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      House Speaker, Ukraine War, Border Wall: Trump’s Influence Reaches a Post-Presidency Peak

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      A Republican leadership vacuum has allowed the former president to exert power over his party — and in the country — in a way that lacks much historical precedent.From a House leadership contest to the southwestern border and a foreign war, Donald J. Trump’s influence this week seemed to pervade the nation’s politics more than it has since the first weeks after his exit from the White House.Not since Jan. 27, 2021, when Representative Kevin McCarthy flew to Mar-a-Lago to mend the rift with Mr. Trump, has the former president’s sway been as widespread or as palpable.Mr. Trump’s successor, President Biden, resumed construction of a border wall that will always be stamped with Mr. Trump’s name and restarted deporting Venezuelan migrants, following a hiatus when the Biden administration extended protective status for those fleeing that devastated nation.The House Republican Conference launched its search for a new speaker following the historic vanquishing of the last one, Mr. McCarthy, and again, Mr. Trump was calling the shots. Some House Republicans even suggested handing the gavel to their unofficial leader, Mr. Trump, before he stepped in to try to anoint Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, with an effusive endorsement that dwelt heavily on the congressman’s high school and college wrestling records.Lurking next is mid-November, when funding for the federal government expires and Mr. Trump’s policy demands will overtake the debate in Congress: halting U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, stiffening border controls and neutering the Justice Department as it pursues felony prosecutions that threaten Mr. Trump’s grip on the reins of his party — and also his freedom.U.S. Border Patrol agents patrolling for migrants in La Grulla, Texas, in 2017. Starr County, where La Grulla is located, is where 20 miles of wall are to be built.Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThat a twice-impeached, quadruply indicted former president is exercising this much influence is baffling to historians far more used to defeated or disgraced politicians fading into obscurity. David Blight, a professor at Yale University who specializes in the dissolution of American unity before the Civil War, struggled for a precedent.“Let’s think of Nixon: What influence did he really have in Washington? He got on TV, did the Frost interviews, but real influence on the Republican Party? No. They tried to become something other than the Nixon Party,” Mr. Blight said.“I don’t know of another analogy except in authoritarian regimes elsewhere,” he concluded, pointing to on-again, off-again dictatorships in Africa and South America and to the attempted returns of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte.But an extraordinary vacuum of leadership has given the former president an in, and he has taken it with zeal. The Republican speaker’s chair is vacant, swept clean by internecine conflict. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is diminished by age, health issues and a Senate Republican Conference increasingly willing to challenge his authority.And the Democrats, led by an aging and soft-spoken president who is temperamentally Mr. Trump’s opposite, are facing issues they cannot solve on their own but without partners across the aisle to help address, including a broken immigration system, the stalled war in Ukraine, crime, labor unrest and economic uncertainty.The White House has struggled to control the narrative on recent events — Mr. Biden insisted, for instance, that his administration’s decision to waive more than 20 federal laws and regulations and resume construction of a border wall was merely the fulfillment of a legally binding appropriation signed into law in 2019 — even as his secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, attested in writing to “an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States.”President Joe Biden resumed construction of a border wall that will always be stamped with Mr. Trump’s name and restarted deporting Venezuelan migrants, leading to a struggle to control the narrative on recent events.