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Netanyahu’s coalition of zealots, the resistance in the streets, and the Israeli Kulturkampf.
On the same reporting trip to Jerusalem, I discovered that the cliché is true: No man is a hero to his director of communications and policy planning. David Bar-Illan, a former concert pianist and editor of the Jerusalem Post, was without illusions about Netanyahu even as he pledged abiding loyalty to him. When I asked Bar-Illan how Netanyahu won the ultra-Orthodox vote despite his rigorously secular life style, Bar-Illan said, “Finessing his being secular was nothing compared to other things, like adultery. One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa—but a married woman! With a shiksa, even the rebbes do it. But a married woman! Now Bibi’ll go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, maybe he’s gone to the Western Wall, or he’ll say the phrase ‘With God’s help.’ But he’s not fooling anyone.”
When Bar-Illan’s remarks were published in The New Yorker and then in the Israeli press, Netanyahu was incensed. He barred his spinmeister from his plane and his next trip to Washington. Bar-Illan, who died in 2003, panicked and not only denied that he’d said those things to me but he also told Israeli television that he had never even met me. (This forced me to go on Israeli TV to display the copy of his book “Eye on the Media,” which he had inscribed, “To David from David, With admiration and best wishes.”)
The point is, Netanyahu has never really fooled anyone. He didn’t fool his fellow-politicians or various American Presidents, who knew him to be a liar and an opportunist. He was not fooling the Mizrahim, who obviously knew that he came from an Ashkenazic background. Nor has he fooled the ultra-Orthodox, who have always known that he followed the rules of fidelity and kashruth with equal attention. Netanyahu’s cynicism, deceptions, and ethical gymnastics are no more shocking to his Israeli supporters than Trump’s similar qualities are to his immense base. He won so long as he could deliver for his constituents.
And now this generation-long drama, the Netanyahu era, has reached its dispiriting resolution. Netanyahu has pursued his aim to cling to power at all costs. Facing criminal charges, he has made common cause with a cabinet of messianic authoritarians and bigots who are righteously determined to hack away at judicial independence, freedom of the press, minority rights, protest and opposition politics, and democracy itself. Next week, the Knesset is poised to get rid of the so-called reasonableness clause, a stricture borrowed from British tradition which allows the Supreme Court to strike down actions of the legislature. Such a move, in a state with no constitution, would undermine what modest balance of powers exists in Israeli political life. Avichai Mandelblit, a former Attorney General, warned recently that, if Netanyahu fails to restrain his coalition, Israel is in the process of turning into a “borderline dictatorial state.”
The government’s ability to act without judicial restraint is only one item on an illiberal menu that also includes efforts to restrict media outlets that are deemed excessively critical and to enshrine as a right the ultra-Orthodox community’s exemption from military conscription. In its contempt for the rule of law, the balance of powers, immigration, and ethnic and sexual minorities, the ruling coalition is in synch with intolerant governments and parties around the world; it is, in fact, a harbinger of Trump 2.0. Netanyahu, who can count, sees that the most religious citizens of his country procreate at a high rate, and he has staked his future with them. As Celeste Marcus writes in the latest issue of the journal Liberties, “Netanyahu, who has for decades projected the image of Israel’s protector, has allied with people who insist the study of Torah provides Israel with as much security as the army does, and therefore shirk mandatory conscription. His cynicism is bottomless.”
For years, left-leaning parties and constituencies in Israel have been dispirited and weak. The settlers of the West Bank have not only increased in their numbers and led the resistance to their territorial dominion but they have also helped shape the political rhetoric and character of the state. The Palestinian issue is rarely spoken of—as if the people of Gaza and the West Bank will somehow do Israel the favor of disappearing—and Arab citizens of Israel are too often regarded, by the right wing, as less than citizens. And because so much of the rest of the world, the United States very much included, is immersed in the very same drama of right-wing populism, only modest attention is paid.
But, as grim as the outlook has been, the defeatism among those who oppose the right-wing coalition government in Israel has come to an end. There is a Kulturkampf in Israel but it is hardly a rout, a settled matter. For the past twenty-eight weeks, infuriated by the coalition government’s “judicial overhaul,” hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched at one dramatic protest after another. It is a sustained act of resistance, an inspiring reassertion of democratic values. These demonstrations have taken place in cities both secular and religious. The protests draw from all occupations and have immobilized city centers and highways. Protesters fearing that the judicial reform will strip women of civil rights sometimes dress in the red robes of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Arnon Bar-David, the head of the Histadrut, the national labor union, has suggested the possibility of a general strike, saying, “If the situation reaches an extreme, we will intervene and employ our strength.” The Israel Medical Association, which represents nearly all of the country’s doctors, voted to “employ all available means” if necessary to head off the judicial reform. Leading figures in the tech industry have threatened to leave the country. Most dramatic, perhaps, hundreds of Air Force reserve pilots signed on to a petition of protest, and there is now a question of whether they will serve if ordered.
