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      Pakistani Justices Reject Ban for Politicians With Past Convictions

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      The decision by the Supreme Court paves the way for a former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to run in parliamentary elections in February.Pakistan’s Supreme Court on Monday overturned a law that barred politicians with past convictions from seeking political office, in a move that paves the way for former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to run in parliamentary elections in February.A seven-justice panel of the country’s top court, headed by Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa, ruled 6-1 that a person could not be banned for life from running for office. The court said instead that politicians could be barred for a term of only five years.Critics had said that the law was draconian and used for political persecution.Mr. Sharif, a three-time former prime minister, was disqualified from running for office for life in 2017. He never finished any of his terms in office, running afoul of the country’s powerful military or, in the latest case, being toppled by corruption allegations.Mr. Sharif left Pakistan for London in 2019 but returned in October to revive his political career and to take part in the Feb. 8 general elections. Marriyum Aurangzeb, the central information secretary for the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz, Mr. Sharif’s political party, hailed the decision as a “vindication” for Mr. Sharif.Ms. Aurangzeb said that Mr. Sharif had been a victim of political persecution. “Only the people of Pakistan have the power through their vote to qualify or disqualify their representatives,” she said.As the country heads for elections early next month, the atmosphere in the country is tense. Pakistan has been reeling from a political and economic crisis since April 2022, when former Prime Minister Imran Khan, who remains widely popular, was removed from power by a vote of no confidence of Parliament after having lost the support of the powerful military establishment.Mr. Khan is in jail on several charges, including treason, and candidates from his party are complaining of being denied a level playing field and the right to freely campaign. His party members have accused the state authorities of intimidation, harassment and unwarranted arrests.Supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan shouting slogans demanding his release during a protest in Karachi in August.Shahzaib Akber/EPA, via ShutterstockThe major political parties have not actively hit the campaign trail, and no big political rallies have been held so far, partly because of uncertainty about the polls and partly because of security fears. Militant attacks have also picked up in the country in recent months.On Jan. 3, Mohsin Dawar, a prominent politician belonging to the National Democratic Movement political party, escaped an assassination attempt after his convoy came under attack in the North Waziristan region in the country’s northwest. Mr. Dawar’s bulletproof vehicle was hit on its front and side mirrors, though he remained safe. There was no claim of responsibility for the attack.Last week, the country’s senate passed a resolution calling for a delay in the election, citing security concerns. The resolution was passed by a group of independent senators.But government officials stressed that there would be no delay or postponement.“The elections will be held on Feb. 8, as scheduled,” said Murtaza Solangi, the interim information minister. More

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      Donald Trump Is Connecting With a Different Type of Evangelical Voter

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      They are not just the churchgoing, conservative activists who once dominated the G.O.P.Karen Johnson went to her Lutheran church so regularly as a child that she won a perfect attendance award. As an adult, she taught Sunday school. But these days, Ms. Johnson, a 67-year-old counter attendant at a slot-machine parlor, no longer goes to church.She still identifies as an evangelical Christian, but she doesn’t believe going to church is necessary to commune with God. “I have my own little thing with the Lord,” she says.Ms. Johnson’s thing includes frequent prayer, she said, as well as podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics and “what’s going on in the world” from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview. No one plays a more central role in her perspective than Donald J. Trump, the man she believes can defeat the Democrats who, she is certain, are destroying the country and bound for hell.“Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Ms. Johnson said recently as she waited outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear the former president speak.Karen Johnson went to church regularly as a child and taught Sunday school as an adult, but, despite identifying as an evangelical Christian, she does not attend church anymore.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesWhite evangelical Christian voters have lined up behind Republican candidates for decades, driving conservative cultural issues into the heart of the party’s politics and making nominees and presidents of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.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?  More

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      Is Trump an Agent or an Accident of History?