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut Mr. Trump’s presence looms undeniably large. A chorus on the right embraced the border decision, claiming “Trump was right” as it still sank in among Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading voice on the Democratic left, dismissed the excuse that the administration was somehow “required to expand construction of the border wall.”“The president needs to take responsibility for this decision and reverse course,” she wrote Thursday evening.Immigrant rights groups are beginning to speak out, using the same accusations of cruelty and callousness toward Mr. Biden that they routinely used against Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Jordan may have given the combative Ohio Republican an edge over the House majority leader, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, in his quest for the speakership, but Mr. Jordan still found himself on Fox News praising Mr. Trump as the best president of his lifetime and the likely next president, to head off suggestions from colleagues that the former president would be a better leader for the House.All of this was extraordinary for a man who is, at this very moment, on civil trial in New York for business fraud, whose co-defendants go on trial in Fulton County, Ga., within weeks on charges that they conspired with him to overturn a presidential election, and whose lawyers are maneuvering to delay or dismiss three felony trials, any of which could put him behind bars.His own former lawyer, Ty Cobb, told a panel at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics this week that Mr. Trump has no legal defense in the federal cases he faces. And, Mr. Cobb added, given federal sentencing guidelines, “a judge is going to have to depart pretty aggressively, under difficult circumstances, if Trump’s convicted, to keep him out of jail.”Yet turmoil has always been an asset to Mr. Trump, a cauldron into which he has always been more than willing to plunge.He did nothing to save Mr. McCarthy, showing no appreciation for the man he once called “my Kevin,” and who rescued him at perhaps his darkest political moment, when even Mr. McConnell was suggesting Mr. Trump face criminal charges for a Capitol riot he was “practically and morally responsible for provoking.” The former president basked briefly in the accolades of his House Republican acolytes who floated his name for speaker before ending such talk with his endorsement of Mr. Jordan.Kevin McCarthy addressed reporters after being ousted as speaker on Tuesday.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesFor now, much of this is only theater. But when a stopgap spending bill expires in mid-November, fealty to Mr. Trump will have real consequences. The next speaker will still be facing a Democratic Senate and president, but will also face the impossible demands dictated by Mr. Trump to his loyal troops in the House.As the migrant crisis worsens in Democratic cities, Mr. Biden could well be pushed further in Mr. Trump’s direction on new border controls. New York Mayor Eric Adams traveled to Mexico this week with a message to deter migrants from coming to the United States. Chicago’s young and liberal mayor, Brandon Johnson, said Wednesday he would also travel to see the porous frontier with Mexico “firsthand,” as migrant buses reach his city by the dozen each day.Mr. Trump’s influence could also imperil Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia.The 45-day measure to keep the government open dropped additional military aid to Ukraine, and supporters of such aid will be hard-pressed to resume the flow through the next spending measures. Mr. Trump’s “America First” mantra was long dismissed by critics as an isolationism that leaned the country toward Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.Ending American assistance to a Ukraine battling an invading army from Moscow would be the apotheosis of Trumpist foreign policy — and could be brought about even without Mr. Trump in the White House.But for all those possible Republican victories, Mr. Trump’s most pressing personal demand — defunding the prosecutions of him — almost certainly cannot be met, raising once again the prospect of a pointless government shutdown.At some point, Republicans in Washington may have to choose between Mr. Trump and governance. More

