World

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Could Mamdani win through a 'conspiracy of cock ups'?

41 min listen

Zohran Mamdani is widely expected to win the race to be the next New York City mayor. The contest is now a three horse race between Mamdani, the Republican candidate Curtis Silwa and Andrew Cuomo, the former Democratic governor. Current democratic mayor Eric Adams was also running but pulled out this week. David Kaufman, who worked on the Adams campaign, joins Freddy Gray in New York to dissect the race. They discuss the democratic ‘cock ups’ that led to Mamdani’s selection, the impact of the war in Gaza on the race and the dimension of identity politics. Could he win as the ‘anti-Trump’ candidate?

Gavin Mortimer

When will David Lammy learn that Nazi smears don’t work?

Is the Third Reich living rent-free in David Lammy’s head? Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister has accused Donald Trump of being a ‘neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath’, likened the Tory European Research Group to Hitler’s National Socialists – and now he has claimed that Reform leader Nigel Farage ‘flirted’ with the Hitler Youth as a youngster. ‘I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgements about someone who once flirted with Hitler Youth when he was younger,’ Lammy said of Farage. Who knew Reform’s leader – born in 1964 – had been around in 1930s Germany? In response to Lammy’s latest Nazi sighting, a Reform source told the BBC: ‘It’s disgusting

Elvira Bary

Putin's dads' and lags' army is struggling

The news that Vladimir Putin is pushing for 135,000 new young recruits in ‘the biggest autumn conscription’ for nearly ten years comes as no surprise. Recently, the Russian leader’s war-machine has been scraping the bottom of the barrel: convicts freed from prison, men in their sixties, debt-ridden farmers, factory workers pulled straight off the line…and foreigners who don’t even speak Russian. The Russian leader’s war-machine has been scraping the bottom of the barrel When Putin began his ‘special military operation’ in February 2022, he expected the entire nation to rally in support of his war. But reality hit hard: plunging approval ratings, economic collapse, and a mass exodus. When partial

Tuesday

Matthew Lynn

Will Trump turn Gaza into the 'Riviera of the Middle East'?

There are plenty of legitimate questions to be asked about the Trump-Blair peace plan for ending the conflict with Israel. Will Hamas ever agree to it? Will any peace deal hold? Will the wider Middle East get behind it? And will Sir Tony Blair ever be able to overcome the legacy of his earlier military adventures in the region to establish any kind of authority? But there is also another question that we must ask. If this peace does hold, can Trump and Blair turn Gaza into a cross between Dubai and Singapore – or is that completely deluded? All the immediate attention will, of course, be on whether this

Mark Galeotti

Have we gone to war with Russia without realising?

Has the world turned upside-down? Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, generally known for his toxic social media posts packed with threat and vitriol, is turning down the volume, while various Western public figures are determinedly turning it up. Yesterday, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, in what he called ‘a sentence that may be a little shocking at first glance,’ stated that ‘we are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either.’ Actually, this was relatively mild. Meanwhile, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk was describing the current confrontation between Europe and Russia as a ‘new type of war’ at the opening of the Warsaw Security Forum. Likewise, on Sunday’s

Jonathan Sacerdoti

Trump's Gaza peace plan changes everything

In a moment of extraordinary geopolitical gravity, US President Donald Trump has unveiled a comprehensive plan to end the Gaza conflict – a proposal whose ambition, structure, and support represent a seismic shift in Middle Eastern diplomacy. But beneath its layered diplomacy lies a singular, inescapable truth: Trump is making it clear that Hamas must be eliminated, and the Palestinian movement reinvented – not merely reformed, but reversed. What he is offering is not a negotiation between equals, but an ultimatum wrapped in a pathway: disarm, de-radicalise and rebuild, or be dismantled by force. ‘This can be done the easy way, or it can be done the hard way, but

Sam Leith

America, where did it go wrong?

