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      France’s Conservative Leader Calls for Alliance With Far Right

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      The announcement by the head of the Republicans was a historic break with his party’s policy. Top politicians on the right have called for him to step down, bringing the party to the brink of implosion.The head of France’s mainstream conservative party on Tuesday called for an alliance with the far right in upcoming snap elections, throwing his party into deep turmoil as the shock waves from President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve the lower house of Parliament continue to course through French politics.The announcement, by Éric Ciotti, the head of the Republicans, was a historic break with the party’s longstanding line and its ties to former President Charles de Gaulle. Mr. Ciotti’s call was immediately met with a chorus of angry disapproval from within his own ranks.No leader of any mainstream French political party has ever previously embraced a possible alliance with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, or its predecessor, the National Front. But across Europe, barriers to what was long regarded as the extreme nationalist right have been falling as those parties adjust their positions and as a broader consensus forms that large-scale illegal immigration across a porous European Union border must be curbed.The elections for the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of France’s Parliament, are scheduled for June 30 and July 7. Mr. Macron called them last week after his party suffered a bruising defeat in the European Parliament elections, gaining just 14.6 percent of the vote nationwide, compared with about 31.4 percent for the National Rally led by Ms. Le Pen’s protégé, Jordan Bardella. The Republicans fared even worse, with only 7.25 percent.Mr. Bardella, 28, who became the new and widely popular face of French politics during the campaign for the European Parliament elections, welcomed Mr. Ciotti’s announcement and described it as “putting the interests of the French people before those of our parties.”In an interview on TF1 television, Mr. Ciotti said on Tuesday that his party had become “too weak” to stand on its own and needed to make a deal with the National Rally to keep a sizable group of lawmakers in the lower house. The Republicans, a party that was long a dominant force in French politics under the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac, has only 61 lawmakers in the 577-seat National Assembly and could see those numbers dwindle even further.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Macron’s Early Election Call After EU Vote Is a Huge Gamble

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      The president has challenged voters to test the sincerity of their support for the far right in European elections. Were the French letting off steam, or did they really mean it?On the face of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right.After the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat on Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Mr. Macron might have done nothing, reshuffled his government, or simply altered course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.Instead, Mr. Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to gamble that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another in a few weeks.“I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Mr. Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events.”Shock coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks, said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision. “A thunderbolt,” thundered Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page.For Le Monde, it was “a jump in the void.” Raphaël Glucksmann, who guided the revived center-left socialists to third place among French parties in the European vote, accused Mr. Macron of “a dangerous game.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      La izquierda gana a lo grande en México. Los inversores están preocupados

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      El peso tuvo su peor semana desde la pandemia. Los inversores temen que el gobierno apruebe “cambios radicales” a la Constitución, considerados como un desmantelamiento de los controles y equilibrios democráticos.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El conteo final de votos publicado el fin de semana sugiere que el partido político de izquierda que gobierna México y sus aliados obtendrían amplias mayorías en el Congreso, lo que podría permitir a la coalición aprobar cambios radicales en la Constitución.El conteo final de votos publicado el fin de semana sugiere que el partido político de izquierda que gobierna México y sus aliados obtendrían amplias mayorías en el Congreso, lo que podría permitir a la coalición aprobar cambios radicales en la Constitución.El recuento oficial de las elecciones de la semana pasada mostró que el partido, Morena, y sus socios parecían en camino de conseguir una mayoría de dos tercios en la Cámara baja del Congreso.En el Senado, parecía que la coalición no alcanzaría la supermayoría, pero por un pequeño número de escaños, según los analistas, lo que significa que probablemente solo necesitaría el apoyo de unos pocos legisladores de la oposición para modificar la Constitución. Construir esas alianzas “es relativamente fácil” de conseguir, dijo el presidente del partido, Mario Delgado, en una entrevista.“Somos ahora una fuerza dominante”, añadió Delgado, “por decisión de la gente”.La composición final de la legislatura aún no está clara porque una parte de los escaños del Congreso mexicano se designan mediante un sistema de representación proporcional en agosto. Las impugnaciones legales también podrían afectar al reparto de escaños.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      N.Y. Lawmakers End Session Without Replacing Congestion Pricing Revenue

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      State Senate Democrats rebuked Gov. Kathy Hochul over her decision to halt a long-developed plan to charge drivers tolls to enter Manhattan’s core.Gov. Kathy Hochul defended her decision to halt congestion pricing hours after State Senate Democrats said they would leave Albany without plugging the funding gap left in its absence.In her first public appearance since announcing she would backtrack from the plan, Ms. Hochul reiterated that the time was not right to increase the burden on New York City’s economy.“We thought that inflation would be lower,” she said at a news conference Friday night. “We thought that people would feel more secure about going on the subways. Yes, yes, we’re coming back, but we can’t afford a setback.”At the news conference, Ms. Hochul was pressed for details about when she had changed her mind about congestion pricing and whom she had spoken to beforehand.While she declined to provide details about the timing of her decision, she described conversations she said she had had with ordinary New Yorkers in diners, naming three diners on the East Side of Manhattan.Her decision leaves a billion-dollar hole in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget, imperiling planned projects and raising grave questions about the future of public transit in the nation’s largest city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Narendra Modi Fell to Earth After Making It All About Himself