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      A Wartime Election in Ukraine? It’s a Political Hot Potato.

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      In normal circumstances, Ukraine’s president would face voters next spring. Analysts say a wartime election is unlikely, but the prospect is causing some anxiety in Kyiv.It might seem like a huge distraction at the height of a full-scale war, not to mention a logistical nightmare: holding a presidential election as Russian missiles fly into the Ukrainian capital and artillery assaults reduce whole towns to ruins.But President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has not ruled it out. His five-year term ends in several months, and if not for the war, he would be preparing to either step down or campaign for a second term.Analysts consider the possibility of wartime balloting a long shot, and under martial law, elections in Ukraine are suspended. Still, there is talk among Kyiv’s political class that Mr. Zelensky might seek a vote, with far-reaching implications for his government, the war and political opponents, who worry he will lock in a new term in an environment when competitive elections are all but impossible.The debate over an election comes against the backdrop of mounting pressure on Ukraine to show to Western donors Ukraine’s good governance credentials, which Mr. Zelensky has touted. Opponents say a one-sided wartime election could weaken that effort.A petition opposing such an election has drawn signatures from 114 prominent Ukrainian civil society activists.A new electoral mandate could strengthen Mr. Zelensky’s hand in any decision about whether to commit to an extended fight, or insulate him if eventual settlement talks with Russia dent his popularity and hurt his chances of re-election later.Mr. Zelensky has said he favors elections, but only if international monitors can certify them as free, fair and inclusive, and he has outlined multiple obstacles to holding a vote. Political opponents have been more categorical in rejecting elections, which before the Russian invasion were scheduled for March and April next year, saying the war was creating too much turmoil to properly conduct a vote.Serhiy Prytula, who runs a charity in support of the war effort, ranks high among the most respected leaders in the country.Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times“The first step is victory; the second step is everything else,” including a revival of domestic politics in Ukraine, said Serhiy Prytula, an opposition figure and the director of a charity assisting the military. Opinion surveys regularly rank him in the top three most respected leaders in the country, along with Mr. Zelensky and the commander of the military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.Mr. Prytula, a former comedic actor, had set up an exploratory committee to run for Parliament before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, following the path from show business to politics taken by Mr. Zelensky, who had played a president in a television series before winning the presidency in 2019. For now, Mr. Prytula has halted all political activity during the war. The Biden administration and European governments supporting Ukraine militarily have not weighed in publicly on an election. But the idea garnered wider attention when Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said the country should go ahead with a vote despite the war.“You must also do two things at the same time,” Mr. Graham said on a visit to Kyiv in August. “I want this country to have free and fair elections, even when it’s under attack.”To hold elections, Ukraine would have to lift, at least temporarily, martial law in the case of a vote for Parliament or amend the law in the case of a vote for president. In a photo provided by the Ukrainian government, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, center, attended a ceremony in July. He is seen as a prospective challenger to Mr. Zelensky in future elections.Agence France-Presse, via Ukrainian Presidential Press ServiceMr. Zelensky has cited as a major obstacle the need to ensure that Ukrainians living under Russian occupation can vote without retribution. “We are ready,” he told a conference in Kyiv last month. “It’s not a question of democracy. This is exclusively an issue of security.”The Ukrainian leader has said online voting might be a solution.Among the states of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine is the country with the largest population to have succeeded in transferring power democratically. Its criminal justice system has been riddled with corruption, and the privatization of state property has been mismanaged, but elections had been consistently deemed free and fair by international monitors. Ukrainians have elected six presidents since gaining independence in 1991.