World

Saturday

Nicholas Farrell

Could Giorgia Meloni become Italy’s next prime minister?

At the last Italian general election in 2018 the right-wing populist party, Fratelli d’Italia, got just 4 per cent of the vote. Last Sunday, at local elections in around 1,000 cities and towns, it led the coalition of the right to victory in nine out of 13 major cities which were won in the first round of voting, including Palermo and Genoa. A further 13 where no one got more than 50 per cent go to a second ballot on 26 June. Overall, right-wing candidates got 44 per cent of the vote compared to 42 per cent for left-wing candidates. But the key significance of the results is that they

William Nattrass William Nattrass

What’s behind the mysterious wave of bomb threats terrorising Serbia?

Is Serbia being terrorised into supporting Ukraine? The question may sound like it comes from the fevered imagination of a Kremlin propagandist, but it’s being asked with increasing urgency in Serbia. The country has been buckling under a tsunami of fake bomb threats which the government claims is being orchestrated by pro-Ukrainian forces after Serbia refused to sanction Russia. Thousands of threats have targeted Serbian schools, hospitals, shops, tourist attractions and airports since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began. So far no bombs have gone off. But the threats are spreading fear and putting an enormous burden on public resources, with evacuations and top-to-bottom police searches becoming a part of everyday

Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

How Russia’s cartoon heroine turned on Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin’s regime has a track record in building up public heroes whom it hopes to use, only to find the ungrateful wretches unwilling to play the roles it intends. The most recent is Natalia Poklonskaya, a woman whose trajectory from cartoon heroine to legal adviser has starkly illustrated the way Putin faces criticisms not just from remaining liberals at home, but also nationalists. Poklonskaya shot to fame amidst the Russian take-over of Crimea. A Ukrainian, she had been a senior prosecutor in Crimea, then in Kyiv, until she resigned in the wake of the ‘Euromaidan’ rising, ‘ashamed to live in the country where neo-fascists freely walk the streets.’ She

Justin Bronk

Is the war slipping away from Ukraine?

After the decisive failure of Russia’s attempt to overthrow the government of Ukraine by seizing Kyiv, Kharkiv and other key cities in February and March 2022, Russia has concentrated its depleted forces in the Donbas and set itself far more limited objectives. In the two months since its retreat from the north of Ukraine, Russia has finally subdued the besieged defenders of Mariupol – who had been surrounded since the second day of the invasion – and slowly gained territory in Donbas. Since then Russia’s most notable conquest has been the small but important town of Popasna and the surrounding high ground that overlooks key supply routes into the city of

Friday

John Keiger John Keiger

Why is Macron so desperate to bring Russia in from the cold?

Emmanuel Macron should get a new historical advisor. He continues to repeat – this time at his Kyiv press conference on Thursday – that Russia must not be humiliated following its invasion and war against Ukraine. Politicians indiscriminately pluck at historical examples to justify controversial policies. For Macron, the aftermath of the First World War serves as a warning against the dangers of humiliating adversaries. According to the French president, humiliation of Germany in the 1919 Versailles Peace treaty resulted in the allies losing the peace and Germany plotting revenge and renewed war twenty years later. He actually turned at this point to German chancellor Olaf Scholz, who had accompanied him (with Mario

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Biden’s upcoming Saudi Arabia visit has no guarantee of success

Joe Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia next month is, arguably, as important as anything that the UK government is doing itself on cost of living. As I say in the magazine this week, only the Saudis deciding to pump substantially more is going to bring down the price of oil and, therefore, petrol. The West’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is deeply, morally problematic. The strains in the US-Saudi relationship – remember how Joe Biden said on the campaign trail that he wanted to turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah because of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – meant that the Saudis have not stepped in to help in the way

