BERLIN — German Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil has assailed U.S. President Donald Trump for his rhetoric on Greenland and actions in Venezuela, saying the situation is worse than politicians like to admit. The comments lay bare divisions inside Germany’s governing coalition over how to handle Washington as transatlantic tensions mount. They also mark a divergence between Klingbeil’s approach and that of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has taken a far more cautious approach to Trump to avoid a rupture with Washington. “The transatlantic alliance is undergoing much more profound upheaval than we may have been willing to admit until now,” Klingbeil said Wednesday in view of Trump’s assertion that the U.S. needs control over Greenland as well as the U.S. administration’s decision to deploy its military to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “The transatlantic relationship that we have known until now is disintegrating,” he added. Merz, by contrast, has said with regard to Greenland that the U.S. president has legitimate security concerns that NATO should address in order to achieve a “mutually acceptable solution.” And while other EU governments strongly criticized the Trump administration following the capture of Maduro, Merz was more restrained, calling the matter legally “complex.” Behind Klingbeil’s more strident criticism of Trump lies a clear political calculus. The vice chancellor — who also serves as finance minister — is a leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governs in coalition with Merz’s conservative bloc and has seen its popularity stagnate. Attacking Trump more forcefully may be one way for the party to improve its fortunes. Polls show most Germans strongly oppose Trump’s actions in Venezuela and his rhetoric on Greenland, and views of the U.S. government more generally are at a nadir. | Pool Photo by Shawn Thew via EPA Polls show most Germans strongly oppose Trump’s actions in Venezuela and his rhetoric on Greenland, and views of the U.S. government more generally are at a nadir. Only 15 percent of Germans consider the U.S. to be a trustworthy partner, according to the benchmark ARD Deutschlandtrend survey released last week, a record low. This underscores the political risk for Merz as he seeks to avoid direct confrontation with an American president deeply unpopular with the German electorate. But Merz has calculated that keeping open channels of communication with the U.S. president is far more critical. Klingbeil, on the other hand, is less encumbered by international diplomacy. “The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to dominate the Western hemisphere,” he said on Wednesday. “One could sit here and say, ‘Yes, what the US has done in Latin America is not pretty. Yes, there are also threats against Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba, but what does that actually have to do with us?’ But then we look at President Trump’s statements today about Greenland. Then we look at what the Trump administration has written in its new national security strategy with regard to Europe. “All the certainties we could rely on in Europe are under pressure,” Klingbeil added.

Thousands rallied in the Albanian capital of Tirana on Monday as the opposition demanded Prime Minister Edi Rama’s resignation over corruption charges against his deputy, Belinda Balluku, whose parliamentary immunity has so far blocked her arrest. The political crisis in the Balkan nation has been building for weeks since anti-corruption prosecutors accused Balluku of interfering in major state contracts. It reached its tipping point Monday night after Molotov cocktails were hurled at Rama’s office. Four protesters were arrested during clashes and seven more put under investigation. Two police officers were injured, and one protester accidentally set himself on fire, local media reported. The protest, organized by veteran opposition leader Sali Berisha and his Democratic Party, followed scenes of chaos in Albania’s parliament last week, when police intervened after lawmakers brawled and set off flares inside the chamber. “We do not condone any form of violence — especially violence exercised by those in power. There is no more blatant form of violence than the extortion and systematic looting carried out by Edi Rama and his ministers against the Albanian people,” Berisha told POLITICO Tuesday via his spokesperson, saying the protests were intended to “stop this violence.” Prosecutors and opposition lawmakers are pushing to lift Balluku’s immunity so that anti-corruption prosecutors can arrest and try her. Rama and his ruling Socialist Party have so far stalled the vote, saying they will wait for a Constitutional Court ruling that is expected in January. Balluku is accused, along with several other officials and private companies, of manipulating public tenders to favor specific companies on major infrastructure projects, including Tirana’s Greater Ring Road and the Llogara Tunnel. She has called the allegations against her “insinuations,” “half-truths” and “lies,” and agreed to cooperate with the judicial process fully. Balluku is also minister of infrastructure, overseeing some of the country’s largest public projects. Rama has also defended Balluku amid the corruption charges, accusing the anti-corruption agency, known as SPAK, of normalizing pre-trial arrests, saying they amount to “arrests without trial” and fall short of European democratic standards. The prime minister told POLITICO in an interview Wednesday that it was “normal” for SPAK to make errors as it is a “newborn institution with a newborn independent power” that has made “plenty of mistakes.” When asked for a statement Tuesday about the protests’ violent turn, Rama refused to comment. He said he did not want to impugn his political opponents, “because in the end they are not enemies to be exposed to the world, but just desperate fellow Albanians, to be confronted and dealt with within the bounds of our own domestic political life.” Berisha hit back, accusing Rama of stealing elections and telling him it was time to go. “He has no legitimacy to remain in government for even one more day,” Berisha told POLITICO. Rama was reelected in May for a fourth term.

