Latest news with #Maga-style
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Between a mathematician and a Trump-loving hooligan': Romania's stark presidential choice
Collecting her 10-year-old son from primary school in Bucharest's crumbling Ferentari neighbourhood, Georgeta Petre was quite sure who she would be casting her ballot for on Sunday, and why. 'I hope he will change things,' she said. 'I hope he'll do things better. Everyone before him just … lied. Look around – we can't continue like this. I can't afford food, or clothes for the children. I'm voting for George Simion. He will be different.' Twenty minutes' drive away, chatting with a gaggle of colleagues outside the gleaming glass-and-concrete offices of his employer, Cosmin Ispas, a 31-year-old corporate lawyer, was equally clear. 'I get that people are pissed off,' he said. 'I get that they want change. But they don't see that the change Simion is proposing is an illusion. It's just words: sovereignty, tradition … Nicuşor Dan may not be perfect, but he's serious, responsible. The choice between him and fascism isn't hard.' Days before a pivotal presidential election rerun that could set the face of their country for a generation, Romania's voters are profoundly, hopelessly polarised. 'For the first time in recent history,' said Cristian Pîrvulescu, a political scientist, 'Romania is in real danger.' Simion, an impetuous, hard-talking, Maga-style ultranationalist who many observers fear could drag Romania from its hitherto steadfastly pro-European trajectory, won almost twice as many first-round votes as Dan, the independent mayor of Bucharest. In recent days the gap between the two has closed, with the more low-key Dan, an articulate, socially conservative mathematician known for his battles against corrupt property developers in the capital, performing strongly in a head-to-head TV debate. But the contest is Simion's to lose, and – with Romania under caretaker government and experts predicting a Simion win could lead to a far-right administration in the near future – the country seems headed for at best damaging instability, and at worst a sharp anti-system turn. The far-right candidate stepped into the shoes of another ultranationalist firebrand, Călin Georgescu, after the original first round last November was cancelled amid allegations of Russian meddling and campaign finance violations – something fiercely criticised by the global right, not least the US's vice-president, JD Vance. Georgescu, who surged from nowhere to win that ballot, was barred from competing in the rerun. On the capital's south-western fringe, Ferentari is often described as the city's poorest and most marginalised district. Home to an estimated 80,000 people, many of them Roma, its Communist-era housing blocks are decaying and disintegrating. Poverty and unemployment are chronic; healthcare and sanitation perfunctory; crime – drugs, prostitution, mob activity – rife. More than 80% of residents connect illegally to the electricity grid; more than 60% have no sewage, because they are squatting. Petre survives on a disability allowance of 500 lei (about £83) a month, plus 250 lei for each of her three young children. Like many in Ferentari, she is placing her faith in Simion, a one-time football ultra and nationalist agitator turned brash populist. Ștefan Șerban, 69, sitting on a bench with his friend Nicolae Carja, 74, said life had been better under the former Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu. 'We were a rich country then,' he said. 'Industry, petrol, gas, goldmines. And no debt.' Now, said Carja: 'We have a mountain of debt. And we've sold everything we had to foreigners. It won't be easy for Simion; he will have to fight hard and it may take a few years. But I think he really wants to shake things up – make people's lives easier.' Doina Radu said Simion meant 'more jobs, better services, higher pensions'. He would do even better, she said, if, as he has promised, he makes Georgescu his prime minister. 'That would really be a top team,' she said. Simion, whose AUR party stands 'for Christian faith, for family and for the love of our nation', has moderated his rhetoric since sweeping the first round, arguing that he is an 'EU-realist' rather than a sceptic, supports Nato membership and is not pro-Russia. But he is an outspoken Trump fan, has compared the EU to the USSR, admires Viktor Orbàn – whom he has described as 'a model' – and, like Hungary's illiberal prime minister, he opposes aid to Ukraine. He says foreign companies are robbing Romania. Simion has been banned from neighbouring Moldova for calling for its reintegration into Romania, and from Ukraine – part of which was, before 1940, also Romanian – for 'systematic anti-Ukrainian activities … violating state sovereignty and territorial integrity'. A Covid anti-vaxxer, Simion thinks 'globalist elites' run the country. His rhetoric can be violent: he has called for rivals to be 'skinned alive', wondered of his critics 'what will I do with you after 19 May?' and threatened to sexually assault a far-right MP. In an already heavily indebted country with a near-junk credit rating and the highest budget deficit in the EU, his economic policies – nationalising utilities, slashing public-sector employment – and unpredictability have seriously spooked markets. Yet some of Romania's most disadvantaged people, including the historically marginalised Roma community, Europe's largest, see him as their saviour. 