Svitlana Morenets Svitlana Morenets

What Ukrainians think of the Macron, Scholz and Draghi visit

The photo said it all. Zelensky’s face when embraced by Macron summed up how Ukrainians saw yesterday’s visit from the leaders of France, Italy and Germany – the Ukrainian media reaction today has varied from scepticism to ridicule. They had arrived to say that Ukraine should be given EU ‘candidate status’ – a goal that drove the 2014 Maidan revolution. This morning, the European Commission confirmed that it would back both Ukraine and Moldova in becoming members of the bloc – and excluded Georgia. After the news broke, President Zelensky said the decision was ‘the first step on the EU membership path that’ll certainly bring our victory closer’. But with

John Keiger John Keiger

France could plunge the eurozone into its next crisis

In the French presidential elections, and now in the legislatives that will close on Sunday evening, the one issue kept under the carpet is finance. Neither the centrist Macronista grouping ‘Ensemble!’, nor the far-left Corbynista-like Nupes coalition of Jean-Luc Mélenchon has updated the electorate on how their manifestos are to be funded. And yet over the last month French finances have deteriorated dramatically. Neither programme has the slightest chance of being implemented without plunging French finances, and thus the eurozone generally, into a new sovereign debt crisis. France is dancing on a debt volcano. The unabashedly ideological Nupes programme calls for nationalisation of the banking and energy sectors, motorways, strategic

Thursday

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

Is Lithuania next on Putin’s hitlist?

For countries bordering Russia, Putin’s war on Ukraine raises a disturbing question: might they be next? A bill put forward to the Duma’s lower house on June 8 suggests Lithuania is in the country’s sights. If passed, the proposal by MP Evgeniy Fedorov could see Russia potentially try to lay claim to Lithuania’s territory. Bonkers and alarming in equal measure, it seems that, not content with focussing on the war it started in Ukraine, some factions of the Russian government are already setting their sights further afield. Harking back to the dying days of the USSR, Fedorov’s bill argues that the decision to recognise Lithuania’s independence in 1991 was made

Sasha Lensky

The end of the Russian dream

I was born in the USSR in 1978 and was just becoming a teenager as the Soviet Union fell. For a schoolboy this was heady stuff. There was no more talk of ‘Good Old Lenin’ in class, and literature and history sessions suddenly became interesting. For the first time, we openly discussed the Stalinist Terror and the gulags, and sat around reading formerly banned books like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. We condemned the madness of the Cold War and rhapsodised about the golden future. The world was opening up and it seemed nothing could prevent its peoples from becoming lasting friends. This was Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ and we believed

Anil Bhoyrul

My 68 seconds in the ring as a white-collar boxer

  Dubai There was still a minute to go in round one when my opponent Rudy started hugging me. ‘Are you OK? Are you OK? I’m so, so sorry,’ he said, looking distraught. Then the doctor appeared, shoved an oxygen tank over my face and ordered me to lie flat on the canvas. That was the moment when I realised that my plan to go from 56-year-old fitness nobody to superstar boxer in just three months hadn’t quite worked out. Yes, I had made it into the ring, in front of a raucous 700-strong crowd at the JW Marriott Marquis in Dubai. But could I make it out? I made

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

If only Tom Cruise would ditch his cult

I keep reading that Tom Cruise is the Last Great Movie Star, as if he’s some noble but endangered animal. I think his people must be putting it about as part of the PR for Top Gun 2, though Lord knows what his peers make of it. Think of Tom Hanks, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, De Niro… all of them Oscar winners (unlike Cruise) and all with a better claim to being the Last Great Star. Tom Cruise himself seems comfortable with the idea. He walks and talks like the L.G.M.S. – controlled, confident, impeccably dressed with just a hint of a helpful Cuban heel. But the higher his star

Douglas Murray

The January 6 hearings are partisan political theatre

Is it possible to hold two ideas in our heads at once? If so, I should like to put forward a case study. That Donald J. Trump did something that makes him ill-suited for public office, and that the current January 6 hearings in Washington are partisan political theatre. For anybody who was in outer space at the time, it is worth recalling that 6 January 2021 was the day Trump urged his supporters to join him in Washington to ‘Stop the steal’. The outgoing president could not accept that he was outgoing. He did not agree that he had lost the election two months earlier, and though it is

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Knighthoods, Northern Ireland and Mick Jagger