Netanyahu knows that, if he dares to forestall the legislation, ministers in his coalition will rebel. And where will that leave someone who values power above all? Anshel Pfeffer, a leading Israeli journalist and the author of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu,” told me that no Prime Minister in the history of Israel has ever been in a weaker situation. “In seventy-five years, there has never been a question of the military’s loyalty or any kind of mass disobedience. Smaller things, but not this,” he said. “We’ve gone from the idea of Bibi being the longest-serving Prime Minister to the weakest P.M. ever! And, for him, it just doesn’t compute. He can’t grasp what’s happening to him. For him, it is like those nightmares that you are driving a car, but when you press the brakes or turn the wheel nothing happens. The car doesn’t respond.” Netanyahu “lives in a bubble and thinks, How can they not be listening to me?,” Pfeffer went on. “He has this crazy, mistaken idea that the tech miracle was his doing. And he thinks, I made these guys rich! Before, we only sold oranges. He thinks, How could they join the protests or move abroad?”
Netanyahu has criticized members of the armed forces who have broken with the government, but some leading reservists have insisted publicly they have the right to stop their voluntary service as a protest against a danger to the state. According to the Times, Brigadier General Ofer Lapidot, a reservist who was among those who stepped down, told Channel 11, “What is worse? The destruction of the country? Or the strengthening of an army that will be serving an illegitimate government—legal but not legitimate—that is bringing us all to a dictatorship and will soon give us illegal orders?”
Some signs at the weekly protests read “President Biden, Help Us Please.” For his part, Biden spent much of this week sending Netanyahu clear signals that the Prime Minister is endangering the stability of his own country and his future relations with the United States. Aluf Benn, the editor of the liberal daily Haaretz, wrote that those signals “can be summed up as a demand to replace the coalition,” to dump fanatics like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir “and replace them with Benny Gantz,” a retired general and alternate Prime Minister from 2020 to 2021. Leading Israeli politicians say that Biden is a longtime friend of Israel, and they worry that younger Democratic politicians don’t share that affection. Biden has made it clear that his Administration wants to see a series of serious policy changes, including a halt to the judicial legislation until there is a broader national consensus on its details; a freeze on construction in the settlements; the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority; and total coördination of military activity regarding Iran.
“It’s impossible to fulfill even a single item on this list with Netanyahu’s present coalition,” Benn wrote. “The only person with the power to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of destruction being led by Netanyahu, before it destroys the country, is Benny Gantz. . . . The time has come for him to offer himself as the national savior, the one who prevents the destruction of the army and the economy moments before a civil war. . . . Israel won’t return to the imaginary ideal portrayed in the army entertainment troupe songs beloved by Gantz, but the bleeding will be stanched.” Such a shift, the replacement of the leading zealots in the coalition government with a retired general and a relative centrist, will hardly represent a revolution in Israel, but even that measure of sanity and reconciliation may be beyond the impoverished political imagination of Benjamin Netanyahu.
ALSO SEE: Israel’s Identity Hangs in the Balance
Ahead of Key Vote on New Law
The legislation reduces the ways that judges can overrule the government. The contentious plan has divided Israelis, who disagree about whether it harms or improves democracy.
The court is now barred from overruling the national government using the legal standard of “reasonableness,” a concept that judges previously used to block ministerial appointments and contest planning decisions, among other government measures.
The enactment of the law is the government’s first victory in a seven-month effort to reduce the court’s power. Previous plans that would have allowed Parliament to overrule the court’s decisions and give the government more sway over who gets to be a Supreme Court justice were suspended by the government in March, after an eruption of street protests, labor strikes and disquiet in the military.
The new law passed despite a similar level of opposition, as well as criticism from the Biden administration. Large parts of the country fear that the legislation undermines the quality of Israel’s democracy and will allow the government — the most ultranationalist and ultraconservative in Israeli history — to build a less pluralist society.
Here is what to know:
- The government and its supporters say that the legislation will in fact improve democracy by giving elected lawmakers greater autonomy over unelected judges, allowing them to more easily carry out the policies that they were elected to enact. The court can still overrule the government using other legal measures.
