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In one indication of a possible window for negotiations, the Ukrainian Finance Ministry formally canceled plans to issue the latest tranche of below-market-rate Eurobonds to the Russian government, the form of financial aid that the Kremlin had been providing.

The reported political agreement that could end the violence came after the bloodiest day in the three-month-old confrontation. On Thursday, security forces fired on masses of antigovernment demonstrators in the capital, Kiev, in a drastic escalation that left dozens dead and Ukraine reeling from the most lethal day of violence since Soviet times.

Many observers noted that Mr. Yanukovych’s office had announced an agreement but there was no immediate corroboration from the opposition.

The demonstrators captured more than 60 police officers, who were marched, dazed and bloodied, toward the center of the square through a crowd of men who heckled and shoved them.

There were signs late Thursday that Mr. Yanukovych might be moving closer to compromise, apparently expressing willingness to hold presidential and parliamentary elections this year, as the opposition has demanded. But given the hostility and mistrust on both sides, aggravated by the deadly mayhem that has engulfed central Kiev, the prospects of any agreement seemed remote — particularly now that many of the president’s adversaries say they will settle for nothing less than his resignation.

Opposition leaders convened a session of Parliament late Thursday, and together with defectors from the pro-government party they passed a resolution obliging Interior Ministry troops to return to their barracks and the police to their usual posts, and prohibiting the use of firearms against protesters. It also asserted that only lawmakers, rather than the president, could declare a state of emergency. Perhaps more than these assertions, the vote was significant for signaling that Mr. Yanukovych had lost control of a majority in Parliament.

“A state of emergency means the beginning of war,” she said. “We cannot let that happen.”

By noon, 11 corpses had been laid out in a makeshift outdoor morgue under a Coca-Cola umbrella at the end of Independence Square. Other bodies were taken elsewhere.

The shootings followed a quickly shattered truce, with enraged protesters parading dozens of captured police officers through Kiev’s central square. Despite a frenzy of East-West diplomacy and negotiations, there was little sign that tensions were easing.

With Mr. Yanukovych’s allies in Parliament still resisting changes to the Constitution demanded by the opposition that would reduce the powers of the president, there were intense talks underway in Kiev in hopes of ending the violence.

In its emergency session on Sunday, the Parliament granted expanded powers to its new speaker, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, who now has the authority to carry out the duties of the president of Ukraine as well.

Former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who was jailed by Mr. Yanukovych after losing the 2010 presidential election and was freed on Saturday, issued a statement saying she did not want to be considered for the premier’s post. Still, it left open the possibility that she will run for president.

The center of Kiev is scorched and scarred. The streets are blackened from fires set during clashes with the police. On Sunday, people placed flowers and candles at makeshift shrines memorializing the dead. Outside the Cabinet of Ministers building, parents had their small children pose for photographs with victorious antigovernment fighters who are still armed with clubs and wearing helmets, but now stand guard over the government headquarters. Many had flowers attached to their metal shields.

“For the first time that Greece is negotiating with its lenders without its back against the wall, you’re pushing for the government to fall,” Mr. Samaras said, describing the leftists as “irresponsible” and “confused.” He said there would be “no more horizontal measures,”

“You have destroyed society and society will no longer allow you to continue this destruction,

“a social holocaust” and noting that “thousands of Greeks are looking through the garbage for food.”

Nearly one in five of Germany's 82 million residents are either immigrants themselves, or children of immigrants who have arrived since 1950, according to Germany's federal statistics office.

Their talks with the Social Democrats, which may continue for weeks, are expected to focus on the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage, taxation and control of key government ministries.

virtually meaningless, since a successful "grand coalition" would give Mrs Merkel control over nearly 80% of the house's seats.

“This could destroy China and the Chinese people. So I cannot stay silent. I have to let them know that there are people against it, and to do so publicly,” protested Li Datong, a retired newspaper editor who became the face of liberal opposition to Xi’s power grab when he published a combative open letter attacking the move.

