Poland's presidential candidates cast votes in tight runoff race
Poland's two presidential candidates cast their ballots in Warsaw on Sunday (June 1), in a tight runoff election that will determine whether the largest country in the European Union's eastern wing cements its place in the bloc's mainstream or turns towards MAGA-style nationalism.
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Telegraph
42 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Tim Stanley on Jacinda Ardern's virtue-signalling memoir: It's like one long therapy session
Don't read this book. You won't, anyway: it's by Jacinda Ardern. But if I tell you that it's a memoir dedicated to 'the criers, worriers, and huggers,' you'll have an idea of the nightmare you've dodged. A Different Kind of Power reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session: 'My whole short life,' the author writes, 'I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough.' Regrettably, she persisted, rising through the two or three ranks of New Zealand society to become prime minister at the age of 37, from 2017 to 2023. And yet the practicalities of the job don't interest her: this book hinges on how everything felt. Large sections are dedicated to an uneventful youth in Murupara, a one-horse town on the north island – the Maori name translates as 'to wipe off mud' – where Ardern was born in 1980. Her father was a cop, her mother a school catering assistant. The Arderns were Mormons, a fact that threatens to make the author remotely interesting – until we learn that she lost her faith after watching a romcom, about a gay Mormon missionary who gives up God for love. Lucky Ardern didn't watch Top Cat, or she might have embarked upon a life of crime. In these passages, our impressionable hero regales us with fascinating accounts of grocery shopping; Nana's funeral; her first job in a chippy ('There was always a steady routine to my Friday night shifts at the Golden Kiki'). As for what drew her into politics: was it Marx? Or Mahatma Gandhi? Well, one influence came early on: she saw a newspaper cartoon of a Tory stealing soup from children and thought, 'that definitely didn't feel right.' Burdened by a 'constant compulsion to be 'useful'', Ardern concluded that 'the world is so big and life could be fragile… but not so big that one person can't do something to change it.' So, Ardern completed a very useful degree in 'Communication Studies', joined Labour and entered Parliament in 2008. This utterly normal person seems to have done almost nothing outside of politics. What about her greatest flaw, then? Probably that she cares too much. Ardern recalls, in those early days of the legislature, feeling overwhelmed by her emotions – and another MP saying, 'Promise me you won't try to toughen up, Jacinda. You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care.' You and I might laugh, but the Kiwis seemed to love it: when Labour entered an unwinnable election in 2017, the party dropped its leader at the last minute and swapped in Ardern – whose nervous smile and boundless compassion, not hindered by having been photographed in Spanx, pushed Labour into office. She lost the popular vote but entered a coalition with a Right-wing party that had previously called her a 'meatless hamburger'. 'Yes, I was the prime minister,' she writes. And yet: 'I was also pregnant.' Plot twist! Don't get me wrong: it's good to be reminded that politicians are human beings, and healthy that a modern woman can both have a baby and run New Zealand. But between all the paragraphs on childrearing and pump-sterilising – 'I expected breastfeeding to be a lot more straightforward than it was' – one gets the impression that there was little else to do. During her time as leader, New Zealand saw a natural disaster and a terror attack, both of which brought out Ardern's best: authoritative and sensitive, she has a fine temperament. But so much ink is given to relationship talk and cake baking – she wants us to know, too, that she replied to every child who wrote to her – that it starts to feel as though the author's self-doubt lies not in her leadership skills, but in a fear that people can't see how nice she really is. As she embraced a volcano victim in 2019, she heard the cameras click and imagined cynics saying it was all for show: 'That's fine, I thought, as I hugged [them] tight… I would rather be criticised than stop being human.' The author's virtue may be signalled brightly enough to be seen from the moon – and yet this empathy curiously doesn't extend to every critic of her Covid policy. You'll recall that when the pandemic began, New Zealand cut off the outside world: the obvious, and easy, thing to do when your country sits in the middle of nowhere. Restrictions and mandates were applied off and on, sometimes severely, through to early 2022. Ardern acknowledges the