- This disagreement is part of a much wider and long-running social dispute about the nature and future of Israeli society. The ruling coalition and its base generally have a more religious and conservative vision, and see the court as an obstacle to that goal. The opposition tends to have a more secular and diverse vision, and consider the court as a standard-bearer for their cause.
- The law passed on Monday limits the Israeli Supreme Court’s use of the legal concept of “reasonableness” to countermand decisions by ministers. The bill moved forward last week after a three-month hiatus during which the government and the opposition failed to reach a compromise on Mr. Netanyahu’s broader overhaul.
- Mr. Netanyahu was in the chamber as lawmakers began voting on Monday, a day after he was rushed to the hospital for an emergency procedure to implant a pacemaker.
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A health worker administers a dose of a Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine in Reading, Pa., in 2021. (photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
Vaccine fatigue is already here, although many Americans will be urged to get three different shots this fall.
“We’re going to have three bugs out there, three viruses: Covid, of course, flu and RSV,” Cohen said in an interview. “We need to make sure the American people understand all three and what they can do to protect themselves.”
Spread of all three respiratory viruses is currently low, but the CDC has begun to detect slight increases in positive Covid tests and Covid-related emergency department visits. And the decline in Covid hospitalizations has stalled.
Omicron XBB subvariants remain the most prevalent forms of Covid, though on Wednesday, the World Health Organization identified a new XBB version, the EG.5, as rising in prevalence around the world and in the U.S.
It’s unclear what — if anything — the emergence of EG.5 means. The WHO noted there's no evidence that it causes more severe illness. Cohen said that so far, the virus remains susceptible to Covid shots.
For the first time this fall, the U.S. will have access to vaccines for another expected virus: respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Those shots, along with a new monoclonal antibody injection for babies and a third vaccine up for approval, have the potential to drastically reduce cases of the virus that typically hits infants and older adults hardest, experts say.
An unexpectedly severe surge of RSV infections in late 2022 overwhelmed children’s hospitals with babies and young kids whose immune systems hadn’t been exposed to the virus during lockdown.
On July 17, the Food and Drug Administration approved a monoclonal antibody injection to help prevent RSV for children up to age 2. Unlike a vaccine that prompts the body to make its own antibodies, the injection works by delivering antibodies against RSV directly into the bloodstream.
And as soon as next month, the FDA could approve the first RSV vaccine for pregnant women, who would then transfer those antibodies to their babies.
Two other RSV vaccines, for adults ages 60 and over, were approved earlier this year.
Timing Covid, flu and RSV vaccines
This means that many Americans will be urged to get three different vaccinations this fall: Covid, RSV and the annual flu shot. But that will be a challenge for the health care system, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases expert and professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
“We’re going to have to learn how to deliver those vaccines in a way that’s effective in actually reaching the population at a time when there’s already vaccine fatigue,” he said.
Some may be wary of getting three shots at once, a concern Schaffner echoed. Combining flu and Covid vaccines doesn’t appear to reduce the effectiveness of either shot, but Schaffner said that there is limited data suggesting that adding the RSV shot to the mix lessens the response.
“I think most of us are going to recommend it’s OK to get flu and Covid vaccines together, but wait a bit until you get the RSV” shot, he said.
Last year, flu season began unusually early — in October — and peaked quickly. There is no indication yet what the U.S. will face this year.
“Right now, they’re having a pretty standard flu season in the Southern Hemisphere,” Cohen said. “But it's still early days.”
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A miner takes in the view from a drilling site in Ambler Metal's Arctic deposit area in the Ambler Mining District in Alaska on Sept. 6, 2022. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/WP)
A proposed copper mine near two national parks is turning into a test of values --- how to protect wilderness while supplying minerals
This is the Brooks Range, roughly 50 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Sweeping green and golden ridgelines tower over lush valleys, which give way to wide, glacial blue rivers. The landscape is completely undeveloped. There is no road or other infrastructure in sight. Looking east is Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Looking west is Kobuk Valley National Park.
And looking straight down: the site of a potential open-pit mine.
There’s roughly $7.5 billion worth of copper under this mountain that the mining venture Ambler Metals wants to extract, which could help build the wind turbines and batteries needed to address climate change. But that bounty — and others like it across the United States — has created a dilemma for Washington. President Biden wants more domestic minerals production to support his climate agenda, but his aides are struggling to find domestic mine sites that don’t risk damaging wildlands and sacred natural treasures.
