domingo, 14 de dezembro de 2025
Live Updates: Police Say Jewish Community Targeted in Deadly Sydney Attack
Live Updates: Police Say Jewish Community
Targeted in Deadly Sydney Attack
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia
called the shooting on Bondi Beach a terrorist attack targeting the Jewish
community during a Hanukkah celebration. At least one gunman is dead and
another is in custody.
Updated
Dec. 14,
2025, 9:35 a.m. ET10 minutes ago
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12/14/world/sydney-bondi-beach-shooting
Yan
Zhuang and Victoria Kim
Victoria
Kim reported from Sydney, Australia.
Here’s
the latest.
At least
11 people were killed by gunmen who targeted a Jewish holiday celebration at
Bondi Beach in Sydney on Sunday, in what the authorities called a terrorist
attack. One of two suspected shooters was also killed, the police said, and the
other was said to be wounded and in custody.
Police
Commissioner Mal Lanyon of the New South Wales Police Force said on Sunday
evening that officers had found what they believed to be several improvised
explosive devices in a nearby vehicle linked to the suspect who was killed.
Bomb disposal units were at the scene, he said.
He also
said that the police were looking into whether any “third offender” was
involved. “We will make sure that we prevent any further activity,” he said.
Hundreds
of people had gathered earlier on Sunday at Bondi, Australia’s best-known
beach, for a Hanukkah event. Children were playing as music and bubbles filled
the air. Then gunshots ripped through the celebration.
The rare
mass shooting sent the crowds scattering. Emergency workers were seen
transporting a person on a stretcher after the shooting. Video from the scene
broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the public broadcaster,
showed police officers fanning out in an outdoor area where a gun was lying
near a tree.
“This is
a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which
should be a day of joy,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said. He
added: “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”
The
shooting on Sunday is the latest in a series of antisemitic attacks in
Australia that intensified last year. The violence has unnerved many in the
country, which has the world’s highest concentration of Holocaust survivors
after Israel. Arsonists last year targeted a Jewish business and a synagogue,
prompting calls for greater accountability.
Chris
Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, praised the actions of a
bystander who was shown in social media footage tackling one of the gunmen from
behind and wresting control of his firearm. He said the man likely saved the
lives of many people.
Commissioner
Lanyon said the shooter who was killed had been previously known to the police.
Robert
Gregory, the chief executive of the Australian Jewish Association, said members
of the community told him the shooting had targeted an event hosted by the
Chabad organization at the beach to observe the Hanukkah holiday.
Some
leaders and organizations from the Jewish community said on Sunday that their
warnings about those calls had not been heeded.
Yad
Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial center, had raised concerns about
the “dangerous rise” of antisemitism in Australia in personal meetings with the
premiers of Victoria and New South Wales.
Here’s
what we know:
Initial
reports: Multiple people called police at about 6:45 p.m. to report that
multiple people had been shot. The gunmen emerged from a small silver hatchback
parked by a footbridge near the beach and begun firing into the crowd
celebrating Hanukkah, according to a witness who was said he was walking a few
dozen yards from the shooters.
Hanukkah
celebration: Witnesses have said the gunmen were targeting the celebration
marking the first night of Hanukkah. They weren’t shooting at everyone, said
the witness, a teenager who asked not to be named for safety reasons.
Rare
shooting: Minutes after the shooting, the New South Wales police issued an
alert asking people to stay away from the beach, which is over 3,000 feet long.
Shootings are rare in Australia, a country with one of the lowest gun-related
death rates in the developed world.
Isabel
Kershner and Damien Cave contributed reporting.
Trump’s backing splits European far right
Trump’s
backing splits European far right
The
Alternative for Germany party wants legitimacy from Trump to end its isolation,
while France’s National Rally sees him as a liability.
December
10, 2025 4:01 am CET
By Nette
Nöstlinger and Victor Goury-Laffont
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-europe-far-right-afd-germany-national-rally-france/
BERLIN —
U.S. President Donald Trump’s overt embrace of Europe’s nationalists is
exposing a rift among its biggest far-right parties.
While
Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has welcomed Trump’s
moral support, viewing it as a way to win domestic legitimacy and end its
political ostracization, France’s National Rally has kept its distance —
viewing direct American backing as a potential liability.
The
parties, which lead the polls in the EU’s two biggest economies, have long had
their differences — not least over some of the German party’s comments related
to World War II. But their divergent reactions to Trump stem less from varying
ideologies than from distinct domestic political calculations.
AfD
leaders in Germany celebrated the Trump administration’s recent attacks on
Europe’s mainstream political leaders and approval of “patriotic European
parties” that seek to fight Europe’s so-called “civilizational erasure.”
Europe’s centrists particularly fear America’s new goal of “cultivating
resistance” to boost the nationalist tide.
“This is
direct recognition of our work,” AfD MEP Petr Bystron said in a statement after
the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy — which, in
parts, sounds like it could have been a manifesto of a far-right European party
— warning that Europe may be “unrecognizable” in two decades due to migration
and a loss of national identities.