“Ukraine’s commitment to democracy is not in question, and being forced to postpone elections due to war doesn’t change this,” said Peter Erben, the Ukraine director of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a pro-democracy group funded by Western governments. Ukrainian politics have revolved around parties formed by prominent personalities rather than policy positions. There is Fatherland, led by Yulia Tymoshenko, the most prominent woman in Ukrainian politics; the Punch, led by Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and a former boxer; the Voice, led by Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, a rock star; and Mr. Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, named for a TV show.Senator Lindsey Graham visited Kyiv in May. He returned in August and spoke about potential elections.Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMilitary veterans are widely expected to play an outsize role in Ukrainian politics when elections resume, as voters and as candidates who could challenge the current political class.Holding an election before the war ends could lock in seats for parties in Parliament now, including Mr. Zelensky’s, while soldiers are still serving in the military and unable to run for office.“A scheduled election isn’t necessary for our democracy,” said Olha Aivazovska, the director of OPORA, a Ukrainian civil society group that monitors elections. There is no means now for refugees, frontline soldiers and residents of occupied territory to vote, she said.An election in “the hot phase of the war” would almost certainly undermine, not reinforce, Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy, she said.Even those who favor an election cite concerns about a potential consolidation of power. Oleg Soskin, an economist and adviser to a former Ukrainian president, has called for elections despite the war, warning that Mr. Zelensky could otherwise usurp authority under martial law. But that is an outlying view in Kyiv. The debate about a potential election represents some re-emergence of familiar political clashes in a Ukrainian government long marked by infighting and vendettas. Most of Mr. Zelensky’s political opponents have refrained from being overly critical of him during the war, but they say a vote now would be unfair.Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, center, and his brother Vladimir Klitschko, left, visiting a residential area after shelling in 2022.Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock“I understand the government wants to maintain its position while ratings are high,” said Dmytro Razumkov, a former chairman of Parliament in the political opposition. Mr. Zelensky’s chances of victory, he said, “will almost certainly be lower after the end of the war.”An election now would only weaken Ukraine as politicians campaigned, competing with and criticizing one another, said Volodymyr Ariev, a member of Parliament from the opposition European Solidarity party. He has advocated for Mr. Zelensky to form a national unity government that would include members of the opposition.“It jeopardizes the unity of society,” he added.Public opinion surveys have consistently suggested that a prospective challenger to Mr. Zelensky in future elections could be the commander of his army, General Zaluzhny. As a serving military officer, he is barred from participating in an election during the war.Dmytro Razumkov, former chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament, in his office on Wednesday.Brendan Hoffman for The New York TimesMr. Zelensky still consistently leads in surveys of leaders whom Ukrainians trust. A recent poll by United Ukraine, a nonpartisan research group, showed 91 percent of Ukrainians trusted Mr. Zelensky, 87 percent trusted General Zaluzhny, and 81 percent trusted Mr. Prytula.Polls have also shown high support for Mr. Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv; Vitaly Kim, the head of the civil military administration in the southern region of Mykolaiv; and Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council.Mr. Prytula’s charity has boosted his national stature during the war. It draws donations from millions of Ukrainians to provide drones, body armor, rifle scopes and other supplies to the army at a time when activities supporting the army are immensely popular domestically.Mr. Prytula said he was focused solely on keeping Ukrainians united behind the war effort. Holding an election now, he said, would be pointless because Mr. Zelensky would all but certainly win.“He is No. 1,” he said. “Our society supports him.”Maria Varenikova More