To reach the minerals here would require a 211-mile road through the heart of this Arctic expanse. It would cross 11 major rivers and hundreds of streams, breaking apart unspoiled tundra and the migratory path of tens of thousands of caribou. Twenty-six of those miles would carve through Gates of the Arctic, sending giant haulers and other industrial trucks through one of the country’s most remote national parks and preserves. The proposal has led to eight years of bureaucratic wrangling and political pressure from environmentalists to kill it.
Because it crosses federal land, the Biden administration must decide the road’s fate.
Dirk Nickisch, a bush pilot who has been flying over the Brooks Range for decades, said it’s hard to grasp the region’s beauty without seeing it from on high. “You take off and you fly for hours and see mountains extending on and on, and river valleys untouched,” he said.
He said it would be “devastating” if a truck route were cut through this landscape, and more could follow. “It’s not going to just be this one road,” he said. “It’s going to be all the spur roads that go off to mines.”
For now, this mountaintop is only reachable by helicopter, and it boasts just a small platform the size of an office cubicle. A drill deep in the Earth explores the metals and minerals below. But if the Ambler project becomes operational, much of the mountainside would be shorn and scooped out to reach the minerals underneath to sell on the global market.
Cal Craig, the environmental and permitting manager for the mining company, said he can understand why some might be nervous. He himself decided to take the job after being captivated by the beauty of the landscape, which he first viewed in a photograph. Even so, he added, “the potential of this district is immense.”
“It’s so easy to just think that all this stuff just sort of exists,” said Craig, who works for Ambler Metals, the joint venture of two companies that want to mine the site and others nearby for copper, zinc and lead. “But it comes from somewhere.”
Biden administration officials have concluded that “somewhere” has to include places in the United States — not just mines in friendly foreign countries — and that the urgency is building. Biden has pledged that the country will halve its total greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, requiring a speedy build-out of energy infrastructure. The International Energy Agency says that type of pressure could cause copper demand to rise 25 percent between 2020 and 2030; demand for other metals such as lithium is already on pace to double or triple in that span.
At the same time, Biden also has set a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of the nation’s land and waters by 2030. And industry advocates say such policies keep permits for new mines held up for years.
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, the state’s publicly owned development corporation, filed for federal permits to build the road in 2015. It got them under the Trump administration five years later, only for the Biden administration to suspend that approval in 2022 to seek additional environmental analysis.
Despite promises that it would finish the review by year’s end, the Interior Department in May abruptly told a federal court it would put off a final decision again — perhaps into mid-2024. Ambler Metals has warned that could compound delays through 2024.
That has frustrated Alaska’s three-member congressional delegation, which said that “the continued failure” to develop minerals will be a setback for the country’s energy transition and supply chains.
Administration officials have yet to back the Ambler Road, and they have declined to say what they intend to do. Brenda Mallory, who chairs the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview that the administration supports domestic mining development, backing permits for a cobalt mine in Idaho and a second lithium mine in Nevada, along with billions in government-backed loans, Energy Department grants for battery development and Pentagon funding for materials for the military.
“That doesn’t mean that every project is going to be the right project,” she said. “We think the important point is that we have to make sure that it’s occurring in the right places, that there are some places that are too special to actually conduct mining in. But there are many other places that are not.”
This friction goes back to the earliest days of Biden’s presidency. In addition to his conservation promises, he pledged to give more weight to the rights and health of low-income, minority and tribal communities near mining sites or affected by their pollution. He also appointed Deb Haaland — a Native American politician who often opposed drilling and mining projects — to head the Interior Department, which oversees many of Washington’s biggest decisions on them.
The administration quickly moved to try to permanently kill a contentious gold and copper megaproject, Pebble Mine, proposed for Alaska’s southwest. And it put a 20-year ban on mining in a giant watershed near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a prospect for copper, nickel and other hardrock minerals.
That has not been enough to satisfy many environmental groups and tribes. Native Americans are protesting the opening of construction at Nevada’s Thacker Pass, slated to be one of the largest lithium mines in the world. Some advocates for tribes have also faulted the administration for not doing more to undo a plan, backed with congressional authorization, for Resolution Copper, a giant mine in Arizona on the sacred site known as Oak Flat.
In Alaska, Native groups are divided about the Ambler Road proposal. Some are eager for employment opportunities that could come from the mines — and the potential lower cost of goods and services if a road were constructed. Although the proposed road would be a private industrial road to be used only by mining companies, many say they believe that it could ultimately lead to broader access to this remote area. That, in turn, might help stem the outmigration of Alaska Natives from these villages, supporters say. The subsistence lifestyle can also be costly, and bringing economic development into the communities may help them pay for the snowmobiles, rifles and other modern equipment that have become essential to hunts.