BRUSSELS ― Belgian police raided the EU’s foreign service and the College of Europe on Tuesday in a bombshell corruption probe — and detained two of the EU’s most powerful officials. Federica Mogherini, who once served as the EU’s top diplomat, and Stefano Sannino, a director-general in the European Commission, were questioned over allegations of fraud in the establishment of a training academy for diplomats. Mogherini was born in Rome, the daughter of a film set designer. She was elected to the Italian parliament in 2008 as an MP with the center-left Democratic Party and became Italy’s foreign minister in 2014, an appointment that, at the time, took many by surprise. The 52-year-old’s tenure was short-lived, as she was made the EU’s high representative — the foreign policy chief — the same year, a position she held until 2019. Her time in the job is perhaps most notable for her work on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. At the end of her five-year term, she became the rector of the Bruges-based College of Europe, a position she’s been in ever since. But her appointment was mired in claims of cronyism, as professors and EU officials argued that she was not qualified for the post, did not meet the criteria and applied after the deadline. She has also served as the director of the EU Diplomatic Academy, a program for junior diplomats across EU countries that is run by the College of Europe, since August 2022. It’s the academy that is at the center of the probe. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) said it has “strong suspicions” that rules around “fair competition” were breached when the EEAS awarded the tender to set up the academy. Sannino, a career diplomat from Naples with a packed CV including various roles in Rome and Brussels, has served as director-general of DG Enlargement, permanent representative of Italy to the EU, Italian ambassador to Spain and Andorra and secretary-general of the European External Action Service (EEAS). He has championed LGBTQ+ rights and is married to Catalan political adviser Santiago Mondragón. He started his current role as director-general of DG MENA, the EU’s department for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf, in February. He has lectured at the College of Europe and at the diplomatic academy. None of the people questioned has been charged. An investigative judge has 48 hours to decide on further action.

NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani capped a sharp-elbowed campaign for New York City mayor Tuesday night with a historic win, cementing the democratic socialist as both a rising star and a divisive figure in the Democratic Party. For Republicans and President Donald Trump, the results hand-deliver an ideal foil heading into midterm elections next year as they seek to paint their adversaries as out-of-touch leftists. Come Jan. 1, Mamdani will become the city’s first Muslim mayor and the second in modern history after David Dinkins to identify as a democratic socialist. With his win, he vanquished former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani in the June Democratic primary and ran an increasingly bitter and negative general election campaign as an independent.

Former United States Vice President Kamala Harris suggested she may run again for U.S. president. The Democratic Party presidential hopeful, who lost to Republican Donald Trump in 2024, told the BBC in an interview to be aired Sunday that she is “not done” with politics. “I have lived my entire career as a life of service and it’s in my bones,” she said. Asked whether she could be the first woman in charge in the White House one day, Harris replied: “possibly,” hinting that she could make another presidential bid. But she added that she has not made a decision yet about whether to run again for president. The next American presidential election is in 2028. “There are many ways to serve,” Harris said, “but I have not decided yet what I will do in the future.” Harris dismissed polls suggesting that she would be an outsider in the presidential race with little chance of winning the Democratic ticket. “If I listened to polls, I would have not run for my first office, or my second office — and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here,” she said.