Say what you like about Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, but his ‘flooding the zone’ thing really works, doesn’t it? Bannon’s thesis about political communication – which is, really, a thesis about political communication as political warfare – is that you need to pump out such a torrent of outrageous and chaotic actions and pronouncements that the press and your opponents are overloaded, flummoxed, thrown into confusion. Nobody can see the big picture. Nobody can focus on anything for any length of time because there’ll immediately be something else still more bizarre or disconcerting to digest. America isn’t just a place. It’s an idea. An idea to do with freedom I say this only because, a few days ago,

Monday

Svitlana Morenets

Ukraine is determined to give Russia a taste of its own medicine

Russians living in the Belgorod region of Russia got a taste of what Ukrainians have been enduring for over three years of war last night, after they spent it without power, hot water or internet. Ukrainian forces set the Belgorod power plant ablaze with US-made Himars missiles after the Trump administration reportedly gave Kyiv the green light to target Russia’s energy grid with American weapons during the UN summit last week. With winter closing in, Russians once untouched by the war now dread that they will be forced to live just like Ukrainians, suffering from daily bombardments and power outages. The strike came after Moscow unleashed nearly 500 drones and

Patrick Gibbons

Only EU membership will secure Moldova's future

‘The European path of Moldova must go on,’ a young Moldovan politician texted me as their parliamentary election results began to roll in yesterday. His party PAS, the pro-European Party of Action and Solidarity, won. The race was not as close as some supporters feared, with PAS receiving about 50 per cent of the vote. The main opposition, Patriotic Electoral Bloc – an alliance of pro-Russian socialist and communist parties – received around 25 per cent. This is a remarkable moment for Moldova. Just three weeks ago President Maia Sandu, the founder of PAS, addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg, warning of Russian interference. Calling the election a ‘battlefield’, Sandu

Yossi Melman

Why Trump wants Blair to run Gaza

Tony Blair is a man for all seasons, a political operator who knows precisely on which side his bread is buttered, the side of the super-rich oil and gas sheikhs and the well-connected elites of the Middle East. It is no coincidence, then, that his name has emerged as a potential candidate for a role envisioned by President Donald Trump’s administration: effectively serving as governor of Gaza if, and when, the ongoing war there comes to an end. Driving his candidacy is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who continues to accumulate vast wealth from investments backed by Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati funds. Kushner is once again returning to mediation in the

Sunday

Renan Avelvor

Is Georgia still willing to fight for its democracy?

On 4 October, voters in Georgia will be called to the polls to vote in the country’s municipal elections and choose a new cohort of local councillors and city mayors. How many citizens will actually turn out, though, remains to be seen: for many, after a steady erosion of democratic freedoms in Georgia, this vote carries little meaning. Georgia’s elections in October last year cemented the dominance of the populist Georgian Dream party in parliament, but the vote’s outcome remains contested by the opposition. Tuesday marked the 300th consecutive day that citizens from across the country have gathered in major cities – every evening in Tbilisi, for example – demanding

Arnout Nuijt

The Netherlands has a wolf problem

Bram and Hubertus are marked for death. Camouflage-clad government marksmen – licensed but anonymous, for security reasons – are hunting them in the sparse woodlands of one of Europe’s most densely populated nations. But it’s proving trickier than expected. The hunters are not alone in the woods. A parallel force – equally camouflaged, well equipped and dedicated if not fanatical – is also out there, a Dutch daily newspaper reports. Animal rights activists and climate crusaders have taken it upon themselves to protect the pair, by any means necessary. A human fatality is only a matter of time Bram and Hubertus are wolves, given cosy, old-fashioned Dutch names to garner sympathy for

Simon Diggins

What is Putin’s game?