“Things are changing anyways,” said Fred Sun, an Ambler Metals worker and the tribal president of Shungnak, a Native village close to the potential mining operation. “We don’t want to get left behind.”
Under a 1971 law, regional for-profit corporations owned by Native shareholders control millions of acres of land in Alaska. NANA, the regional corporation whose territory includes the Ambler Mining District, has partnered with Ambler Metals on the exploratory drilling here. If the mines are built, the region’s 15,000 Iñupiat shareholders could get a portion of any profits through the corporation’s annual dividends.
A NANA spokesman said the corporation is “neutral” on the Ambler Road. It has a three-year agreement with the state for “preconstruction activities," which includes studies and field activity intended to provide additional environmental, engineering and design information.
Other Alaska Natives fear the potential impact on wildlife essential to their culture, and they have filed a lawsuit to stop the road. They and others say the project will disrupt the migration path for one of the world’s largest caribou herds and pollute waterways crucial to salmon and sheefish, key to the subsistence diet for several local tribes.
There are thick forests of white spruce and aspen here; soggy tundra of moss and lichen; and an uncounted number of lakes, rivers and streams that form a watery labyrinth as seen from the air.
“We’re expecting the worst-case scenario of what you can do to this last great roadless area in America,” said Frank Thompson, the tribal president of Evansville, a Native village near the eastern end of the road’s proposed path. “There’s been people living and walking through this land for generations, thousands of years.”
As proposed, the two-lane and 32-foot-wide gravel road would need nearly 50 bridges over wide waterways and nearly 3,000 culverts for smaller water crossings. It would also need accompanying material sites, maintenance camps, airstrips and guard stations. It is estimated trucks hauling ore and equipment would eventually make an estimated 168 round trips on the road per day.
Fighting the Ambler Road is now one of the top priorities for the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. And its leaders see the mining industry potentially threatening other popular parks, including areas in the Mojave National Preserve, east of Death Valley National Park and around the Grand Canyon.
“It does seem as though mining companies are claiming that every mine they propose is necessary and needed for the clean energy revolution. And that’s simply not true,” said Alex Johnson, the group’s Alaska senior program manager, who noted that copper is not on the official federal list of critical minerals. “There are places that remain too precious, too connected, too wild, too important for tribes and people who live in that landscape to be mined.”
Alaskan projects often bring the most intense scrutiny. The state is home to some of the country’s last intact and undisturbed natural habitats, providing refuge to migratory birds, polar bears and walruses, and full of sensitive lakes and marshes connected by an underground web of freshwater. The administration is still facing intense political blowback from young activists over its March decision to permit a huge oil drilling project, Willow, on the state’s North Slope.
And opposition to new mines extends far beyond Alaska, leaving many wondering where and how the Biden administration can achieve its goal of securing a reliable U.S. supply. U.S. automakers and other major industries are scouring the world for minerals, and they are often finding stiff competition from Chinese rivals, or suppliers that endanger local communities or their workers. Fierce geopolitical friction with China and Russia further raises the pressure to fulfill demand from sources at home.
A draft of the Energy Department’s annual assessment of critical minerals, released in May, concludes that about half a dozen critical minerals, including nickel and cobalt, already face major supply challenges. Twice as many could face major risks in the next dozen years, with lithium, platinum and magnesium joining the list. Success in the United States and other countries in creating clean-energy programs is likely to lead to a global surge of demand, the report says, while the pandemic’s lingering impacts and the conflict in Ukraine has also limited capacity.
And the pressure on demand could grow even larger. To meet the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, the world would need to increase mineral demand as much as fourfold in the next 20 years, according to the estimates from the International Energy Agency.
Congress also has required that, to be eligible for tax breaks, clean technology must use content from the United States or its trade partners, boosting demand for metals from the United States or close allies. Industry lobbyists say they are under constant pressure to show Washington lawmakers and some investors that they are distancing themselves from troubled foreign suppliers, especially China.
And many, especially from the mining industry, have been critical of administration efforts to secure mineral through international trade deals or diplomacy.
“In order to have their cake and eat it too, they’re going overseas,” said Rich Nolan, president and chief executive of the National Mining Association. “We prefer they start here and try to spur a domestic industry — not try to shut it down.”
Mallory and other senior administration officials say that they are pushing Congress to update the nation’s 150-year-old mining law to boost domestic mining, and that government research shows incomplete permit applications, staff shortages and after-the-fact changes in permit requests are the biggest sources of delays.