“The AfD
has always fought for sovereignty, remigration, and peace — precisely the
priorities that Trump is now implementing,” added Bystron, who will be among a
group of politicians in his party traveling to Washington this week to meet
with MAGA Republicans.
One of
the AfD’s national leaders, Alice Weidel, also celebrated Trump’s security
strategy.
“That’s
why we need the AfD!” Weidel said in a post after the document was released.
By
contrast, the National Rally in France is much warier of alignment with Trump,
who is very unpopular among the French electorate.
National
Rally President Jordan Bardella gave interviews to British media this week in
which he broadly agreed with Trump’s anti-migrant program, but pushed back
against the idea of a role for the U.S. president in steering French politics.
“I’m
French, so I’m not happy with vassalage, and I don’t need a big brother like
Trump to consider the fate of my country,” he said in an interview with The
Telegraph published Tuesday.
Thierry
Mariani, a member of the party’s national board, explained Trump hardly seemed
like an ideal ally.
“Trump
treats us like a colony — with his rhetoric, which isn’t a big deal, but
especially economically and politically,” he told POLITICO. The party’s
national leaders, Mariani added, see “the risk of this attitude from someone
who now has nothing to fear, since he cannot be re-elected, and who is always
excessive and at times ridiculous.”
AfD’s
American dream
It’s no
coincidence that Bystron is part of a delegation of AfD politicians set to meet
members of Trump’s MAGA camp in Washington this week. Bystron has been among
the AfD politicians increasingly looking to build ties to the Trump
administration to win support for what they frame as a struggle against
political persecution and censorship at home.
This is
an argument members of the Trump administration clearly sympathize with. When
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency declared the AfD to be extremist earlier
this year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move “tyranny in
disguise.” During the Munich Security Conference, U.S. Vice President JD Vance
urged mainstream politicians in Europe to knock down the “firewalls” that shut
out far-right parties from government.
AfD
leaders have therefore made a simple calculation: Trump’s support may lend the
party a sheen of acceptability that will help it appeal to more voters while,
at the same time, making it politically harder for German Chancellor Friedrich
Merz’s conservatives to refuse to govern in coalition with their party.
This
explains why AfD polticians will be in the U.S. this week seeking political
legitimacy. On Friday evening, Markus Frohnmaier, deputy leader of the AfD
parlimentary group, will be an “honored guest” at a New York Young Republican
Club gala, which has called for a “new civic order” in Germany.
National
Rally sees ‘nothing to gain’
In
France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally has distanced itself from the
AfD and Trump as part of a wider effort to present itself as more palatable to
mainstream voters ahead of a presidential election in 2027 the party believes
it has a good chance of winning.
As part
of the effort to clean up its image, Le Pen pushed for the AfD to be ejected
from the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament last year
following a series of scandals that made it something of a pariah.
At the
same time, National Rally leaders have calculated that Trump can’t help them at
home because he is deeply unpopular nationally. Even the party’s supporters
view the American president negatively.
An Odoxa
poll released after the 2024 American presidential election found that 56
percent of National Rally voters held a negative view of Trump. In the same
survey, 85 percent of voters from all parties described Trump as “aggressive,”
and 78 percent as “racist.”
Jean-Yves
Camus, a political scientist and leading expert on French and international
far-right movements, highlighted the ideological gaps separating Le Pen from
Trump — notably her support for a welfare state and social safety nets, as well
as her limited interest in social conservatism and religion.
“Trumpism
is a distinctly American phenomenon that cannot be transplanted to France,”
Camus said. “Marine Le Pen, who is working on normalization, has no interest in
being linked with Trump. And since she is often accused of serving foreign
powers — mostly Russia — she has nothing to gain from being branded ‘Trump’s
agent in France.’”
This
story has been updated.
The Far Right in Germany Keeps Trying to Unseal National Secrets
The Far
Right in Germany Keeps Trying to Unseal National Secrets
Opponents
of AfD lawmakers say that their push to publish sensitive details about
national security could benefit Russian military planning.
Christopher
F. Schuetze
By
Christopher F. Schuetze
Christopher
Schuetze reported from Berlin and Erfurt, a city in eastern Germany where
far-right lawmakers have made dozens of requests for sensitive information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/world/europe/germany-far-right-afd-russia-security-secrets.html
Dec. 14,
2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
One
far-right lawmaker demanded that the German authorities reveal the exact routes
used by the German military to take supplies to Ukraine.
A second
pushed the government to disclose whether it had provided Ukraine with a
long-range rocket system capable of striking deep inside Russia.
A third
wanted officials to reveal if the German Army used drones to patrol its eastern
border.
Lawmakers
from the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, have set off a political
furor in Germany by repeatedly using their constitutional powers to press
government agencies to publish sensitive details related to national security.
The party’s members have made more than 7,000 attempts in the past five years
to unseal this kind of secret information, according to one analysis.
The
group’s opponents say the publication of such secret information, parts of
which relate to Germany’s support for Ukraine, could benefit Russian military
planning. These claims, which the party strongly denies, have heightened
concerns about the AfD’s relationship with Russia. The party’s lawmakers have
praised Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, often; visited counterparts in
Russia or at the Russian Embassy in Berlin; and questioned Germany’s support
for Ukraine.
