívico que el pobre que está en el último rincón del país”, dijo Castillo a una multitud de simpatizantes el mes pasado, refiriéndose a distritos exclusivos de Lima.“Nunca se burlen de un hombre cuando viene con sombrero. No se burlen más de un campechano, no se burlen más de un obrero, de un rondero, de un maestro. Porque así se hace patria”, dijo Castillo. “Hoy tenemos que enseñar a la juventud, a la niñez, que todos somos iguales ante la ley”.Muchos simpatizantes de Castillo dijeron que votaron por él con la esperanza de que renueve el sistema económico neoliberal impuesto por el padre de Keiko Fujimori, Alberto Fujimori, un sistema que, según dijeron, condujo a avances iniciales en el pasado pero que al final fracasó en ayudar a millones de las personas más empobrecidas del país.Esa dolorosa disparidad se hizo más evidente cuando llegó el coronavirus. El virus ha devastado a Perú, que tiene la cifra per cápita de fallecimientos por COVID-19 más alta del mundo. Casi el 10 por ciento de su población ha caído en la pobreza en el último año.“Treinta años en los que los grandes capitalistas se han enriquecido más y en Perú hay más pobreza”, dijo Manuel Santiago, el dueño de 64 años de una tienda que votó por Castillo. “Estamos cansados de lo mismo”.Pero Castillo enfrentará enormes desafíos.Castillo mientras hablaba con sus simpatizantes desde su sede de campaña en Lima, el mes pasado.Harold Mejía/EPA vía ShutterstockEn los últimos años, la corrupción y las venganzas políticas han convulsionado al país que en un periodo de cinco años tuvo cuatro presidentes y dos congresos.Quizás de manera más significativa, Castillo, quien nunca ha ocupado un cargo público, carece de la experiencia política y del respaldo generalizado y organizado que tuvieron otros líderes de izquierda que llegaron al poder en Sudamérica.“Él como figura política representa problemas que abonarían a la inestabilidad”, dijo el politólogo peruano Mauricio Zavaleta.En la Bolivia de 2005, Evo Morales, quien se convirtió en el primer presidente indígena del país, “ganó en la primera vuelta con más del 50 por ciento del voto”, dijo Zavaleta. En Venezuela en 1998, Hugo Chávez “fue un vendaval electoral”. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, en Brasil en 2002, y Rafael Correa, en Ecuador en 2006, fueron figuras de la política tradicional que la primera vez que contendieron a la presidencia fueron elegidos con márgenes grandes.Castillo “no es de esos fenómenos”, dijo Zavaleta.Y agregó que es poco probable que Castillo cuente con el apoyo del Congreso, el ejército, los medios de comunicación, la élite o un movimiento político amplio. “Simplemente no tiene el músculo para llevar a cabo las reformas ambiciosas que ha propuesto”.Castillo había prometido reevaluar el sistema político y económico para reducir la pobreza y la desigualdad, y remplazar la Constitución vigente por una que incrementara el papel del Estado en la economía. Hizo campaña con un sombrero de campesino y, a veces, apareció a caballo o bailando con los votantes.“Es alguien que no tiene que ir a visitar un pueblo para estar en contacto con la gente y conocer sus problemas, porque viene de un pueblo”, dijo Cynthia Cienfuegos, especialista en asuntos políticos de Transparencia, una organización de la sociedad civil.“Su triunfo refleja una demanda de cambio que se ha pospuesto durante mucho tiempo”, dijo.Castillo creció en la zona montañosa del norte de Perú y, durante su juventud, limpiaba habitaciones de hotel en Lima. Después de asistir a la universidad en una ciudad en el norte del país decidió regresar a la misma provincia de las tierras altas donde creció para trabajar en una escuela sin agua corriente ni alcantarillado.Una simpatizante de Pedro Castillo en Lima, el mes pasado.Paolo Aguilar/EPA vía ShutterstockDespués de convertirse en representante sindical de los maestros, Castillo ayudó a liderar una huelga de 2017 en la que los educadores pidieron mejores salarios.Posteriormente, desapareció en buena medida del ojo público hasta este año cuando se unió a un partido marxista-leninista para postularse a la presidencia y emergió de manera sorpresiva como el líder —aunque por un estrecho margen— de la primera ronda de la contienda electoral.Durante la campaña viajó por todo el país para escuchar a los votantes, y a menudo cargaba un lápiz enorme bajo el brazo para recordarles su promesa de garantizar la igualdad de acceso a una educación de calidad.Difícilmente podría ser más distinto de Keiko Fujimori, quien tuvo una crianza privilegiada y se convirtió en la primera dama del país a los 19 años, luego de que sus padres se separaron.El padre de Keiko Fujimori, de manera similar a Castillo, llegó a la presidencia como una figura al margen de la política tradicional en uno de los momentos más complejos de la historia del país. Si bien al principio se le atribuyó a Fujimori el apaciguamiento de las violentas insurgencias de izquierda en la década de 1990, ahora muchos lo consideran como un autócrata corrupto.En una serie de juicios, Fujimori fue condenado por dirigir las actividades de un escuadrón de la muerte, por delitos de corrupción y otros crímenes. Está encarcelado desde 2007, con una breve interrupción.Su hija también se enfrenta a un proceso judicial, acusada de dirigir una organización criminal que traficaba con donaciones ilegales durante una campaña presidencial anterior. Ella niega los cargos. Si la encuentran culpable, podría ser condenada a 30 años de prisión.Castillo, quien asumirá el cargo el 28 de julio en el bicentenario de la Independencia de Perú de España, se ha presentado como un nuevo comienzo para un país con una larga historia de amiguismo y corrupción.Julie Turkewitz es jefa del buró de los Andes, que abarca Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Perú, Surinam y Guyana. Antes de mudarse a América del Sur, fue corresponsal de temas nacionales y cubrió el oeste de Estados Unidos. @julieturkewitz More

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      Pedro Castillo, Leftist Political Outsider, Wins Peru Presidency