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      Biden admits he is worried Republican infighting could hurt Ukraine aid – video

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      Facing a likely roadblock from House Republicans, US president Joe Biden says he is worried their infighting in Congress could hurt Ukraine aid but said there was a ‘majority of members of the House and Senate in both parties’ that support the need for it. The president promised to deliver a speech soon to outline why the US needs to continue to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, and suggested there were ‘other means’ by which he could find funding but gave no further details More

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      in US Politics

      Kevin McCarthy’s historic ouster as US House speaker was a tragedy foretold

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      “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” These words, delivered at the US Capitol by president John F Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural address, seemed particularly apt on Tuesday.Kevin McCarthy’s ousting as speaker of the House of Representatives was a personal tragedy foretold. The first seeds of destruction had been planted when, days after declaring Donald Trump responsible for the January 6 insurrection, McCarthy went grovelling at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and made his pact with the devil.Then came last year’s midterm elections when, thanks to Trump’s assault on democracy and his rightwing supreme court’s assault on abortion rights, Republicans underperformed and squeezed out only a narrow majority, handing extremists a huge influence.The power-hungry McCarthy was elected speaker after an epic 15 rounds of voting and, minutes later, publicly paid tribute to Trump for working the phones to help him secure victory. But he had cut a deal with the far right that would come back to bite him, including rules that made it easier to challenge his leadership.McCarthy then spent nine months trying to govern an ungovernable party, described by former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod as the “Lord of the Flies caucus”. As the Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has noted, the House Republican caucus is in a state of civil war.It is further proof that the political consultant Rick Wilson was on to something when he wrote a book titled Everything Trump Touches Dies. After sneaking a win in the electoral college in 2016 while losing the national popular vote, Trump has repeatedly been a grim reaper for his party’s fortunes in 2018, 2020 and 2022.The toadies who have shown extreme loyalty to Trump have usually regretted it. His fixer Michael Cohen went to prison. His vice-president, Mike Pence, could have been hanged on January 6 and is now condemned to the purgatory of explaining to half-empty rooms why he should be president. Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows and other January 6 co-conspirators face possible jail time.Now McCarthy, who purported to be restraining Trump’s worst impulses, has become the first speaker of the US House in history to be forced out of the job. Trump did nothing to spare him the humiliation. McCarthy destroyed any hope of being rescued by Democrats by announcing a baseless impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and blaming them for trying to shut down the government.Maxwell Frost, a Democratic congressman from Florida, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “The Speaker did this to himself by lying to both Democrats AND Republicans. Speaker McCarthy will go down in history as the weakest Speaker in the history of our country.”No one who has been following US politics in the self-destructive, nihilistic, eat-one’s-own age of Trump will be surprised by Tuesday’s events. Words such as “historic” or “unprecedented” will have to be retired. There is no obvious heir apparent.The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, summed it up: “The Republican party of Trump cannot govern at any level; The Maga parasite is eating them alive. There will be a reckoning for the GOP as the next Speaker will be even more of a Maga apologist because that’s what the party demands. No one is coming to the rescue who has the courage to tell the truth, only cowards who hide behind the chaos and pretend to look busy.”It is a recipe for more days or perhaps weeks of inertia in Congress, which instead of tackling social inequality or supporting Ukraine will be consumed with factional infighting. America’s long march of democratic decay continues. More