“The stakes could not be any higher; renewed hostility among political rivals and the repression of political dissent puts China at risk of repeating the tragedies of the Mao era,” Huang added.

“If somehow there is a weakness to be found, I think that his enemies will circle and go in for the kill. That’s the greatest danger to him at this point,” Economy said.

For those who opposed Xi and his crackdown on human rights and dissent it boded ill, she said. “I think it’s very bleak, the outlook politically.”

Labour had allowed expectations for election gains to grow high, particularly in London, where some senior figures talked up prospects of a victory in Wandsworth. A dispute over the handling of anti-Semitism in the party may have also cost support for Labour and Mr. Corbyn, particularly in Barnet, where there is a significant Jewish population. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Nevertheless, the voting took place at a difficult time for a divided government facing many problems. In recent weeks, Mrs. May’s predicament has been complicated by the House of Lords, the unelected chamber of Parliament, which has inflicted 10 defeats on her Brexit legislation, adding amendments that she will try to overturn in the House of Commons, the main chamber.

Mrs. May’s problems over a withdrawal are coming to a head over her promise to leave Europe’s customs union, which guarantees tariff-free trade with Continental Europe.

This issue has come to symbolize a deep division: Pro-Europeans want to stick close to the bloc, Britain’s biggest trade partner, in order to protect the economy, while hard-line Brexit supporters want to break free and to negotiate other trade deals with non-European nations.

The collapse of traditional social democratic parties has opened acres of space on the center left. A generation of younger voters is casting about for new allegiances, and others, for an antidote to the nationalist, populist far right.

With migration receding in the news, climate change has become a potent new front in the battle between green-minded liberals and populists.

they have become enemy No. 1 for far-right populists and others who cast their policies as part of an elitist agenda that hurts ordinary people

In Germany, where the Greens surged to over 20 percent in the recent European Parliament elections, their campaign posters explicitly attacked the far right: “Hatred is no alternative for Germany.”

Britain’s Greens won a striking 12 percent of the vote, finishing fourth ahead of the governing Conservatives, not only by promoting the environment — but also by opposing Brexit.

To those who could least afford it, the tax was seen as a way for them to offset the environmental damage caused primarily by big businesses and the jet-setting urban elites, who increasingly vote Green but whose lifestyles have the biggest carbon footprint

“The Green idea has been European from the outset, because you can’t solve environmental problems within national borders,

In southern Europe, with swelling debt and high youth unemployment, Green parties remain marginal

the Alternative for Germany, commonly known as AfD, accuses Ms. Baerbock’s party of being elitist — and hypocritical

“They buy themselves a good conscience, because they are the ones who hurt the environment most, they are the ones with the air miles.”

“But ordinary people are being told that they are responsible for the impending climate apocalypse because they drive a car,” Mr. Hilse said.

They were not only the most popular among all voters under the age of 60 but for the first time among unemployed voters, too.

in the European Parliament, the Greens will have roughly the same influence in the 751-seat assembly as the far-right populists led by Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvin

Germany’s Greens recently learned from a study of voter concerns in Europe that the second-most-popular statement among far-right voters, after one on limiting migration, was this: “We need to act on climate change because it’s hitting the poorest first and it’s caused by the rich.”

“Environmental policies are punitive when they are poorly implemented,’

“But if we reallocate this money to help people better insulate their homes and reduce their energy bills, everything is fine,

That is what Germany’s labor unions are preaching, too.

“If you want to achieve an ecological society, you have to take working people with you. That new society,” he said, “has to be fair.”

Workers are facing the prospect of job losses and transformation on two fronts: automation and climate policy

the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else.

America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.

Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity

some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue.” In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.

Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines!

The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.” Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively.

A special issue dedicated to exposing the racial terror-state in America before and after Reconstruction is extremely worthwhile

In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers:

I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”

It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way?

“One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.” In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms.

It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it

Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview.

This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship

Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us.

hat would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.

the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one.

Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it.

it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end

between Sohrab Ahmari, representing the Trumpy post-liberals, and David French, a Reagan-style fusionist, it was a rare moment of agreement. They both took it as a premise that Drag Queen Story Hour — a relatively new trend in which drag queens read kids stories in local libraries — was a problem they both wish didn’t exist

both French and Ahmari have no idea what they are talking about.

drag queens are clowns. They are not transgender (or haven’t been until very, very recently). They are men, mainly gay, who make no attempt to pass as actual women, and don’t necessarily want to be women, but dress up as a caricature of a woman. Sure, some have bawdy names, and in the context of a late night gay bar, they can say some bawdy things. But they’re not really about sex at all. They’re about costume and play

Children love drag queens the way they love clowns or circuses or Halloween or live Disney characters in Disney World. It’s dress-up fun.

I think the cost-benefit analysis still favors being a member of the E.U. But it is not crazy to come to the opposite conclusion.

o how on Earth is this a sign of the cultural apocalypse? These clowns read children’s stories to kids and their parents, and encourage young children to read books. This is the work of the devil?

allow me to suggest a parallel version of Britain’s situation — but with the U.S. The U.S. negotiated with Canada and Mexico to create a free trade zone called NAFTA, just as the U.K. negotiated entry to what was then a free trade zone called the “European Economic Community” in 1973

Now imagine further that NAFTA required complete freedom of movement for people across all three countries. Any Mexican or Canadian citizen would have the automatic right to live and work in the U.S., including access to public assistance, and every American could live and work in Mexico and Canada on the same grounds. This three-country grouping then establishes its own Supreme Court, which has a veto over the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there’s a new currency to replace the dollar, governed by a new central bank, located in Ottawa.

How many Americans would support this

The questions answer themselves. It would be unimaginable for the U.S. to allow itself to be governed by an entity more authoritative than its own government

It would signify the end of the American experiment, because it would effectively be the end of the American nation-state. But this is precisely the position the U.K. has been in for most of my lifetim

It’s not a strip show, for Pete’s sake. It’s a laugh, designed for the entire family. And yes, Dave Chappelle, the sanest man in America at the moment, is right. Men dressed obviously as women are first and foremost funny.

It is requiring the surrender and pooling of more and more national sovereignty from its members. And in this series of surrenders, Britain is unique in its history and identity. In the last century, every other European country has experienced the most severe loss of sovereignty a nation can experience: the occupation of a foreign army on its soil. Britain hasn’t

this very resistance has come to define the character of the country, idealized by Churchill in the country’s darkest hour. Britain was always going to have more trouble pooling sovereignty than others. And the more ambitious the E.U. became, the more trouble the U.K. had.

that is Boris Johnson’s core case: the people decided, the parliament revoked Article 50, and so it is vital for democracy that the U.K. exit without any continuing hassle or delay. If parliament is seen as dismissing the result of the referendum, then the parliament will effectively be at war with the people as a whole, and he will rally the people against them. It’s near perfect populism. His job is to get what the people voted for done, despite the elites. And if that is the central message of the coming election campaign he will not only win, but handily.

“Changing our lives is now unavoidable,” Orban told lawmakers last week when justifying the proposed bill. “Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary.”

The emergency law also stipulates five-year prison sentences for Hungarians found to be spreading “false” information, as well as prison terms for those defying mandated quarantines. Critics argue that vital support for the country’s health-care system is still lacking, while Orban has given himself carte blanche to exercise even more domineering control.

On Monday, former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi tweeted what many liberal Europeans feel — that Hungary’s illiberal slide threatens the values of the European Union as a whole and could merit its expulsion from the bloc.

But there’s no clear path forward for such drastically punitive action, not least as the continent flounders in its battle against the coronavirus. And Orban has his supporters, too. He has been lionized as a nationalist hero for the West’s anti-immigrant populists and welcomed to the White House by President Trump.

“Everyone should think twice before giving Orban the benefit of the doubt,” Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote last week. “His decade-long premiership has been marked by a continual assault on any constraints on his power — whether by courts, civil society or the media.”