The
outcry over the AfD’s demands for information has touched a national nerve as
Germans debate how to respond to the threat Moscow poses to European and German
security. It also comes as the AfD runs neck and neck in the polls with the
governing Christian Democratic Party, edging it closer to power.
Mainstream
parties have long refused to work with the AfD, keeping it in a form of
political quarantine. The stronger the party’s perform, the likelier it is to
finally be allowed to join a governing coalition at either the federal or state
level.
The AfD’s
leaders say the outrage is confected by political opponents who fear losing
power and popularity to the far right. Its leaders have previously described
the requests as a routine activity for an opposition party seeking to ready
itself for power and familiarize itself with the nuances of government. The
party’s interest in military infrastructure “stems from our platform as a party
committed to internal and external security,” Beatrix von Storch, the AfD’s
deputy leader in Parliament, said in statement. “Our questions serve to expose
problems, criticize the government and develop our own proposals for
solutions.”
The scale
of the AfD’s inquiries was first brought to light in October by Georg Maier,
the interior minister in Thuringia, a state in eastern Germany.
Mr. Maier
had kept a low profile in regional politics, leading the state’s Interior
Ministry and the local branch of the Social Democrats, a center-left party. As
interior minister, Mr. Maier must sign off on lawmakers’ requests for
information that touch on his expertise, like those related to the police or
homeland security — including requests from his political opponents in the AfD.
Mr. Maier
told the national news media last month that AfD members had made dozens of
security-related queries in Thuringia alone, some of which contained dozens of
detailed questions, and that the questions looked as if they had been provided
by the Kremlin.
Mr. Maier
repeated that assertion in an interview with The New York Times at the
statehouse in Erfurt, Thuringia, but he provided no evidence of Russian
influence over the queries and stopped short of leveling the accusation of
espionage.
“I am
responsible for ensuring the safety of the people here,” Mr. Maier said, noting
that if he saw “anything unusual affecting our critical infrastructure,” he
needed to address the issue.
Mr.
Maier’s statements set off a frenzy, thrust him onto the national stage and led
other mainstream politicians and national news outlets to sift through tens of
thousands of questions submitted by the AfD over the past decade to agencies
and authorities across Germany, including the federal Parliament in Berlin.
The
Greens, another center-left party, soon produced a list of the AfD’s questions
in Brandenburg, a state that surrounds Berlin and abuts the German-Polish
border. These included questions about civil defense and drones — responses to
which, the AfD’s opponents said, might benefit Russia.
Then, a
third list of security-related questions — this time posed by the AfD in the
federal Parliament — was leaked to journalists, increasing the outcry. As well
as asking about Germany’s long-range missiles, the AfD’s federal lawmakers
sought to reveal information about the army’s drone program and defensive
plans.
Der
Spiegel, a national newsmagazine, later produced the most systematic analysis
of the inquiries. Its journalists spent three weeks combing through government
archives to find 7,000 questions submitted by the AfD that the reporters deemed
suspicious.
The AfD
denied that it was working for the Kremlin and brought libel suits against both
Mr. Maier, who denies that he libeled the AfD, and the Handelsblatt, a business
newspaper that printed the first interview with him on the matter. A judge
threw out the case against Handelsblatt, but the case against Mr. Maier
continues.
“Smearing
us as Nazis no longer works; now they are trying to portray us as agents of
Russia,” Tino Chrupalla, a chair of the party, said on public television in
October after the parliamentary questions first came to light.
The AfD
said its critics had misinterpreted its questions, some of which had nothing to
do with Russia, or exaggerated their content for political reasons.
One
question Mr. Maier had listed as suspicious was actually related to road
construction in Thuringia. Another, flagged by the Green Party, focused on an
incident in which an easyJet plane hit a bird and made an emergency landing at
an airport in Berlin, asking how such incidents might be avoided.
The AfD’s
supporters pointed out that government officials can refuse — and have refused
— to release information they think is too sensitive, meaning that the
questions do not in themselves pose a security risk. None of the questions
resulted in the release of what the state authorities considered sensitive
information. And asking for it was not illegal.
Analysts
also said there could be legitimate reasons for AfD lawmakers to seek
security-related information, for example to highlight government actions that
the party deems harmful to the national interest. And the AfD is not the only
party to ask for such sensitive information, even if it employs the practice
far more often and conspicuously than its rivals.
The Left
Party, for example, used the same parliamentary tool in 2023 to press the
government to outline its economic strategy on China; critics said the
revelation would help China counter the strategy.
The AfD’s
critics were unconvinced. They said that a party with such clear affinity with
Russia must have had an ulterior motive in asking such sensitive questions. The
German Parliament held a debate early last month about the AfD’s questions,
during which mainstream lawmakers made rancorous accusations about their
far-right colleagues.
Jens
Spahn, a senior lawmaker from the governing Christian Democrat party, said
during a later parliamentary debate that Alice Weidel, the other AfD chair,
sounded like “a fifth column for Putin.”