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      In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, a “psychohistorian” in a far-flung galactic empire figures out a way to predict the future so exactly that he can anticipate both the empire’s fall and the way that civilization can be painstakingly rebuilt. This enables him to plan a project — the “foundation” of the title — that will long outlast his death, complete with periodic messages to his heirs that always show foreknowledge of their challenges and crises.Until one day the foreknowledge fails, because an inherently unpredictable figure has come upon the scene — the Mule, a Napoleon of galactic politics, whose advent was hard for even a psychohistorian to see coming because he’s literally a mutant, graced by some genetic twist with the power of telepathy.Donald Trump is not a mutant telepath. (Or so I assume — fact checkers are still at work.) But the debates about how to deal with his challenge to the American political system turn, in part, on how much you think that he resembles Asimov’s Mule.Was there a more normal, conventional, stable-seeming timeline for 21st century American politics that Trump, with his unique blend of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV charisma, personal shamelessness and demagogic intuition, somehow wrenched us off?Or is Trump just an American expression of the trends that have revived nationalism all over the world, precisely the sort of figure a “psychohistory” of our era would have anticipated? In which case, are attempts to find some elite removal mechanism likely to just heighten the contradictions that yielded Trumpism in the first place, widening the gyre and bringing the rough beast slouching in much faster?I have basically changed sides in this debate. Into the early part of Trump’s presidency I was an apologist for elite machinations: I wanted party unity against his primary candidacy, a convention rebellion against his nomination, even a 25th Amendment option when he appeared initially overmastered by the office of the presidency.Past a certain point, though, I became convinced that these efforts were not only vain but counterproductive. In part, this reflected strategic considerations: The plausible moment for unified intraparty resistance had passed, and the united front of elite institutions had failed spectacularly to prevent Trump from capturing the White House. In part it reflected my sense that “Resistance” politics were driving liberal institutions deep into their own kind of paranoia and conspiracism.But above all my shift reflected a reading of our times as increasingly and ineradicably populist, permanently Trumpy in some sense, with inescapable conflicts between insider and outsider factions, institutionalists and rebels — conflicts that seemed likely to worsen the more that insider power plays cement the populist belief that the outsiders would never be allowed to truly govern.This shift doesn’t mean, however, that I am immune to the arguments that still treat Trump as unique, even Mule-ish, with a capacity for chaos unequaled by any other populist. You can see this distinctiveness in the failures of various Republican candidates who have tried to ape his style. And you can reasonably doubt that a different populist would have gone all the way to the disgrace of Jan. 6 — or inspired as many followers.So as much as I find the legal case for the 14th Amendment disqualification entirely unpersuasive, I can almost make myself see the return-to-normalcy future that some of its advocates seem to be imagining.Start with a 7-to-2 decision, maybe written by Brett Kavanaugh, disqualifying Trump. Then comes a lot of ranting and rage that mostly works itself out online. Then a sense of relief among Republican officeholders who move on to a Nikki Haley vs. Ron DeSantis primary. Then various Trump-backed spoiler-ish and third-party options emerge but fizzle out. Then, quite possibly, you have a DeSantis or Haley presidency — in which partisan loyalty binds Republicans to their new leader, and an aging Trump eventually fades away.I will concede to partisans of disqualification that such a scenario is theoretically possible. I certainly would find some versions of it eminently desirable. (My fears about a Haley presidency I will save for a future column.)But what I would ask them in turn is whether, having lived through the last eight years of not just American but global politics, they actually find it likely that normalcy will be restored through this kind of expedient — a judicial fiat that millions of Americans will immediately regard as the most illegitimate governmental action of their lifetimes?What odds would they give that future historians, reflecting on our republic’s storms the way we now reflect on ancient Rome, will memorialize such an action as the moment when the seas began to calm?As opposed to what seems so much more likely — that it would eventually produce some further populist escalation, every-deepening division, not peace but the sword.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Playing for Time, U.K. Leader Sets Up Chance of U.S. Election Overlap

