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That Malta has a deeply-rooted nexus between organised crime, prominent politicians, police officers and big business has now been made amply clear by last Decembers horrific revelations, which led to the disgraceful exit of Joseph Muscat, who has now resigned from parliament without shedding any light on his relationship with his former chief of staff, Keith Schembri. Then COVID-19 came and the anti-corruption drive took a back seat as everyday insecurities and fears took centre-stage.

Change without revolution

Under Robert Abela the country has moved forward on a number of aspects, with all the protagonists of Panamagate and its aftermath having been removed or forced to resign. This includes former police commissioner Lawrence Cutajar, former Attorney General Peter Grech, deputy police commissioner Silvio Valletta, minister and former Labour deputy leader Chris Cardona, former minister Konrad Mizzi who was fired from his own parliamentary group and finally Muscat, who has now resigned from parliament.

Police also arrested Keith Schembri and Brian Tonna, and Nexia BTs audit licence has been suspended. Yet while this list of departures looks impressive, the absence of any political reckoning in Labour on what led Malta to an institutional fracas, which ultimately created the climate for the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, is all the more striking.

So while Abela seems to be delivering in terms of removing impunity, something which cannot be underestimated in the Maltese political context where resignations are rare, he evades the political reckoning which his party and country deserve. Abela has to be commended for instituting reforms on key appointments, but fails in delivering political closure in three important aspects: cutting the umbilical cord between big business and politics through radical transparency reforms and state financing for political parties; investigating the nefarious deals undertaken by Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri; and finally convening his party to reflect on what went wrong in the Muscat era.

Culture wars: hunting and migration

While Malta is gripped by COVID-19 insecurities and a daily roll-call of deaths of its elderly citizens, sacrificed on the altar of economic recovery, what we have witnessed so far has been culture wars unleashed from above.

Abela seems keen on appeasing the hunting lobby by literally turning poachers into gamekeepers at Miieb, in that way provoking a negative reaction from both environmentalists and a segment of PN voters appalled by their own partys silence on the issue. Pushing the hunting issue to the fore helps Labour not just to reinforce the countryside alliance it had craftily built during the Spring hunting referendum of 2015, but also to sow confusion inside the PN which suffered its worst decline in pro hunting localities like Zebbug, Siggiewi, Safi and Gozo.

The same strategy is also present in the perverse logic of Abelas inane challenge to Opposition leader Bernard Grech where he demanded he agree with him that Malta is full up with immigrants, in what amounts to agreement with a verbal commitment, and which can only be enforced through an abnegation of international law clearly, a statement that would only serve to fuel toxic, xenophobic sentiment in the country by emboldening bigots. It also offers a ridiculous choice between absolutist positions instead of focusing on everyday community policing, cultural mediation and integration, and investing in deprived communities.

In this context the government could well be manufacturing electoral consent by deploying popular, but misinformed common sense to silence and delegitimatise not just the parliamentary opposition, but also activists who are actually fighting popular and pro working-class struggles but are regularly demonised for advocating social justice for migrants.

The abortion bogeyman

To further murk the waters, Abelas disgraced predecessor Joseph Muscat came close to declare his rational and justified pro-choice stance in an interview on state television, a stance which puts him at odds with Abela and which can only have a polarising effect on civil society. In this context while Labour can afford to remain officially against abortion, it stands to gain from pushing the debate on this issue to the fore to keep liberals away from an opposition where ultra-conservatives are irked by the very idea of a debate on the topic.

In reality even if it remains against, Labour will always be perceived as more liberal than the PN on this particular issue. In this way Labour, which uses Trumpian nonsense on migration to hold on to its redneck vote, can still offer hope to liberals.

But while the country cannot be expected to stop discussing any issue, and abortion has indeed been left under the carpet for ages, Muscats intervention in the nascent debate risks contaminating it with a presence which also makes pro-choice liberals uncomfortable.

Naturally, Muscat provokes the more conservative elements to come out of the woodwork to vilify him, and here he can even find a way to reinvent his damaged political persona, just as Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando had done after the Mistra scandal. But is he throwing a grenade at his own party leader or handing him an effective weapon to disorient the opposition?