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      Mr. Castillo, who has vowed to overhaul the political and economic system to address poverty and inequality, narrowly defeated the daughter of a jailed former president.LIMA, Peru — His parents were peasant farmers who never learned to read. As a child, he walked hours to school, before becoming a teacher himself. Then, two months ago, he burst onto Peru’s national political scene as an anti-establishment candidate with a captivating call to the ballot box: “No more poor people in a rich country.”And on Monday night, nearly a month since the second round of the presidential election, officials declared Pedro Castillo, 51, the next president of Peru. In a very close vote, he defeated Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a right-wing former president and herself a towering symbol of the Peruvian elite.Mr. Castillo’s victory, however narrow the margin, is the clearest repudiation of the country’s establishment in 30 years. It was also the third straight loss for Ms. Fujimori.Mr. Castillo, a socialist, will become Peru’s first left-wing president in more than a generation, and its first to have lived most of his life as a “campesino” — or peasant — in a poor Andean region.In a victory speech from a balcony in downtown Lima, with his supporters chanting “yes, we could” in the streets below, Mr. Castillo promised to work for all Peruvians.“I call for the broadest unity of the Peruvian people,” Mr. Castillo said. “Together we’ll share this struggle and this effort to make a more just, dignified and united Peru.”Addressing Ms. Fujimori, he added “Let’s not add more obstacles to moving this country forward.” The announcement of his victory came after a more than monthlong effort by Ms. Fujimori to have about 200,000 votes tossed out in areas where Mr. Castillo won by a landslide, an action that would have disenfranchised many poor and Indigenous Peruvians.Shortly before authorities declared Mr. Castillo president-elect, Ms. Fujimori said in a televised speech Monday evening that she would acknowledge the results out of respect for the law, but called his pending proclamation as president-elect “illegitimate” and insisted again that his party had stolen thousands of votes from her.She called on her supporters to enter into “a new phase” in which they remained politically active to “defend the Constitution and not let communism destroy it to take power definitively.” She added: “We have the right to mobilize as we have been doing and we should continue to do — but peacefully, and within the law.”Keiko Fujimori climbing onstage shortly before making her televised address on Monday evening.Sebastian Castaneda/ReutersMs. Fujimori accused Mr. Castillo’s supporters of tampering with tally sheets across the country. But in the weeks that followed the vote, no one came forward to corroborate her central claim: that the identities of hundreds of poll workers had been stolen and their signatures falsified. The dispute brought thousands of the two candidates’ supporters to the streets of Lima in dueling protests since the election. Many of Mr. Castillo’s supporters from rural regions spent weeks camping out to await the official proclamation that he had won.In the end, the election authorities dismissed all requests by Ms. Fujimori’s party to discount ballots from an official tally that put Mr. Castillo 44,163 votes ahead, with a total of 8,836,280 votes to Ms. Fujimori’s 8,792,117.“Votes from the highest mountain and farthest corner of the country are worth the same as votes from San Isidro and Miraflores,” Mr. Castillo told throngs of supporters last month, referring to two upscale districts in Lima.“No more making fun of workers, peasant leaders or teachers,” Mr. Castillo said. “Today we must teach the youth, the children, that we are all equal before the law.”Many of Mr. Castillo’s supporters said they had voted for him in the hope that he would reform the neoliberal economic system put in place by Ms. Fujimori’s father, Alberto Fujimori. That system, they said, delivered steady economic growth and tamed inflation, but ultimately failed to help millions of poor people.The painful disparity became more glaring still when the coronavirus struck. The virus has ravaged Peru, which has the highest documented per capita Covid-19 death toll in the world. Nearly 10 percent of its population has been pushed into poverty in the last year.“Thirty years of the big businessmen getting richer — and in Peru we have more poverty,” said Manuel Santiago, 64, a shop owner who voted for Mr. Castillo. “We’re tired of the same thing.”But Mr. Castillo now faces enormous challenges.Mr. Castillo speaking to supporters from his campaign headquarters in Lima last month.Harold Mejia/EPA, via ShutterstockCorruption and political vendettas have convulsed the nation in recent years, and the country has cycled through four presidents and two congresses in the past five years.Perhaps most critically, Mr. Castillo, who has never held office, lacks the political experience and popularity that buoyed other left-wing leaders who took power in South America.“As a political figure, he has a lot of problems that lead to instability,” said Mauricio Zavaleta, a Peruvian political scientist.In Bolivia in 2005, Evo Morales, who became the country’s first Indigenous president, won in the first round with more than 50 percent of the vote, he pointed out. In Venezuela in 1998, Hugo Chávez “was an electoral storm.” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in Brazil in 2002, and Rafael Correa, in Ecuador in 2006, were established figures first elected president by wide margins.“Castillo is not part of those phenomena,” Mr. Zavaleta said.Moreover, he said, Mr. Castillo is unlikely to have the support of Congress, the military, the media, the elite or a large political movement. “He simply doesn’t have the muscle to carry out the ambitious reforms he’s proposed,” Mr. Zavaleta said.Mr. Castillo has promised to overhaul the political and economic system to address poverty and inequality, and to replace the current Constitution with one that would increase the state’s role in the economy. He campaigned wearing a traditional farmer’s hat, and sometimes appeared on horseback, or dancing with voters.