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      As the war in Ukraine grinds on, western support is beginning to crack | Gaby Hinsliff

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      The blue and yellow flag still flies high over Britain’s town squares and public buildings, signalling our unwavering and enduring solidarity with Ukraine’s war effort.Well, in theory, anyway. For you can feel the fatigue descending now, like heavy autumn mist pooling in the bottom of a valley; a sort of strange public torpor, quietly smothering the high emotion of the early days of the war. Having leapt too quickly at the assumption that Kyiv couldn’t possibly hold out against the mighty Russian army, British public opinion then swung wildly towards what has turned out to be an equally unrealistic idea, namely that plucky Ukraine could somehow achieve a David v Goliath victory over the rusting superpower within the year. We could put up with one winter of rocketing gas bills, surely, if that was the price to be paid for peace in Europe. Only now it’s the second winter of not daring to turn on the central heating, and the stories emerging from the frontline are no longer of Ukrainian farmers cheerfully towing away stranded tanks with their tractors, but of a grinding war of attrition that could last up to a decade.This is the most dangerous of moments for Ukraine, whose soldiers are locked into a critical military offensive and whose civilians face another brutal winter of Russia trying to freeze them into submission by attacking their power infrastructure. But it’s western, not Ukrainian, resolve that shows the most worrying signs of faltering, with Republicans in Congress balking at signing off Joe Biden’s military aid package, and victory in last week’s Slovakian elections for a pro-Russian populist promising to end support for Ukraine. Here in Britain, meanwhile, a prime minister keen to give President Zelenskiy anything he wanted has been succeeded by an unsentimental economic hawk better known for watching every penny, under enormous political pressure to deliver tax cuts.It’s almost certainly not a coincidence, then, that former British defence secretary Ben Wallace chose the morning of the current chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s party conference speech – and the closing stages of behind-the-scenes negotiations over Hunt’s crucial autumn statement – to reveal that he had asked Rishi Sunak for another £2.3bn for Ukraine just before he resigned this summer. In war, Wallace wrote, “the most precious commodity of all is hope”, and it was Britain’s duty to keep those hopes of victory alive by stumping up.British politicians have been privately worrying about how to shore up support in Washington for the war since at least early spring, amid rising resistance on the Republican right and suspicions that Donald Trump will turn off the tap if he wins the next presidential election. “We’re giving away so much equipment, we don’t have ammunition for ourselves right now,” Trump told potential voters in New Hampshire in May, when asked if he would continue aid to Ukraine. But now similar views are filtering through the political undergrowth in Britain, too. Nigel Farage asked viewers of his GB News show earlier this year whether Britain had now given “too much” to the country and risked leaving itself defenceless, even though the whole point of arming Ukraine is to avoid Nato members having to defend themselves against whatever a victorious Russia might choose to do next.While the likes of Russell Brand peddle conspiracy theories about Ukraine, Nato and the IMF, in rightwing populist circles the idea that we can’t afford to keep supporting Ukraine is building up a powerful head of steam. “When it’s been five minutes and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid,” Elon Musk posted on his social media site X (nee Twitter) on Monday over a Photoshopped image that appeared to ridicule the Ukrainian leader.The idea that charity ought to begin at home, long used as a battering ram against spending on overseas aid, is now being deployed as an argument against military aid even though western military support for Ukraine is anything but charity: if anything, it’s guilt money. Ukraine’s allies have an existential interest in halting Russian aggression in Europe but they don’t want to risk their own troops’ lives, so instead they have been persuaded to get out the chequebook – both for weapons and to absorb the effects on their own economies of oil and gas price rises. That was the unwritten deal, but Wallace is not alone in seemingly fearing that it may start to unravel as times grow tougher. Conservative party members love a bit of patriotic tub-thumping on defence at conference. But if they had to choose between tax cuts at home and supporting someone else’s war overseas – well, would you bet Europe’s future on the outcome?“We have a chance to help finish this,” Wallace wrote in the Daily Telegraph. “The Russian army is cracking.” But only, perhaps, if western politics doesn’t crack first.
      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Biden says ‘brinkmanship has to end’ after US shutdown avoided but Ukraine aid left out – video

