Tag: prime minister
Indian Dissidents Want America to Stop Praising Modi
No one knows how the fire started. But in 2002, a train was set ablaze in a Muslim neighborhood in Gujarat. Those killed were Hindu nationalists, and the state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, quickly deemed the fire a “preplanned” terrorist attack.
Modi’s government had the charred bodies brought to the state’s largest city, where they were displayed in public. His party called for a strike. The strike devolved into months of violence, and the Gujarati police did little to
Can Giorgia Meloni Govern Italy?
Italy’s first far-right leader since World War II—and the first woman ever to lead the country—is small, blond, fierce, street-smart, working-class, and Gen X. Raised by a single mother in Rome after her father took off for a new life in the Canary Islands when she was a toddler, Giorgia Meloni came of age in far-right youth movements. Now 46, she has been a professional politician since she was a teenager.
Her victory in September’s national elections unsettled the
Britain’s Guilty Men and Women
In July 1940, three journalists published a short, anonymous polemical attack on the failures of British statecraft that forever shaped Britain’s understanding of the Second World War. Guilty Men, by the pseudonymous Cato, accused 15 of Britain’s senior political figures during the interwar years of leading a once prosperous and secure empire “to the edge of national annihilation.” The war may have broken out in 1939, Cato charged, but the genesis of Britain’s misfortunes could be dated
The Return of Fascism in Italy
“The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing,” Hillary Clinton said to an Italian journalist at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month. She was speaking of Giorgia Meloni, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, who could make history if the Brothers of Italy party does as well as expected in Sunday’s elections.
That would be one sort of break
The Second Elizabethan Age Has Ended
The first Elizabethan era ended on March 24, 1603, when 69-year-old Queen Elizabeth I died in her sleep at Richmond Palace. “This morning, about three o’clock, her Majesty departed from this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree,” the lawyer John Manningham wrote in his diary. Elizabeth I’s 45-year reign was a “golden age,” a course of events that no one would have predicted at her birth. She had survived her mother’s execution,
Behind the U.S. Right’s Fascination With Viktor Orbán
H
ungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has become a hero for the American right. This past January, Tucker Carlson relocated his Fox News show for the second time to Budapest. In May, Orbán himself opened a special event in Budapest organized by the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference; the Hungarian leader was a guest again at the group’s annual meeting this month in Texas, where his declaration that “the globalists can all go to hell” was greeted with hosannas.
In
Why Britain Changed Its China Stance
As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.
From 2020 onward, however,
What Brexit Promised, and Boris Johnson Failed to Deliver
Britain today is a poor and divided country. Parts of London and the southeast of England might be among the wealthiest places on the planet, but swaths of northern England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are among Western Europe’s poorest. Barely a decade ago, the average Brit was as wealthy as the average German. Now they are about 15 percent poorer—and 30 percent worse off than the typical American.
The great project of Boris Johnson’s government is to “unite
Boris Johnson Has Only Delayed the Inevitable
Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Britain, meanwhile, lives to endure another day in his shadow, a bit part in the soap opera of his life, watching on as the drama is set on an endless doom loop from comic farce to tragedy.
After months of turmoil over Johnson’s behavior in office, in which he became the first sitting British prime minister ever to be fined for breaking the law, enough of his fellow Conservative members of Parliament finally
Fintan O’Toole’s Passionate, Angry, Slyly Humorous History of Ireland
Early in the pages of We Don’t Know Ourselves, Fintan O’Toole’s masterful “personal history” of modern Ireland, I came upon a moment in O’Toole’s life that intersected unexpectedly with my own. The date was Tuesday, March 8, 1966. In a Dublin bedroom in the chill dark of early morning—1:31 a.m. exactly—O’Toole’s mother, given to premonitions, awoke and exclaimed, “God, what was that?” Then came the sound of a distant explosion.
I, too, heard the explosion. My American family