Trying to
defuse the fallout, some senior AfD leaders tried to distance the party from
Russia, criticizing AfD colleagues who had planned trips to meet Russian
officials, highlighting a divide within the party on the issue. Last month, at
the height of the dispute, senior AfD lawmakers persuaded colleagues to cancel
a meeting with Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president, during their
visit to Russia.
But the
actions of other leaders fueled further criticism.
When Mr.
Chrupalla, the senior AfD official, went on public TV last month to try to
clear up the AfD’s view of Russia, he ended up downplaying the risk that
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia posed to Germany. Mr. Chrupalla suggested
that Poland, one of Germany’s closest allies, was also a threat.
About Mr.
Putin, he said, “He’s never done anything to me.”
Christopher
F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics,
society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Europe's center is barely holding — and Trump plans to blow it apart
Europe's
center is barely holding — and Trump plans to blow it apart
Despite
recent election wins for moderates in the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K.,
the far right is stronger than ever.
By TIM
ROSS
in
Jaywick, England
December
12, 2025 4:00 am CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-far-right-center-politics/
In recent
elections, voters in Europe have given hope to embattled centrist politicians
across the Western world.
Donald
Trump may have romped back into the White House, but the international movement
of MAGA-aligned populists has run into trouble across the Atlantic. At
elections in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania — and in a
sprawling vote across 27 EU countries for the European Parliament — mainstream
candidates defeated populist hardliners and far-right nationalists.
“There
remains a majority in the center for a strong Europe, and that is crucial for
stability,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, after the
EU Parliament elections last year. “In other words, the center is holding.”
Sixteen
months later, that hold is looking anything but secure.
Hard-right
and far-right politicians are now leading the polls in France, the U.K. and
even Germany. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval rating is a dire
21 percent. His French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, is even lower, at 11
percent — and the mood is so grim that this fall’s spectacular theft at the
Louvre is being treated by some as a giant metaphor for a country unable to
manage its challenges.
Even von
der Leyen’s own EU conservatives now rely on the votes of far right lawmakers
to get her plans approved in Brussels. One outraged centrist likened the shift
to those German politicians who enabled Adolf Hitler to take power.
Populists
at the extremes, meanwhile, cast themselves as the obvious alternative for
populations that want change. And now they can expect Trump to help: In a
brutal rupture of transatlantic norms, a new U.S. National Security Strategy
aims to use American diplomacy to cultivate “resistance” to political
correctness in Europe — especially on migration — and to support parties it
describes as “patriotic.” Trump himself told POLITICO he would endorse
candidates he believed would move Europe in the right direction.
On that
trajectory, in the next four years the political map of the West faces its most
dramatic upheaval since the Cold War. The implications for geopolitics, from
trade to defense, could be profound.
“What
[Europeans are] getting from Trump is the strategy of maximum polarization that
hollows out the center,” said Will Marshall from the Progressive Policy
Institute, the centrist American think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the
1990s. “The old established parties of left and right that dominated the post
war era have gotten weaker,” he said. “The nationalist or populist right’s
revolt is against them.”
Nowhere
is this recent transformation more dramatic than in the U.K.
As the
sun sinks toward the horizon over a calm sea one Thursday evening in November,
half a dozen regulars huddle around the bar in the Never Say Die pub, a few
yards from the beach at Jaywick Sands, on the east coast of England.
Built in
the 1930s as a resort 70 miles from London, Jaywick is now the most deprived
neighborhood in the country. The area had such a bad image that in 2018 a U.S.
MAGA ad used a photograph of a dilapidated Jaywick street to warn of the
apocalyptic future facing America if Trump’s candidates were not elected.
It is
here among the pebbledashed bungalows and England flags hanging limp from
lampposts that a new political force — Nigel Farage’s rightwing Reform UK — has
built its heartland.
At the
bar, Dave Laurence, 82, says he doesn’t vote, as a rule, but made an exception
for Farage, who was elected to represent the area last year. “I quite like him.
He’s doing the best he can,” Laurence says as he sips his pint of lager, with
’80s pop hits playing in the background. “I’ll vote for him again.”
Laurence
freely describes himself as “racist” and says he would never vote for a Black
person, such as the center-right Conservative Party’s leader Kemi Badenoch.
What troubles him most, he says, is the number of immigrants who have arrived
in the U.K. during his lifetime, especially those crossing the Channel in small
boats. Soon, Laurence fears, the country will be “full of Muslims and they’ll
fucking rebel against us.”
With its
anti-establishment, immigration-fighting agenda, Farage’s Reform UK offers
voters a program tightly in tune with far-right parties that have gained ground
across the West. According to opinion polls, Farage now has a real chance of
becoming the U.K.’s next prime minister if the vote were held today. (A general
election is not due until 2029).
It’s
startling to note that as recently as July 2024, Starmer’s Labour Party won a
historic landslide and some of his triumphant election aides traveled to the
U.S. to advise Democrats on strategy. Today, Starmer is derided as “First Gear
Keir” as he fights off leadership rivals rumored to be trying to oust him. And
Reform isn’t the only force remaking British party politics. To the left of
Labour, the Greens have also made recent gains in the polls under a new leader
calling himself an “eco-populist.”