What happens when you boil a frog? It doesn’t notice the warming water until it is too late. According to Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, Russia is boiling Nato like a frog. He fears that Vladimir Putin’s provocations of Nato (none of which on their own would necessitate a military response) will become increasingly and slowly severe, testing and ultimately undermining Nato’s defences. There is force to his argument. Two weeks ago, Polish air defences shot down Russian drones. Last Friday, Russian jets violated Estonian airspace and forced Nato planes to scramble. More drones, operated by a ‘capable actor’, according to a Danish Police spokesman, flew over Norwegian and Danish

Saturday

Katja Hoyer

The plight of Germany's powerless centrists

Germany is a tense country these days. Conversations with friends and relatives there invariably turn to politics, and, when they do, things can get heated very quickly. Gone is the casual sarcasm and the grumbling that marked political dinner table discourse in years gone by. It has been replaced by anger and intense frustration. The political mainstream and its supporters sense this disaffection, too, and it frightens them. But their panicked efforts to do something about it are backfiring, alienating even more voters. Many centrists fear a breakdown of the democratic post-war order Widespread disgruntlement with the status quo isn’t just anecdotal. It can be measured in numbers. Chancellor Friedrich

Paul Wood

Tony Blair will not be welcome in Gaza

During an earlier Gaza war, I spoke to families who had fled the fighting but whose place of refuge – a UN school – had been hit by white phosphorus. We stood around and looked at what remained of one of the shells… the bits were still smoking and would burst into flames if you nudged them with your foot. A middle-aged man in a rumpled suit was furious, and not just with the Israelis. ‘You’re to blame for this,’ he said, wagging his finger, his voice getting louder. He meant the British: ‘You and your Balfour Declaration.’ The declaration was made in a letter written in 1917 by Arthur

Friday

Svitlana Morenets

Is Nato really ready to shoot down Russian jets?

Until recently, when Russian drones strayed into Nato airspace during mass attacks on Ukraine, fighter jets would scramble, not to shoot them down, but to watch. The allies tracked the drones as they flew across the Nato border, either jammed off course or deliberately redirected to confuse Ukrainian air defences. In both cases, if the drones didn’t crash into a field somewhere in Romania or Poland, they always made it back to bomb Ukrainians, under the close watch of Nato’s best pilots on fully loaded warplanes. Is Nato so terrified of Vladimir Putin that it allows Russian drones to roam its skies freely? For Ukrainians, this was infuriating. They could

Sam Leith

Tony Blair can't save Gaza

There’s a very short list of important questions, these days, to which the right answer is ‘Tony Blair’. I mean, a really short list. In a round of the US gameshow Jeopardy, when the host says ‘Tony Blair’, nobody is going to win a doublewide trailer by piping up: ‘Who would be the best person to be king of the Gaza Strip once all the bodies have been cleared away?’ The scheme circulating for Blair the Viceroy involve GITA entering Gaza as its ‘supreme political and legal authority’ And yet. Our former prime minister – now, though the way he carries on it’s easy to forget, a private citizen –

Travis Aaroe

When Curtis Yarvin met Alastair Campbell

A video has been doing the rounds in which a woman holds an iguana up to the glass window of an aquarium. A beluga whale emerges from the murk. For a brief moment two creatures whose very existence is incomprehensible to each other – who would never, in millions of years, have met but for this precise set of circumstances – come nose to nose. The whale then turns, and is gone. Something similar occurred on stage at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival on Sunday, where Alastair Campbell interviewed Curtis Yarvin – a ‘neo-reactionary’ blogger, tech entrepreneur and court theorist to J.D. Vance. He has argued for a form of monarchy in

Yossi Melman

Do not dismiss Trump’s Gaza plan

The recent moves by Donald Trump to promote a plan to end the two-year war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza appear this time to be more serious and promising than in the past. The American administration, led by Steve Witkoff, the President’s special envoy for international conflicts, has been formulating for several weeks a detailed outline, whose main points are: The release of 47 remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Twenty are believed to be still alive – among them one woman – But Israeli intelligence and the families know that they are in bad health and starving and in miserable condition. Israel will release from its

James Tidmarsh

How the judiciary took down Nicolas Sarkozy

A Paris court has sentenced France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy to five years, three of which must be served behind bars, for criminal conspiracy tied to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign. He’ll be imprisoned within weeks, irrespective of any appeal. The image of a former French president heading to prison is brutal and France is shaken by it. The law is being used not just to punish, but to shape the field of politics. What makes today’s decision extraordinary isn’t just the verdict. It’s the court’s choice to immediately enforce its judgment. Appeal or not, Sarkozy will be behind bars. This so-called exécution provisoire is the French