“He’s someone who doesn’t have to go visit a village to be in touch with people and get to know their problems, because he comes from a village,” said Cynthia Cienfuegos, a political affairs specialist with the Peruvian civil society group Transparencia.“His triumph reflects a demand for change that’s been postponed for a long time,” she said.Mr. Castillo grew up in Peru’s northern highlands, and as a young man, he cleaned hotel rooms in Lima. After attending university at a city in northern Peru, he chose to move back to the same highland province where he grew up to run a school without running water or a sewage system. A supporter of Pedro Castillo in Lima last month.Paolo Aguilar/EPA, via ShutterstockAfter becoming a union activist for schoolteachers, Mr. Castillo helped organize a 2017 strike to push for better salaries.Then he largely disappeared from public view — until this year, when he joined with a Marxist-Leninist party to launch a bid for the presidency and emerged as the surprise leader, if by a narrow margin, in the first round of the race.As a candidate, Mr. Castillo traveled the country widely to hear from voters, often carrying a giant pencil under his arm to remind them of his promise to ensure equal access to a quality education.He could hardly be more different from Ms. Fujimori, who grew up in privilege, becoming Peru’s first lady at age 19, after her parents had separated.Like Mr. Castillo, her father swept into office as an outsider at one of the most difficult points in the country’s history. While Mr. Fujimori was initially credited with beating back violent leftist insurgencies in the 1990s, he is now scorned by many as having been a corrupt autocrat.Mr. Fujimori was convicted in a series of trials on corruption and other charges, including directing the activities of a death squad. He has been in prison, with a brief interruption, since 2007.His daughter, too, now faces prosecution, accused of running a criminal organization that trafficked in illegal campaign donations during a past presidential bid. She denies the charges. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to as long as 30 years in prison.Mr. Castillo, who will take office on July 28, the 200th anniversary of Peru’s independence from Spain, has portrayed himself as a clean start for a country with a long history of cronyism and corruption.“Let’s end this bicentennial, which has had a lot of problems along the way, and open the door so the next bicentennial is full of hope, with a future and a vision for a country in which we all enjoy and eat from the bread of the country,” Mr. Castillo told a plaza full of supporters last month. “Let’s take back Peru for Peruvians.” More

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      US Backed Haiti's Jovenel Moïse Even as Democracy Eroded

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      Washington dismissed warnings that democracy was unraveling under President Jovenel Moïse, leaving a gaping leadership void after his assassination.As protesters hurled rocks outside Haiti’s national palace and set fires on the streets to demand President Jovenel Moïse’s resignation, President Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago in 2019, posing cheerfully with him in one of the club’s ornate entryways.After members of Congress warned that Mr. Moïse’s “anti-democratic abuses” reminded them of the run-up to the dictatorship that terrorized Haiti in decades past, the Biden administration publicly threw its weight behind Mr. Moïse’s claim on power.And when American officials urged the Biden administration to change course, alarmed that Haiti’s democratic institutions were being stripped away, they say their pleas went unheeded — and sometimes never earned a response at all.Through Mr. Moïse’s time in office, the United States backed his increasingly autocratic rule, viewing it as the easiest way of maintaining stability in a troubled country that barely figured into the priorities of successive administrations in Washington, current and former officials say.Even as Haiti spiraled into violence and political upheaval, they say, few in the Trump administration took seriously Mr. Moïse’s repeated warnings that he faced plots against his life. And as warnings of his authoritarianism intensified, the Biden administration kept up its public support for Mr. Moïse’s claim to power, even after Haiti’s Parliament emptied out in the absence of elections and Mr. Moïse ruled by decree.President Donald Trump welcomed Mr. Moïse and other Caribbean leaders to his Mar-a-Lago resort in March 2019.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Moïse was assassinated this month, it left a gaping leadership void that set off a scramble for power with the few elected officials remaining. The United States, which has held enormous sway in Haiti since invading the country more than 100 years ago, was suddenly urged to send in troops and help fix the mess.But in interviews with more than a dozen current and former officials, a common refrain emerged: Washington bore part of the blame, after brushing off or paying little attention to clear warnings that Haiti was lurching toward mayhem, and possibly making things worse by publicly supporting Mr. Moïse.“It was predictable that something would happen,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont. “The message that we send by standing alongside these people is that we think they are legitimate representatives of the Haitian people. They’re not.”Critics say the American approach to Mr. Moïse followed a playbook the United States has used around the world for decades, often with major consequences for democracy and human rights: reflexively siding with or tolerating leaders accused of authoritarian rule because they advance American interests, or because officials fear instability in their absence.Mr. Moïse’s grip on power tightened notably under Mr. Trump, who spoke admiringly of a range of foreign autocrats. Mr. Trump was also bent on keeping Haitian migrants out of the United States (they “all have AIDS,” American officials recounted him saying). To the extent that Trump officials focused on Haitian politics at all, officials say, it was mainly to enlist the country in Mr. Trump’s campaign to oust his nemesis in the region: Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro.President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in Caracas in 2018.Miraflores Palace, via ReutersThe Biden administration arrived in January consumed by the pandemic and a surge of migrants at the border with Mexico, leaving little bandwidth for the tumult convulsing Haiti, officials say. It publicly continued the Trump administration policy that Mr. Moïse was the legitimate leader, infuriating some members of Congress with a stance that one senior Biden official now calls a mistake.