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      The Indian leader used his singular persona to lift his party to new heights. Then the opposition found a way to use his cult of personality against him.When everything became about Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, his party and its century-old Hindu-nationalist network were propelled to unimagined heights.On the back of his singular charisma and political skill, a onetime-fringe religious ideology was pulled to the center of Indian life. Landslide election victories remade India’s politics, once dominated by diverse coalitions representing a nation that had shaped its independence on secular principles.But there were always risks in wrapping a party’s fortunes so completely in the image of one man, in inundating a country of many religions, castes and cultures with that leader’s name, face and voice. Voters could start to think that everything was about him, not them. They could even revolt.On Tuesday, Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., fell back to earth. After having promised their biggest election romp yet, they lost more than 60 seats. Mr. Modi will remain in office for a third term, but only with the help of a contentious coalition of parties, some of which are opposed to his core beliefs and want power of their own.With the result, India’s strained democracy appeared to roar back to life, its beaten-down political opposition reinvigorated. And after a decade in which Mr. Modi’s success in entrenching Hindu supremacy had often felt like the new common sense, India is seeing its leader and itself in a new light, and trying to understand this unexpected turn.Most fundamentally, the opposition, newly coalesced for what it called a do-or-die moment as Mr. Modi increasingly tilted the playing field, found a way to use the cult of personality around him to its advantage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In India’s Election, Democracy Lives On

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      Back in January, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India looked all but unstoppable, he visited the small city of Ayodhya for the unofficial start of his campaign to win a third term. The location was freighted with symbolism. For decades, Hindu nationalists had sought to build a temple in Ayodhya, at a spot they believe to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. The only problem was that there was already a house of worship on the spot, a mosque built by a Mughal emperor in 1528. A Hindu mob had dismantled the mosque in 1992, setting off riots that killed 2,000 people, most of them Muslims. The ruins were a flashpoint of religious tensions in India for decades.Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party promised to build the temple, and the lavish event at which Modi officially opened it was a showcase for that achievement. At the time it seemed like strong election-year messaging for a politician who built his career on the twin planks of Hindu nationalism and building a muscular new India. Unlike other politicians, the event implied, Modi made promises and kept them.“It is the beginning of a new era,” he declared.Feeling supremely confident, Modi had boldly asked the Indian electorate for something akin to a blank check to remake the country — control of 400 seats in Parliament in elections that began in April and concluded on June 1. And why shouldn’t he have been confident? India’s economy was the fastest-growing in the world. India had overtaken China as the world’s most-populous country. World leaders sought Modi’s support on issues ranging from the war in Ukraine to the climate crisis, cementing India’s ascent in global affairs.But the ever unpredictable electorate of the world’s largest democracy responded to Modi’s demand for still more power resolutely: No thanks.In a stunning rebuke, election results released on Tuesday showed that India’s voters have reduced the parliamentary share of Modi’s party by more than 60 seats, not enough for an outright majority, never mind the supermajority he had sought.It struck me as particularly apt that despite all the fanfare about the glorious new temple in Ayodhya, Modi’s party lost the city’s parliamentary seat to a political opposition that had been all but left for dead.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Louisiana Passes Surgical Castration Bill for Child Molesters

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      The bill, if signed by the governor, would be the first to allow a judge to order surgical procedures for those who commit sex crimes against children.Judges in Louisiana could order people who are convicted of sex crimes against children to undergo surgical castration under a bill that state lawmakers passed overwhelmingly on Monday.While Louisiana and a few other states, including California, Texas and Florida, have long allowed chemical castration, the option to punish sex offenders via surgical castration — which is far more intrusive — appears to be the first in the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and prisoners’ advocacy groups.The bill now awaits the signature of Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who took office in January vowing a tough-on-crime approach. And while the bill easily passed the Republican-dominated Legislature, it was a Democrat from Baton Rouge, Senator Regina Barrow, who introduced the measure.“We are talking about babies who are being violated by somebody,” Ms. Barrow told lawmakers during an April committee meeting. “That is inexcusable.”The bill allows for the procedure to be ordered for either men or women.Some legislators expressed concerns about Louisiana’s record of wrongful convictions and the prospect of racial bias.“Who does this affect most?” Representative Edmond Jordan, a Baton Rouge Democrat who is Black, said during a legislative hearing. “I know it’s race neutral. I know we say it can apply to anybody, but we all know who it affects.” More

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      The Climate Challenges That India’s Next Government Will Face

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      India, the world’s most populous country, is also among the most vulnerable to climate hazards. That’s not only because of the heat and floods that global warming has exacerbated, but also because so many of the country’s 1.4 billion people are vulnerable to begin with. Most people are poor, by global standards, and they have no safety net.Early election results Tuesday signaled that the party led by Narendra Modi, the two-term Hindu nationalist Indian prime minister, is poised to win the largest number of seats in the Indian Parliament but may have to join with smaller parties to form a coalition government.That government will face major challenges brought on by climate change.Heat is now an election issue, literally.The six-week process of voting took place amid a scorching heat wave in several parts of the country. In the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, at least 33 people, including poll workers, died of complications from the heat last week, according to government authorities cited by Reuters.Rohit Magotra, deputy director of Integrated Research and Action for Development, called on national election officials to reschedule elections in the future to avoid such calamities. He pointed out that workers from every political party suffer in the heat, and so do voters, who often have to line up under the sun.“I definitely see the momentum building up, and elections are unlikely to be scheduled in peak summer in future,” said Mr. Magotra, whose organization has advocated heat solutions in Indian cities.The Election Commission this year did set up a task force to monitor weather conditions, but only after voting got underway amid abnormally high temperatures. It also sent election workers a list of heat precautions prepared by the National Disaster Management Agency. However, according to a report published in Scroll, an Indian news site, political-party campaigners were not told to do anything differently because of the heat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More