Delays aren’t a challenge only in the United States. Social unrest is stalling projects in Peru, and debates over royalties and taxes are causing slowdowns in Chile. People in France are preemptively organizing to prevent lithium mining under a nature reserve. Sweden recently found Europe’s largest deposit of so-called rare-earth minerals, but the region’s Sami Indigenous population says it threatens their culture of traditional reindeer herding.
“It’s a global problem,” said Nick Pickens, who oversees global mining research at the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. “We want this stuff, but nobody is prepared to do the hard yards.”
But those who have a stake in preserving wildlands reject that reasoning.
“The argument that we can mine our way to a greener future is crazy to me,” said John Gaedeke, a Brooks Range wilderness guide whose livelihood is tied to the great outdoors and unblemished mountains and streams.
He added: “Every day there isn’t a road out there, I feel more hopeful.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Emily Elconin/WP)
Donald Trump Melts Down Over His Latest Indictment
Matt Young, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "Donald Trump was particularly active Sunday night on Truth Social, raging against the Department of Justice."
Donald Trump was particularly active Sunday night on Truth Social, raging against the Department of Justice and the usual suspects (looking at you, special counsel Jack Smith) over his recent slew of legal battles, notably complaining over his latest indictment while campaigning for president. Trump went as far to label charges brought against him by Attorney General Merrick Garland and Smith as “prosecutorial misconduct” and “election interference.” He wrote: “Do you think that A.G. Garland, and Deranged Jack Smith, understand that we are in the middle of a major political campaign for President of the United States? Have they looked at recent poll numbers? Why didn’t they bring these ridiculous charges years before - Why did they wait to bring them NOW - A virtually unheard of scenario? PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT! ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Earlier, the former president criticized President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, telling fans “DO THEY UNDERSTAND THE DAMAGE BEING DONE TO AMERICA?” Trump wrote. “IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE. WE MUST STOP THESE ‘MONSTERS’ FROM FURTHER DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY!”
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People celebrate poll results Sunday night in Madrid. (photo: Oscar Del Pozo/AFP)
Conservatives had hoped for a comeback in a progressive bastion of Europe with some of the world’s most liberal laws on abortion and transgender rights. But the left led by the Socialists of photogenic Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — who had called early elections in a risky gambit — overperformed, posting better numbers than projected. Late Sunday, a jubilant, defiant Sánchez addressed supporters in Madrid, who chanted anti-fascist slogans.
“Spain has been clear. The bloc of devolution, of retrocession, that wants to take back all we have achieved, of machismo, has failed,” he said.
In a game of margins, the center-right Popular Party, however, slightly underperformed — coming first in the race and posting big gains, but not quite as much as expected. In a result that could rally European progressives at a time when archconservatives are gaining traction across the continent — the anti-LBGTQ+, anti-feminist climate deniers of the far-right Vox Party also did slightly worse than anticipated, winning just over 12 percent of the vote and losing 19 of their 52 seats.
Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal appeared to acknowledge the challenge facing any right-wing alliance. “We are ready to be on the opposition and for a repetition of the election,” he told supporters late Sunday.
In a quirk of parliamentary systems, they were still only a few seats away from being able to enter government in a possible conservative coalition with the PP. Had they performed even slightly better, Spain would be on the cusp of its farthest right government since the death of its longtime dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. The PP late Sunday said it would not give up.
“As the candidate of the most-voted party, I believe it is my duty to open a dialogue to try to govern our country in accordance with the election results, in accordance with the electoral victory,” the PP’s chief, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, declared to supporters at party headquarters in Madrid.
As things stood, however, Sánchez’s socialists were closer to cobbling together the magic number of 176 seats in the 350-seat parliament. The potential left and right blocs, including parties that offer them passive support, stood at 172 and 170, respectively. In the balance were largely seats from independent parties in restless Catalonia, some of which are more likely to side with Sánchez.
The result was so fragmented that a governing coalition by either side would require remarkable political skill. The hung parliament raised the prospect that Spaniards — who have gone to the polls five times in eight years — could simply end up doing it all again in a re-vote.
Either way, the result presented hope for the left — which could find new opportunities in conservative disappointment and disarray in the aftermath of a vote they were confident to win. The center right, meanwhile, found itself in a jam — now saddled with the toxic Vox party as its best and perhaps only potential ally, since few other political parties in Spain appeared willing to join a coalition involving the far right.