“Moïse is pursuing an increasingly authoritarian course of action,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, now the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a joint statement with two other Democrats in late December, warning of a repeat of the “anti-democratic abuses the Haitian people have endured” in the past.“We will not stand idly by while Haiti devolves into chaos,” they said.In a February letter to Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, they and other lawmakers called on the United States to “unambiguously reject” the push by Mr. Moïse, who had already ruled by decree for a year, to stay in power. They urged the Biden administration to push for “a legitimate transitional government” to help Haitians determine their own future and emerge from “a cascade of economic, public health, and political crises.”But Mr. Biden’s top adviser on Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, said that at the time, the administration did not want to appear to be dictating how the turmoil should be resolved.Rep. Gregory Meeks during a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs after testimony from Secretary of State Antony Blinken in March.Pool photo by Ken Cedeno“Tipping our finger on the scale in that way could send a country that was already in a very unstable situation into crisis,” Mr. Gonzalez said.Past American political and military interventions into Haiti have done little to solve the country’s problems, and have sometimes created or aggravated them. “The solution to Haiti’s problems are not in Washington; they are in Port-au-Prince,” Haiti’s capital, Mr. Gonzalez said, so the Biden administration called for elections to take place before Mr. Moïse left office.“The calculus we made was the best decision was to focus on elections to try to use that as a way to push for greater freedom,” he added.In reality, critics say, the Biden administration was already tipping the scales by publicly supporting Mr. Moïse’s contention that he had another year in office, enabling him to preside over the drafting of a new Constitution that could significantly enhance the president’s powers.Mr. Moïse was certainly not the first leader accused of autocracy to enjoy Washington’s backing; he was not even the first in Haiti. Two generations of brutal Haitian dictators from the Duvalier family were among a long list of strongmen around the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere who received resolute American support, particularly as allies against Communism.“He may be a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supposedly said of one of them (though accounts vary about whether the president was referring to American-backed dictators in Nicaragua or in the Dominican Republic).Supporters of the former dictators held photos of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier during a court hearing in Port-au-Prince in 2013.Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated PressThe debate has continued in both Democratic and Republican administrations about how hard to push authoritarian allies for democratic reforms. Once the threat of Communist expansionism faded, American administrations worried more about instability creating crises for the United States, like a surge of migrants streaming toward its shores or the rise of violent extremism.Elliott Abrams, a foreign policy official in multiple Republican administrations and a special representative on Venezuela in the Trump administration, argued that Washington should support democracy when possible but sometimes has few alternatives to working with strongmen.“In Haiti, no one has developed a good formula for building a stable democracy, and the U.S. has been trying since the Marines landed there a hundred years ago,” he said.Early on in the Trump administration, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former co-star on “The Apprentice” and new adviser to the president, began pressing Mr. Trump and his aides to engage with Haiti and support Mr. Moïse.Officials were wary. Haiti supported Venezuela at two meetings of the Organization of American States in 2017, turning Mr. Moïse into what one official called an enemy of the United States and scuttling her efforts to arrange a state visit by him..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I believed that a state visit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Moïse would have been a strong show of support for Haiti from the U.S. during a time of civil unrest,” Ms. Newman said, adding in a separate statement: “Jovenel was a dear friend and he was committed to being a change agent for his beloved Haiti.”Mr. Moïse just after being sworn in as president of Haiti in February 2017.Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated PressThe episode underscored the degree to which some top Trump officials viewed Haiti as just a piece of its strategy toward Venezuela. And in the eyes of some lawmakers, Mr. Trump was not going to feel empathy for Haiti’s problems.