psychological effects of lockdown via a letter from a woman who 'couldn't see her daughter's body after she died in a farm[ing] accident' – but this happens to be a citizen who 'understood why we had the rules we had, no matter how hard they felt.' How convenient for the author. By contrast, the anti-lockdown crowd Ardern describes protesting outside New Zealand's Parliament, wore 'literal tinfoil hats', flew 'swastikas' and 'Trump flags'. This is exactly how centrist dads (and mums) subtly vilify their opponents: set a perfect example and imply a comparison. I am so kind that anyone who disagrees with me must be nasty; so reasonable that my critics must be nuts. Yet despite the impression here that Ardern merely emoted throughout her time in office, as though manning the phones at the Samaritans, she implemented real, controversial policies that ended in a property bust, bad finances and a crime wave. And in a move that showed almost zero compassion to her colleagues, she quit office before they were due to be judged in a general election – thus avoiding the worst defeat for an incumbent government in decades. Post-office, Ardern became a fellow at Harvard University, teaching a course in… you guessed it: 'empathetic leadership'. The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice. How does that work with Vladimir Putin or the boys in Hamas? On the contrary, true leadership is about making tough judgments, guided by sound philosophy: St Jacinda bungled the former, lacked the latter. By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity – a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions. But there is one wonderful moment of zen. It comes when Ardern meets the late Queen in 2018, and asks whether she has any advice on raising children. 'You just get on with it,' said the monarch. It must have been a put-down; it sounds like a put-down – and yet Ardern is too naive to notice.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Political staffer says he still respected Gareth Ward professionally after alleged 2015 rape
A political staffer has told a Sydney court he embellished a glowing email he wrote to a state MP who allegedly sexually assaulted him years earlier. The Kiama MP, Gareth Ward, 44, is on trial in the New South Wales district court after pleading not guilty to sexual intercourse without consent and indecent assault charges. The jury has heard Ward approached a young, drunk political staffer after a midweek event at NSW Parliament House in 2015 and offered him a place to stay for the night. The man, who was 24 at the time but is now in his 30s, alleges Ward climbed into bed with him, groped his backside and sexually assaulted him despite him repeatedly saying no. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email During his third day of cross-examination on Tuesday, the alleged victim was asked about an email he wrote to Ward in March 2019, congratulating him on his appointment as minister for families. 'Your friendship means the world to me and my respect for you is already as high as it can be,' the man wrote to Ward. He told the jury he sent the email in the hope of securing a job in politics at a time when he was worried about his career prospects. He said he had embellished and fibbed about appreciating Ward's friendship. The complainant maintained that the email was not inconsistent with his claims he had been sexually assaulted by Ward, whom he continued to hold in professional esteem. 'I respect Mr Ward immensely,' the alleged victim told the jury. 'He is an incredible local member and he has done some incredible work as a minister.' When asked if he had told another political staffer that the then NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, had chosen a 'rapist' for her cabinet, the complainant said he couldn't recall the conversation but the words were consistent with what he had reported. He said he had not tell anyone about the alleged sexual assault before 2019 because it was 'incredibly embarrassing' and 'not something I would bring up in conversation'. The jury had previously heard the man had felt 'dirty' and 'confused', and he asked himself whether he had invited what he said were unwanted advances. Ward is also accused of indecently assaulting an intoxicated 18-year-old in 2013 at his south coast home after meeting the man at a networking event a year earlier. The man claims the MP fondled his buttocks and scrotum, and gave him an unwelcome back massage despite his repeated requests to stop. Ward, who was charged over the alleged assaults in 2022, is fighting the allegations in a trial set down for four weeks. He has held the Kiama electorate since 2011, winning three elections as a Liberal before securing the seat in 2023 as an independent.
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
The public doesn't like Brexit. Has anyone told the media?
