Latest news with #MagaMovement
Times
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Times
Lord Mandelson: Starmer and Trump are ‘masters of the same drivers'
Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to the US, was fêted by Washington's Maga elite on Thursday night as a plaque in his honour was unveiled at Butterworth's, a favourite restaurant for members of the Trump administration. As guests sipped Hambledon English sparkling wine, Mandelson satisfied cries for a speech. 'I don't know what to say,' he said. 'I do feel that I have finally made it from tribal politician to real diplomat now that I have unveiled the first plaque in my new diplomatic career.' Discussing the tribute from the restaurant that is a hotspot these days for the young Maga faithful, Mandelson said he felt 'really chuffed by the ambassador's sofa'. • Peter Mandelson: how prince of darkness became the Trump whisperer The plaque rests above the French-style sofa upon which Mandelson reclined when he met with Raheem Kassam, one of the restaurant's co-owners who is a former adviser to Nigel Farage, soon after arriving in Washington this year. 'When I came here, I wandered off the streets hungry not knowing what it was. I thought I might get a nice lobster thermidor if I was lucky. I sprawled out on this sofa and we had a wonderful conversation for a long time,' he said. Mandelson has spent his first few months in the role fostering closer relations with the Trump administration and allies in the wider Maga movement. He has made a point of inviting its younger subscribers to embassy events, including one recently held for 'new media'. Speaking about Kassam, who is a close ally of the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Mandelson said: 'Although we don't have identical politics, we are familiar with masters of the same drivers that brought our respective figures to power — President Trump in your case and Keir Starmer in mine.' He said that both leaders had delivered similar mandates from 'angry people who felt they were being unheard by mainstream politics' who were 'angry about the cost of living, angry about uncontrolled immigration and angry about uncontrolled woke culture spreading across institutions'. 'I feel that over centuries now, British diplomats here in United States have been creating coalitions that support the special relationship,' he said. 'I have my own classic New Labour experience of fishing for votes across the political spectrum and forging unlikely coalitions, so good luck to you. 'I just think what you have created here at Butterworth's is fairly remarkable. You've brought the best of British gastro pub food and planted it down here on Capitol Hill. I feel you've brought the special relationship up to a new higher level.' Kassam told Mandelson he was delighted by his attendance as it was important to show 'Brits back home that we can actually work together in His Majesty's interest'. Pressed on his thoughts about the Musk and Trump bust-up on Thursday, Mandelson said he wasn't across it, owing to not being on social media. He did say, however, that the office of president ought to be respected. Thankfully for the ambassador, this unveiling went smoother than the last time he was asked to unveil a plaque. In his early days as a member of parliament for Hartlepool, County Durham, Mandelson opened a skills centre in his constituency and with 'great flourish and great aplomb I ripped back the curtain and there was no plaque'. He recounted: 'I looked at it slightly bemused and they said, 'It is on its way it just hasn't been done yet' as if that was that.'
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Populist Nawrocki's triumph threatens Poland's place at Europe's top table
The victory margin of the nationalist Karol Nawrocki in Poland's presidential elections may have been wafer-thin, but it marks a huge upheaval in the country's political landscape whose impact will be felt not just in Warsaw but across the EU. Backed by the previous ruling conservative Law & Justice (PiS) party and, openly, by Donald Trump's Maga movement, Nawrocki, a radical-right historian, defeated his liberal rival, the capital's mayor, Rafał Trzaskowski, by 50.89% to 49.11%. His win means PiS retains a size-11 boot in the door of Poland's politics that could seriously destabilise the coalition government of the centre-right prime minister, Donald Tusk, and threaten the country's newfound place at Europe's top table. Tusk's election in 2023 brought to an end eight years of PiS rule and signalled Poland's return to the European fold. Over the past two years, the bloc's sixth-biggest economy has become a key player at the heart of mainstream European policymaking. Nawrocki's victory hands him a presidential veto that will make it difficult for Tusk's government to pass promised legislation rolling back the judicial and other reforms implemented by PiS that led to repeated clashes with Brussels. But it heralds more than just a delicate period of cohabitation between a pro-EU prime minister and a nationalist, Eurosceptic president. The 42-year-old, who has never held elected office, will seek to actively undermine Tusk wherever he can. Poland's outgoing PiS-aligned president, Andrzej Duda, deployed his veto, but sparingly. Nawrocki will do so more aggressively and systematically, analysts say, aiming to weaken the prime minister before 2027 parliamentary elections. PiS and its