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Just days before the December 12 election, The Guardian’s opinion poll tracker finds the Tories to “have a significant lead” over Labour even as support for the Liberal Democrats and the Brexit Party has slumped. In recent years, opinion polls have been notoriously unreliable. Rob Watson,...
When Boris Johnson became prime minister in July, he assembled the most aggressively anti-human rights cabinet in decades. The current home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to bring back the death penalty. The chancellor, Sajid Javid, as a former home secretary, deported British citizens to the US...
Elections are almost invariably termed historic. For once, the use of the term is not an exaggeration. When British voters go to the polls on December 12, they will indeed be making a historic choice. Scroll down to read more in this 360° series British democracy has been...
In the frenzy and fury of yet another UK election that whirls and swirls around Brexit, our politicians are dancing in a conga line of counter-accusations, misinformation and outright lies. Savvy political pundits and sage pollsters assess and debate the direction of travel of the conga line. And...
A succession of social upheavals over the last decade has radically realigned political power throughout the world. As a result of these tectonic shifts, what had once been on the furthest fringes of the right has now moved toward the center while the left has been pushed to the margins....
In a recent interview with The Economist, French President Emmanuel Macron shocked fellow NATO allies by calling the organization “brain dead.” His words, described as “astonishingly candid,” received a harsh rebuke from Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as from Turkey’s...
Profiting from his return to Europe to celebrate the 70th anniversary of NATO, US President Donald Trump used the platform to launch the opening salvos in a new skirmish in his endlessly improvised “America First” trade wars. On the same day, we learn that Brazil and Argentina are also under...
The suspect in the terrorist attack on a synagogue in the German city of Halle in October, 27-year-old Stephan B., was driven by anti-Semitism and a radical-right worldview. After the murder of Walter Lübcke in June, this was the second deadly radical-right terrorist attack this year to shake...
When arguing that political parties cannot solve global issues such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and fiscal justice, and that we need a new global movement capable of pushing forward concrete solutions and harness the energies of the youth, we meet a few “deniers.” Critiques of...
Over centuries, Europeans have developed local traditions that define the economy, the arts and the rituals of daily life. Those traditions sometimes belong to nations or are spread across the entire continent. Sometimes they are very local and remain unknown beyond a small region. The...
In September, citizens of the former East German states of Brandenburg and Saxony headed to the polls to elect their new legislatures. The results were, on the one hand, a breath of fresh air for traditional parties, in particular the Social Democrats (SPD) who, following a series of disastrous...