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      Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signaled that voters will go to the polls in the fall, around the time that the United States will be in the midst of its own pivotal vote.When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said this week that he was not likely to call a general election in Britain before the second half of the year, he was trying to douse fevered speculation that he might go to the voters as early as May. But in doing so, he set up another tantalizing prospect: that Britain and the United States could hold elections within days or weeks of each other this fall.The last time parliamentary and presidential elections coincided was in 1964, when Britain’s Labour Party ousted the long-governing Conservatives in October, and less than a month later, a Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, swept aside a challenge from a right-wing Republican insurgent. The parallels to today are not lost on the excitable denizens of Britain’s political class.“It’s the stuff of gossip around London dinner tables already,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington who is now a member of the House of Lords. For all the Côte du Rhône-fueled analysis, Mr. Darroch conceded, “it’s hard to reach any kind of conclusion about what it means.”That doesn’t mean political soothsayers, amateur and professional, aren’t giving it a go. Some argue that a victory by the Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, over President Biden — or even the prospect of one — would be so alarming that it would scare voters in Britain into sticking with Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party, as a bid for predictability and continuity in an uncertain world.A supporter of Donald J. Trump laying out signs on Tuesday before an event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesOthers argue that the Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, could win over voters by reminding them of the ideological kinship between the Conservatives and Mr. Trump, who remains deeply unpopular in Britain. Mr. Trump praised Mr. Sunak last fall for saying he wanted to water down some of Britain’s ambitious climate goals. “I always knew Sunak was smart,” Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account.Still others pooh-pooh the suggestion that British voters would make decisions at the ballot box based on the political direction of another country, even one as close and influential as the United States. Britain’s election, analysts say, is likely to be decided by domestic concerns like the cost-of-living crisis, home-mortgage rates, immigration and the dilapidated state of the National Health Service.And yet, even the skeptics of any direct effect acknowledge that near-simultaneous elections could cause ripples on both sides of the pond, given how Britain and the United States often seem to operate under the same political weather system. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 is often viewed as a canary in the coal mine for Mr. Trump’s victory the following November.Already, the campaigns in both countries are beginning to echo each other, with fiery debates about immigration; the integrity — or otherwise — of political leaders; and social and cultural quarrels, from racial justice to the rights of transgender people. Those themes will be amplified as they reverberate across the ocean, with the American election forming a supersized backdrop to the British campaign.“The U.S. election will receive a huge amount of attention in the run-up to the U.K. election,” said Ben Ansell, a professor of comparative democratic institutions at Oxford University. “If the Tories run a culture-war campaign, and people are being fed a diet of wall-to-wall populism because of Trump, that could backfire on them.”Some argue that if the elections coincide, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, could win over voters by reminding them of the similarities between the Conservatives and Mr. Trump.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesProfessor Ansell identified another risk in the political synchronicity: it could magnify the damage of a disinformation campaign waged by a hostile foreign power, such as the efforts by Russian agents in Britain before the Brexit vote, and in the United States before the 2016 presidential election. “It’s a two-for-one,” he said, noting that both countries remain divided and vulnerable to such manipulation.On Thursday, Mr. Starmer appealed to Britons to move past the fury and divisiveness of the Brexit debates, promising “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives.” That was reminiscent of Mr. Biden’s call in his 2021 inaugural address to “join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature.”Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist who studied at Oxford and has advised Conservative Party officials, said he warned the Tories not to turn their campaign into a culture war. “It will get you votes, but it will destroy the electorate in the process,” he said he told them, pointing out that a campaign against “woke” issues had not helped Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida dislodge Mr. Trump.Mr. Sunak has vacillated in recent months between a hard-edge and more centrist approach as his party has struggled to get traction with voters. It currently lags Labour by 20 percentage points in most polls. While general elections are frequently held in the spring, Mr. Sunak appears to be playing for time in the hope that his fortunes will improve. That has drawn criticism from Mr. Starmer, who accused him of “squatting” in 10 Downing Street.“I’ve got lots that I want to get on with,” Mr. Sunak told reporters Thursday. He could wait until next January to hold a vote, though analysts say that was unlikely, since campaigning over the Christmas holiday would likely alienate voters and discourage party activists from canvassing door to door.Counting votes in Bath, England, during the U.K.’s last general election in 2019.Ian Walton/ReutersWith summer out for the same reason, Mr. Sunak’s most likely options are October or November (Americans will vote on Nov. 5). There are arguments for choosing either month, including that party conferences are traditionally held in early October.In October 1964, the Conservative government, led by Alec Douglas-Home, narrowly lost to Labour, led by Harold Wilson. Like Mr. Douglas-Home, Mr. Sunak is presiding over a party in power for more than 13 years. The following month, President Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Republican senator from Arizona, who had declared, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”Sixty years ago, the Atlantic was a greater divide than it is today, and the links between trans-Atlantic elections more tenuous than they are now. Mr. Trump, armed with a social media account and a penchant for lines even more provocative than Mr. Goldwater’s, could easily roil the British campaign, analysts said.And a Trump victory, they added, would pose a devilish challenge to either future British leader. While Mr. Trump treated Mr. Sunak’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, as an ideological twin, he fell out bitterly with Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, and there was little reason, they said, to hope for less drama in a second Trump term.The biggest pre-election danger — much more likely for Mr. Sunak than for Mr. Starmer, given their politics — is that Mr. Trump will make a formal endorsement, either while he is the Republican nominee or newly elected as president, said Timothy Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London.“Given how negatively most Brits feel toward Trump,” Professor Bale said, “such an endorsement is unlikely to play well for whichever of the two is unlucky enough to find favor with him.” More