allies will portray Sunday's presidential vote as a full-scale rejection of Tusk's progressive and reformist agenda – and may even be tempted to try to bring down his already fractured coalition government before the end of its term. Snap elections could be triggered, for example, if Nawrocki, whose campaign focused on conservative Catholic values, attacks on EU migration and climate policy and opposition to Ukraine's accession to the bloc, decides to stall the budget, which he could do by sending it to the PiS-dominated constitutional tribunal. Polls suggest that PiS and the far-right, libertarian Confederation party of Sławomir Mentzen, who won nearly 15% of the vote in the first round of the presidential ballot, could control a majority of seats in parliament if they were to unite. So far, Mentzen has ruled that out, even refusing to endorse Nawrocki. But an analysis of Sunday's vote showed that almost 90% of Mentzen's first-round voters backed Nawrocki in the presidential runoff, and the potential affinity is clear. In Europe, while Tusk will continue to represent Poland at EU summits, he will inevitably be weakened by the challange to his domestic legitimacy. Nawrocki, as commander-in-chief, may also seek to sway Poland's strongly pro-Ukraine stance. He has not shied away from tapping into Polish anti-Ukrainian sentiment over refugees, has criticised Kyiv and its EU and Nato accession plans, and his attendance at Nato summits could significantly complicate Europe's united pro-Ukraine front. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion Nawrocki will have somewhat less influence over other EU issues to which he is also opposed, such as deeper integration, joint borrowing and Europe's Green Deal, but the overall effect of his election on Poland's pro-EU ambitions will be chilling. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Monday the EU would continue its 'very good cooperation' with Poland. But analysts note Polish conservatives cast Sunday's vote as a refendum on Tusk's whole pro-EU agenda. The nationalist's win is also a boost for Europe's populist EU-critical parties, led by Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and to Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister and the bloc's disrupter-in-chief, whose illiberal rule-of-law playbook PiS follows. Nawrocki's triumph was a 'fresh victory for patriots', Hungary's foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said on his Facebook page on Monday. Nawrocki, who was invited to Washington by Trump and has shared a selfie with the US president, is opposed to Europe's recent security shift away from the US and favours closer transatlantic ties – another source of tension with Tusk, and Brussels.
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Sport
- Telegraph
Enhanced Games: $1m cheques, Trump Jr and a threat to the Olympics
Featuring prominently on the slick website of a concept called the Enhanced Games is a particularly eye-catching message from Donald Trump Jr. 'The Enhanced Games represent the future – real competition, real freedom and real records being smashed,' says the quote from the US president's son, which sits beneath a video of the president himself that proclaims: ' The impossible is what we do best.' The message from Trump Jr, whose 1789 Capital firm has made a multi-million-dollar investment, goes on: 'This is about excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage – something the Maga movement is all about. The Enhanced Games are going to be huge, and I couldn't be prouder to support this movement that is changing sports forever.' Trump Sr has not himself provided a personal endorsement but, with just over three years until the United States will actually host the Olympic Games, complete with its oath that explicitly commits 'to sport without doping', it is still a fairly extraordinary juxtaposition. The Enhanced Games, if you did not know, is a concept founded on allowing its athletes to use performance-enhancing substances. It is paying $1 million for every 'world record' and, alongside the release of an hour-long documentary following certain athletes on their chemically enhanced journey, has just announced that the inaugural Enhanced Games will be held next May in Las Vegas. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Enhanced Games (@enhanced_games) The documentary largely details the training of the Australian former world swimming champion James Magnussen, complete with footage of him injecting himself. 'The base of it was testosterone and then peptides… we used BPC-157, CJC-1295, ipamorelin and thymosin,' he later explained, speaking as if the audience had a biochemistry PhD. The headline moment, however, was provided elsewhere. Wearing an aerodynamic swimsuit that is also outlawed in regular competition, the Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev was timed breaking the existing 50m freestyle world swimming record. Gkolomeev finished fifth at last year's Olympics Games and the 50m freestyle is one of four swimming disciplines (alongside the 100m freestyle and 50m and 100m butterfly) that will make up the swimming events at the first Enhanced Games next year. There will also be sprint events in athletics as well as weightlifting. News of Gkolomeev's feat provoked a predictably fierce backlash from sport's established governing bodies. 'Like clowns juggling knives, sadly, these athletes will get hurt performing in this circus,' said World Aquatics. 