A battle-cry for the next election

Abela cant afford to fight an election where the main item on the agenda remains corruption and the scandals of the Muscat era. Neither can the opposition hope for a repeat of the 2017 election. Bernard Grech himself seems to have learnt the lesson by pouncing on the governments handling of elderly care during the pandemic.

Neither can anyone expect voters to dismiss bread and butter issues even if corruption and subservience to big business impinge on long-term sustainability, quality of life and competence in handling the pandemic.

But with COVID-19 crippling the economy and killing the elderly, Abela should not just fall back on Labours economic track record except in emphasising that the rich coffers gave the government breathing space to keep spending up during the pandemic.

When having to deal with this kind of headache, culture wars on migration and hunting have the advantage having no bearing on dominant business elites, unlike more radical demands for stricter planning rules, rent controls and the introduction of a living wage, which Labour seems less keen on pushing to the fore. Without a left-wing alternative and with the PN keen on reassuring business elites and potential donors, Labour can afford to pay homage to these issues without really addressing them.

A real socialist party would fight the next election on a radical platform of transparency, sustainability and social justice. But Abela would prefer presiding over a hotchpotch of issues which keeps unlikely bedfellows the xenophobes, groupies and turncoats, social liberals, partisans, developers and hunters united in an electoral bloc that holds the conservative Nationalists at bay, but riven with massive contradictions and possibly even more scandals for the future as the murky wine gets repackaged into new bottles.

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Culture wars: How hunting, migration and abortion weigh on the next election - MaltaToday

Oct 24th 2020

Live Not By Lies. By Rod Dreher. Sentinel; 256 pages; $27.

WORLDLY SUCCESS has not made Rod Dreher fonder of the world as he finds it. In The Benedict Option, published three years ago, the veteran commentator on religious affairs lamented that conservatives like him had been utterly vanquished in Americas culture wars. The moral gap between liberals and traditionalists had become unbridgeable, he argued; the only hope for the godly lay in abandoning the fight for power and withdrawing from the social mainstream into self-contained families and communities.

The Benedict Option was a bestseller. So warm and widespread was the acclaim that its Manichean pessimism seemed to have been disproved. But Mr Dreher has not mellowed. In his new book he compares the situation of observant Christians in America to dissidents, especially religious ones, in the Soviet Union. The title, Live Not By Lies, invokes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who told his compatriots that even if they could not oppose Soviet rule, they should avoid colluding with it.

Plenty of believers, in America and elsewhere, share Mr Drehers sense of alienation. But his work resonates for another reason. Many others who disavow the rest of his worldview have confronted the basic choice that he lays out: participation or flight. That fraught dilemma seems especially acute in an age of sharply polarised politics, but it is ancient.

Visiting Russia, Mr Dreher learns how honest Soviet citizens tried to avoid having much to do with the system. Geology was a popular discipline among scientists, as it let researchers spend a good portion of their lives in far-flung and unsullied places. (Humbler jobs as furnace-stokers or nightwatchmen were another refuge for free spirits.) Mr Dreher also speaks to people who lived through communism and know modern America. These battle-hardened folk say they find something horribly familiar about the emergence of intolerant thought police who can ruin careers, in academia or the professions, as punishment for dissent from the new orthodoxies on gender, race or sexuality.

Whatever you make of that analogy, there are some fundamental parallels between the two places. Like Russia, America is vast, meaning retreat has always seemed physically possible, even enticing, whether in the mountains of Idaho or the Arizona desert. Motives for withdrawal have included ideological dissent, Utopian experiments, eschatological hopes, the avoidance of social or technological change or the acceleration of such change. America has its Amish communities; the taiga and steppe of tsarist Russia accommodated schismatic groups such as the Old Believers, who were theologically conservative but economically progressive.

Today the kind of flight proposed by Mr Dreher need not be physical. You can live on a remote island and engage furiously in political battles (Mr Dreher wages his own from Baton Rouge, Louisiana). Conversely, a city-centre flat can be a place of isolation, embraced for intellectual reasons as well as pandemic-related ones. And in many modern democracies lots of liberal-minded people, too, have been tempted to desert the political and social mainstream, with or without a change of place. That has been most starkly true in cantankerous America and Brexit-era Britain.