“We are all aware of his perception of the nation — in that he spoke about ‘s-hole’ countries,” said Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus.By 2019, nationwide protests grew violent in Haiti as demonstrators demanding Mr. Moïse’s ouster clashed with the police, burned cars and marched on the national palace. Gang activity became increasingly brazen, and kidnappings spiked to an average of four a week.Mr. Trump and his aides showed few public signs of concern. In early 2019, Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Moïse at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of a meeting with Caribbean leaders who had lined up against Mr. Maduro of Venezuela.By the next year, Mr. Moïse’s anti-democratic practices grew serious enough to command the attention of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who publicly warned Mr. Moïse against delaying parliamentary elections.A Haitian police officer aimed his weapon at protesters who were calling for the resignation of President Moïse in Port-au-Prince in 2019.Rebecca Blackwell/Associated PressBut beyond a few statements, the Trump administration did little to force the issue, officials said.“No one did anything to address the underlying weaknesses, institutionally and democratically,” over the past several years, said Peter Mulrean, who served as the American ambassador to Haiti from 2015 to 2017. “And so we shouldn’t really be surprised that the lid blew off again.”After Mr. Biden’s election, lawmakers and officials in Washington took up the issue with new urgency. Mr. Moïse, who came to office after a vote marred by low turnout and allegations of fraud, had been ruling by decree for a year because the terms of nearly all members of Parliament had expired and elections to replace them were never held.Mr. Moïse won a five-year term in 2016, but did not take office until 2017 amid the allegations of fraud, so he argued that he should stay until 2022. Democracy advocates in Haiti and abroad cried foul, but on Feb. 5, the Biden administration weighed in, supporting Mr. Moïses’s claim to power for another year. And it was not alone: International bodies like the Organization of American States took the same position.Port-au-Prince at dusk last week.Federico Rios for The New York TimesMr. Blinken later criticized Mr. Moïse’s rule by decree and called for “genuinely free and fair elections this year.” But the Biden administration never withdrew its public position upholding Mr. Moïse’s claim to remain in office, a decision that Rep. Andy Levin, a co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus, blamed for helping him retain his grip on the country and continue its anti-democratic slide.“It’s a tragedy that he was able to stay there,” Mr. Levin said.The Biden administration has rebuffed calls by Haitian officials to send troops to help stabilize the country and prevent even more upheaval. A group of American officials recently visited to meet with various factions now vying for power and urge them “to come together, in a broad political dialogue,” Mr. Gonzalez said.The Americans had planned to visit the port to assess its security needs, but decided against it after learning that gangs were occupying the area, blocking the delivery of fuel.“How can we have elections in Haiti when gang members control 60 percent of the territory?” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network. “It will be gangs that organize the elections.”David Kirkpatrick contributed reporting. More

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      Germany Floods: Climate Change Moves to Center of Campaign as Toll Mounts

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      With more than 160 dead across the region, the receding waters revealed extensive damage as well as deep political divides around how far and fast Germans should go to stem carbon use.BERLIN — With the death toll surpassing 160 and rescue efforts intensifying, the once-in-a-millennium floods that ravaged Germany and much of Western Europe this week had by Saturday thrust the issue of climate change to the center of Germany’s politics and its campaign for pivotal elections this fall that will replace Chancellor Angela Merkel after 16 years in power.The receding floodwaters revealed not only extensive damage — homes wiped away, businesses lost, electricity and sewer systems knocked out and hundreds of vehicles destroyed — but also bitter political divides on climate policy in a week when the European Union rolled out the globe’s most ambitious proposals to cut carbon emissions in the next decade.Though German authorities said it was still too early to place a figure on the damage, its sheer scale shifted the debate from calls not to politicize the catastrophe to the realization that the policies behind it must now play a central role in deciding who will take over leadership after the election on Sept. 26.“The Weather is Political,” Germany’s ARD public television said in its lead editorial on the Friday evening news.“For a long time, chatting about the weather was synonymous with triviality. That’s over now,” it said. “The weather is highly political; there is hardly any nonpolitical weather anymore, especially not during an election campaign.”Residents were clearing mud and unusable furniture from houses on Saturday in Bad Neuenahr, Germany.Thomas Frey/dpa, via Getty ImagesThe death toll in Germany climbed to at least 143 on Saturday, while the toll across the border in Belgium stood at 24, the authorities there said.On Saturday, rescue workers were still sifting through ruin across the region. The German news media was filled with images of homes still submerged in muddy brown water up to the second floor and of bridges reduced to crumbled heaps of stone or tangled metal pylons.Tales of tragedy emerged, as well, perhaps none more poignant than in Sinzig, where neighbors recalled hearing the screams from disabled residents trapped in the waters that gushed into the lower floors of the residential home where a lone night watchman was powerless to save them. The event vividly raised tough questions about whether the authorities had been prepared and why flood warnings were not acted on more aggressively by local officials.More than 90 of those who died in Germany had lived in towns and villages in the valley of the Ahr River in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, the police said. Local authorities set up a hotline for citizens in the hard-hit area needing support, whether material or psychological, and issued a call for equipment to help provide basic infrastructure and even clean drinking