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      Election Will Further Test Bangladesh’s Ailing Democracy

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      Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is expected to roll to a fourth consecutive term as the gutted opposition boycotts what it calls an unfair election.There is little doubt that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will seize a fourth consecutive term when Bangladesh goes to the polls on Sunday. The bigger question is what will remain of the country’s democracy.The main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been crushed and left with little mobilizing capacity. Its leaders who are not already in jail are bogged down with endless court appointments or are in hiding with the police on their tail. Ms. Hasina’s Awami League, in power since 2009, has cleared the way for a race so one-sided that the party urged its own contestants to prop up dummy candidates so it does not look as if they won unchallenged.The B.N.P. has boycotted the vote, after Ms. Hasina rejected its demand that she step aside during the campaign period so the election could be held under a neutral administration. Even as Bangladesh has appeared to be finding a path to prosperity and shedding a legacy of coups and assassinations, the uncontested election shows how politics in this country of 170 million remains hostage to decades of bad blood between the two major parties.The possibility of violence hangs in the air. The opposition’s effort to protest the vote, with repeated calls for nationwide strikes and civil disobedience, has been met with an intensified crackdown. More than 20,000 B.N.P. members and leaders have been arrested since the party’s last major rally, in October, according to party leaders and lawyers.Diplomats in Dhaka said they had received reports of appalling conditions inside overcrowded prisons. At least nine opposition leaders and members have died in jail since the Oct. 28 crackdown, according to human rights organizations and reports in local news media.As the B.N.P. has issued another call for a national strike, this one on the eve of the election, security has been increased, with the army deployed in the capital, Dhaka, and other regions.Bangladeshi soldiers were deployed on streets as part of enhanced security measures ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary elections.Mahmud Hossain Opu/Associated Press“There is a risk of increased violence after the polls, from both sides,” said Pierre Prakash, the Asia director for the International Crisis Group. “If the B.N.P. feels the largely nonviolent strategy it deployed in the run-up to the 2024 election has failed, leaders could come under pressure to revert to the more overt violence of the past.”And if the B.N.P. does resort to widespread violence, Mr. Prakash said, it will be walking right into a trap. Ms. Hasina’s party has been laying the groundwork for an even wider crackdown as it pushes a narrative that the opposition is filled with “terrorists” and “killers.”During Ms. Hasina’s 15-year rule, her second stint in power, the country has been a paradox of sorts.As investments in the garment export industry began paying off, the economy experienced such impressive growth that average income levels at one point surpassed India’s. Bangladesh has also shown major strides in other development areas, from education and health to female participation in the labor force and preparedness against climate disasters.But all along, critics say, Ms. Hasina, 76, has tried to turn the country into a one-party state. From the security agencies to the courts, she has captured government institutions and unleashed them onto anyone who does not fall in line.In the latest example, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus was given a six-month jail sentence in what he has described as a political vendetta. Mr. Yunus is out on bail and appealing the verdict in a case that government officials say is not political and involves violations of labor laws.Ms. Hasina’s drive to dismantle the B.N.P. often appears to be a personal campaign of vengeance.Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina addressing a campaign rally in December.-/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor most of the time since Bangladesh’s creation in 1971 — when it separated from Pakistan after a bloody campaign of cultural oppression against Bengalis — the country has been ruled by the two parties.The Awami League was the party of Ms. Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s independence leader and founding president. After he set out on a campaign to centralize power, he was killed in a military coup that also left much of his young family dead.The B.N.P. was formed by Gen. Ziaur Rahman, the army chief who rose to power after a bloody phase of coups and counter-coups in the wake of Sheikh Mujib’s assassination. Mr. Zia, as he was known, was also later killed in a military coup.While Ms. Hasina sees the B.N.P. as the creation of the same military cadre that protected her father’s killers, her drive to destroy the party is even more personal, her aides say. When the B.N.P., led by Mr. Zia’s widow, Khaleda Zia, was in power in the early 2000s, one of Ms. Hasina’s rallies as an opposition leader was attacked by dozens of grenades. She survived a close call, but more than 20 of her party’s leaders and supporters were killed.Over the past couple of years, Ms. Hasina’s crackdown has become particularly severe as the sheen from the story of economic progress has worn off.The successive blows of the pandemic and the Ukraine war, which pushed up fuel and food prices, have shrunk Bangladesh’s foreign reserves to dangerous lows. The crisis has exposed not only Bangladesh’s overreliance on the garment industry, but also what Western diplomats in Dhaka say are kleptocratic practices hidden beneath the country’s economic growth.The ruling elite, diplomats say, tap into banks and the nation’s riches with little accountability. With about 60 percent of Parliament made up of businesspeople, economic interests and political power have become deeply intertwined, impeding economic reform, analysts say.The opposition tried to capitalize on public anger over rising prices, holding its first large rallies in years. But its momentum was short-lived, as the government’s crackdown deepened.Supporters of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party in Dhaka in July.Atul Loke for The New York TimesThe B.N.P. says its demand for an election under a neutral caretaker was nothing new — Ms. Hasina called for the same when she was in the opposition, and she came to power in an election administered by a caretaker government. Bangladesh’s institutions are so vulnerable to abuse by the ruling party that no opposition has won election when the vote was not held under a caretaker.But Ms. Hasina considers the B.N.P.’s demand to be a violation of the constitution — because, after she came to power, she amended the charter to declare the practice illegal and a disruption to the democratic cycle.Seeking to avoid a repeat of the 2014 vote, in which Ms. Hasina’s party won more than half of the seats uncontested, the Awami League has been pointing to the smaller parties that are still contesting this year’s election. But analysts say the party has engineered a new token opposition. Some of these candidates made clear on campaign posters where they stood: “Supported by the Awami League.”The B.N.P.’s leader, Ms. Zia, a former prime minister, remains under house arrest. Her son, the party’s acting chairman, is in exile in London. Much of the party’s leadership is in jail.In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the party’s visibility was largely reduced to virtual news conferences by Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, one of the few senior B.N.P. leaders not in jail.Ruhul Kabir Rizvi, the senior joint secretary general of the B.N.P., in his party office in June. Atul Loke for The New York TimesMr. Rizvi himself faces 180 court cases, and for months at a time he remained locked up in his office, sleeping in a small corner bed, as he risked arrest if he ventured out. He walks with a cane because of a bullet wound he received while protesting a military dictator in the late 1980s.“We and other like-minded parties have boycotted this election,” Mr. Rizvi said in a virtual news conference on Thursday, announcing a new strike to begin on Saturday. “The political parties and the people of the country have already understood that this election is going to be a rehearsal of the anarchy of Awami League. It’s going to be a one-sided election.”Obaidul Quader, general secretary of the Awami League, said it regretted the main opposition’s absence.“Had B.N.P. been there,” he added, “the election would have been more competitive.” More