Anthony Barnett, an English writer on democracy, observes a mood of retreat among older, left-leaning people in England and America: some over 50 are, he says, withdrawing from active politics into un-ideological passions such as gardening. The impulse, he thinks, derives less from fatalism than from an awareness that the job of fixing a broken system properly belongs to a younger, untarnished generation. The older cohort know they were part of the problem.

Retreat and reflection are a healthy response for liberal-minded activists chastened by populism, reckons Hugo Dixon, a co-leader of the failed campaign for a second popular vote on Brexit. They must ponder why the old managerial style of politics was rejected in favour of abstract values like meaning and community. Nor are they the only ones to feel desolate or, for the time being, politically homeless. Linda Bilmes, a professor of public policy at Harvard who served in Bill Clintons administration, points to the cadre of moderate Republicans who have been driven to abandon the fray. Whatever its outcome, the impending presidential election may push some Americans into a sort of internal exile.

Conservatives longing for a safe space to marry and bring up children as they see fit; liberals in search of a quiet spot to lick their wounds: another category of people may harbour a different worryabout the impact on social cohesion when the disillusioned withdraw. One risk is that their flight from the arena will leave it free for opportunists and cynics, and that politics enters a degenerate spiral. Alongside that concern is a long-standing question of personal morality. If you are deeply convinced that the present order is wrong, do you have the right to opt out rather than remaining engaged and working for change?

Among the philosophical currents that shaped the West, a powerful one insists not merely on the right to engage in public debates, but on the duty. The great Anglo-Irish theorist Edmund Burke reputedly warned that evil would prevail if good people stood aside. You need not be a totalitarian to find merit in Karl Marxs adage that philosophers must change the world as well as understand it.

More recently some of the Frankfurt School of German thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno, took refuge from Nazism in the United States; but their critique of modern society and populist culture, for all its cerebral opacity, was meant for active use, not just idle observation. Their ideas probably helped shape post-war German culture and immunise it against fresh totalitarian temptation.

In some circumstances, the calculus changes. Former dissidents of the kind Mr Dreher meets might insist that the Soviet regime offered no leeway for improvement. Preserving their own integrity was as much as they could doand that in itself could amount to a profound moral statement, incurring harsh retribution. Rancorous as they can be, though, have America and other democracies really reached a similar point now? After all, for those who abhor national politics, there is a glorious array of alternative forms of engagementfrom voluntary groups and local civic initiatives to conservation movements, not to mention the free exercise of speech online and elsewhere.

As it happens, the worlds first democracy, in ancient Athens, also fretted over degrees of participation and the price of withdrawal. Many Athenians resented the apparent indifference to politics of the citys wisest person, Socrates; some alleged, not absurdly, that his seeming apathy had opened the way for vicious interludes of authoritarianism.

On trial for his life, Socrates insisted he was anything but indifferent to the citys welfare. He simply chose to stand a few paces back, challenging his fellow-citizens by asking basic, awkward questions and hence prodding them, like a gadfly, to act more wisely. Socrates was not a quietist, says Paul Cartledge, a British expert on ancient democracy. The trouble was that some of his compatriots saw politics, like religion, as something to be done in public if it was done at all.

Todays representative democracy finds it easier to accommodate a division of labour between thinkers and doers, actors and observers, participants and abstainers. Many citizens eschew even the minimal commitment of voting. But those who abstain will always face hard questions about whether leaving the stage was the only way to enact their principles.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Worlds of their own"

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Giving up on politics is often tempting. It is also risky - The Economist

Caroline Brehman / AP

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee Executive Business meeting, including the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020, on Capitol Hill inWashington.

Friday, Oct. 23, 2020 | 2 a.m.

The Republican Partys war on minority voters is more than a last-resort strategy to keep winning elections.

Its actually an assault on democracy itself.

Think about it: Why would the GOP not want people to vote? Yes, the surface-level answer is that Republicans need to freeze out voters of color so the party can continue to win elections by artificially pumping up the power of the white supporters who sustain it, but theres more to it than that. In breaking down the situation, it becomes clear that the GOPs voter suppression strategy speaks to vastly more than simply a political calculation of a minority party.