'They've been pushed into his arms,' said Nicu Dumitru of the NGO Roma for Democracy. 'They distrust the system and he's not part of it. They've been denied the education to see through him,' he said of his community. 'They are disappointed and disillusioned, they want a revolution and he is the only option.' Almost 50% of Roma cast their first-round vote for Simion. More alarming still, Dumitru said, is that this 'has happened before. It's a copy-paste of the 1930s and 40s' – when many Roma supported Romania's powerful interwar fascist Legionary movement and brutal Iron Guard, led by Corneliu Codreanu. Public anger at corrupt and ineffective mainstream politicians, high inequality and poor services plays a clear part in the present-day rise of Simion and Georgescu: household incomes are a third of the EU average; nearly 40% of Romania's 19 million people are at risk of deprivation. But, noted Pîrvulescu, the dean of the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania's long history of far-right and fascist movements is also a factor. 'This is not a rich country, but it's not poor either,' he said. EU membership had brought significant economic benefits since 2007, Pîrvulescu said; GDP per capita was greater than Hungary, Greece and Portugal. The minimum wage had risen by 80%. But the appeal of the nationalist authoritarianism runs deep. After the war, Ceauşescu pioneered 'national communism' around a profoundly nationalist glorification of Romanian history. As recently as 2000, a foul-mouthed, Holocaust-denying ultranationalist made it to the presidential runoff. Polling by Grigore Pop-Eleches, a politics professor at Princeton, has found that voters expressing a 'strong like' for Cordeanu and Ceauşescu are up to four times as likely to vote for Simion than those who strongly dislike the two authoritarian leaders. But the far right's current resurgence, Pîrvulescu said, had also been fuelled by Covid, which Simion's AUR weaponised as a culture war battle, and the spread of conspiracy theories on social networks, including Kremlin-sponsored hybrid warfare. Gelu Duminică, a sociologist and activist, pointed to straightforward democratic inexperience. 'We had democracy for a decade in the 1930s, then barely three since the end of communism – for us, democracy still means 'We can do what we want',' he said. Dan's voters insist they are all too aware of the importance of Sunday's vote. Back at the business park, Raluca, a thirtysomething IT worker who asked not to be further identified, said it was 'simple. It could define our future for the next 20 years.' Dan was a good candidate, she said: 'He's pro-European. Not corrupt. Respects the rule of law. He did a lot for Bucharest: fixed the water pipes, the buses.' Her colleague Richard said Dan was the first mayor to 'actually tackle stuff, not just patch it up'. Ionut Baban, 33, an IT manager, agreed. 'Dan may not be a crowd-pleaser, but he will take logical, evidence-based decisions,' he said. 'Simion's a mouthy provocateur. Between a mathematician and a Trump-loving hooligan, I know my preference.' Few doubt the consequences of a Simion victory. Elena Calistru, a civil society activist and cofounder of the Funky Citizens NGO, which Simion has warned will be 'held accountable … for stirring up things that don't exist', said the fallout would not be confined to Romania. 'The president runs foreign policy and attends EU leaders' summits,' she said. 'That means decisions on the next seven-year budget, defence, enlargement – including Ukraine. The scope for disruption is enormous.' Domestically, she fears the worst. 'The president is not particularly powerful, but he has a very visible pulpit he can use to become a real player,' she said. 'He can send bills back to parliament. He makes the big judicial and intelligence appointments. He appoints the prime minister.' Crucially, he can also dissolve parliament if MPs twice reject his proposals for prime minister – and the centre-left Social Democrats (PSD) and centre-right Liberals (PNL), whose ruling coalition collapsed this month, are desperate to avoid fresh elections. That, Calistru and others believe, could well lead to a minority far-right government led by Simion's AUR – parliament's second-biggest party – and backed by an 'opportunistic' PSD, or even, if enough MPs switch parties, to a far-right majority. 'And that would be a recipe,' she said, 'for disaster.'
