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José “Pepe” Mujica did not have much use for Uruguay’s three-story presidential residence, with its chandeliers, elevator, marble staircase and Louis XV furniture. “It’s crap,” he told me last year. “They should make it a high school.” So when he became president of his small South American nation in 2010, Mr. Mujica decided he would…
Fifty years ago, my father, an American war reporter, climbed over the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and scrambled onto a chopper that took off from a roof in the mission. “My last view of Saigon was through the tail door of the helicopter,” he wrote in the Chicago Daily News. “Then the…
Robert W. McChesney, an influential left-leaning media critic who argued that corporate ownership was bad for American journalism and that Silicon Valley billionaires who dominated online information were a threat to democracy, died on March 25, at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 72. The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife,…
When Yoon Suk Yeol was running for president, he had the word “king” written on his palm. South Koreans dismissed — and ridiculed — it as a shamanistic ritual that reflected his desire for top government office. But after his inauguration in May 2022, it didn’t take long for them to see an authoritarian streak…
“FREE MARINE LE PEN!” With this blunt call, a strange one in that the French far-right leader is walking the streets of Paris, President Trump has waded into the politics of an ally, condemning her conviction this week on embezzlement charges and her disqualification from running for public office. The conviction was “another example of…
Last year, Marine Le Pen spoke menacingly of the possible fallout from her trial on embezzlement charges. “Tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people will see themselves deprived of their candidate for the presidency.” After a court disqualified her on Monday from running for public office for five years, those millions of French voters…
Inside the auditorium, the event went on as planned. The hundreds of students who remained listened and learned. They peered into a world beyond shouted slogans and curated stories. They learned about the region’s politics and power dynamics, and the evolving national identities and echoes of past empires that continue to shape the reality of…
When President Joseph R. Biden Jr. convened democracy summits at the White House in 2021 and 2023, he pointedly disinvited President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a man he had once described an “autocrat” who deserved to be driven from office by voters. On Tuesday, President Trump offered a much rosier assessment of the Turkish…
Over the last two decades, countries like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and India gave the world a lesson on how democracy can erode into “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are still meaningful, but leaders manipulate the rules to their own benefit, while systematically violating civil liberties. Now, we are starting to find out…
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, will face trial on charges that he oversaw a vast scheme to cling to power after losing the 2022 elections, including an attempt to overturn the vote and a plot to assassinate the nation’s president-elect, the country’s Supreme Court decided on Wednesday. The ruling marks a significant effort to hold…