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      Former Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt Toys With Running for Mayor of Florence

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      The museum’s former director, Eike Schmidt, is toying — somewhat mischievously — with entering the race to become Florence’s mayor.Will he? Or won’t he?It’s a question that’s been buzzing at dinner parties and on street corners in Florence, and throughout the Italian art world. The “he” in question is Eike Schmidt, who until last month was the director of the Uffizi museum, and who has hinted that he might run for mayor of Florence in upcoming municipal elections.Since the summer, Schmidt has been toying — somewhat mischievously — with the idea of running with the Brothers of Italy, the hard-right majority party in the coalition that governs the country.Even after he was appointed last month as the new director of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, a four-year posting set to begin this month, Schmidt has not clarified his intentions, except to say in an interview in an Italian newspaper that he would be unable to do both jobs at once.On Wednesday, Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, posted a photo on social media with Schmidt, and wrote in an accompanying post that there were “great plans and ideas” for the Capodimonte that he had discussed with the new director.But many still believe that Schmidt has larger aspirations and that his candidacy in Florence remains possible. The former director of the Uffizi — considered one of the world’s great museums, with instantly recognizable works by Renaissance masters like Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo — has said he would make a decision this month. He declined to be interviewed for this article.“He’s a person who likes challenges,” said Giorgio Bernardini, who writes about local politics for Corriere Fiorentino, the local edition of the national daily Corriere della Sera. “And he’s a strong personality,” Bernadini added.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?  More

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      Experts See a Message in Chinese Balloons Flying Over Taiwan