Irish Times
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The centrists battling to stop Romania's far-right surge
Pro-European centrists are battling for second place in Romania 's upcoming presidential elections, in a bid to thwart a far-right victory that would further destabilise the European Union and Nato member state. For the first time since the fall of communism, a Maga-style ultranationalist has a comfortable lead in opinion polls ahead of Sunday's election rerun, five months after the vote was annulled due to alleged Russian meddling. George Simion, who is campaigning to 'Make Romania Great Again' and has previously questioned the merits of EU and Nato membership, is polling at about 34 per cent – well below the 50 per cent threshold needed to win outright. That leaves room for a centrist challenger in the May 18th run-off to block his path to the presidency. 'Populism and isolationism' were putting Romania's pro-western orientation at risk, centrist candidate Crin Antonescu said. He called his nationalist rivals 'impostors' and 'cardboard figures' who were unable to defend Romania's international interests. READ MORE A 65-year-old former liberal senator who came back from political retirement in December, Antonescu is playing up his leadership skills after having briefly served as president in 2012 during impeachment proceedings against then-president Traian Basescu. Antonescu, who is running on behalf of the three government coalition parties, is polling neck and neck with another pro-EU centrist, Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan. According to surveys published by FlashData earlier this week, Antonescu would win a run-off against Simion. Dan has also described the country's foreign policy orientation the 'most important thing at stake after this election', adding that only himself or Antonescu would guarantee the country's continued commitment to the EU and Nato. Populists such as Simion, said Dan, 'may try to emulate [US president Donald] Trump, but they copy Russian narratives in Romania ... They were always against supporting Ukraine during the war.' The FlashData scenarios mapped out on Monday showed that Antonescu was likely to win the run-off against Simion, but that Dan would have difficulties beating the far-right candidate in the second round. Siegfried Mureșan, a centre-right Romanian MEP whose party supports Antonescu, said Dan's supporters were likely to swing behind Antonescu in the second round – but the reverse was less certain. Some of Antonescu's voters, he warned, might be more drawn to Simion than to Bucharest's mayor. 'Simion is qualifying for the run-off and will be an anti-EU candidate,' Mureșan said. 'The question is who will be the pro-EU candidate and how to help him succeed.' Simion's popularity soared after he took over the baton from Calin Georgescu, a fringe pro-Putin nationalist who surprisingly topped the elections last November after having polled in the low single digits. Romanian declassified intelligence reports pointed to Russia having orchestrated a sophisticated social media campaign in favour of Georgescu, who was subsequently barred from running again. The self-proclaimed 'president-elect' who performed a Nazi salute after being questioned by prosecutors is under investigation for illegal campaign financing and attempts to overthrow the constitutional order with the help of fascist groups. Another Maga-style candidate, former prime minister Victor Ponta, has lost traction in surveys after having briefly polled second earlier in the race. Elena Lasconi, a pro-EU centrist who made it into the run-off against Georgescu last year, is even further behind and has come under pressure from her own party to drop out and back Dan. Dan (55) is a trained mathematician turned anti-corruption activist who won the mayorship of the Romanian capital as an independent for a second time last year. After having put his name forward in December, Dan failed to garner the support of the ruling parties. But he has secured the backing of his old party, the centrist opposition Union Save Romania, which withdrew its support from Lasconi. Dan has faced scrutiny over his campaign finances and alleged Russia links of some people in his entourage, which were later debunked. Antonescu also had to fend off what he described as a smear campaign about a statement he gave in his youth for the communist secret police, who had asked him about a childhood friend who had fled abroad. Antonescu said such statements were commonplace before the fall of communism in 1989 and that he did not include anything that could have hurt his friend or his family. The official archives of the Securitate, the communist secret services, found no evidence of him having collaborated with the secret police. Antonescu said that if elected president he would work with the government to reset US relations that have come under strain after the Trump administration criticised Bucharest for annulling last year's vote. 