“Normally it would not be so hard for the PP to find another few votes,” said Lluís Orriols, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University. “The problem is Vox. It’s a party that is not accepted by the vast majority of the other parties in parliament. Nobody wants to vote with them.”
The far-right losses came despite its success in regional elections, where it has gone into alliance with the PP. For now, the vote set up Spain — a country saddled with living memory of Franco-era firing squads, prison and shock treatment for gays and lesbians and legal limitations on women’s rights — as something of a firewall against the hard-right parties moving into government across Europe.
Extreme parties once seen as anathema to the continent’s center right have come in from the political cold. Staunch conservatives won Italy and entered the government in Finland. Illiberal leaders already rule in Hungary and Poland. And the far right is gathering strength from Germany to Greece.
In Spain, Vox had vowed to try to overturn progressive laws for women LBGTQ+ Spaniards, while moving to select what books children read in school and allowing them to skip lessons their parents don’t agree with.
Ahead of the vote, Sánchez warned liberal Spaniards of what was at stake.
“We reach agreements to make progress on rights and freedoms,” he said. “They reach agreements to cut those rights and freedoms.”
To retain power, Sánchez would need the support or the abstention of the pro-independence Catalan political parties. The left-leaning Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya’s leader Gabriel Ruffian called for a joint front with other separatist parties to pressure Sánchez and his allies into concession.
Spaniards had braved scorching temperatures to go to the polls Sunday in the highly charged election.
The wild cards this year were many. After losses in local elections in May, Sánchez called an early national vote, putting the election in the middle of a brutal summer heat wave and staging it at a time when Spanish minds tilt more toward vacation than voting. There were a record number of mail-in ballots. Because of vacation season, some polling centers were so short-staffed that the very first in-person voters on Sunday risked being deputized as volunteers. On Twitter, a Madrid drag queen sought to rally liberal voters to turn out.
Most opinion polls had suggested a first-place finish for the PP, led by the 61-year-old moderate conservative Feijóo. Hailing from the same Spanish region — Galicia — as both Franco and Spain’s last conservative prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, Feijóo has proudly described himself as “boring” even as he outmaneuvered Sánchez in the debates and led conservatives to the threshold of power. Stoking Spanish nationalism, he has hammered Sánchez’s left-wing alliance for cooperating with regional parties in the Basque country and Catalonia that have agitated for independence.
In the closing days of the race, Feijóo suffered setbacks. Fresh questions have emerged about his 30-year relationship with a convicted drug trafficker, and a journalist called him out for patently false statements. On the campaign trail, his choice of words led to charges of sexism, and back problems forced him to pull out of the last debate.
But he has sought to capitalize on voters who see Sánchez as a grandstanding self-promoter who pushed Spain to adopt laws the right portrays as radically leftist, including a transgender bill that allows people as young as 16 to legally change their gender on national IDs without medical supervision.
“Changing your sex is easier than getting a driver’s license,” Feijóo quipped to the Spanish press last month.
The transgender law has splintered even the left. Feminists in the vein of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who argue that women’s rights are damaged by the assertion that transgender women are real women, have railed against the law for too easily allowing biologically born men to enter female safe spaces. But the law also included other broad protections for the LBGTQ+ community, including a ban on conversion therapy. It remains unclear whether a repeal of the law would be partial or total.
Silvia María Fernández, an unemployed 56-year-old in Granada, in southern Spain, said she voted for the PP despite knowing it may need to govern with Vox.
“I think Spain will do better than it is” with the right, she said. Feijóo “would have no other choice” but to govern with Vox, she added, “and I prefer that to the Socialists.”
Sánchez, a 51-year-old economist, has led the Socialist Party since 2014 and was the first politician in Spain to kick out a sitting prime minister through a no-confidence vote in 2018. He is a survivor even within his own party, but this election amounts to his riskiest gamble. His opponents portray him as a power-obsessed politician ready to do whatever it takes to remain in government, while his supporters at home and abroad see him as a staunch pro-European and influential leader unafraid to push deeply progressive policies.
Some left-wing voters were fretting about a possible government with Vox.
“I have always been a leftist but I think that if the right wins, especially if they govern with the far-right Vox — which has many fascist and Trumpist tendencies — there will be a regression,” said Enrique García, 61, in Granada. “I am gay and married, and I think the rights we’ve won in past years are in danger.”
Feijóo had previously pledged to try to avoid a coalition with Vox, but he has grown more pragmatic on a quest to rule. Long considered fringe, Vox denies human-caused climate change, has banned the LGBTQ+ flag in one Spanish town where it recently came to power, and wants to repeal gender-based violence laws, roll back abortion rights, close the Equality Ministry and eliminate “ideology” from schools.