AMSTERDAM — Socialist lawmakers expect the center-right European People’s Party to try to keep the European Parliament presidency despite a power-sharing agreement signed after the 2024 EU election. Under the 2024 power-sharing arrangement, the top Parliament job would be shared — the first half of the term for the EPP, second half for the Socialists. But Socialist lawmakers now doubt that the center-right EPP — which holds the highest representation in the European Commission, the Council and the Parliament — will let them take the job, according to nine MEPs, aides and senior officials who were granted anonymity to speak candidly with POLITICO. That is because the Socialists also have the top post at the European Council with Portugal’s former Prime MinisterAntonio Costa, and it is unlikely the EPP would let the Social Democrats — which have lost political weight across countries in recent years — lead two out of the three EU policymaking institutions, the lawmakers said. The lawmakers also said it is likely the EPP will try to have incumbent Parliament President Roberta Metsola reelected for a third term — a first in the parliament’s history — especially after she refused to go back to Maltese politics as the leader of her Nationalist Party. Publicly, however, the Socialists are holding their ground. The president of the Party of European Socialists (PES) Stefan Löfven said Friday night that his political family will not support a third term for Metsola. “If you and I make a deal, you expect me to keep it … if they still want a decent working environment in Brussels, they need to stick to the deal,” Löfven told POLITICO ahead of the Socialist leaders dinner on Friday night during the PES congress. MIDTERM RESHUFFLE He added that the 2024 deal also includes a second term for European Council President Antonio Costa, Portugal’s former Socialist prime minister — though EPP officials contest that it was not explicitly part of the agreement, opening the door to use Costa’s reelection as leverage to keep control of the Parliament president position. Ahead of the 2027 midterm reshuffle, where all top jobs within the Parliament are up for grabs, Socialist lawmakers make it a given that Spain’s Iratxe García will remain as the chair of the Socialists and Democrats group in the chamber. “If Metsola stays on, Iratxe will stay on, for consistency,” said one MEP. “I don’t see Iratxe being challenged,” said a second lawmaker, who added that García can only be ousted if the Italians turn against her — which is unlikely given both Italy and Spain traditionally stick together. “Otherwise if they are united, any challenger would need to first match their votes together, which is a lot,”  this person said. The Italians and Spaniards hold 41 out of 136 seats. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and García are meeting with Italian Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein on Saturday, as part of a busy agenda with many bilateral meetings.  “Oh, so that’s the agenda for the meeting?” Schlein laughed when asked by POLITICO whether she would support García as she walked into the room. The Italians, who are the largest national delegation within the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), are unlikely to claim the presidency as they are very divided and there is no clear candidate among their ranks for the job. Instead, they are expected to keep group Secretary-General Fabrizia Panzetti for another term as part of a power-sharing agreement among the national party leaders. “They are trying not to open the debate and just keep everything as it is,” said a third MEP. “I wish there would be a change, not necessarily about Iratxe, but we should have an open debate internally, and not just between leaders,” this person added. While everyone assumes publicly that García will stay on — as long as Sánchez stays in power — some leaders remain tight-lipped on whether they will support her. “Iratxe has done a good job,” Swedish Social Democratic leader Magdalena Andersson — who is topping the polls one year away from national elections — told POLITICO. But “no, it has not been decided” if the Swedish delegation will support her, Andersson said. The EPP did not reply to a request for comment in time of publication.

LONDON — It was March when Gretchen Whitmer bumped into Morgan McSweeney in London while on a trade visit to the U.K. Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan and potential hopeful in the 2028 U.S. presidential election, and McSweeney, the chief of staff to embattled British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, discussed Labour’s landslide victory in its 2024 general election campaign, said a person who recalled the encounter. There, Starmer’s chief of staff accepted an eye-catching gift from Whitmer — a £90 “Michigan Wood” pen. The encounter was a small glimpse of the ties that remain between the U.K. prime minister’s aides and the U.S. Democratic Party, still licking its wounds after a resounding election defeat by Donald Trump and the Republicans. It was also indicative of something else: McSweeney’s personal desire to build a coalition and playbook for center-left parties to win and govern worldwide, with Starmer at its heart, including and going beyond just the U.S. Democrats. That desire was undimmed in recent months, according to four people with knowledge of the conversations, despite Starmer and McSweeney firefighting crises (and falling poll ratings) in office. Labour’s engagement with the Democrats has faded to the background since Trump’s reelection last November, not least because of Starmer’s efforts to charm the president — Trump’s gilded state visit to Britain starts on Sept. 16 — and the fact the Democrats have no candidate to charm. But that may change soon. The Starmer-friendly think tanks IPPR and Labour Together and U.S.