Critics have accused Edelstein of acting in defiance of the public will. They point to the timing of a tweet he made on Sunday, just moments after President Rivlin tasked Gantz with trying to form a new government.

Edelstein argued on Twitter that he did not close the Knesset so much as order an "intermission" to allow time for negotiations between Netanyahu's Likud and Gantz's Blue and White to create a unity government between the two main parties -- rather than a coalition of center-left parties supported in some form by the Joint Arab List party and a right-wing party led by former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman.

The opposition leader blasted Edelstein and Netanyahu, calling the refusal to convene the legislature unprecedented and anti-democratic. "No crisis, whatever its scope, should be exploited as a means to trample upon values of national decorum and responsibility, and to undermine the will of the voting public," Gantz said in a video statement. "The Knesset is a critical institution at all times, including times of crisis. It is neither possible nor desirable to manage a crisis of this scope without a functioning parliament."

"I call on Blue and White to stop distributing fake news ... and to join a national emergency government to fight for saving lives of the citizens of Israel," Netanyahu said in a message on Facebook. "This is a moment of leadership, of national responsibility, and cooperation. We can and should form a government now."

Many, exceptionally for France, are also minorities, and 50 percent are women. After the last elections, one researcher found a mere 12 members of Parliament of minority origin, barely 2 percent of the legislature — hardly representative of France’s diverse population.

Like Mr. Berville, over 50 percent have never held political office (only 5 percent are incumbents), and their average age is under 50. Mr. Berville is not even the youngest.

“People are needing renewal. They’re needing change,” said a farmer listening to Mr. Berville, Olivier Bruyant, who later gave the candidate a bunch of organic carrots.

But even more significant: The predicted majority for Mr. Macron, 39, would put the finishing touches on the new president’s dismantling of the parties that held power in France for 50 years until he came along.

The incumbent opposing Mr. Berville in the Côtes-d’Armor department, the Socialist Viviane Le Dissez, does not even give her party’s name on the cover of campaign literature.

He speaks fluently about developing-world economic strategies, says he has never been the subject of racial discrimination in a part of France where there are few immigrants and shrewdly recognizes the exoticism of his appeal to the voters.

Mr. Macron wants to open up unemployment benefits to independent workers, while loosening up the rigid French labor code to make it easier to hire and fire. His candidate in Brittany had no difficulty defending a program “liberating energies and protecting individuals,” as he put it.

Along with concerns about the rare blood clots, vaccine hesitancy has been fueled by misinformation spread on social media, longstanding suspicion in government systems and a belief that diseases like Ebola and measles constitute more of a threat than Covid.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, several African leaders have succumbed to the coronavirus. In the Republic of Congo, the opposition presidential candidate Guy-Brice Parfait Kolélas died of Covid-19 in March just hours after voting ended. Abbay Kyari, a former chief of staff to Nigeria’s president, and the South African minister Jackson Mphikwa Mthembu both died of complications related to Covid-19.

He urged nationalist politicians who have joined the coalition talks not to establish what he called a "leftist government.

Bennett, a former Netanyahu aide turned rival, said he was taking the dramatic step to prevent yet another election. While sharing Netanyahu's nationalist ideology, Bennett said there was no feasible way for the hard-line right wing to form a governing majority in parliament.

Each of the past four elections was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu — who has become a polarizing figure as he stands trial on corruption charges — with each ending in deadlock.

If his opponents fail to form a government and new elections are triggered, it would give him another chance at seeing the election of a parliament that is in favor of granting him immunity from prosecution. But if they succeed, he would find himself in the much weaker position of opposition leader and potentially find himself facing unrest in his Likud party.

In order to form a government, a party leader must secure the support of a 61-seat majority in parliament. Because no single party controls a majority on its own, coalitions are usually built with smaller partners.

But with Wednesday's deadline looming, negotiations have kicked into high gear. Lapid has reached coalition deals with three other parties so far. If he finalizes a deal with Bennett, the remaining partners are expected to quickly fall into place.