Javier, a 39-year-old construction worker in Granada who did not give his last name, said he voted for Vox. “I don’t like the way the current government is managing things,” he said. On a day when temperatures were set to rise to 103 degrees, he said he did not consider the party’s stance that climate science is fiction — and that it wants to undo water-restriction rules in drought-plagued Spain.
“I honestly didn’t think about that,” he said. “And it is true that it’s real, because I am suffering it myself every day at work, with temperature changes that aren’t normal.”
Vox and the PP are co-ruling in several Spanish jurisdictions, including the important region of Valencia. But its entry into national government would be profoundly symbolic for Spain as well as Europe, where other right-led countries such as Italy and Poland have sought more aggressive stances against migrants and asylum seekers, and spoken of the need to balance efforts to fight climate change with economic realities.
At home, both Vox and the PP have sought a repeal of Spain’s “Historical Memory Law,” which unequivocally denounced the Franco regime and deployed state funds to help identify legions of still-unidentified victims buried in mass graves. In some local communities, Vox has stood accused of censorship, including defunding a gender-bending play by Virginia Woolf and canceling library subscriptions to Catalan-language magazines.
Some feared its rise to national government could influence cultural expression in Spain.
L’ETNO, the Valencian Museum of Ethnology, for instance, is showing a stirring exhibition on the Franco years that simulates a mass grave and showcases the outfits of firing-squad victims.
“We need independence,” said Joan Seguí, the museum’s director. “If Vox or any other political party puts problems in the normal development of cultural activities, in any country, you have to start to be worried.”
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An official in South Korea measures radiation levels of a fish imported from Japan. A fish has been caught near the Fukushima nuclear plant that far exceeds legal levels of radioactive cesium-137. (photo: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)
Black rockfish caught in May close to disaster-hit nuclear power station is one of dozens caught in the past year above the legal safety limit
The black rockfish caught on 18 May was found by plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) to have 18,000 becquerels per kilogram of cesium-137, compared with the legal maximum level of 100 becquerels per kg.
Japan’s plan to release 1.3m tonnes of treated water from the Fukushima plant has sparked concern in the region, despite approval from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Hong Kong has threatened to ban food imports from 10 Japanese prefectures if the water release goes ahead as planned.
China began blanket radioactivity testing of Japanese seafood imports this week, leading some wholesalers to cease handling such produce from Japan.
Asked about concerns around the water discharge, the Tepco official reiterated that the company was confident “the impact on the public and environment will be minuscule”.
Rainwater from the areas around reactors one, two and three, which melted down during the March 2011 disaster, flows into the inner breakwater where the rockfish was caught in May. Cesium concentration in the sediment from the seabed in the inner breakwater measures more than 100,000 becquerels per kg, according to Tepco.
“Since contaminated water flowed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station port immediately after the accident, Tepco has periodically removed fish from inside the port since 2012 using fishnets that have been installed to prevent the fish from escaping the port,” a Tepco official told the Guardian.
A total of 44 fish with cesium levels above 100 becquerels per kg have been found in the Fukushima plant port between May 2022 and May 2023, Tepco confirmed, with 90% of those caught in or near the inner breakwater. Other specimens identified as having particularly high radioactivity were an eel with 1,700 becquerels per kg, caught in June 2022, and rock trout, with 1,200 becquerels in April 2023.
Regular monitoring of fish from the inner breakwater had been suspended after nets were installed in January 2016 to keep potentially contaminated fish inside the area.
“However, when a black rockfish with radioactive concentrations that exceed regulatory standards was caught off the coast of Soma [about 50km north of the plant] in January 2022, we began sampling again within this area in conjunction with the installation of more nets to prevent fish from leaving the port,” added the Tepco official.
Shipments of black rockfish caught off Fukushima prefecture were suspended in February 2022 after the radiation was detected and have yet to resume. The high radioactivity levels found in the tested specimen led authorities to believe it had escaped from the nuclear plant’s port. All species of seafood from the areas around the plant are regularly monitored for radioactivity.
Next month Tepco is scheduled to begin the release of more than 1.3m tonnes of treated water from the Fukushima plant, a process that is due to take decades to complete. The operation has been approved by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, but been criticised by China and opposition parties in South Korea, and caused unease among some Pacific islands.
Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, hit back at China’s decision to test Japanese seafood while on a recent tour of the Middle East. Speaking in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, Kishida said his government will “press for discussion based on scientific evidence”, regarding the release of the water from Fukushima.
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