World

Friday

Constantin Eckner

Angela Merkel’s executive power-grab

Germany’s Social Democrats have remained quiet for months as their coalition partner, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, have tackled this pandemic. But it seems as if some have had enough. Social Democrats are fed up with how the federal government has relied on decrees and executive orders during the epidemic, rather than using the proper legislative procedures. Critics believe Merkel and her cabinet have effectively neutralised Germany’s national parliament and now govern in whatever way they want. A law proposed by Merkel’s health minister Jens Spahn could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Spahn’s advisers have drafted an update to the Infection Protection Act – which has already given

Jim Lawley

Spain’s politics is fraying

‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Philosopher George Santayana’s dictum is starting to look more relevant than ever in Spain, the country of his birth. The political temperature in Madrid has risen sharply in recent weeks and the language politicians are using has become unmistakably bellicose. The casual observer might almost be forgiven for wondering momentarily if we’re back in 1936, with politicians limbering up for a re-run of Spain’s civil war.  The opposition has accused the left-wing government of using Covid restrictions as ‘a political weapon’ and of enforcing the Madrid lockdown ‘at gunpoint’. Political parties criticise each other for retreating to their respective

Daniel DePetris

Joe Biden’s one job in the presidential debate

Former Vice President Joe Biden had one job in tonight’s final presidential debate: tread water. Don’t get rattled. If President Trump talks about your son, Hunter, as if he were an influence peddler or a Chinese Communist Party crony, take a breath and don’t take the bait. And definitely don’t get so angry that you provide Trump an opening to expand upon the attacks. For the most part, the long-time politician got the job done. Of course, just because Biden saved himself from getting goaded into a long discussion about his son’s alleged business dealings doesn’t mean Trump wouldn’t return to the subject on a few occasions during the 90-minute

Amber Athey

This was Donald Trump’s best debate performance yet

Donald Trump had arguably his best debate performance ever on Thursday night, for which he owes a big ‘thank you’ to the Commission on Presidential Debates. The CPD instituted a new rule for the debate in Nashville: each candidate would have their microphone turned off while their opponent was giving their initial two-minute response. This was intended to prevent the consistent interruptions that occurred during the first debate, which were primarily blamed on Trump but were started by former vice president Joe Biden. I suspect that the CPD, which has proved itself to be very biased, thought this would harm the President most. People who don’t like Trump tend to

Thursday

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Xi’s world: how Covid has accelerated China’s rise

32 min listen

China has come out on top from this pandemic year – what does this mean for the world? (00:50) Was Test and Trace doomed from the start? (12:35) And what’s with all these Covid excuses? (22:35) With historian Rana Mitter; security expert Nigel Inkster; analyst Richard Dobbs; virologist Elisabetta Groppelli; editor of the Oldie Harry Mount; and Real Life columnist Melissa Kite. Presented by Cindy Yu. Produced by Cindy Yu, Max Jeffery and Matt Taylor.

John Jenkins

We’ve become desensitised to terror

Samuel Paty, a teacher at a school in a sedate suburb of Paris, was beheaded in the street last Friday by an 18-year old Chechen former asylum-seeker. The reason for this act of savagery was that Paty had shown cartoons of the prophet Muhammad to a school class, to illuminate a discussion about civic freedoms and the boundaries of debate. In order to avoid unnecessary offence, he had allowed anyone who wished to avoid viewing the cartoons to leave the classroom. Afterwards, one Muslim pupil is reported to have told her father. He complained to the school and then is alleged to have launched a sustained and inflammatory online campaign

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Who’d want the job of vaccinating the nation?

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News of a viable vaccine is the one development in the Covid drama that could drag the national mood out of the current despair that’s pulverising economic recovery; it would also provoke a euphoric stock market rally. And it’s clearly getting closer. But how close? The chance of a magic potion for Christmas remains ‘slim’, according to Vaccine Taskforce chair Kate Bingham; spring next year is a safer bet, says chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, adding that ‘we should not overpromise’. He’s right there: the worst thing ministers could do

Douglas Murray

My week with the baying Antifa mob

Portland, Oregon In the days when you could still watch a nature documentary without feeling as if you were sitting through a politics lecture I saw footage of a pack of smaller predators taking down an elephant. At the time I remember thinking: ‘Why don’t you keep running? Why don’t you knock the first one off and keep going?’ Strangely, I thought of that elephant again in the very different savannah of Portland, Oregon. In recent years this city in the Pacific Northwest has become famous for a variety of reasons — none of them good. As one long-term resident said to me last week: ‘This used to be a

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Europe’s long Covid: things aren’t getting better any time soon

China is now suffering only mild symptoms from the global pandemic. It is Europe that is stuck with the dreaded long Covid. The Chinese economy has rebounded and its exports are going through the roof, as it sells medical equipment to a world devastated by the pandemic it covered up. The virus originated in Wuhan, yet China has avoided much of the pain, despite how slow Beijing was to admit to the initial outbreak. But eurozone economies were a tenth smaller this spring than at the start of the year. Only a few weeks ago, it had seemed that Britain — and Europe — was on a steady path to

Rana Mitter

Xi’s world: Covid has accelerated China’s rise

Back in February, the Chinese state appeared to be in trouble. A terrifying virus had infected thousands of people and the country’s social media exploded in anger against the authorities faster than Chinese censors could scrub away the critical comments. Like governments elsewhere, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turned to the emergency analogy of choice, the second world war. Channelling Mao Zedong’s guerrilla campaign against the Japanese in the 1930s, state media declared that China was fighting a ‘people’s war’ against the virus. As in that earlier war, China’s conflict with the virus has shifted from a defiant retreat to a declaration of victory. Nor is this just bluster. The

Wednesday

Daniel DePetris

Can Trump the peacemaker convince US voters?