Though the Iraqi debate that called for the US exit is not binding, and would require a one-year notice period, the fact that the move was led by a prime minister regarded as a US ally showed just how divisive the killing has become, and how quickly US interests in the region could unravel as a result.

Shortly after Abdul Mahdi’s statement, the US announced that it was suspending operations against the Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and a five-year-old training mission to equip local forces. A US statement claimed the suspension was a reaction to rocket attacks on US bases, carried out in recent weeks by Shia militia members.

Suleimani was the second most powerful person in Iran and the most influential Iranian outside the country, travelling the region like a Persian viceroy as he directed conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and as far away as Yemen. The extraordinary scenes of mourners thronging Iranian cities were a powerful testament to his popularity at home and the anger directed at the US for his killing a figure so central to Iran’s presence on the regional stage.

“The US army has killed these people,” Nasrallah said, referring to Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an ally of Suleimani also hit in the airstrike in Baghdad in the early hours of Friday. “We do not at all mean the American people and citizens across our region … It is up to anyone from the axis of resistance to deliver a fair punishment after Soleimani’s assassination.”

Withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be damaging to Washington’s interests in a region still recovering from the invasion of Iraq 17 years ago and the rampage of Isis, which forced millions of people from their homes and led to widespread destruction across the country. While Isis has been defeated on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, it remains a residual insurgent threat and there are growing signs that the terror group is reorganising, despite being on its knees in its former heartland.

In Iraq’s parliament, the resolution urging a US exit was passed by 170 votes to nil.

“The new generation has been re-politicized,” Lagodinsky said. “We thought about these young people as people who only stare at their screens. But they can walk the streets. And that has an impact on their parents and grandparents.”

Green issues have reverberated outward: Leaders from other parties, seeing a Green success bubbling in opinion polls, emphasized climate issues in the campaign

“Green is not the sole property of the Green Party,” Frans Timmermans, a senior Dutch politician who was the European center-left coalition’s lead candidate, said at a debate last month. He said other political parties — notably his own — were also focusing on the environment

But it had never enjoyed a night like Sunday, when it vaulted into second place nationwide with nearly 21 percent of the vote. The surge for the Greens was mirrored by a collapse for the Social Democrats, traditionally the dominant party on the left of German politics but perhaps now supplanted.

Exit polls in Germany showed the Greens to be the overwhelming top choice for young voters and for first-time voters. The party also did especially well in cities, taking voters from the center-left and center-right parties

In a reflection of just how much the Greens are steering the debate in Germany, far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alexander Gauland declared that the party was now “our main enemy.”

The AfD, which denies the science behind man-made climate change, had a disappointing night on Sunday, failing to match its performance in the 2017 federal elections.

As in Germany, France saw a humiliating loss for the center-left but surprising gains for the Greens. They came in third place, with approximately 13.5 percent of the vote. The Socialists, by contrast, won only 6.2 percent.

Although the Greens also placed third in 2009, winning 16.3 percent of the vote then, Sunday’s victory came in the context of the near-total flatlining of the older political movements that dominated France for decades.

 In France as elsewhere, the left seems not to have died but merely to have changed form. To the extent that a muscular leftist movement exists, it is now green.

“The Greens represent the only project of the future,” French Greens leader Yannick Jadot said Monday on French television.

Climate change, said an editorial in France’s Liberation newspaper, “has become the principal criteria of judging political action in the European Union.

1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.

The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010

For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over

Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.

In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!

May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.

Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.

Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.

Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen

Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry.

Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.

For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.

A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.

A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.

May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.

Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.

In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England.

Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.

each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.

Accepting defeat and recognizing the results of a public poll is a cultural problem that cannot be solved overnight.

Leaders of the Islamic Action Front did not even recognize what observers had noted about the elections: that they were relatively free and fair.

Absent also are independent cultural figures who should be chiming in with their position in regards to any national event.

But what the elections have shown is that even if changes are made to the electoral process, a much more important change is required, namely of the culture of the citizenry: to believe in the system, accept its results and have the courage and sportsmanship to admit defeat.

This article was first published in the Jordan Times on Jan. 30, 2013.