-based Center for American Progress (CAP) will take a “Global Progress Action Summit” — previously held in Canada — to London for the first time on Sept. 26. Events planned so far include the newly minted justice secretary and deputy prime minister, formerly the foreign secretary, David Lammy — a friend of Barack Obama — in conversation with past (and perhaps future) Democratic hopeful, Pete Buttigieg. High-profile further speakers are expected to follow. McSweeney has been a key figure behind the scenes in recent months shaping thinking around the conference, said the four people referenced above, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. That’s despite him battling political turmoil at home — which in the past fortnight has included the departures in disgrace of Starmer’s deputy, Angela Rayner, and his ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, and a reshuffle of both his Cabinet and No. 10 staff. A second, private day at the conference is planned for staff, where Labour government aides can swap notes with counterparts from nations such as Australia and Spain, whose socialist government’s proposals to tackle a housing crisis are being watched closely in No. 10. One of the four people said: “Morgan sees Keir as being a leader among global progressives.” Another said: “We’re trying to write kind of a blueprint or playbook of what it means to be a center-left government in the era that we’re now in” — one where neither left-wing populism, nor a return to the shared “Third Way” politics of former leaders Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, are the answer. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has a huge poll lead and is promising to deport hundreds of thousands of people. Public disillusionment with establishment parties — and Starmer, the process-driven former lawyer — is high. No. 10 aides are looking at artificial intelligence and social media’s impact on society, an aging population, a public sector in need of reform, growing Chinese might and public unease at mass migration — problems plaguing governments everywhere — and believe “deliverism” is the way forward. It might not work. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer speaks during the 69th Annual Fight For Freedom Fund Dinner on May 19, 2024. | Monica Morgan/Getty Images So how close really can Labour and the Democrats get right now — and can they teach each other more than just how to lose ground? POLITICO talked to more than a dozen politicians and strategists, several on condition of anonymity, in a bid to find the answer. THERE IS NO DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE The first difficulty with meeting the Democrats is obvious. Who are you supposed to meet? The party structure is different to Labour, which almost always has a leader. A senior figure in a U.K. think tank said: “It’s not like you can speak to the equivalent of Keir Starmer in opposition and start to build relationships.” Labour MP Emily Thornberry, the chair of Britain’s cross-party foreign affairs committee of MPs which went to Capitol Hill over the summer, said: “I wasn’t, for example, being taken to see Democrats and being told, ‘Oh, this is a rising star, we think that this guy or this woman is worth cultivating, because we think that they are future leaders.’ “No, it was all about who we think are the movers and shakers on the Hill. Or who we think might be — we haven’t even worked it out yet.” Enter, then, an army of center-left think tanks to fill the void. The CAP, Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Third Way all have regular contact with U.K. counterparts about Democratic renewal. “Britain has proven a useful place for them to have those conversations that they can’t have easily in the U.S.,” argued the senior think tank figure quoted above. Others involved in this transatlantic dialogue include the U.S.-based Open Markets Institute, the former home of Biden antitrust guru Lina Khan, and the Sunrise Movement, as well as the U.K.-based Future Governance Forum, backed by a roster of Starmer donors, and the Labour Climate and Environment Forum. Claire Ainsley, a former aide to Starmer who is now the director of the PPI’s project on center-left renewal, said: “Looking at who’s going to be the next candidate is actually only one part of the equation. The other part of it is which faction, if you like, is going to get their candidate to emerge?” With Bill Clinton in the 1990s, she argued, “you build the platform and the candidate emerges. It wasn’t as if Clinton came with all these ideas — you had to build a platform.” But this becomes a battle of competing ideologies too, with different think tanks lobbying for the kind of center left they want to see. BUILDING A NETWORK Third Way, the D.C.