Home The British economy contracted by 0.3 per cent in April after shrinking by 0.1 per cent in March, according to the Office for National Statistics. Wages by April were 2.2 per cent lower in real terms than a year before, and economic inactivity fell by only a smidgen (0.1 per cent) to 21.3 per cent. Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, urged the Competition and Markets Authority to see whether a 5p cut in fuel duty, from 58p to 53p a litre, was being passed on quickly enough to drivers. VAT at 20 per cent is charged on the price including duty. The Duke of York, on family advice, took

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘He killed with a very cold heart’: Meet the Ukrainian prosecutor bringing war criminals to justice

Last month, Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian soldier, was jailed for life. His sentence marked the first successful war-crimes prosecution since the conflict in Ukraine began. On the fourth day of the invasion, after coming under fire, Shishimarin and four other soldiers hijacked a car and drove around looking for other units to join. They stopped in the north-eastern village of Chupakhivka where they came across 62-year-old Oleksandr Shelipov. Fearing he might share their location, Shishimarin shot him. Captured by Ukrainian troops, Shishimarin pleaded guilty in court, but said he was acting on orders. Shelipov’s widow was in court and addressed the killer directly: ‘Tell me please, why did you

John R. MacArthur

Will Mélenchon upend the French political establishment?

Paris In his memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote that he had always possessed ‘a certain idea of France’, a phrase that evoked a mystical past of grandeur and glory, as well as an ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. In French it is a lovely expression, but it’s doubtful the great man had in mind the angry parents of state-school children revolting against incumbent politicians in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, where on Sunday night there was a kind of mini-insurrection by Nupes, the ungainly coalition of left-wing parties that threatens to upend the French political establishment and deny President Emmanuel Macron majority control of the National Assembly during his second

Charles Moore Charles Moore

Why neither Andrew Neil nor I can be part of the Establishment

Even before the ECHR injunction, the bishops had issued their anathema. All 25 of them in the House of Lords told the Times that flying asylum-seekers to accommodation in Rwanda ‘should shame us a nation’. I can see reasonable objections to the policy, but is it really a source of shame? Most countries try to check the flow of refugees and most voters agree. They pay other countries to help them do this. In 2020, Turkey contained about four million refugees from Syria. It is still being paid by the EU to keep most of them out of the EU. The housing Britain is funding in Rwanda looks (though one

Wednesday

C.J. Farrington

Who might replace Putin once he’s gone?

How long does Putin have left? Combined with rumours of ill-health, Putin’s disastrous military campaign in Ukraine has led many to question how long he will cling to power. According to the Russian-Latvian independent news platform Meduza, ministers and oligarchs alike are unhappy at the scale of sanctions and the slow and uncertain progress of Putin’s ‘special military operation’. Alongside rumours of secret plans for a post-Putin Russia, elite discontent has already fuelled several high-profile resignations, including Boris Bondarev, Russia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and Valentin Yumashev, Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law. The ship is beginning to sink, and the rats are beginning to swim. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Progressives, don’t cheer Rwanda’s setbacks

The last-minute halting of the first flight to Rwanda is humiliating for Boris Johnson’s government. An urgent interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights prompted a domino effect of domestic court orders that ended with the plane returning to base without passengers. The ECtHR’s order came down to three factors. First, that evidence from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and others suggested asylum seekers transferred to Rwanda ‘will not have access to fair and efficient procedures for the determination of refugee status’. Second, that the High Court had found ‘serious triable issues’ in the government’s decision to treat Rwanda as a safe third country on the grounds that

Matthew Lynn

The eurozone crisis is back

Stock markets are crashing. Bond yields are soaring. And the cryptos are evaporating. There is so much going on in the financial markets right now it would be hard to miss the most significant event. The eurozone crisis, which almost broke apart the single currency back in 2011 and 2012, is back. And this time around, there is no very obvious way of fixing it. With inflation soaring across the world, the era of plentiful printed money coming to an end and interest rates starting to rise, every kind of financial market is in turmoil. Investors are adjusting to a new set of circumstances, and doing so very quickly. So