'History has shown us time and time again the grave dangers of doping to human health. This is a sideshow to those who compete honestly, fairly, and respect the true spirit of sport.' Travis Tygart, the influential chief executive of the US Anti-Doping Agency, called it a 'dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle', while Lord Coe, the president of World Athletics, has previously dismissed the concept as 'b-------'. The International Olympic Committee has not publicly commented and, as members gathered in February to elect Kirsty Coventry as the new IOC president, there was apparently no thought of the Enhanced Games. 'I did not hear it mentioned once all week – the mood was very upbeat after the success of Paris,' said one IOC insider. FASTEST SWIMMER IN HISTORY Kristian Gkolomeev breaks the 50m Freestyle World Record with a time of 20.89 seconds, earning a $1,000,000 prize. Breaks Cesar Cielo's 2009 record (20.91). Watch Documentary — Enhanced Games (@enhanced_games) May 22, 2025 The IOC, though, has some very obvious points of vulnerability. There was dismay last summer among many athletes over the handling of an anti-doping investigation that cleared Chinese swimmers to compete. Faith in the authorities' ability to enforce current rules is, to put it politely, limited. And then there is the issue of money and the rewards for Olympic athletes who dedicate their lives to a multi-billion-pound show but are frequently left with no more than memories and huge financial debts for the honour. 'I think the business model that is going right now is very outdated for the athletes,' the swimmer Adam Peaty told me last year. 'We need to encourage the next generation to come through – have a fair compensation; it should be coming from the IOC and trickling back down to the athletes who put on the show.' It is a sentiment widely shared, including among promoters in sports where not paying prize money or even appearance fees to athletes would be utterly unthinkable. 'The day after a medal, no one says: 'Who is going to put food on your table?' You try eating a medal – you'll lose your teeth,' says Barry Hearn, whose Professional Darts Corporation has a £1 million first prize for its next world champion. For those Olympic athletes who already dope, or who believe that doping is so prevalent that they cannot win cleanly, you could imagine some might become drawn to a concept where chemical enhancement is out in the open and the potential financial rewards are huge. The Enhanced Games themselves have been emphasising the involvement of medics in the preparation of their athletes – there is a 14-strong 'independent medical and scientific commission' – even if claims of 'safety' have been strongly disputed elsewhere within the profession. 'We live in a world transformed by science,' said Enhanced Games founder Aron D'Souza. 'But sport has stood still. We are not updating the rulebook – we are rewriting it. And we're doing it safely, ethically, and boldly.' Magnussen has also been emphasising the financial point. 'The most common response I hear from current athletes is, if this all goes ahead the way we believe it will in the first year, then we're very interested to join,' he said. 'Because the opportunity to set yourself up for life just isn't there at the moment. But it's very clear that opportunity is available with the Enhanced Games.' As well as Trump's 1789 Capital firm, other known investors include the billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The big immediate challenge, though, will surely be finding enough world-class athletes over the next 12 months to stage meaningful competition. The Enhanced Games website includes a form for potential participants to register their interest – and it is striking that the list of signed-up athletes currently numbers just four: Magnussen, Gkolomeev and two more swimmers, Josif Miladinov of Bulgaria and Ukranian Andrii Govorov. Of the four, only Miladinov is below the age of 30. It rather suggests that this particular concept has too many ethical and reputational barriers to seriously impact on conventional sporting structures, certainly in the immediate future. But, as it basks in the afterglow of Paris and the election of a continuity president in Coventry, the IOC would be wise to address some of the very legitimate grievances that still fester.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Ramaphosa withstood Trump's bizarre ambush – but he let down South Africans
The dust is still settling from Donald Trump's latest 'ambush' in the Oval Office. What started off as a series of pleasantries about golf between the US president and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa's delegation quickly turned into a lecture – complete with a video screening and reams of printed-out news articles – about how a white genocide is supposedly under way in my home country. The delegation was largely successful in correcting that narrative. It emphasised that crime affects South Africans of all races and that white citizens are not specifically targeted. Zingiswa Losi, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, rightly pointed out that in rural areas, it is Black women who bear the brunt of violent crime. On the surface, this might all seem like a familiar conflict – one between Trump's deluded and emboldened hard-right vision of the world and a country's