Going back decades, the GOPs overall campaign strategies have pitted Americans against each other by dividing the population into us versus them us being white voters, them being voters of color. This is a fundamentally biased position that excludes whole swaths of the population. Its not clear exactly when the GOP crossed this line it wasnt always this way. But traces of it can be found in the Southern Strategy that was developed in the Nixon years, and it appears to have metastasized during the Reagan administration remember his welfare queens attacks on Black women to appeal to a white base? and the beginnings of the culture wars of the 1990s.

Today, the Republican Party must suppress votes because its a minority and is one by choice. Instead of broadening its appeal to ethnic communities, it has doubled down on its whites-only strategy. Consider that upwards of 85% of the votes for President Donald Trump in 2016 and congressional Republicans in 2018 came from whites, even as the American population grew more ethnically diverse. Continuing to win elections on that strategy is unsustainable, and the GOP knows it. Therefore, their satisfaction with minority status means they must suppress votes.

The GOP understands that us is a minority group led by an even smaller minority certain big-money interests, the people benefiting from the enormous wealth transfer of recent decades due to Republican economic policies that tilt heavily toward the wealthiest Americans. More wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than at any time in American history, and the GOP is entirely about representing the interest of that 5% or 6% of the population. The rest can be damned. The Republicans simply manipulate the rest of the have-nots in their narrow minority coalition by spreading irrational fears.

The GOPs absolute refusal to try to create a bigger tent by listening to the needs of a larger population and therefore court them means one thing: It doesnt want to represent anyone other than its narrow leadership. This renders the contemporary GOP as fundamentally anti-democracy, because the inherent design of a democracy compels parties to vie to expand their base and represent more, rather than fewer, people. And expanding the base means including more people, solving problems for as many people as possible, and representing the interests of an ever-widening group of constituents. Republicans want nothing to do with that they know who they represent, and its a vanishingly small percentage of society. Todays GOP is deaf to the voices and needs of a diverse America and listens only to the tiny percentage at the top.

The corollary of this is that the modern GOP wants to silence everyone else. Indeed Republicans want to limit the fundamental rights of non-supporters. Consider last weeks explicit remarks of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that young Black people can go wherever they want in South Carolina as long as they are conservative. The message to nonconservative South Carolinians? You cant even travel freely in the state, much less vote without GOP interference. Us will be free in the GOP view, them will face ever-narrowing rights. And of course, Graham lied when he used the term conservative the modern GOP has no resemblance to a conservative party. Instead what he meant was you can travel wherever you like if youre a Republican.

President Donald Trump amplifies the moral rot of the modern GOP but this anti-democracy effort has been the long-term project of Republicans for several decades, with or without Trump. Whatever vestiges of ideology are gone from todays GOP. It didnt even offer a policy vision for the next four years at its 2020 convention.

True conservative ideology most certainly has a place in the dialogue of the nation but real conservatives ethical and pro-democracy now find themselves stateless because todays GOP has abandoned conservatism.

Clearly, the partys goal is to maintain power for the top few percentages of Americans at the cost of everyone else. It means to silence and suppress the rights of non-Republicans.

There is no cure for that and no signs of reform ideological conservatives must form a new party to represent their political philosophy. For everyone else, the message of this election cycle where Republicans across the country have gone to war with voting is this: This isnt simply strategy, its a worldview and the GOP has declared war on democracy itself.

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If conservatism is to live on in this nation, its adherents must flee the GOP - Las Vegas Sun

Disparate groups of protesters in Senekal on Friday.

PHOTO: Pieter du Toit/News24

Race and cultural issues are being used by some political parties as a growth strategy and this could have an impact on democracy in the long-term, writes Mmusi Maimane.

Who benefits from racial divisions in South Africa? Who benefits from culture wars and increased public conflict? Surely it is not the average citizen? These divisions do not make the workplace more productive, they do not improve the quality of life and they do not create the necessary conditions for quality debate.

South African politics is quickly following the path that American politics has taken - a politics of racial and cultural division have witnessed the American spiral to mayhem. One wonders if this is something that we should readily embrace. It has clearly not improved the quality of discourse or law-making in the USA, if anything the race and culture wars have been a noisy distraction from the hard work of thinking through the modern challenges of democracy and solving them with maturity and due concern for the most vulnerable communities in society.