water.The village of Sinzig, Germany, on Friday.Adam Berry/Getty ImagesMs. Merkel, who turned 67 on Saturday and has said she will leave politics after the election, was expected to visit the district on Sunday to survey the scope of the destruction, her office said. She spoke with the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate by video link on Friday, hours after touching down in Berlin from her trip to Washington.While in the United States, the chancellor and President Biden signed a pact that included a commitment to “taking urgent action to address the climate crisis,” which is to include stronger collaboration “on the policies and energy technologies needed to accelerate the global net-zero transition.”The European Union’s ambitious blueprint, announced Wednesday, is part of plans to make the 27-country bloc carbon-neutral by 2050, and will arguably affect no European country more than Germany, the continent’s largest economy and its industrial powerhouse.Coming a day later, the extensive flooding, which affected Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, in addition to Germany, immediately drew parallels between the calamity and the effects of climate change from environmental activists and wide range of politicians.Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Biden this week at the White House.Doug Mills/The New York TimesArmin Laschet, 60, the conservative governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, who is looking to succeed Ms. Merkel, has lauded his regional government for passing legislation on climate change, but critics point to the open-pit soft coal mines in the state that are still threatening local villages and his repeated emphasis on the importance of Germany remaining an industrial powerhouse.When pressed on Thursday during an interview on WDR local public television over whether the floods would be a catalyst for him to take a stance toward climate change, Mr. Laschet snapped at the moderator.“I am a governor, not an activist,” he said. “Just because we have had a day like this does not mean we change our politics.”But in 2011, Ms. Merkel did just that.After seeing the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, Japan, melt down after a tsunami hit, the chancellor backtracked on her government’s decision to extend the country’s dependence on nuclear power until 2033. The disaster led her to reset the target shutdown date to 2022, while increasing the amount of energy powered by renewable sources.Floods have a history of influencing political campaigns in Germany. In 2002, pictures of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder wading in rubber boots through streets awash in the muddy waters of the swollen Elbe, while his conservative rival remained on vacation, are credited with helping him win the election that year.Armin Laschet, right, the conservative governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, second right, visiting the Erftstadt fire department on Saturday.Pool photo by Marius BeckerPerhaps wary of that lesson, Annalena Baerbock, 40, who is the Greens party candidate for chancellor and Mr. Laschet’s strongest rival, cut short her vacation to visit stricken areas in Rhineland-Palatinate on Friday.She called for immediate assistance for those affected, but also issued an appeal to better protect “residential areas and infrastructure” from extreme weather events, which she linked to the changing climate.“Climate protection is now: In all areas of climate protection, we need to step up our game and take effective climate protection measures with an immediate climate protection program,” Ms. Baerbock said.Whether the flooding will be enough to lift support for the Greens remains to be seen. After enjoying an initial surge of excitement surrounding the announcement of Ms. Baerbock’s campaign — she is the only woman running to replace the country’s first female chancellor — support for the Greens has now dipped to around 20 percent in polls.That puts the party in second place behind Mr. Laschet’s conservatives, who have been climbing to around 30 percent support, the latest surveys show.“In the next two months, there will always be extreme weather events somewhere in the world,” said Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin. “The focus is set after the catastrophe in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia. The topic will determine the election campaign.”Olaf Scholz, 63, Ms. Merkel’s finance minister who is running for the chance to replace her and return his Social Democratic Party to the chancellery, also headed on Friday to flooded regions in Rhineland-Palatinate, where he pledged swift help from the government and linked the disaster to climate change.Workers clearing debris from the streets on Saturday after flooding caused major damage in the village of Schuld.Christof Stache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I am firmly convinced that our task is stopping human-made climate change,” Mr. Scholz told ZDF public television. He praised his party’s role in passing some of Germany’s first climate laws when the Social Democrats governed with the Greens from 1998 to 2005, but called for a stronger effort to move toward a carbon-neutral economy.“What we still have to do now is get all those who have resisted right up to the end that we raise the expansion targets for renewable energies in such a way that it also works out with a CO2-neutral industry to give up this resistance,” he said.While the focus at the moment is on the role that environmental issues will play in the election campaign, questions are also being raised over whether the chancellor, who was a champion for combating climate change going back to 1995, when she presided over the United Nations’ first Climate Conference in Berlin, actually pushed her own country hard enough.Once she came into power, it proved harder to persuade her country’s powerful industrial and automobile lobbies — key supporters of her conservative party — to do their part.The result was legislation that Germany’s highest court ruled in April was not aggressive enough in its attempts to bring down emissions. It ordered the government to strengthen the law to ensure that future generations would be protected.“In recent years, we have not implemented many things in Germany that would have been necessary,” said Malu Dryer, the governor of Rhineland-Palatinate state, said in an interview with the Funke media consortium.She urged German consumers to support climate-neutral products and the country to “show more speed,” adding that climate change is no longer an abstraction. “We are experiencing it firsthand and painfully,” Ms. Dryer said.The city of Bad Münstereifel, Germany, on Friday.Ina Fassbender/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMelissa Eddy More