leadership trying its best to stick to the facts without aggrieving the beast too much (South Africa is still facing 30% tariffs, after all). But as an investigative journalist and researcher who focuses on land dispossession and reform in South Africa, to me the encounter looked different. All I could see was a missed opportunity. One spark for this ongoing showdown between the Maga movement in the US (allied with some white Afrikaners in South Africa) and the African National Congress (ANC) government has been the introduction of a land reform act that was passed in January. The law aims to address the inequalities of the white-minority-rule era by tackling an issue that has been ignored for too long in post-apartheid South Africa and lies at the root of many of our problems: land. To explain why, let me return to the subject of golf – a subject that feels all the more appropriate given that, at Trump's request, Ramaphosa's delegation included professional golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen. I've written extensively about golf courses and golf estates. Take the suburb of Fourways in northern Johannesburg, which contains some of the most exclusive and luxurious golf estates in the country. With homes that sell for tens of millions of rands, these enclaves serve South Africa's wealthy elite. Among their many amenities such as private lagoons, nature trails, sports fields and high-end restaurants, the most coveted is safety. In a city with high rates of car hijackings and home invasions, their surveillance systems, access control and electrified perimeter walls offer peace of mind that is a luxury in Johannesburg. Inside those walls lies a world largely insulated from the realities of South Africa – a world that is overwhelmingly white, even though more than 80% of the South African population is Black. Before Fourways became a hub of luxury living, it was an agricultural region made up of farms and smallholdings. The land was seized in the 19th century by Afrikaner settlers who forced the original Black residents into labour tenancies. Stripped of land rights, those tenants could only stay on their ancestral land if they worked it for the settlers. In the 1980s, as apartheid began to falter and the prospect of democracy grew, many white landowners sold their farms to private developers and fled the area or the country. The labour tenants were left behind, only to be forcibly relocated to underresourced townships such as Alexandra and Soweto. They lost not just their homes and livelihoods but also family graves and burial plots that could not be moved. Some 30 years into democracy, the former labour tenants of Fourways, like the majority of South African land claimants, are still trapped in a backlogged, corrupted land-claims process with their hope dwindling that they'll ever be granted compensation or restoration of their land rights. This is why it's so tragic that Ramaphosa's team has been framing the failure of land reform as proof of successful race relations. It's as if they're effectively saying: 'Look – there can be no 'white genocide' in South Africa because white people own 72% of farmland!' This is factually correct. However, our inability to redistribute land, and thus create a more equitable and sustainable South Africa, is not a marker of national unity. It is the ANC's most glaring policy failure, one the government is only belatedly trying to fix with this controversial law. The crowded, impoverished townships where the state relocated Black South Africans under the Group Areas Act remain among the most dangerous places in the country. Generations of South Africans have been cut off from the wealth-building power of land ownership. Here's the key point: this economic exclusion, combined with mass unemployment, fuels the very crime that the delegation insisted affects everyone equally. I appreciate that it may not have been the right occasion and Trump was probably not a receptive audience for a nuanced conversation. Still, it saddens me to think of the resources poured into this mission to correct the damage being wrought by a malicious, white supremacist agenda in South Africa and the US. Meanwhile the historically dispossessed South Africans who need these resources most are left to flounder, overlooked as the true victims of the violence of the apartheid regime and the dark shadow it has cast over our young democracy. Most Black South Africans will never be able to afford to move to areas such as Fourways. They live in places the government once designated for removal, with limited access to jobs, safety or infrastructure. They are the ones most exposed to violent crime, not those living in fortified golf estates and large fortified farms. Zanele Mji is a writer, investigative journalist and podcaster based in Johannesburg, South Africa
Telegraph
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Maga-styled parties given bloody nose in round of European elections