-based Democrat-friendly think tank, talks to people “both in and adjacent to No. 10” and “a variety of folks in government,” said Senior Vice President Josh Freed — though most conversations are informal and not at the level of elected officials. Likewise, Labour’s recent former General Secretary David Evans, now an adviser to PPI, has been to the U.S. with Ainsley to speak to Democratic strategists, including at a Denver summit in April. The pair are due to attend a similar behind-closed-doors “retreat” in Las Vegas on Sept. 13, where speakers will include Obama’s former chief of staff (and potential presidential hopeful) Rahm Emanuel. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has a huge poll lead and is promising to deport hundreds of thousands of people. Public disillusionment with establishment parties — and Starmer, the process-driven former lawyer — is high. | Lia Toby/Getty Images The PPI has its eye on talented governors such as Whitmer, Colorado’s Jared Polis, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, newcomers such as North Carolina’s Josh Stein and former governors such as Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo, who also served in Joe Biden’s cabinet as a commerce secretary. Shapiro and Whitmer in particular, argued PPI President Will Marshall, embody an “impatience with government bureausclerosis” — a battle occupying Labour in the U.K. Friendly think tanks like to hail Shapiro for fixing a key interstate in just 12 days after it collapsed. In the U.K., PPI is interested in center-left ministers such as Lammy, Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, John Healey, Ellie Reeves, Alison McGovern, Torsten Bell, Kirsty McNeill and Lucy Rigby, along with new junior ministers such as Kanishka Narayan and Mike Tapp. Democratic former Congressman Tim Ryan — who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020 as well as against the now-Vice President JD Vance in a 2022 Ohio Senate race — came to the U.K. in July, facilitated by the PPI, and held briefings with Labour MPs and peers. Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, a pollster and former Starmer adviser who works with the PPI, presented research on swing voters who are becoming disillusioned with center-left parties. Ryan also met Starmer at a pre-arranged encounter during an event in parliament and the two spoke about politics, said one person who was there. Marshall said the PPI-Labour relationship “withered” in the years the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, but the history goes back to 1989, when he met Patricia Hewitt, a center-left think tanker in the political wilderness, who would become a Cabinet minister under Tony Blair. THE GOVERNMENT CAN HELP Labour isn’t in the wilderness this time — at least not yet — and has the levers of government to help. The U.K. Embassy and consuls general will play a role in building links between the government — in a non-party-political way — and potential Democratic runners and riders. Diplomats will keep tabs on rising stars and gather contact details for their teams, and this will likely kick up a gear when the picture becomes clearer after the U.S. midterm elections in November 2026. This, of course, is true of Republican rising stars too. “We do have the advantage of the machinery of the Foreign Office network to deal with that,” said one former Labour adviser. There are always two tracks, the adviser added — cross-party, pragmatic relationships with U.S. administration figures come first, “but clearly, you also have your political family that you are part of, and the alliances that you have as fellow progressive political leaders.” Such fellow leaders could include California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose pugilistic and Trump-mimicking social media style has made waves with Democrats, or JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor whose deep pockets as the heir of a hotel fortune could allow him to self-fund a presidential candidacy. These tracks can sometimes appear to overlap. Starmer gave the job of ambassador to Washington D.C. — usually reserved for a civil servant — to Peter Mandelson, a close ally of McSweeney and long-time operator on the center left (although he was also quick to cultivate relationships with Trump’s MAGA right). Mandelson was due to be briefed on this month’s summit before he was sacked on Thursday over revelations about his friendship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Likewise, Emily Thornberry’s choice of meetings in Washington this summer was guided by diplomatic officials, and the embassy would sometimes have someone taking notes in the room. But Trump and the Republicans are by far the priority, at least for now. Labour officials are still scarred by a row during the 2024 U.S. election, in which Trump’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” after activists went to volunteer for Kamala Harris’ campaign. | Jeff Kowalsky/AFP Thornberry recalled of her visit: “The impression I got was that reengaging with however the Democrats emerge is on the back burner, waiting for things to happen — because the pressing issue is trying to understand what the hell is going on under the Trump regime. So that’s the priority.” Thornberry recalled a surprising bond between MPs and some Republicans, because many of them had links to the U.S. military. “For these guys who’ve actually been under fire with Brits, they have a very different relationship with Britain than Democrats, who see us as, you know, their liberal friends from across the pond — but they have lots of liberal friends across the pond,” she said. DON’T WAKE THE BEAST Bonding too closely