In our country, we must stand firm and say that race matters.

We cannot ignore that the apartheid system organised around race and allocated social and economic rewards on the basis of race.

We cannot skip ahead to a non-racial utopia without doing the hard work required to undo the injustices of apartheid; we have done some of that work, but the job is incomplete.

Our present goal should be to create a society that is racially cohesive, where there is empathy for injustices of the past, tolerance for difference and a deliberate pursuit of redress for those left behind.

READ |Opinion: As a nation how do we move from hopelessness to hopefulness?

We must affirm that people can be seen for the colour of their skin and that's okay as long as seeing their colour does not lead to discrimination against them because of their colour.

We are not weak because of our racial diversity, actually together we make a beautiful diverse society. We must avoid the current trend towards racial toxicity. We must avoid the acceleration of political race entrepreneurship.

Locally, the beneficiaries of race conflict are the populist political movements and the liberation movements who want to keep up a narrative of an incomplete liberation struggle, borne out of a liberation movement and their offshoots.

Dominant party states

A liberation movement must affirm liberation credentials permanently against the backdrop of failures in other areas. So they benefit from any events that they can use to shape a narrative, reminding citizens that "we liberated from you the oppressive race, and whilst we may have failed on the economy and education, we are still liberators".

If we can all agree that dominant party states are part of the problem in Africa, we must examine what they use to retain popular support. Robert Mugabe was especially good at this, he positioned himself to Africa as the one true defender of Africa against the white colonial settler, his favourite target was Tony Blair.

In the USA, the beneficiaries of the race divisions are the extremist politicians and the extremist movements. They are able to gain traction and funding from the fanning of racial divisions. Ultimately, it is not in their interests to find pathways to unity, they are rewarded by continuation and escalation of conflict.

Some opposition parties are also using the race and cultural issues as a growth strategy, but this is something we must not readily welcome. It poses a long-term threat to the stability of our democracy.

READ |Elmien du Plessis: Senekal murder: Whichever lens you are using, we are affected by the same issue

In SA, the challenge to create unity is profound. We have to work towards creating real economic equity, which is to say, creating real pathways for those who have been economically marginalised to access social mobility and dignity.

This work remains largely undone, and it requires a different atmosphere to the one currently being created by those who benefit from the politics of division and confrontation, the politics of conflict rather than a politics of cohesion.

The outcome of conflict politics based on race and culture wars is that, ironically, it preserves the historical spatial and economic legacy that keep our divisions in place.

Our political discourse is unhealthy for democracy and is unsustainable.We are fighting each other, rather than fighting the real and common enemy.

In simply terms, our enemies are those who abuse power and poverty.

Let us build afresh and break down political parties who divide us on race.

Let us build a new movement.

- Mmusi Maimane is Chief Activist of the One South Africa Movement

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Mmusi Maimane | We must reject race and culture wars - News24

Over the four feverish years since the Brexit vote and Donald Trumps election, we have got used to thinking of populism as a movement whose time has come. Its loudmouth leaders, constant rule-breaking and seductive promises of national renewal have dominated democratic life in much of the world.

Many people who find populism appalling have also been fascinated, sometimes mesmerised. After the relatively predictable and cautious politics of the 90s and 00s, populism has provided electoral shocks, colourful ideologues, risk-taking governments and also a potent sense of novelty.

Surges of populism have happened before, but often so long ago in 1930s America, in 1950s France that until recently the phenomenon had been largely forgotten. So the 21st-century version has been able to present itself as fresh and radical. And many voters and journalists, jaded by decades of stodgier politics, have been taken in. Populism has been the indulged young rebel of the political world.

But that phase in its life cycle may be coming to an end. After four years of President Trump, and four years of trying to get Brexit done, populism is entering a trickier political stage: middle age.

All political movements age if they make it into power, scarred by inevitable failures and worn down by increased public exposure. But populism ages faster than most. Its huge pledges to voters tend to invite disillusionment: at his inauguration, Trump said he would get America winning like never before.

And its governing style is manic and exhausting. After only 15 months in Downing Street, Dominic Cummings already seems to be trying to transform most of the British state, and to be at war with large parts of it.