'There are many areas of common interest between Romania and the US,' he said, citing the energy and defence sectors, with America's significant military presence at Romanian bases near the Black Sea coast. Romania plans to boost its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP from next year, in line with what Nato's new target is expected to be after Trump pressured European allies to spend more for their own security. Ion M Ionița, an independent Romanian analyst and historian, noted that the level of dissatisfaction with the political class was difficult to map out in surveys, which meant that the outcome of this election was still highly unpredictable. 'We don't know how the anti-establishment vote will come out,' he said, noting that in November Georgescu won 23 per cent of the votes even though he had polled in the single digits just a few weeks prior to the election. 'The protest [vote] could upend our calculations.' − Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
How Trump and the new right came to ‘own' the future – while apparently exploiting the past
At first glance, today's politicians appear to have shifted their eyes from the future to the present and the past. The way to win power, it seems, is to make Maga-style appeals to the glories of yesteryear, while the best hope of keeping it is to pursue the short-term gains that will emerge before the next election. Observers of democracy have long said such patterns are inbuilt: for the 19th-century thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, 'It is this clear perception of the future, founded on enlightenment and experience, that democracy will often lack. The people feel much more than they reason.' Yet today's politicians, rather than being oblivious to the future, seem increasingly obsessed with it. The ascendant far right in North America, Europe, Israel and beyond finds much of its appeal in stories about what lies ahead. Nativist desires to protect the west from cultural decline and demographic 'replacement', while ostensibly backward-looking, find their urgency in anxieties that it will soon be too late to change course, mixed with hopes of a political showdown. For the true believers, the future is a source of impending collapse, one that will sharpen identities, hierarchies and boundaries, something to accelerate towards. Today's identitarian new right is concerned less with the warm glow of the imagined past than with new possibilities that lie in store in 'the aftermath of the chaos', as the French new right activist Guillaume Faye described it. The appeal of the future is clearer still among those strands of the techno-right flocking to Trump. Silicon Valley tycoons embrace ideas of 'disruption' that are all about upending the status quo for the sake of passage to something better. Their manifestos draw favourable links to figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the early-20th century political and aesthetic movement of futurism, defined by its aversion to existing codes and a restless fixation on the new. Then and now, such futurists can be elusive about what they hope to achieve – tie yourself to a programme and you limit the disruptive potential. An aura of unpredictability helps keep opponents on the back foot. Historically, this elusiveness has been no barrier to influence. 'Without futurism,' said Mussolini, 'there would never have been a fascist revolution.' Today's liberal centre and centre-left are preoccupied with the future in a quite different way – as something to calculate and control. Economic measures like GDP are constantly monitored for the trajectory towards growth or recession. Targets for inflation shape the activities of central banks. Public authorities invest in 'horizon scanning'and 'early warning' systems. Decarbonisation goals are set in response to the escalating effects of climate breakdown. Again, this suggests anything but indifference towards the future, but it is generally about particular policies rather than a broader programme of change. It is a managerial stance, focused on adapting to the probable and dodging the worst. 'Any transformative vision of a common future died in the early 1980s,' the political scientist Adam Przeworski writes. 'Social democrats moved from revolution to reform to coping with problems as they appear.' Whereas the disruptive outlook of the far right is deliberately ill focused, centred on vague anxieties and the thrill of upheaval, the centre left's approach is all too concrete. It is about particular targets and metrics, abstracted from broader ideas of change and the organisational forms that could support it. Rather than embrace a visionary approach, parties of the centre left more often define themselves against it, to burnish their credentials as pragmatists. This technocratic approach to the future may be less offensive than its far-right equivalent, but it struggles to compete with it politically. One reason is that it is anodyne. A focus on targets and threats gives people no sense of being part