with Democrats is fraught with danger. Labour officials are still scarred by a row during the 2024 U.S. election, in which Trump’s campaign accused Labour of “blatant foreign interference” after activists went to volunteer for Kamala Harris’ campaign. Many Labour activists privately saw it as the weaponization of the sort of routine campaigning that would usually pass without comment. The row erupted after Labour’s Head of Operations Sofia Patel told would-be volunteers: “We will sort your housing.” One Labour volunteer who went to the U.S. said: “It was a foolish, ill-advised LinkedIn post, and it wasn’t even properly true, because many of us were just organizing ourselves into groups — former staffers, current staffers, who were warm and interested — it wasn’t all organized by the party. Lots of us had just got ourselves into a group, booked ourselves into an Airbnb and a hotel and booked the same flights.” People paid their own way and many avoided posting on social media, the volunteer said. The danger hasn’t passed. While Starmer is seeking to define himself as a friend of Trump, many Democrats define themselves by resisting him. Formal contacts with Democratic politicians are rare for Starmer and his aides these days, though the PM met with House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer at the NATO summit in July. Mike Williams, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said Starmer’s government is focused on making sure the “U.K. is in a decent place with regards to Trump.” JUST KEEP TALKING The conversations continue regardless. Organizers behind this month’s London summit are hoping for representatives from most center-left governments in Europe and others from further afield. McSweeney has relationships with people in progressive think tanks in the U.S. and other countries, is close to former Biden and Obama officials and attended the Democratic National Convention last year alongside Matthew Doyle, Starmer’s then-director of communications. One former Labour staffer argued, however, that party HQ actually cultivated stronger links with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) than it did with the Democrats before Britain’s 2024 election. Labour hired Aussie strategist David Nelson to help run its general election campaign last year, alongside a second, more junior former Australian Labor staffer. Evans and Ainsley of the Progressive Policy Institute went to Australia to meet the ALP this past June. “Politically, we’re more similar to Australia than anywhere else in Europe,” the former Labour staffer added. “Their electorate behaves more like ours.” Despite all his domestic woes, Starmer’s allies believe he can still lead the pack. “There is a method and a recipe that worked for the center left, and it worked to get Labour into power … It is having a clear leader, vision and program to change the lives of working people for the better,” Ainsley said. She added: “Where center-left governments drift from that as their priority, it’s where they come unstuck.” But Keir Starmer is now drifting in the polls, and his critics have also accused him of a lack of vision. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images At the Denver summit in April, PPI’s Marshall said Democrats were asking Evans “ ‘How did you all win? What did you do? How did you win back those Red Wall constituencies in the July election last year?’ ” But Starmer is now drifting in the polls, and his critics have also accused him of a lack of vision. The conversations now are not just about how to win — but how to rebuild. “Conceivably, we learn the most from failure,” said Williams of CAP. “I think there’s a lot to learn.” Some failures unite most center-left strategists — like needing to focus on voters’ wallets rather than distant economic indicators. Marshall said part of his conversations with British MPs in early 2024 were “reality therapy about the Biden administration and Bidenomics.” Until Biden’s crushing defeat, he said, many center-left politicians including in Britain were looking to his strategy as the answer. Other issues, such as migration and gender politics, are thornier. Williams argued: “Do I think that we’re learning the right lessons yet? No. The folks [in the U.S.] who are pushing this whiplash back to the center and saying that we need to be tough on immigration, we need to push back on transgender rights — I think they’re dead wrong.” And for Freed of Third Way, Starmer would benefit from pushing the bureaucratic part of his personality aside. “Far be it for me to give advice to someone who successfully won an election and is leading a government,” he said. “But I think the thing that we’re seeing in general is that this is not a moment for buttoned-up, cautious, precise leaders. That this is not the moment to only go on controlled interviews where you know the questions and it’s only going to be 15 minutes. It’s not the moment where you’re unwilling to share insights and glimpses of yourself, of who you are, of the passions you care about.” Freed then put it more directly: “The blunt challenge of the moment is, this is like two owners of football clubs talking to each other. The Democrats just got relegated. The other [party, Labour], let’s be blunt, looks like [it] might be relegated — they’re in a relegation battle at the very least.” For football fan Keir Starmer, it’s a battle that may define his legacy. Shia Kapos contributed reporting.