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      US president Joe Biden said that aid to Ukraine must keep flowing after a deal to avert a government shutdown dropped assistance for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. The president lambasted Republicans for holding up government spending talks and assured Ukraine that US support and aid were unwavering. ‘We cannot under any circumstances allow American for Ukraine to be interrupted,’ Biden said More

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      In Poland, Supporters of Opposition March in Warsaw Ahead of Key Election

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      The fate of democracy and aid for Ukraine undergird the October vote, which will decide whether the governing Law and Justice party secures an unprecedented third term in a row.Huge crowds marched through Poland’s capital, Warsaw, on Sunday, converging around a giant flag commemorating a 1944 uprising against Nazi Germany, as opponents of the governing party sought to rally voters for a critical general election that they see as the last chance to save the country’s hard-won democratic freedoms.The Warsaw city government, which is controlled by the opposition, put the crowd at a million people at its peak. But state-controlled television, which mostly ignored the event, instead broadcasting a pre-election convention by the governing Law and Justice party, estimated fewer than 100,000 had turned out, citing police sources.The march was the biggest display of antigovernment sentiment since Poland’s Solidarity trade union movement rallied against communism in the 1980s. It set the stage for the final stretch of an increasingly nasty election campaign. Poland, bitterly polarized on everything from relations with the rest of Europe to abortion rights, will hold a general election on Oct. 15 that will decide whether the conservative Law and Justice party secures an unprecedented third term in a row in government.In a speech peppered with references to Poland’s past struggles for liberty, Donald Tusk, the main opposition leader, appealed for patriots to cast out a right-wing nationalist government that he said was pitting Poles against Poles, defiling the legacy of national heroes who had resisted foreign occupation.He promised to end what he called “the Polish-Polish war” stoked by the governing party’s denunciation as traitors Poles who deviate from traditional Catholic values or look to the European Union for help against discrimination and government meddling in the judiciary.“Change for the better is inevitable,” he said.Billed as “the march of a million hearts,” the event featured Polish and E.U. flags, as well as a few American ones waved by Poles with family in the United States. Before leading a huge crowd in singing the Polish national anthem, which starts with the words “Poland has not yet perished,” Mr. Tusk said the opening line “has never had such a strong and authentic ring as it does today.”Seeking to reclaim patriotism from Law and Justice, which presents itself as a protector of Polish values and sovereignty against E.U. bureaucrats in Brussels and accuses Mr. Tusk of being a stooge for Germany or Russia or at times both countries, the opposition leader said: “They are not Poland. We are Poland!”Donald Tusk, the leader of opposition Civic Coalition, attended the march in Warsaw on Sunday.Omar Marques/Getty ImagesSpeaking to his own supporters at a pre-election party convention in the southern city of Katowice, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice’s chairman and Poland’s de facto leader, mocked Mr. Tusk as “such an idiot” whose victory would lead to the country’s enslavement by foreign powers.He claimed that Mr. Tusk’s term as prime minister, from 2007 to 2014, had made “Poland subordinate to external forces,” especially Germany and Russia. Law and Justice, he said, needed “mobilization, faith, determination and work” to “ensure that Tusk’s system does not return to Poland.”Recent opinion polls give Law and Justice around 38 percent of the vote, compared with 30 percent for Mr. Tusk’s Civic Coalition, an alliance of centrist and center-left forces, with smaller left and far-right parties trailing far behind. The gap narrowed sharply over the summer, but after a full-throated media campaign demonizing Mr. Tusk and his supporters as enemies of the Roman Catholic Church, Law and Justice picked up support, particularly in areas that rely on the party-controlled state broadcasting system.No single party is expected to win a majority in the vote, and the shape of the next government will depend on which of the front-runners — Law and Justice or Civic Coalition — can find allies to form a coalition.As Mr. Tusk spoke to supporters in Warsaw, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, addressed the Law and Justice convention in southern Poland, hammering the party’s favorite theme that the opposition serves German and Russian interests.“Tusk was their handmaiden,” he claimed, referring to energy deals struck between Berlin and Moscow while Mr. Tusk was Poland’s prime minister before taking a job in Brussels as president of the European Council — another strike against him, in the governing party’s view.Worried about competition from Konfederacja, a far-right group that has been vocal about reducing Poland’s assistance to Ukraine, Law and Justice has sent mixed messages in recent weeks about its policy toward Kyiv. It has insisted that it would not do anything to reduce the flow of weapons to fight Russia’s invading forces, while suggesting recently that it might do just that.Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Morawiecki told a national broadcaster that Poland was “no longer transferring any weapons to Ukraine, because we are now arming ourselves with the most modern weapons.” Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, later walked back Mr. Morawiecki’s remarks, clearly made for electoral reasons but still unsettling for Poland’s foreign partners.Desperate to hang on to voters in rural areas, an important base of support, Law and Justice has vowed to halt the import of cheap Ukrainian grain and protect Polish farmers from the damage this has caused to their income. The grain was meant to just transit through Poland, but some of it was siphoned off for sale on the domestic market.Pre-election promises by the Polish government, along with those of Slovakia and Hungary, to halt all deliveries of Ukrainian grain did not stop the leader of a Polish farm lobbying group, Agrounia, from speaking on Sunday in support of the opposition.Law and Justice’s pre-election shifts and maneuvers have confused and annoyed fellow European countries that previously viewed Poland as a solid anchor of the West’s support for Ukraine, particularly those like Germany that Warsaw has repeatedly chided for not being steadfast enough in helping Kyiv.Janusz Michalak, 71, a retired logistics manager who joined the march with his wife, Alicija, said he had lived through communism and worried that Law and Justice — through cynical maneuvers to win support, the tight control of state broadcasting and the demonization of its political foes — want “us silent under their boot like the communists did.”“If we don’t change this government, democracy dies in Poland,” he added.Anatol Magdziarz More

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      Slovakia Appears Set to Join the Putin Sympathizers After Election