of a collective endeavour, of standing for something in common. All the stuff of political engagement and debate – why the target should be a target, why the threat is a threat – is lost without a narrative of the values at stake. This is a future for experts and insiders, schooled in the practices of forecasting and calculation, with little role for the wider public. However frightening the apocalyptic outlook of the far right, its promise is the promise of a shared experience, of an assault on things we are said to hold dear. A technocratic approach can also be self-defeating in policy terms. Render the future too concrete and it becomes harder to think about far-reaching structural change. In the language of the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, an ethics of probability tends to crowd out an ethics of possibility. Moreover, the precision of targets can make failures more glaring, as goals are missed and deadlines pass. This weakens commitment in adversity – a point made by sympathetic critics of a climate agenda centred on 'hitting the carbon numbers'. Arguably one of the preconditions of radical politics is an element of imprecision. The anticolonial thinker and activist Frantz Fanon once warned of the 'curious cult of detail' that could afflict the scientific mindset in politics, causing its bearer to lose sight of the bigger picture: 'Thus, if a local defeat is inflicted, he may well be drawn into doubt, and from thence to despair.' Far-right ideas of breakdown and disruption prosper when the left gives up on more demanding visions of the future. In any context where people have become dissatisfied with the status quo, the promise to throw things up in the air is likely to do better than a politics of exact targets and metrics. It responds better to the yearning for change. And for those with economic and political power on their side, it is often enough to embrace the future as chaos: throw things in the air from a position of strength and you can assume they will land in a favourable way. Disruption needs no coherent ideology, no consistency from one day to the next. The challenge for the left is different. To pursue change against the grain of existing power relations, you need a vision of where you are going. The left abandoned a programmatic approach to the future because of the belief it was distracting and dangerous. As the former SPD German chancellor Helmut Schmidt memorably put it, 'anyone who has visions should go to the doctor'. Sticking to tangible goals promised a more reasonable and credible politics. But in the age of far-right futurism, this calculus may no longer hold. To invert Tocqueville's logic: exactly because people need emotion as well as reason, they need the hope of a better future they can commit to and shape. Jonathan White is professor of politics at LSE. His latest book is In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile).
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on JD Vance in Munich: Europe must stand up for its values
In 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech to the Munich security conference that stunned western diplomats by launching an unforeseen assault on the post-1989 international order. The United States, alleged Mr Putin, had perniciously manufactured a unipolar world 'in which there is one master, one sovereign'. Seven years later, Russian forces illegally occupied Crimea, and Moscow-funded separatists seized swathes of territory in eastern Ukraine, in what turned out to be the precursor to full-blown invasion. Nearly two decades later, the disturbing speech at the same venue by the US vice-president, JD Vance, may prove to be similarly significant as the geopolitics of the 21st century continue to shift. Mr Vance had been expected to concentrate last Friday's remarks on Ukraine, after a week in which Donald Trump appeared to be unilaterally preparing to negotiate a ceasefire deal entirely on Mr Putin's terms. Instead, he used his platform as a pulpit from which to berate the US's European allies on issues such as multiculturalism, migration and the regulation of social media. Indefensibly, the Trump administration now actively cheerleads for far-right parties such as Germany's Alternative für Deutschland, whose leader, Alice Weidel, he chose to meet in Munich. A month into Trump 2.0, Mr Vance and other senior outriders such as Elon Musk are full of ideological hubris and jubilant self-regard. But the vice-president's use of Maga-style culture war rhetoric to attack European governments amounted to more than mere trolling. In deeply ominous fashion it also shredded the idea of a 'west' that shares fundamental values. In the post-cold war era, the transatlantic alliance was founded on a common commitment to international norms that this White House holds in sneering contempt. Mr Trump's brutally transactional approach is infused with a Hobbesian cynicism – witness his determination to exploit Ukraine's vulnerability to seize 50% of its rare earth