BERLIN — The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party nearly tripled its support in municipal elections in Germany’s most populous state on Sunday, according to initial results. The results in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany’s west, underscored the party’s growing appeal to voters outside its strongholds in the states of the former East Germany, where it is the strongest political force. AfD leaders now see the more populous west of the country — including the declining industrial cities of North Rhine-Westphalia, home to steel factories and a diminishing coal industry — as the key to expanding the party’s base, particularly with working-class voters increasingly defecting to the far right. The AfD won nearly 15 percent of votes in the state, coming in third place, according to the initial results. In the last municipal elections in North Rhine-Westphalia five years ago, the party won 5.1 percent of votes. In the city of Gelsenkirchen, a former center of heavy industry, the AfD candidate appeared set to face a center-left politician in a runoff for mayor. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) still came out clearly ahead of all other parties with 33 percent of the total vote, according to initial results. Merz’s coalition partners in the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — once the dominant political power in North Rhine-Westphalia’s industrial centers — came in second with around 22 percent, according to an early tally. These vote shares are slightly lower than results for the parties in the state’s municipal elections five years ago. The elections, while having no direct effect on national politics, were widely seen as a barometer of the national mood, coming roughly four months after Merz took office. Some of Germany’s conservative and centrist politicians expressed relief that the CDU and SPD performed as well as they did, since both parties have seen their national poll numbers slump while the AfD’s have risen. “All Christian Democrats will be delighted with this result,” Hendrik Wüst, the conservative premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, said in a televised interview shortly after the polls closed. At the same time, Wüst added, the AfD’s strong result “cannot allow us sleep peacefully.” Centrist politicians must ask themselves “what the right answers are when it comes to poverty and migration,” Wüst said. “Are all parts of our welfare system really fair? What about problems with housing costs? Some issues have been allowed to drag on for a very long time.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union still came out clearly ahead of all other parties with 33 percent of the total vote, according to initial results. | Andreas Arnold/Getty Images In Germany’s federal election in February, the AfD came in second with 20.6 percent of the vote, the best national result for a far-right party in Germany’s postwar history. The AfD’s success rested largely on its dominance in the former East Germany, where it came first in virtually all regions. Since then the AfD has become even more popular despite being designated as an extremist party by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, intensifying a simmering debate as to whether the party should be banned under the provisions of Germany’s constitution. AfD leaders are now intent on increasing their support in the former West Germany. Turnout in the North Rhine-Westphalia municipal elections increased significantly to 58 percent on Sunday, according to exit poll data, suggesting the party may have mobilized new voters. AfD politicians celebrated the results. “A huge success,” Alice Weidel, a national party leader, wrote on X. “We have cemented our voter base,” Enxhi Seli-Zacharias, an AfD politician in North Rhine-Westphalia, added in a televised interview. “It is no longer purely a vote of frustration.”

Charlie Kirk understood — perhaps more so than anyone except Donald Trump himself — how power really operates within the MAGA movement. As the myriad tributes to Kirk in the day since his death have captured, he served a dizzying array of functions within the broader Trumpian universe: a firebrand activist and debater; a media mega-personality overseeing a vast digital empire; the head of a multi-million-dollar political machine at Turning Point USA; a popularizer of the ideological fashions of the young and online right; an occasional adviser to Trump and his inner circle; and a bosom buddy with many of the most powerful denizens of the White House and Mar-a-Lago. Kirk has no real equivalent on the left. A rough approximation of a left-leaning Kirk would begin with some amalgamation of gun control activist-turned-erstwhile-DNC official David Hogg with the party consensus voice of the Pod Save America crew, supplemented by the online edginess of lefty streamer Hasan Piker and the institution-building power of a George Soros. Yet such a figure on the left is probably impossible. Kirk’s preternatural charisma and otherworldly fundraising abilities no doubt played a major role in his rise: During his early days of building TPUSA, stories circulated of skeptical megadonors writing five-figure checks after even the briefest of encounters with the 18-year-old Kirk. But a figure like Kirk is probably only possible within the unique circumstances of Trump’s GOP. Throughout his career, Kirk’s real superpower was intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump. Beginning in 2016, he systematically built political organizations to fulfill the functions once served by the party infrastructure that Trump destroyed. In the place of anemic campus groups like College Republicans, Kirk built Turning Point USA into a grassroots powerhouse with chapters on over 800 campuses. In the place of party-run turnout operations, he expanded the organization’s activist arm, Turning Point Action, into a multi-million dollar get-out-the-vote