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      2022 Midterm Elections: Democrats See Early Edge in Senate Map

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      Early fund-raising has given Democrats cause for optimism in key states as Republicans split over how closely to align with Donald Trump’s preferences. Six months into the Biden administration, Senate Democrats are expressing a cautious optimism that the party can keep control of the chamber in the 2022 midterm elections, enjoying large fund-raising hauls in marquee races as they plot to exploit Republican retirements in key battlegrounds and a divisive series of unsettled G.O.P. primaries.Swing-state Democratic incumbents, like Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Mark Kelly of Arizona, restocked their war chests with multimillion-dollar sums ($7.2 million and $6 million, respectively), according to new financial filings this week. That gives them an early financial head start in two key states where Republicans’ disagreements over former President Donald J. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020 are threatening to distract and fracture the party.But Democratic officials are all too aware of the foreboding political history they confront: that in a president’s first midterms, the party occupying the White House typically loses seats — often in bunches. For now, Democrats hold power by only the narrowest of margins in a 50-50 split Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker to push through President Biden’s expansive agenda on the economy, the pandemic and infrastructure.The midterms are still more than 15 months away, but the ability to enact new policy throughout Mr. Biden’s first term hinges heavily on his party’s ability to hold the Senate and House.Four Senate Democratic incumbents are up for re-election in swing states next year — making them prime targets for Republican gains. But in none of those four states — New Hampshire, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia — has a dominant Republican candidate emerged to consolidate support from the party’s divergent wings. Out of office and banished from social media, Mr. Trump continues to insist on putting his imprint on the party with rallies and regular missives imposing an agenda of rewarding loyalists and exacting retribution against perceived enemies. That does not align with Senate Republican strategists who are focused singularly on retaking the majority and honing messages against the Democrats who now fully control Washington.“The only way we win these races is with top-notch candidates,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who used to work on Senate races. “Are Republicans able to recruit top-notch candidates in the Trump era?”Of the seven contests that political handicappers consider most competitive in 2022, all but one are in states that Mr. Biden carried last year.“We’re running in Biden country,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic pollster involved in Senate races. “That doesn’t make any of these races easy. But we’re running in Biden country.”The campaign filings this week provided an early financial snapshot of the state of play in the Senate battlefield, where the total costs could easily top $1 billion. Other than the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, the top fund-raiser among all senators in the last three months was Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. Mr. Scott collected $9.6 million in the months after his State of the Union response, an eye-opening sum that has stoked questions about his 2024 ambitions.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina collected $9.6 million in the months after his State of the Union response.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut critical races remain unsettled for Republicans. The party is still trying to find compelling Senate candidates in several states, with Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, considered the highest priority for recruitment, to challenge Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who raised $3.25 million in the last three months. A bevy of Republican senators have lobbied Mr. Sununu to enter the race, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, went so far as to ask activists at a conservative conference last week to “call Chris Sununu” and urge him to run.“If he does, we will win,” Mr. Scott said.Mr. Scott has similarly pursued the former attorney general of Nevada, Adam Laxalt, saying last month that he expected Mr. Laxalt to run against Senator Catherine Cortez-Masto, the Democratic incumbent.The unexpected retirements of Republican senators in Pennsylvania and North Carolina have opened seats and opportunities for Democrats in those swing states, but the path to victory is complicated. In both, Democrats must navigate competitive primaries that pit candidates who represent disparate elements of the party’s racial and ideological coalition: Black and white; moderate and progressive; urban, suburban and more rural.In Pennsylvania, the Democratic lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, has emerged as one of the strongest fund-raising newcomers, taking in $2.5 million in the quarter. Val Arkoosh, a county commissioner in a Philadelphia suburb, raised $1 million, and Malcolm Kenyatta, a state legislator seeking to become the nation’s first openly gay Black senator, raised $500,000. Representative Conor Lamb, a moderate from outside Pittsburgh, is also considering a run.In Wisconsin, a third Republican incumbent, Senator Ron Johnson, has wavered for months over whether he will seek a third term. Mr. Johnson raised only $1.2 million in the last quarter, just enough to carry on but not quite enough to dispel questions about his intentions.Whether or not Mr. Johnson runs, Wisconsin is among the top Democratic targets in 2022 because Mr. Biden carried it narrowly in 2020. Perhaps nothing has better predicted the outcome of Senate races in recent cycles than a state’s presidential preferences.Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, has emerged as one of the strongest fund-raisers among newcomers as he pursues the state’s open Senate seat.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn Florida, national Democrats have all but anointed Representative Val Demings, a Black former police chief in Orlando who was vetted by the Biden team for vice president, in a state that has repeatedly proved just out of reach.Ms. Demings raised $4.6 million in her first three weeks, topping Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican incumbent, who raised $4 million over three months. (Ms. Demings spent more than $2.2 million on digital ads raising that sum, records show.)Two other G.O.P. retirements in redder states, Ohio and Missouri, have further destabilized the Republican map, providing at least a modicum of opportunity for Democrats in Trump territory. Republicans face heated primaries in both states.In Ohio, the Republican candidates include the former party chair, Jane Timken; the former state treasurer, Josh Mandel, who has run for Senate before; the best-selling author J.D. Vance; and two business executives, Bernie Moreno and Mike Gibbons.The leading Democrat is Representative Tim Ryan, a moderate who ran briefly for president in 2020, and who entered July with $2.5 million in the bank.In Missouri, the early efforts to woo Mr. Trump have been plentiful, and that includes spending at his Florida resort.Two potential candidates have trekked to Mar-a-Lago for fund-raisers or to meet with the former president, including Representatives Billy Long and Jason Smith. Mr. Long reported spending $28,633.20 at the club, filings show; Mr. Smith, who also attended a colleague’s fund-raiser on Thursday at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster property in New Jersey, according to a person familiar with the matter, paid $4,198.59 to Mar-a-Lago.“I’m expecting someone to start flying over Bedminster with a banner at some point,” said one Republican strategist involved in Senate races, who requested anonymity because, he said half-jokingly, it could end up being one of his candidates buying the banner.Representative Val Demings of Florida is running for the Democratic nomination to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe biggest name in Missouri is Eric Greitens, the former governor who resigned after accusations of abuse by a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair. He raised less than $450,000. Among his fund-raisers is Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., and his campaign also made payments to Mar-a-Lago.Three other Republicans in the race out-raised Mr. Greitens: Representative Vicky Hartzler, Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Mark McCloskey, the man best known for waving his gun outside his St. Louis home as protesters marched last year. Some national Republican strategists are worried that if Mr. Greitens survives a crowded primary, he could prove toxic even in a heavily Republican state.Mr. Scott has pledged to remain neutral in party primaries, but Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has long preferred promoting candidates he believes can win in November.“The only thing I care about is electability,” Mr. McConnell told Politico this year. With Mr. Scott on the sidelines, a McConnell-aligned super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, is expected to do most of the intervening.Mr. Trump, who is often at cross-purposes with Mr. McConnell, has appeared especially engaged in the Arizona and Georgia races, largely because of his own narrow losses there. He has publicly urged the former football player Herschel Walker to run in Georgia — Mr. Walker has not committed to a campaign — and attacked the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, even after Mr. Ducey has said he is not running for Senate. Some Republican operatives continue to hope to tug Mr. Ducey into the race.Mr. Trump delivered one early Senate endorsement in North Carolina, to Representative Ted Budd, who raised $953,000, which is less than the $1.25 million that former Gov. Pat McCrory pulled in. Some Republicans see Mr. McCrory as the stronger potential nominee because of his track record of winning statewide. In Alaska, Kelly Tshibaka is running as a pro-Trump primary challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted to convict Mr. Trump after his second impeachment. Ms. Murkowski, who has not formally said if she is running again, raised more than double Ms. Tshibaka in the most recent quarter, $1.15 million to $544,000.In Alabama, Mr. Trump gave another early endorsement to Representative Mo Brooks and recently attacked one of his rivals, Katie Britt, who is the former chief of staff of the retiring incumbent, Senator Richard Shelby. Ms. Britt entered the race in June, but she out-raised Mr. Brooks, $2.2 million to $824,000. A third candidate, Lynda Blanchard, is a former Trump-appointed ambassador who has lent her campaign $5 million.Mr. Brooks won over Mr. Trump for being among the earliest and most vocal objectors to Mr. Biden’s victory. The photo splashed across Mr. Brooks’s Senate website is him speaking at the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. In his recent filing, one of Mr. Brooks’s larger expenses was a $25,799 tab at Mar-a-Lago.“The map tilts slightly toward the Democrats just based on the seats that are up,” said Brian Walsh, a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate races. “But the political environment is the big unknown, and the landscape can shift quickly.”Rachel Shorey More