Farage’s
stunning rise from the sidelines to the front of a political revolution carries
lessons well beyond Britain’s borders. Europeans raised in the old school of
mainstream politics fear that the traditional centerground — their home turf —
will not hold.
‘Durably
unstable’
Macron,
for his part, tried to counter the rise of the hard right by calling a snap
election for the French National Assembly last year. The gamble backfired,
delivering a hung parliament that has been unable to agree on key economic
policies ever since. Macron is now historically unpopular.
French
lawmakers’ clashes over the budget have toppled three of Macron’s picks as
prime minister since the summer of 2024. A backlash against his plan to raise
the pension age has forced ratings agencies to mull a damaging downgrade.
Macron, who himself became president by launching a new centrist movement to
rival the political establishment, now has no traditional party machinery to
help bolster his position. “He’ll leave a political landscape that is perhaps
durably unstable. It’s unforgivable,” said Alain Minc, an influential adviser
and former mentor to the French president.
The chaos
gives populists their chance. The main politicians making any running in
conversations about the next presidential election belong to the far-right
National Rally of Marine Le Pen and its youthful party president Jordan
Bardella, who are riding high in the polls at 34 percent.
In
Germany, too, the center ground is steadily eroding.
Though
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives won a snap election in February, his
ideologically uneasy coalition, which consists of his own conservative bloc and
the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), holds one of the slimmest
parliamentary majorities for a government since 1945, with just 52 percent of
seats. That leaves the Merz coalition vulnerable to small defections within the
ranks and makes it hard for him to achieve anything ambitious in government.
The far-left Die Linke party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD)
both surged at the last election, too, with AfD winning the best result in a
national election for any far-right party since World War II.
Merz’s
attempt to defang the AfD by moving his conservatives sharply to the right on
the issue of migration seems to have backfired. The AfD has only continued its
rise, surpassing Merz’s conservatives in many polls.
The rise
of the far-right is a cultural shock to many centrist Germans, given the
country’s deeply entrenched desire to avoid repeating its past. “For a long
time in Germany we thought with our history, and the way we teach in our
schools, we would be a bit more immune to that,” one concerned German official
said. “It turned out we are not.”
Even in
the Netherlands, where centrist Rob Jetten won a famous but narrow victory over
the far-right firebrand Geert Wilders in October, there are reasons for
mainstream politicians to worry. Wilders’ Freedom Party is still one of the
biggest forces in the land, winning the same number of seats as Jetten’s D66.
He could well return next time, just as Trump did in the U.S.
Where did
all the voters go?
According
to polling firm Ipsos, a large proportion of voters in many Western democracies
now have little faith in the political process. While they still believe in
democratic values, they are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working for
them.
A large
survey questioning around 10,000 voters across nine countries found 45 percent
were dissatisfied, fueling support for the extremes. Among voters on the far
left (57 percent) and the far right (54 percent), levels of dissatisfaction
were highest of all.
The
countries with the highest rates of dissatisfaction in the Ipsos study were
France and the Netherlands, where political upheaval has taken its toll on
faith in the system.
Alongside
the coronavirus pandemic and the aftermath of lockdowns, the biggest drivers of
dissatisfaction were the cost of living, immigration and crime, according to
Gideon Skinner from Ipsos. Trust in politics fell in the 90s and took another
hit in the late 2000s at the time of the financial crash, he said.
“There
may be specific things that have made it worse over the last couple of years
but it’s also a long-term condition,” Skinner told POLITICO. “It’s something we
do need to worry about and there is not a silver bullet that can fix it all.”
Perhaps
the greatest problem for incumbent centrists is that in most cases their
economies are so moribund that they lack the fiscal firepower to spend money
addressing the issues disillusioned voters care about most — like high living
costs, ailing public services and migration.
The
inequality emergency
The
financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020-21 left many
governments strapped for cash. In the U.K., for example, the economy was 16
percent smaller than it should have been a decade after the 2008 crash if prior
growth trends had continued, according to Anand Menon, professor of European
politics at King’s College London.
“Crucially,
the impact of the financial crisis, like the impact of so much else in our
politics, was massively unequal,” Menon said. “Prosperous places with high
productivity, with well-educated workforces suffered far, far less than poorer
parts of the country.”
Nobel
Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz submitted a study to the G20 in
November warning that the world was facing an “inequality emergency.” Fueled by
war, pandemic and trade disruptions, the crisis risks preparing the ground for
more authoritarian leaders, his report said.
In many
Western countries, the centerground is more than just a metaphor. It is in
capital cities like London, Paris and Washington that power and money
accumulate and the economic and political elites seek to maintain their grip on
the status quo.
The
further you travel from these centers out to areas in decline, the more likely
you are to find support for radical politics.
As Menon
notes, Britain’s 2016 revolution — the referendum vote to leave the European
Union after almost half a century of membership — can be mapped onto the
culinary geography of the country.
“Pret a
Manger” is a smart national chain of sandwich and coffee shops, catering for
hungry commuters and office workers in wealthy, successful British cities.