machine. He inserted his podcasts and his social media presences into the space left by traditional party messaging and media initiatives. As the GOP became an increasingly hollow shell with Trump — and Trump alone — at its core, Kirk created new institutional scaffolds to keep the rickety structure together around its leader. He was clear about his ambition to turn TPUSA into a kind of substitute for all the old official actors of the right. “We want to be an institution in this country that is as well-known and as powerful as The New York Times, Harvard and tech companies,” Kirk recently told Deseret News. “And we believe we’re creating that.” He didn’t quite succeed, but the success he did achieve gave him real political power within the GOP. In 2021, he identified then-candidate JD Vance as a rising figure in the MAGA movement and introduced Vance to the powers-that-be in Trump world. By some accounts, TPUSA’s get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states like Arizona and Wisconsin helped tip the 2024 election in Trump’s favor, earning Kirk a quietly powerful role in Trump’s transition effort and a direct line to the Oval Office. MAGA was a somewhat surprising ideological space for Kirk to have landed. Growing up in a wealthy Chicago suburb, Kirk began his career as a high-school student with a pronounced libertarian bent, a passion for Rush Limbaugh and a budding interest in Tea Party politics. After founding TPUSA in 2012 to challenge what he saw as progressive orthodoxy on college campuses (despite not attending college himself), he was somewhat slow to embrace Trump: In 2016, he supported Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then Sen. Ted Cruz, before joining the Trump campaign as a scheduler and social media coordination for Donald Trump Jr. Over the next eight years, Kirk built TPUSA and its activist wing, Turning Point Action, into two of the most powerful conservative youth groups in the nation — and essential vehicles of the MAGA movement. During the same period, he underwent a subtle ideological transformation of his own: He gradually left behind his Tea Party-era libertarianism in favor of a Trump-inflected populist nationalism, premised on the idea that conservatives were locked in a war to “save Western civilization,” as he recently put it to Deseret News, from the destructive forces of progressivism. During the pandemic, he embraced conservative Christianity and began hosting conferences that mixed Trumpian populism with more explicitly Christian nationalist ideas. All the while, he perfected his more potent method of political evangelism: the live, in-person debate on college campuses, where he would spar with students about wokeness, race, immigration politics, faith, family and any other culture war skirmish of the day. Even in the realm of ideas, Kirk exploited the ideological landscape that Trump’s hollowing out of the Republican Party had left in its wake. A party without strong institutional structures is also devoid of any meaningful ideological checks, one where the boundaries between its intellectual mainstream and its ideological fringe — to the extent that those boundaries exist at all — are extremely porous. Kirk expertly navigated this porousness to build his brand, vacillating between an apparently good-natured “just asking questions” earnestness and a real tolerance — and even appetite — for extreme ideas. Kirk sat for hours-long debates with liberal college kids, then turned around to seek out right-leaning figures that even many within the MAGA movement considered beyond the pale — people like the openly theocratic pastor Doug Wilson, whom Kirk invited to a TPUSA faith summit in 2024, or the monarchist writer Curtis Yarvin, a one-time guest on Kirk’s podcast. In one breath, he professed — and often lived out — a commitment to small-L liberal debate in the old-school market of ideas; in the next, he flirted with implicitly anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideas, including the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet Kirk’s real power was never as an intellectual or a theorist — he tended to reflect ideological trends on the right rather than set them — but as an institutional builder in a landscape where all the institutions had been dynamited. And that, in part, helps explain why he still has no real counterpart on the left. Kirk arrived on the Republican scene at a moment when conservative institutions had been leveled by Trump and his allies. Starting from these decimated foundations, he was able to build his way into every corner of Trump’s GOP. The Democratic Party today suffers from a hollowness of its own, but its existing structures still stand — for better and for worse. As Kirk well understood, you can’t become the New York Times, Harvard and Meta all rolled into one if those institutions still hold sway.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba plans to step down from his leadership role after less than a year on the job. He announced his intention to resign during a press conference on Sunday. Ishiba won the leadership of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party in September last year, effectively landing him the prime minister’s job. His party lost its majority in the lower house during snap elections in November 2024, and a LDP-led coalition also failed to secure a majority in the upper house elections this past July. The Liberal Democratic Party has been gripped by a scandal over the misuse of campaign funds since 2023. In July, Japan reached a trade deal with the U.S., which was signed into effect by U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday. Under the agreement, the U.S. imposes 15 percent tariffs on most goods, and Japan pledges to invest $550 billion into the U.S. Ishiba cited the completion of the trade deal with the U.S. as a reason for him to step down and not run in an upcoming leadership contest of the Liberal Democratic Party.