Spain’s caretaker prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, is due to seek parliament’s support for a second term on Tuesday but knows that his chances are slim.
“There is a serious risk of having to call a third election in the same year,” he warned supporters of his conservative People’s Party in Galicia this weekend.
Spaniards returned to the polls in June after the parties failed to put together a coalition government in the wake of the election in December. Neither major party commands an absolute majority, however, and the left-wing Socialists have said they will not vote for the right-wing Rajoy. If they refuse to budge, a third election may be inevitable. (more…)
Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton warned on Thursday that her rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, is enabling a far-right takeover of the Republican Party.
The Democrat argued in a speech delivered in Reno, Nevada that Trump is part of a wider “alternative right” movement that includes British Euroskeptics and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“The names may have changed,” she said.
Racists now call themselves “racialists.” White supremacists now call themselves “white nationalists.” The paranoid fringe now calls itself “alt-right.” But the hate burns just as bright.
Trump — “a man,” according to Clinton, “with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet” — surrounds himself with these people.
Only last week, he appointed Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, a far-right “news” site, as his campaign chief. (more…)
View of Washington DC with the United States Capitol in the distance, February 17, 2015 (Matt Popovich)
There is a persistent belief on the American right that Republicans in Congress have done little to stop President Barack Obama. Commentators, especially of the fringe variety, claim the party — which has held a majority in the House of Representatives since 2011 and in the Senate since 2015 — stabbed its supporters in the back to enable the Democrats.
Jonathan Bernstein argues at Bloomberg View that this is the sort of myth that makes conservative voters susceptible to a candidate like Donald Trump, who promises to uproot the entire political system.
I argued here last week that some conservatives are coming to terms with their complicity in Trump’s rise. They recognize that they have spent too much time vilifying their allies as opposed to their opponents and raised unreasonable expectations as to what a party can do when it only controls one branch of government.
But others, like Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart and Drudge, continue to peddle the stab-in-the-back narrative. They won’t be satisfied no matter how many times conservatives get their way in Washington or block a Democratic policy proposal, because — like Trump — they thrive on grievance, not success.
So it’s worth pointing out the Republicans’ successes when you don’t read too much about them in the right-wing media. (more…)
Turkish tanks rolled across the border into Syria on Wednesday. Protected by warplanes and flanked by special forces, they quickly succeeded in forcing Islamic State militants out of the city of Jarablus and driving a wedge between their territory and that of the Syrian Kurds.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkish-backed rebels — mostly Arab and Turkmen — had taken control of the city. (more…)
I don’t disagree with a word in Dan Hodges’ latest column about the Labour leadership contest. Owen Smith, the Welshman who has challenged Jeremy Corbyn, is running a shambolic campaign, veering to the far left on issues of health care and security when his record suggests he is more of a centrist.
But what about the rest of the party?
Why didn’t any of the genuine social democrats, who could lead a serious, pro-European opposition to a right-wing government that is committed to taking Britain out of the European Union, enter the contest? (more…)
Forces loyal to Syrian president Bashar Assad have for the first time bombarded Kurdish rebel positions in the northeast of the country, marking a shift in the regime’s strategy.
The largely Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) claims that regime forces carried out airstrikes in the Al-Hasakah Governorate and attacked urban areas with artillery, killing and injuring dozens.
CNN reports that American officials were nearby when the attack occurred.
The United States support the YPG in their fight against the self-declared Islamic State, a fanatical Sunni Islamist group that occupies territory in between the Assad regime’s and the Kurds. (more…)
Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Chicago, Illinois, March 14 (Hillary for America/Barbara Kinney)
If it wasn’t for Donald Trump, America’s Republicans would have stood a good chance of beating Hillary Clinton in November and returning one of their own to the presidency.
That is according to models that study the election’s “fundamentals”.
There is no total agreement on just what “fundamentals” are, but most political scientists would include economic and job growth, the incumbent’s approval rating and the unlikelihood of a party winning three consecutive presidential terms.
Florian Hollenbach and Jacob Montgomery combined six different models that profess to analyze the election’s fundamentals and found (PDF) that, on average, they give the Republican candidate 50.9 percent support against 49.1 percent for the Democrat. (more…)
The one good thing that may come of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is an awareness on the American right that it has done real damage to the Republican Party and indeed the country.
Not all conservatives are ready to admit that Trump is the end of the line for a movement that has for decades fed off people’s anxieties and undermined their faith in institutions. But for some, Trump is making clear what the politics of grievance and anti-government can lead to.
A spat between two right-wing commentators — Sean Hannity of Fox News and Bret Stephens of the The Wall Street Journal — is a preview of the blood feud we can expect on the right post-November if indeed Trump loses the election.
Hannity has preemptively blamed center-right Republicans, arguing that the likes of House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate leader Mitch McConnell have been harsher on Trump “than they’ve ever been in standing up to Barack Obama and his radical agenda.”
He said on his radio show, “You created Donald Trump, all of you. Because of your ineffectiveness, because of your weakness, your spinelessness, your lack of vision, your inability to fight Obama.” (more…)
It is always disappointing to read something of poor quality in The American Interest, which is one of my favorite publications. In this case, a Theresa May puff piece by one Neil Barnett that bears little relation to the realities of British foreign policy.
Barnett takes former prime minister David Cameron and his deputy, George Osborne, to task for gutting British defense, including the Harrier jet, leaving Britain without a carrier strike capability until the F-35 enters service, and the Nimrod MRA4 maritime patrol aircraft, leaving Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines vulnerable to Russian stalking.
He’s not wrong about the specifics. The Atlantic Sentinel has published similar criticisms, including this excellent report from Chris Revell about the Nimrod back in 2014.
But Barnett commits a classic polemic sin when he ascribes motive to Cameron and Osborne without giving us any reason to believe he has an intimate understanding of their thinking.
He writes,
Both men appeared to have no real sense for or interest in security matters, rather viewing the Ministry of Defence as little more than a drain on the budget and NATO as a dreary obligation.
That’s quite an accusation to make, especially when you don’t have anything to back it up. (more…)
One theory of Donald Trump’s popularity has been turned on its head. Gallup’s Jonathan T. Rothwell argues in a working paper that the businessman’s voters are not in fact motivated by any disproportionate impact from immigration and trade.
Rothwell bases his analysis on interviews Gallup conducted with more than 87,000 American voters, including Trump supporters and Trump opponents. He then compared support for Trump to various other indicators, including proximity to the Mexican border (which Trump has famously promised to wall off), the share of manufacturing in local employment, educational attainment and racial segregation.
Some of his findings confirm widely-held beliefs. Trump’s voters are older than the general electorate and more likely to be retired; more male, more white, less likely to hold a college degree and more likely to work, or have worked, in a blue-collar profession.
But their average household income is actually higher than the general population’s and they are more likely to be self-employed than unemployed. Labor force participation is lower among Trump supporters, but not after adjusting for age.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise altogether. The website FiveThirtyEight previously reported that Trump’s supporters on average earn more than the average median household, belying the notion that they are working class. (more…)
