Even Israel’s vehement critics might pause and marvel at what ordinary Israelis achieved this week. After weeks of mounting demonstrations against the government’s judicial-reform bills, hundreds of thousands took to the streets on Sunday night — proportionally, as if millions of Americans were on the march — when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — A political crisis in Israel and setbacks to democracy in several other major countries closely allied with the United States are testing the Biden administration’s defense of democracy against a global trend toward the authoritarianism of nations like Russia and China. President Biden will deliver remarks on Wednesday at the second White House-led […]
Read More
In proposing his judicial overhaul, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has said he was restoring the balance of power between elected lawmakers and unelected judges. “It is not the end of democracy, it is the strengthening of democracy,” Mr. Netanyahu said last week, before a huge wave of protest and civil unrest forced him […]
Read More
NEW DELHI — Rahul Gandhi, one of the last national figures standing in political opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, was disqualified as a member of parliament on Friday, sending shock waves across the country’s political scene and devastating the once-powerful Indian National Congress party Mr. Gandhi leads. Mr. Gandhi was expelled from […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Merrick B. Garland was busy typing away in his upstairs office at home, finalizing remarks he planned to deliver the following day when he was to be introduced as Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s nominee to be attorney general. The speech was originally a summons to restore […]
Read More
PHILADELPHIA — It’s just a few blocks on Arch Street between the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the oldest art school and museum in the United States, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia, founded in 1976 to celebrate the achievements of African Americans from pre-colonial times to the current day. Yet rarely have […]
Read More
PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron, addressing the French people for the first time since the tumultuous passing of a law that raises the retirement age to 64 from 62, denounced violent protests and said he would not tolerate their threat to the republic. Speaking in a televised interview with two journalists, Mr. Macron said he […]
Read More
PARIS — “We have a president who makes use of a permanent coup d’état.” That was the verdict of Olivier Faure, the leader of the French Socialist Party, after President Emmanuel Macron rammed through a bill raising the retirement age in France to 64 from 62 without a full parliamentary vote this past week. In […]
Read More
President Emmanuel Macron, worried that France’s Parliament would not approve a fiercely contested bill raising the retirement age to 64 from 62, opted to ram the legislation through on Thursday without a full parliamentary vote, a decision certain to inflame an already tense confrontation over the measure. After three meetings on Thursday with Mr. Macron […]
Read More
The president of Israel presented a compromise proposal on Wednesday for softening a government plan to drastically overhaul the country’s judiciary — a plan that critics say would destroy the country’s liberal democratic system and that has sent hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets in recent weeks. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected […]
Read More
The K.M.T. has a long history of arguing for economic integration with China. The party’s roots date back to the nationalist army that lost a civil war against Chinese Communists in 1949 and escaped to Taiwan to regroup. K.M.T. officials, who initially ruled as a military dictatorship, were so committed to the dream of returning […]
Read More
When Amira Bouraoui, an Algerian-French pro-democracy activist, boarded a plane to France from Tunisia last month, she thought her ordeal had finally come to an end. She had already failed twice to flee Algeria, where her activism had put her in the government’s cross hairs. Her third attempt, by illegally entering neighboring Tunisia, resulted in […]
Read More
“It often happens in democratic countries,” he continues, that many men who have the desire or the need to associate cannot do it, because all being very small and lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and do not know where to find each other. Up comes a newspaper that exposes to […]
Read More
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, […]
Read More
When Israeli lawmakers passed a law in 1992 that would give judges the power to block future legislation, an argument broke out on the floor of Parliament that foreshadowed the fight over the judiciary that is engulfing Israel today. “You are subjecting Parliament to the Supreme Court,” declared Michael Eitan, a lawmaker and a critic […]
Read More
When Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar appeared before the Supreme Court last week to defend the Biden administration’s ambitious plan to waive federal student loan debt, she had some explaining to do. The policy she’s defending belongs to Mr. Biden. But the system of governance it relies on is a product of the George W. Bush […]
Read More
While the mediation remains far from success, its existence, nevertheless, adds nuance to an otherwise toxic and emotional national discourse that many fear could devolve into political violence or even civil war. The government’s supporters and opponents have accused each other of attempting a coup, amid fears on both sides that the future of Israel’s […]
Read More
CIUDAD DE MÉXICO — Más de 100.000 personas salieron a las calles de México el domingo para protestar las leyes recién aprobadas que restringen al instituto electoral del país, en lo que los manifestantes dijeron era un repudio a los esfuerzos del presidente de debilitar a un pilar de la democracia. Vestidos en varios tonos […]
Read More
More than 100,000 took to the streets of Mexico on Sunday to protest new laws hobbling the nation’s election agency, in what demonstrators said was a repudiation of the president’s efforts to weaken a pillar of democracy. Wearing shades of pink, the official color of the electoral watchdog that helped end one-party rule two decades […]
Read More
Upon winning independence from its British colonizers in 1960, thousands of Nigerians watched as their new green and white flag was raised over the capital at the time, Lagos, at midnight. As fireworks lit up the streets, hope and promise filled the air. Nigerians’ hopes have been dashed many times since then. They have endured […]
Read More
It was a brave political move and one that almost certainly cost Ford the presidency in 1976, when he narrowly lost to Jimmy Carter. But what if Ford made the wrong calculus? The precedent Ford set seems to have paralyzed a half-century of prosecutors. That precedent and Justice Department policy have left the United States […]
Read More
A year since Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade Ukraine, the war is far from over. However bravely Ukrainians fight on, and however muddled the performance of Russia’s military, Ukraine cannot prevail without continued and substantial Western assistance. Since the invasion, that has swelled to over $150 billion in American and European spending, and […]
Read More
Narrow charges could include the Georgia felonies of solicitation of election fraud in the first degree and related general crimes like conspiracy to commit election fraud, specifically focusing on events and people who have a strong nexus with Georgia. In addition to Mr. Trump, that might include others who had direct contacts with Georgia, like […]
Read More
It took 505 days for President Biden to even talk to former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, a far-right leader who had questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s election. It will take Mr. Biden just more than a month to welcome to the White House Mr. Bolsonaro’s successor, Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula […]
Read More
I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many different groups for dignity and respect in public life has been a driving force in American history since the […]
Read More I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many different groups for dignity and respect in public life has been a driving force in American history since the […]
Read More
This by no means discredits the good work The Post does. But news organizations will inevitably lose public trust when they pretend to be something they aren’t. We are not simply disinterested defenders of democracy writ large. We are actors within that democracy, with a powerful megaphone that we can sometimes use in problematic ways. […]
Read More
In an email, Willer explained what was going on: One of the key findings of this new study is that we found some overlap between the interventions that reduced affective polarization and the interventions that reduced one specific anti-democratic attitude: support for undemocratic candidates. Specifically, we found that several of the interventions that were most […]
Read More
Next year Modi will almost certainly run again, and if he wins and serves a third term, he would become the longest-serving prime minister other than India’s first, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his daughter Indira Gandhi. It was Nehru who set the blueprint for a secular, democratic, multiethnic India. In his speech on the eve of […]
Read More
President Biden has been conspicuously quiet on the topic of the Supreme Court. Even as there’s an active debate about what to do about a court that has too often exceeded the bounds of its authority, he has avoided regular criticism of it. His restraint in discussing the court is true in general, and it’s […]
Read More
Earlier this week, I wrote that American policing lies largely outside of democratic control. In practice, despite the formal authority of mayors, city councilors and other elected officials, police departments can and do operate without meaningful accountability or public oversight. But the problem of democracy and American policing goes beyond questions of accountability. The police […]
Read More