“Places that had a Pret voted Remain,” Menon said. Parts of the U.K. where
median wages were lower were disproportionately likely to vote to leave the
EU.
Immigration,
immigration, immigration
After the
Brexit vote in 2016, immigration slid from the top of the priority list for
British voters and Farage himself took a step back. Both have now returned, as
Farage rides a wave of headlines about irregular migrants landing in small
boats from France.
From
January to May this year, there were a record 14,800 small boat crossings, 42
percent more than in the same period in the previous year, according to Oxford
University’s Migration Observatory.
For
Laurence, in the Never Say Die pub, the small boats represent the biggest issue
of all. “What’s going to happen in 10 years’ time? What’s going to happen in 20
years’ time when the boat people are still coming over?” he asked.
A decade
ago, German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors to hundreds of thousands
of refugees arriving into Europe from Syria, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq.
The AfD surged in the months that followed, permanently changing German
politics. At February’s election, the AfD won a record 21 percent of the vote,
finishing in second place behind Merz’s conservative bloc.
“The
fundamental failure that is common to the whole [centrist] transatlantic
community is on immigration,” said Marshall from the Progressive Policy
Institute. “All of the far-right movements have made it their top issue.”
It is the
perceived threat that waves of migration pose to traditional national cultures
which drives much of the support for the far right. Trump’s White House is now
primed to join the European nationalists’ fight.
According
to a new U.S. National Security Strategy document released in December, Europe
is facing “civilisational erasure” from unrestricted immigration, as well as
falling birthrates. The analysis draws on the so-called great replacement
theory, a racist conspiracy theory. Free speech — in the MAGA definition, at
least — is another casualty of conventional centrist rule in Europe, as
political correctness veers into “censorship,” the U.S. document said.
In his
interview with POLITICO earlier this week, Trump aligned himself fully with the
strategy paper. European nations are “decaying” and their “weak” leaders can
expect to be challenged by rivals with American support, he said. “I’d
endorse,” he added.
In
Brussels, the double-punch of the president’s interview and the strategy
document left diplomats and officials feeling bruised and alarmed all over
again, after a period in which they allowed themselves to hope that the
transatlantic alliance wasn’t dying. One EU diplomat was blunt in assessing
Trump’s new method: “It’s autocracy.”
The
stolen jewels
Sometimes,
it takes a random news event — ostensibly unconnected to politics — to
crystalize the national mood. In Paris, the theft of France’s priceless crown
jewels from the Louvre provided just such an opportunity, morphing into an
indictment of an establishment that can’t get the job done, even when the job
simply involves thoroughly locking the windows at the world’s most famous
museum. National Rally leader Jordan Bardella called the incident a
“humiliation” before asking: “How far will the breakdown of the state go?”
In
Britain, just a month after Starmer’s victory last year, riots broke out across
the country, fueled by far-right extremists. The catalyst was the murder of
three young girls aged 6, 7 and 9, in Southport, northwest England, by a Black
teenager wrongly identified at the time on social media — in posts amplified by
the far-right — as a Muslim.
At the
time, Farage suggested the police were withholding the truth about the suspect,
earning him the fury of mainstream politicians. While stressing he did not
support violence, Farage railed against what he called “two-tier policing,” a
phrase popular among far-right commentators who claim police treat right-wing
protesters more harshly than those on the left.
It’s an
opinion that resonates in Jaywick. Chennelle Rutland, 56, is walking her two
dogs along the beachfront, admiring the view as the sun sets, flaring the sky
orange, then purple. The colors catch the surface of the flat sea. “It’s one
rule for one and one rule for the other,” she says. “The whites have got to
shut up because if you do say anything, you’re ‘racist’ and ‘far right.’”
It would
be wrong to characterise residents of Jaywick as simply ignorant or full of
rage. Many who spoke to POLITICO there were cheerful, happy with their
community and up to speed with the news. But, just as they’d soured on their
country’s centrist establishment, they were also tuning out its favored news
sources.
In
Jaywick, some of Farage’s voters prefer GB News, Britain’s answer to Fox News,
which launched in 2021, or learn about current affairs from YouTube and other
social media. The BBC — for decades the mainstay of the British media landscape
— has lost a portion of its audience here. Right-wing commentators and
politicians attack it as biased. Trump has lately joined in, threatening to sue
over a BBC edit that he said deceptively made it look as if he was explicitly
inciting violence. The BBC’s director general and head of news both resigned.
In the process, another piece of Britain’s onetime centerground was giving
way.
What
next?
There are
reasons for centrists to hope. In Rome, Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of
Italy party has become less extreme in power, and the worst fears of moderates
about a group with its historic roots in neo-fascism have not come to pass. She
remains popular, and while pushing a culture war at home, she has avoided the
wrath of the EU leadership and kept Trump onside.
Populists
and nationalists don’t always win. Trump lost in 2020. In the Netherlands,
Wilders lost in October this year, though only by a whisker. Romania’s Nicușor
Dan won the presidency as a centrist in May, but again only narrowly defeating
his far-right opponent.