Illustration by Michael Villegas / Ikon Images Such were the headlines that you'd imagine the EU reset to be the Suez Crisis, Munich Conference and loss of the Thirteen Colonies all rolled into one. 'STARMER'S SURRENDER' howled the Mail in all caps, like a furious text from your dad. 'DONE UP LIKE A KIPPER', agreed the Sun, which knows a good pun about fishing regulations when it sees it. The Telegraph instead used a picture of Starmer greeting Ursula von der Leyen to justify its more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger effort, 'Kiss goodbye to Brexit'. I'm not going to quote the Express. I just don't have the word count. Not everyone was quite so hysterical. The Guardian led with Starmer's claim that the deal 'puts Britain back on the world stage', and left suggestions of surrender from little-known opposition leader Kemi Badenoch to the subheading. The FT even flirted with positivity. But browsing the newsstands that morning, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only person who backed the deal – which would, among other things, make holidaying in Europe a whole lot less annoying – was Keir Starmer. You'd get the same impression from the BBC. One surprising group who might disagree with this rather downbeat assessment were the actual British electorate. According to YouGov, reported a visibly baffled Times, there was backing for the deal, including overwhelming support for the youth mobility scheme. ity scheme that everyone had confidently predicted would be its most controversial element. Another YouGov poll, just days earlier, had found that 66% of the public support, and just 14% oppose, a closer relationship with Europe so long as it didn't involve re-joining the EU, single market or customs union – pretty close to overwhelming support. Over half (53%) were in favour of undoing Brexit altogether. Remember when newspapers cared about the will of the people? How times change. The traditional explanation for why newspapers are so out of touch with their readers was that the press don't merely reflect public opinion but attempt to shape it. Owners and editors have, in every sense, different interests to the general public: it's not as if the range of press opinion in the 20th century reflected the range of public opinion either. There's also the problem that reliance on advertising – an industry inevitably keener on some bits of the public than on others – has pushed papers in certain directions, too. But there's another thing which has kicked in these last few years, which I'm not sure everyone has internalised: the general public and newspaper readers are not the same thing. They never perfectly aligned, of course; but now the group that reads newspapers is a fraction of the public as a whole. How small a fraction is surprisingly hard to pin down. Claimed national newspaper circulation slid by a third, from around 11 million copies a day in the early 1990s to around 7 million by 2020. Exactly what's happened since is hard to know, as a bunch of the main papers have since stopped reporting the figures – but sales of those which still do so have fallen by half. In five years. We can probably assume that those which keep the numbers to themselves don't do so because sales are surging. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe However many people are still buying papers, something we know about them is that they are not a representative slice of the country as a whole. According to a 2024 Ofcom report, just 10% of 16-24 year olds today get their news from newspapers (rising to 24% including online). Even among the 35-44 group, a distinctively generous definition of young, those numbers were just 19% and 32% respectively. Once you hit retirement age, though, things look much rosier for the subscriptions department. Among 65-74 year olds, it's 33% (45% including online); among the over 75s, it's 47% (53%). It's not a big leap to assume that the issues explored and positions taken by newspapers are likely to reflect this ageing readership. This is not to say younger people are not engaged with the news: but they get theirs from relatively new online or social media, sources which are by definition more fragmented. It's harder to tell what they're reading, what they're interested in or what they think. But the agenda of politics, the sense of what the nation cares about, still has to emerge from somewhere – and in the absence of an alternative, it's still set by the newspapers. Broadcast producers scan the front pages every morning. Ministerial teams use them to determine which stories they need a line on. Old fashioned print media is in decline everywhere but in the mind of the nation's political class. The result is that our leaders are getting a very warped sense of what the average voter thinks, reads and cares about. This may, if you squint, explain rather a lot. Not just why ministers are still being exhorted to defend a Brexit the nation no longer supports, but why benefits for older people are treated differently to ones for those of working age or children. Every day, MPs are told that these are the real issues facing the newspaper readers of Britain. The problem is that is not the same thing as 'the voters'. [See more: Robert Jenrick is embarrassing himself] Related