minerals on favourable terms. Europe must swiftly learn to adapt to an isolationist US that sees it as an ideological adversary and economic competitor. Conflicts and challenging trade-offs are inevitable. Mr Vance's excoriation of 'digital censorship' in Europe is a prelude to future attempts to see off the regulation of US tech companies via the EU Digital Services Act. On security and defence, climate action and the terms of transatlantic trade, European nations will need to find the unity to stand up to 'America-first' bullying tactics, and begin to lay foundations for greater strategic and economic autonomy. This week's crisis meeting on Ukraine in Paris, convened at short notice by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, is a step in the right direction. Amid justified fears of a neo-imperial carve-up, it is imperative to ensure that Europe, along with Ukraine itself, plays a full part in any future negotiations with Mr Putin – all the more so given that the apparent US expectation that it would police the result. Europe was slow to wake up to the implications of a newly rivalrous and multipolar world, in which transatlantic ties would no longer bind in the same way. The new reality will be characterised by Trumpian bluff, bluster and brinkmanship. Following Mr Vance's visit to Munich, leaders can hardly say they have not been warned. The task now is to find ways to safeguard the European model from an increasingly sinister US administration that would love to see it fail.
The Guardian
28-01-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on the British Council: cherish and preserve
As geopolitics takes an increasingly ominous turn in the age of Trump, the government has been focusing on what has been seen as a traditional British diplomatic strength. Earlier this month, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, and the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, announced the creation of a 'soft power council', aimed at boosting the UK's reach and reputation abroad. At a time of growing global insecurity and mistrust, it makes sense to mobilise influential figures from industries such as sport and music to help deepen relationships and forge partnerships abroad. Far more difficult to understand is the simultaneous neglect of an institution that has been a world leader in the soft power game for nine decades. Set up to promote understanding of Britain through cultural and educational cooperation with countries all over the world, the British Council has doubled as a powerful ambassador for liberal and democratic values. Yet at a time when these are under renewed threat globally, its depth of expertise and range of connections risk being squandered. Interviewed by this newspaper, the council's chief executive, Scott McDonald, has warned that without more generous funding guarantees by Westminster, it could go under within a decade. The loss of English‑language teaching income during Covid has left the council burdened by a £200m government loan, which it is struggling to pay back at commercial rates that the Foreign Office says it is obliged to enforce. As a consequence, Mr McDonald is faced with the prospect of implementing swingeing budget cuts and ending the council's presence in up to 40 countries. The contingent financial legacy of the pandemic should not be allowed to kill off a long-running national success story. Maximising the UK's soft power is one way to describe the raison d'etre of the British Council. But the deeper value of its presence on the ground has been to foster mutual understanding and reciprocal links. The author and poet Lemn Sissay, for example, once described a British Council-sponsored visit to South Africa as a learning curve for himself rather than his audiences, as the perspectives of local artists confounded his expectations. In Kyiv, the three-year-old Theatre of Playwrights – a remarkable showcase for new writers, including war veterans – was partly inspired by the example of London's Royal Court, thanks to connections facilitated by the council in the 1990s. Replicated in 100 countries across the globe, the forging of such long-term links is an invaluable source of goodwill and esteem. The cultural and educational outreach also delivers a knock-on boost in vital economic sectors such as tourism and international student recruitment. As the chill winds of Maga-style nationalism blow across borders, such institutions should be cherished. Germany's Goethe-Institut and France's Alliance Française both enjoy far more generous funding arrangements for pursuing the same line of work. In a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of the British Council in 1984, Margaret Thatcher said of its then chairman, Sir Charles Troughton: 'He has the enviable reputation of being one of the few men who have come to me asking for more money and got what he asked for!' Times may be tough at the Treasury, but Mr McDonald's pleas for some financial latitude should receive a similar response.