When The Telegraph sat down with Romania's far-Right candidate for the presidential elections, he proudly proclaimed that 'the wave of the Maga movement is here in Europe'. But on Monday morning, George Simion was licking his wounds after suffering defeat to a pro-EU centrist, with similar election results also filtering in from Portugal and Poland. On Sunday, three EU member states held crucial elections seen as a test for the political centre, with pro-Donald Trump, Right-wing candidates hoping to import his cut-throat style to the continent. But the tactic hasn't worked. In Romania, self-styled Maga (Make America Great Again) firebrand Mr Simion hoped to beat Nicușor Dan, the liberal pro-EU mayor of Bucharest, in the second round of the presidential elections. The vote was a rerun of the November presidential elections, which were annulled due to suspicions that Russia had influenced them in favour of pro-Putin candidate Călin Georgescu. In Poland, right-wing party Law and Justice [PiS], which was exceedingly close to Mr Trump during his first term in office, jostled for power with Civic Platform, Donald Tusk's ruling centrist party, for the role of president. And in Portugal, the hard-Right, anti-corruption Chega party was up against the Socialists and Democratic Alliance, the centre-Right ruling party. To the relief of EU leaders, and to the disappointment of the Trump camp, all three centrist candidates swept to victory in their respective polls - albeit by an extremely narrow margin in the case of Poland, where a run-off will be held. Mr Trump has long sought to boost the profile of far-Right, anti-EU populist movements in Europe, as he considers them natural political bedfellows. Like him, they feel that the centrist rulers of Europe are grossly complacent on hot-button issues such as mass-migration. Some share his more sympathetic view towards Vladimir Putin and Russia. The US president has also tried unsuccessfully to shift the odds in his favour in Greenland – where the centrist Democrats won by a landslide, apparently thanks to voters who oppose Mr Trump's desire to take over the territory. Likewise in Canada, the Trump administration-backed Conservative Party was trounced by Mark Carney – the anti-Trump liberal poster boy, and former governor of the Bank of England,. It is also no secret that Europe's current crop of centrist leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron, loathe populism: they view it as a con which offers, but cannot deliver, fast and easy solutions to complex problems. They will no doubt feel emboldened by this set of results, which counters the White House narrative that European countries are embracing Trumpian populism one by one. In future dealings with Mr Trump, they can bring up this set of results in response to suggestions that the centrists don't really have the democratic backing of the people. Some of Mr Trump's closest allies, including Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, aggressively campaigned on behalf of the far-Right populist Alternative for Germany [AfD] party during February's federal elections. The Trump administration's support was so brazen that JD Vance, the vice-president, snubbed a meeting with Olaf Scholz, the then chancellor, at the Munich Security Conference and instead paid a visit to Alice Weidel, the AfD leader. The gambit did not pay off, with Friedrich Merz's centre-Right Christian Democrats [CDU] instead emerging as the victor. Nor did it yield results on Sunday in the cases of Romania, Poland and Portugal. On Monday, it was Mr Merz's turn to send congratulations: 'Romania affirmed its commitment to a strong and secure Europe: Dear [Mr Dan] congratulations on your election victory!' he wrote in a Romanian language post on X. While the champagne corks might have been popping in Brussels on Monday, these results also carried a warning to the centrists: in Portugal, the far-Right Chega party secured its best-ever result with 22 per cent of the vote. It is likely to become the second largest party in parliament. That result mirrors the success of the AfD, now the de-facto opposition in the Bundestag, the German parliament, having won 20 per cent of the vote in February. Chega's success appears to be mainly drawn from railing against corruption, with leader André Ventura vowing to clean up Portuguese politics. Ironically, the party has had to expel or discipline members for being caught up in precisely the kind of sleaze scandals it opposes. One MP has already been kicked out of the party for stealing suitcases at airports, another member has been caught drink-driving, and a third has been charged with paying for oral sex from an underage teenager. None of this seems to have turned off pro-populist voters in Portugal, which is perhaps no surprise: Mr Trump himself has weathered countless sleaze scandals over the past nine years. In Poland, the results paint a much more mixed picture, even if the centrist candidate came in first place, as neither party won an outright majority. That means a run-off will be held in Poland on June 1, allowing Karol Nawrocki, the Right-wing PiS candidate, a chance at overtaking Rafał Trzaskowski, the centrist who is backed by Donald Tusk, the prime minister. 'Nawrocki's victory would undermine Tusk's political project and could be the harbinger of PiS' return to power in 2027 or even earlier in case of a snap election,' said Piotr Buras, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 'In the medium term, disintegration of Tusk's coalition could be one of the consequences.' He added: 'The campaign in the next two weeks will be very polarizing and brutal, a confrontation of two visions of Poland: pro-EU, liberal and progressive versus nationalist, Trumpist and conservative.' Back in Bucharest, however, Mr Simion does not seem too brutally disappointed by the results – and seems to view them as a temporary setback.