Structural
obstacles may also slow the radicals’ progress. The U.K.’s first-past-the-post
voting system makes it hard for new parties to do well. The two-round French
system has so far stopped Le Pen’s National Rally from gaining power as
centrists combine to back moderates. In Germany, a similar “firewall” exists
under which center parties keep the far-right out.
Even as
he enjoys a sustained lead in the polls and wins local elections in the U.K.,
Farage has not convinced voters that Reform would do a good job. Even some of
his supporters worry he will be out of his depth in government.
The
problem, for the centrists who are in power, is that a lot of voters seem to
think they, too, are out of their depth. And, whether that involves dealing
with migration, combatting inequality, or just boosting the security around the
Mona Lisa, it’s a reputation they’ll need to fix in order to survive — no easy
task given the intractability of the challenges facing the rich world.
The next
year will see more elections at which the centrists — and their populists
rivals — will be tested. In Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, long seen as
the far-right bad boy of EU politics, is fighting to keep power at an election
expected in April. There are regional votes in Germany where the AfD is on
track to prosper. France may require yet another snap election to end its
political paralysis. Trump’s diplomats and officials will be ready to
intervene.
Farage’s
party, too, will be on the ballot in 2026: It is expected to make gains in
Wales, Scotland and local votes elsewhere next spring. After that, his sights
will be on the U.K. general election expected in 2029, by which time European
politics may look very different.
“Of
course I know Mr. Orban and of course I know Giorgia Meloni, of course I know
these people,” Farage told POLITICO at a recent Reform rally. “I suspect that
after the next election cycle in Europe there will be even more that I know.”
Natalie
Fertig in Washington, Clea Caulcutt in Paris and James Angelos in Berlin
contributed to this report.
An Anatomy of the MAGA Mind
Books
An
Anatomy of the MAGA Mind
Under
Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and
scholarship for vulgarity.
By George
Packer
November
24, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2025/11/how-trump-corrupted-intellectual-right/685021/
“In the
United States at this time,” the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950,
“liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
Conservatives and reactionaries, Trilling added, had no ideas, only
impulses—“irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Whether the
point was true in mid-century America—the reactionary writer Richard M. Weaver
published Ideas Have Consequences, an attack on the modern West, two years
before Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—today it is obviously false. For the
past decade or more, the intellectual energy in American politics has been on
the right.
In
Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, the political theorist Laura
K. Field organizes the ideas that have coalesced around Donald Trump into
several schools of thought. At the Claremont Institute in California, the
disciples of Leo Strauss, the intellectual guru to several generations of
conservatives, combine Platonic philosophy, biblical teachings, and a reverence
for the American founding into a politics of ethical and religious absolutism.
Post-liberal Catholic thinkers, such as Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame and Adrian
Vermeule of Harvard, believe that the liberalism of the Enlightenment has led
to civilizational collapse, and only the restoration of the beloved community
under Christian governance can save the West. National conservatives, including
a number of Republican politicians, base their policy agenda—anti-immigrant,
protectionist, isolationist, socially traditionalist—on an American identity
defined by ethnic and religious heritage rather than democratic values. In
Silicon Valley, techno-monarchists such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin
denounce democracy itself and dream of a ruling class of entrepreneurs. And in
dark corners of the internet, media celebrities and influencers with handles
such as “Bronze Age Pervert” and “Raw Egg Nationalist” celebrate manliness and
champion outright misogyny and bigotry.
These
tendencies come with various emphases and obsessions, but the differences
matter less than the common project. The MAGA ideologues who provide America’s
new ruling elite with any claim to having a worldview should be understood as
offspring of a shared parentage, not unlike the Lovestoneites, Trotskyites, and
Shachtmanites of 1930s and ’40s communism. More reactionary than conservative,
their political ancestry is in the underground of the American right—Strom
Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, Patrick Buchanan—rather than the forward-looking
Reaganite libertarians who dominated the Republican Party for four decades.
Their favorite philosophers are not Locke and Mill but Plato, Aquinas, or even
Carl Schmitt, the Nazi theorist of authoritarianism. They believe that justice
and the good life can be found only in traditional sources of faith and
knowledge. They share a revulsion toward liberalism and pluralism, which, they
believe, have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by
accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor
Orbán.
The
American experiment in egalitarian, multiethnic democracy fills these
intellectuals with anxiety, if not loathing. As Field notes, they often express
undisguised hostility toward women, sexual minorities, the “woke Marxists” of
the left, and the cultural elites of the “soulless managerial class.” Vermeule
writes of “the common good,” and R. R. Reno, editor of the Christian journal
First Things, speaks of “a restoration of love,” but the mood and rhetoric of
the MAGA intellectuals are overwhelmingly negative. Without enemies they would
lose vitality and focus. Their utopia is located so high in the heavens or deep
in the past that the entire project always seems on the verge of collapse for
lack of a solid foundation. “The movement is, in many respects, untethered from
the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its
idealistic best,” Field writes—“and from the pluralistic reality of the country
as it exists today.”