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      Some analysts see the objects as a calculatedly ambiguous reminder to voters that Beijing is watching.A surge in sightings of balloons from China flying over Taiwan has drawn the attention of the island’s military and struck some experts as a calculatedly ambiguous warning to voters weeks before its presidential election.Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has reported occasional sightings of balloons floating from China since last month, and a surge in recent days, according to the ministry’s daily tally of Chinese military activities near the island. Official Taiwanese accounts about balloons were previously very sporadic.The recent balloons have mostly stayed off Taiwan’s coast. On Monday, however, one flew across the island, according to the ministry’s descriptions of their paths. Of four spotted on Tuesday, three flew over Taiwan, and two passed through to the island’s east side, facing the Pacific Ocean. Another flew over the island on Wednesday.The Taiwanese reports also noted some of the balloons’ proximity to the island’s military bases. Of the four reported on Tuesday, three were first detected 120 to 184 miles from the Ching Chuan Kang Air Base in the city of Taichung. Taiwan’s defense ministry declined to specify how close to the base they may have flown.The balloons do not appear to pose an immediate military menace to Taiwan, a self-governed democracy of 23 million people that Beijing says is its territory. Taiwan’s defense ministry last month indicated that the balloons seemed to be for collecting data about the atmosphere, but it has declined to give details about the ones detected this week.“The Ministry of National Defense is closely monitoring and tracking them, responding appropriately, and is also assessing and analyzing their drift patterns,” Maj. Gen. Sun Li-fang, a spokesman for the ministry, said on Thursday in response to questions about the balloons.Taiwan has, so far at least, experienced none of the alarm that gripped many Americans last year when a hulking Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon floated across the United States. China denied that the balloon was for spying, but Washington did not buy that line, and the dispute soured relations for many months.A surveillance balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina in 2023. China denied that the balloon was for spying, but Washington did not buy that line.Randall Hill/ReutersTaiwanese people are used to Chinese military flights near the island, and news of the balloons has generally been met with calm, if not indifference.The balloon flights may, nonetheless, be part of the “gray zone” tactics that China uses to warn Taiwan of its military strength and options, without tipping into baldfaced confrontation. The timing of the balloon flights, close to Taiwan’s election, was telling, said Ko Yong-Sen, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank in Taipei funded by Taiwan’s defense ministry. Mr. Ko has analyzed the pattern of recent sightings.“It’s more an intimidating effect in what happens to be a quite sensitive time, with we in Taiwan holding our election on Jan. 13,” Mr. Ko said in an interview. China, he said, “may want to tone it down. People say that it has recklessly used major weapons like planes and ships for harassment, so it’s shifted to balloons that can be used for a certain kind of lower-intensity intimidation and harassment.”In the election, Taiwanese voters will choose a president and legislature, and Beijing has made no secret of wanting the governing Democratic Progressive Party to lose power. The party opposes Beijing’s claims to Taiwan, and has asserted Taiwan’s distinctive identity and claims to nationhood. Decades ago, the party endorsed independence for Taiwan but now says it accepts the more ambiguous status quo of democratic self-determination.Lai Ching-te, the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, has been leading in most polls up to Wednesday. But Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with China, has trailed Mr. Lai by only a few percentage points in some recent surveys, and the Nationalists may emerge as the biggest party in the legislature, ending the Democratic Progressive Party’s majority.When asked late last month about the initial reports of balloons near Taiwan, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense, Wu Qian, did not confirm or deny any flights, but suggested that, as Taiwan was a part of China, any dispute over balloons crossing the median line between the two sides was moot. He also accused the Democratic Progressive Party of whipping up the issue “to swindle votes.”In 1996, China’s attempt to use missile tests and menacing military drills to shape Taiwan’s presidential election failed, and this time, Beijing has not rolled out any major military exercises in the weeks before the vote. The balloons may augur a more fiery response from China’s leaders if they dislike the election result, said Ben Lewis, a military analyst based in Washington who maintains a daily data record of Chinese military activities around Taiwan.“I think the number of overflights, and, even more, their timing, is still an escalation in the P.R.C.’s activities,” Mr. Lewis said by email, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “If nothing else, I’m taking this as a warning that the P.R.C.’s response to the election will likely be impossible to predict.”The latest sightings were almost certainly not the first time that balloons from China floated over Taiwan, Mr. Lewis said. The Taiwanese defense ministry began regularly reporting Chinese military flights near the island in 2020, and their numbers have grown year by year and now include drones. After a Chinese weather balloon was found last year on a small island controlled by Taiwan, Taiwan’s defense ministry said that most of the balloons swept in around the Taiwan Strait from December to February when, it noted, the “prevailing wind direction” helped them along.Mr. Ko, the Taiwanese defense expert, said that he worried more about what the Chinese military could do with more concerted use of high-altitude balloons over the island, like the one spotted over the United States last year, which could augment data collection using satellites and radar.“The intelligence gathering from Taiwan would be even more serious,” he said. “This is something we’ve been concerned about, and it would be more troublesome.” More

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      The Run-Up: Should Jan. 6 Disqualify Trump From the 2024 Ballot?

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | AmazonKenny Holston/The New York TimesIt’s the start of the actual election year — and a new chapter in the campaign.Voting in early states is less than two weeks away. But, amid the crunchtime campaigning, another story line is unfolding.Two states are saying that Donald Trump can’t be on the ballot … at all.Officials in Colorado and Maine are basing this on a clause of the 14th Amendment, which bars candidates from holding office if they have engaged in insurrection.The Trump campaign is appealing. And other states, like California and Michigan, have ruled the opposite way on the same issue. But with more than a dozen similar cases pending, the question is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. We speak to Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, about her decision to disqualify Trump from the 2024 primary ballot and to Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times.About ‘The Run-Up’“The Run-Up” is your guide to understanding the 2024 election. Through on-the-ground reporting and conversations with colleagues from The New York Times, newsmakers and voters across the country, our host, Astead W. Herndon, takes us beyond the horse race to explore how we came to this unprecedented moment in American politics. New episodes on Thursdays. Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More