President Donald Trump has been running from rally to rally like a headless chicken ready to cluck about his accomplishments. The only issue is there aren’t many accomplishments for him to run on. His campaign advisers are begging him to focus all his energy on the prospects of an economic comeback in the last two weeks of the campaign. The candidate, however, doesn’t take orders from his staffers very well. Rather than making his case for another four years in the White House, Trump is using this critical stretch of time calling the nation’s most respected doctor an ‘idiot’ and a ‘disaster’, unconcerned about the notion that assaulting Anthony Fauci’s

Monday

David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Iran is now a country in decay

If 2020 is generally accepted to be a global annus horribilis, then it is perhaps fitting that the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ability to do mischief has seemingly just received a hefty boost. On Sunday morning, the UN lifted its 13-year long arms embargo on the Iranian armed forces. Iran is now (technically at least) free to buy and sells arms in the international marketplace.  It seems an odd time to be easing up on Iran. At the end of last year, just before coronavirus set in, the regime was making an excellent fist of massacring its own people. It machine-gunned them from rooftops, it beat them in the streets,

Tim Ogden

Russia’s conundrum in the Caucasus

For the second time since fighting began on 27 September, a humanitarian ceasefire was agreed between the warring countries of Azerbaijan and Armenia — and, for the second time, it was quickly broken. Momentum is now firmly in Azerbaijan’s favour, with Azeri forces capturing a number of towns and settlements in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. These could subsequently be used to launch an assault on the capital, Stepanakert, which has already come under multiple bouts of artillery fire. Armenia has retaliated with long-range bombardments of its own against Azerbaijan’s second city of Ganja, an act that has caused outrage in Baku as the city is comfortably outside the disputed

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The empty rhetoric of ‘je suis Samuel’

The mother of my daughter didn’t attend yesterday’s rally in Paris to honour the memory of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded in a street in the north-west of the French capital last Friday. A teacher herself in a state school in Seine-Saint-Denis in the north of Paris, a district often cited as the most deprived in France, she was profoundly shocked by the death of Monsieur Paty. Naturally, she has nothing but sympathy for his family but she had no wish to stand shoulder to shoulder with politicians, intellectuals, the judiciary and members of an education authority who for years have offered her profession little or no support in their

Saturday

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Terror in the Republic: the beheading of Samuel Paty

The decapitation of middle school teacher Samuel Paty, 47, by an Islamist in a suburb of Paris yesterday is not just another tragedy and blow to French morale — it is also a reminder of why Emmanuel Macron feels exposed on the issue of what he calls ‘Muslim separatism’. Channelling the Spanish civil war slogan ‘No pasarán’, Macron himself tweeted last night that Islamism ‘ne passeront pas’ — they will not pass. Marine Le Pen, his main challenger in the coming presidential election, countered that it has done so already. The problem for Macron is that this atrocity fits a trend. It is eight years since the killing of Jewish children

Nicholas Sheppard

Jacinda Ardern’s Labour landslide

Jacinda Ardern’s Labour party has won re-election in a landslide. Her government improved its vote-share by around 12 per cent from the last election in 2017, its best result since 1938. New Zealand’s political system is proportional, allowing minor parties garnering more than 5 per cent of the vote to enter Parliament. Jacinda Ardern’s victory is so emphatic that, for the first time since the proportional system was set in place in 1996, it appears a majority party will be able to govern alone, without needing coalition parties or any kind of confidence and supply agreement. The machinery of the electoral system wasn’t really designed for such a result. Were

Friday

Senay Boztas

Why the Dutch can’t stop bending the Covid rules

Half an hour before a partial lockdown began on Wednesday night, scores of people packed into tents outside a bar in the Hague to drink and party. Their celebrations were perhaps characteristic of how the Dutch have handled the pandemic. Metres away, in the Dutch lower house, parliamentarians were at that moment enacting a partial lockdown to control spiralling coronavirus infections in the Netherlands. In the 14 days before 14 October, the infection rate reached just over 412 per 100,000, making the Netherlands one of the worst-affected countries in the EU. The partial lockdown means bars and restaurants will be closed for four weeks, adult team sports banned, people limited

Emmanuel Macron

Building an Islam of the Enlightenment

What is it that today, in our society, endangers our Republic, our ability to live together, and inform you of the decisions taken as a result which are the result of methodical work carried out for nearly three years? The problem is not secularism. Secularism in the French Republic is the freedom to believe or not to believe, the possibility of exercising one’s worship from the moment public order is ensured. Secularism is the neutrality of the State and in no case the erasure of religions in society in the public space. Secularism is the glue of a united France. If spirituality is everyone’s domain, secularism is everyone’s business. And

Daniel DePetris

Trump won’t admit it, but he’s in trouble

President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden were supposed to debate in front of the American public last night. The debate, however, was called off after Trump refused to do it via video link. So instead, Americans were treated to two different town-halls on two different U.S. television networks. While Trump was talking about conspiracy theories on NBC, Biden was talking policy on ABC. The former was part-absurd, part-therapy session. The latter was boring and frankly what you would think a typical presidential town-hall would look like. Trump won’t admit it, but he’s in trouble. As the coronavirus count gets higher, his poll numbers are getting lower and