The
author’s background perfectly positions her to deliver this lively, devastating
taxonomy and critique of MAGA’s ideologues. She was originally trained in
Straussian scholarship—a reading of classical political thought that criticizes
the modern turn away from the sources of moral authority toward liberalism and,
in Strauss’s view, nihilism. His approach has had a deep influence on leading
conservative American intellectuals of the past half century, including Allan
Bloom and Harry Jaffa, the godfather of the Claremont Institute. Nearly a
decade in these academic circles makes Field a knowledgeable guide to a subject
she takes seriously. She’s also a Canadian woman, a double identity that puts
her at a skeptical distance from the more and more extreme world of the
American right.
Her
exodus, as she tells it, began in 2010, when she was a fifth-year graduate
student, during a lavish banquet at the University of Virginia where she was
seated next to an important member of the host organization’s staff, who
described meeting First Lady Michelle Obama: “Very tall, very impressive. I’d
really like to fuck her.” Field excused herself to go to the restroom. Gazing
in the mirror, she wondered: “What on earth am I doing here?”
She
didn’t flee entirely. In the ensuing years she lingered as a sort of spy,
attending conferences where speakers took turns denouncing liberalism,
secularism, feminism, and modernity itself—until, in 2024, she became persona
non grata. By then something had happened to the sober, pious minds of the new
right. That something was Trump.
Beginning
with his election in 2016, anti-liberal intellectuals made a Faustian bet that
this coarse real-estate developer and reality-TV star would be the vehicle for
realizing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. “Trump was the strongman
brought to bring liberalism to heel,” Field writes. But in attaching themselves
to MAGA, they did less to influence the new regime than Trump did to corrupt
them. Field shows, for example, how the Claremont Institute became a nest of
conspiracy theorists and election denialists, with one of their own
Straussians—the constitutional scholar John Eastman—providing Trump with a
bogus legal justification for overturning the 2020 presidential election. Or
take Deneen, a serious philosophical mind whose widely influential 2018 book,
Why Liberalism Failed, was a kind of 95 theses nailed to the front door of the
Enlightenment. “Whereas in 2012, in addition to disdain and skepticism, Deneen
showed some sensitivity to the attractions of elite modern urban life,” Field
writes, “ten years later he was naming the American elite ‘one of the worst of
its kind produced in history,’ calling to ‘replace’ them, and advocating for
‘regime change.’”
Subverting
the establishment is a lot more thrilling than defending it. Many of those who
trade in ideas that overturn the status quo are drawn to power and have a
particular weakness for extremism. Whether the likes of Steve Bannon, Michael
Anton, Stephen Miller, and Tucker Carlson are driven by conviction,
opportunism, personal grievance, or some combination of these motives is never
easy to say. What’s clear is that MAGA ideologues—including the prize recruit
to the anti-liberal right, J. D. Vance—have entered a downward spiral of ever
cruder language and thought, usually with notes of bigotry and xenophobia, and
sometimes blatant ugliness, as if to show their bona fides. They’ve abandoned
tradition for radicalism, careful scholarship for vulgar discourse, reason for
the irrational, universal truths for narrow identities, and philosophy for
partisanship.
A few
obscure figures—I wasn’t familiar with the name Julius Krein—recoiled and
withdrew from the magnetic sphere around Trump. Others, such as Rod Dreher,
have very recently begun to voice concern over the hateful trajectory of the
American right. But reading Field, you can see something like the current wave
of MAGA anti-Semitism coming from a long way off. Moral and intellectual
descent is inherent in a political project that sets out to undermine liberal
democracy, reject the inclusive egalitarianism of modern America, find enemies
to demonize, and heroize a leader who defiles common decency. Such a movement
might begin with Plato, but it will inevitably lead to Nick Fuentes.
The MAGA
right has filled a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization,
neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological
power, and democracy itself. A question that Field touches on but never
analyzes in depth is why liberal minds haven’t produced an equally potent
answer. The French cliché that the left thinks while the right governs has been
nearly reversed in 21st-century America. Making the same mistake as Trilling,
defenders of liberal democracy can hardly fathom any other framework for
organizing modern life. “Liberals (and establishment types, too) have
difficulty conceiving of perspectives and world views that differ so
significantly from their own and seem so outlandish and extreme,” Field writes.
In the
humanities, where the most profound questions about politics and life should be
asked, many academics are so stuck in a calcified ideology of identity, with
its ready-made answers, that they’ve ceased exploring fundamental moral
arguments and stopped teaching the books where they can be found. In religion,
progressives have a hard time admitting matters of faith as legitimate concerns
in civic life. In politics, they debate policy ideas such as “the abundance
agenda” and constitutional reform without confronting the deeper malaise of the
modern West. To most of its adherents, liberalism means free speech, due
process, rule of law, separation of powers, and evidence-based inquiry. It
doesn’t join the quest for meaning and dignity that haunts our civilization.
Liberals
are in the necessary but untenable position of having to defend democracy from
right-wing assault in an age of broad discontent. They need their own theorists
and influencers, their own institutes and manifestos, to undertake the historic
task of not only reversing America’s self-destruction, but showing the next
generation why liberal democracy offers the best chance for a good life.