Having claimed to represent the people against the elite, populism also loses some of its credibility and vitality when populist premiers create their own versions of the establishment. The always-centralising, often complacent governments led by Trump and Boris Johnson look ever less like insurgencies and more like circles of cronies. Theyve made populism feel less novel and iconoclastic by pursuing traditional rightwing policies, such as outsourcing state functions to corporations and cutting taxes for the rich.

Populisms ageing in office has been accelerated by the pandemic, too. Usually a broad-brush politics that plays on voters yearnings for an idealised past or a dramatically better future, populism finds dealing in practical detail with present-day problems much more difficult. The Covid-19 tolls in countries with populist leaders have made that horribly clear.

Over the next few weeks, the British and US varieties of populism are going to be judged in ways they havent been before. First in the US elections, on 3 November, and then after Brexit finally happens on 1 January, the consequences and future of transatlantic populism will become a lot clearer.

Trump likes to say how much he loves electioneering. For once, he may be telling the truth: hes a showman, and elections are a break from governing. But they are also especially perilous for populist leaders.

Losing, as Trump seems increasingly likely to, doesnt just mean leaving office: it also shows that your claim to represent the people is a fiction. And thats the opposite of what populist leaders want elections to do.

They may win power through them, just as other politicians do, but once in office they tend to see elections less as open, democratic competitions and more as opportunities for the people to reaffirm their support. A populist government regards itself not as a temporary [electoral] winner, wrote the analyst of populism Nadia Urbinati in 2018, but as if it were the right winner. So a failure to get re-elected is hard, and sometimes impossible, for populists to accept.

Trumps threats not to respect Novembers result should be seen in this light: as a sign of American populisms brittleness its lack of readiness for electoral setbacks as well as its stubbornness and arrogance.

Populists are also vulnerable if their grand promises end up as unglamorous policies. From 1 January, Brexit will start being less about coming up with clever nationalistic catchphrases, and more about laying on enough temporary toilets for thousands of lorry drivers queueing for customs checks in Kent. I dont think these are the colossal new investments in infrastructure that Johnson envisaged in his 2019 election victory speech.

If Brexit is a disaster, and Trump loses, many may conclude that populism is in terminal decline. That may be premature. The Conservative party and press have already identified enough Brexit saboteurs from the EU to remainer civil servants to keep British populism riled up and politically mobilised. After its defeat in the first referendum on European membership in 1975, British euroscepticism survived many changes of government and shifts in society until it won the second referendum four decades later. The culture wars constantly launched by the Johnson government this week, over the concept of white privilege may sustain British populism for a long time.

American populism is likely to survive any Trump defeat too, however difficult that loss may be to swallow. When populists find themselves in electoral opposition, wrote the political scientist Paulina Ochoa Espejo in 2017, they see that as a flagrant injustice that requires taking back the country. The two most recent Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, had to govern against a distracting backdrop of claims from the right that their tenures were illegitimate, despite the fact they both won two presidential elections. Joe Biden may suffer the same fate.

In Britain, anyone excitedly looking forward to Trumps defeat, and imagining it will be a foretelling of Johnsons, should remember that populists do sometimes get re-elected. The current populist leaders of Poland, Hungary, Turkey and India all managed it. Populism may be a crude and often ineffective philosophy for government, but the record in office of smoother operators such as Emmanuel Macron and David Cameron has not been much better.

And unlike centrism and mainstream conservatism, populism at least has an urgency and intensity that fits the times. Populists realise that the more stable world of the two decades before the financial crisis is not coming back.

Yet even if the movement stays strong in Britain and the US, its best days may be over. Many voters and journalists are now familiar with its tricks and limitations, such as supposedly tough-talking leaders who can only cope with friendly audiences. Meanwhile, orthodox politicians such as Biden and Keir Starmer seem less flustered by populism than their predecessors were. They have not been drawn into its culture wars. By sounding measured instead, theyve made the movement seem shrill.

If British and American populism does lose its hold on power, it may discover an uncomfortable truth about being a supposedly radical movement in opposition. Its much harder if youve just been in office: your rebel aura has gone. Populism has never had that much else.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT (3pm EST). Book tickets here

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This is a moment of truth for rightwing populists but don't celebrate yet - The Guardian