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      The front-runner in the parliamentary vote has pledged “not to send a single cartridge” to neighboring Ukraine, a sign of the flagging European support for a victim of Russian aggression.The victory of Robert Fico, a former prime minister who took a pro-Russian campaign stance, in Slovakia’s parliamentary elections is a further sign of eroding support for Ukraine in the West as the war drags on and the front line remains largely static.Slovakia is a small country with historical Russian sympathies, and the nature of the coalition government Mr. Fico will seek to form is unclear. He may lean more toward pragmatism, as Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has done since her election last year. Still, the shift in Slovakia is stark: It was the first country to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine.The election results come as disquiet over the billions of dollars in military aid that the West has provided to Ukraine over the past 19 months has grown more acute in the United States and the European Union, with demands increasing for the money to go to domestic priorities instead.House Republicans declined to meet with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in Washington last month, and tensions between Kyiv and the White House over Ukrainian military strategy have surfaced. In Central Europe, once the core of fierce anti-Russian sentiment among fearful frontline states that endured decades of harsh communist rule as reluctant members of the Soviet bloc, the war is now viewed with greater nuance.Mr. Fico’s victory, taking about 23 percent of the vote on a platform that included stopping all arms shipments to Ukraine and placing blame for the war equally on the West and Kyiv, is a case in point.He laced social conservatism, nationalism, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. rhetoric and promises of generous welfare handouts in what proved to be an effective anti-liberal agenda, especially in small towns and rural areas.“The wear and tear from the war is more palpable in Central Europe than Western Europe for now,” said Jacques Rupnik, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris and an expert on the region. “Slovakia demonstrates that the threat at your door does not necessarily mean you are full-hearted in support of Ukraine.”Ukrainian artillery positions firing at enemy forces near the front line in the Donbas region this month.Lynsey Addario for The New York TimesA Globsec survey in March of public opinion across Central and Eastern Europe found that 51 percent of Slovaks believed either the West or Ukraine to be “primarily responsible” for the war. Mr. Fico, who served for more than a decade as prime minister until 2018, played off this sentiment.He adopted some of the rhetoric of Hungary’s pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Orban, who has resisted the overwhelming Western position on Ukraine that Russia’s brutal invasion of the country was a flagrant violation of international law that must be resisted in the name of liberty, democracy and the sanctity of national sovereignty.“Fico was inspired by Orban, but does not have the same deep ideological roots, and is more of a pragmatist,” said Ludek Sekyra, a Czech businessman who chairs the Sekyra Foundation, a supporter of liberal causes. “He has been adept in exploiting unease over the vast influx of Ukrainian refugees, small-country resentment of the European Union and Russian sympathies that do not exist in the Czech Republic.”A possible coalition with another former prime minister, Peter Pellegrini of the social democratic Voice party, which won almost 15 percent of the vote, may increase the likelihood of pragmatism from Mr. Fico, who was responsible for Slovakia’s adoption of the euro and has shown strong pro-European sentiments in the past.With Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia all showing significant sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the tides have shifted in this part of Europe. Even Poland, an ardent supporter of Ukraine that has taken in more than 1.5 million refugees from there during the war, recently decided to close its border to low-price Ukrainian grain imports.The governing hard-right nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland is in a tense electoral standoff this month against the liberal opposition. Although the country’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczynski, remains staunchly anti-Russian, his nationalism and conservative values mesh with Mr. Orban’s and Mr. Fico’s. A PiS victory would undermine European unity further as the war shows no sign of a possible resolution.Mr. Kaczynski opposes the kind of European political, military and economic integration of which President Emmanuel Macron of France is a fierce advocate. There has even been murmuring of a possible Polish exit from the European Union — a far-fetched notion but one suggestive of the European tensions that the war has begun to feed.The NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, left, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at a news conference in Kyiv on Thursday.Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven in Western Europe, a recent German Marshall Fund survey found that support for Ukrainian membership in the European Union stood at just 52 percent in France and 49 percent in Germany. In Germany, only 45 percent of respondents favored Ukrainian membership in NATO.Still, overall, the survey found that on both sides of the Atlantic, some 69 percent of people favor financial support for Ukraine’s reconstruction, while countries including Britain, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and Lithuania showed strong support for the Ukrainian cause across the board.“More and more, we are hearing a clear message to Mr. Zelensky: Please cut a deal with Putin,” said Mr. Rupnik.After the immense sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in defense of their country against a flagrant Russian aggression, that, however, is the thing most difficult for Mr. Zelensky to contemplate, let alone pursue.That a country on the Ukrainian border should now have voted for a man who has said he will “not send a single cartridge” of ammunition across that border can only increase the pressure on Ukraine’s leadership.It also poses evident problems for a European Union already worried that Donald J. Trump may retake the White House next year, and facing internal divisions that a Polish election may sharpen further. More