Before the elections on April 12, a scandal engulfed the Hungarian government. On leaked recordings, foreign minister Péter Szijjártó can be heard deferentially acquiescing to his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and passing on information from EU meetings. Szijjártó appeared willing to help the Kremlin’s cause in Brussels, to remove oligarchs and their relatives from the EU blacklist, and to block efforts to aid Ukraine. Hungary’s advocacy for the Kremlin’s agenda culminated in its recent veto of fresh sanctions on Russia and over $100 billion in loans to Ukraine. On X, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote that while “Hungary is and will be in the European Union, Victor Orbán and his foreign minister left Europe long ago.” And the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin described Szijjárto’s calls with Lavrov as both “sinister” and “alarming.”

Szijjárto alleged that “foreign intelligence services, with the active involvement of Hungarian journalists, have been intercepting my phone calls.” It is a plot, the Hungarian government claims, to influence the upcoming polls. Orbán directly blames Ukraine for seeking to unseat his government. The opposition, led by Peter Magyar, has a healthy lead in the polls and describes the Hungarian government’s closeness to the Kremlin as “treason.” According to European intelligence reports, Moscow sent a three-person team to Hungary, overseen by Putin confidant Sergei Kiriyenko who ran an operation to interfere in the Moldovan election back in September. His tactics encompassed “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.” A Kremlin-linked media consultancy, facing EU sanctions, was hired to dismiss Magyar as a Brussels stooge and portray Orbán as the only candidate strong enough to to be treated as an equal by world leaders, as evidenced by the strength of his relationship with Trump. 

Despite a war with Iran that doesn’t appear to be going entirely to plan, the U.S. president took time out to back Orbán with enthusiasm and at considerable length on Truth Social. Trump said Orbán was “a true friend, fighter, and WINNER.” JD Vance, the vice president, is scheduled to visit Hungary on April 7, just five days before the election. And secretary of state Marco Rubio went to Hungary in February. It is now part of the U.S. National Security Strategy to work towards “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” To that end, notes the U.S. government, “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.” Orbán speaks MAGA’s language on immigration, traditional values and the Christian essence of Western societies. He is, like Putin and Trump, in MAGA’s view, an implacable opponent of secular, progressive, globalist politics as symbolised by Brussels.

Orbán, the longest serving current head of government in the EU, has become a figurehead for populist, nationalist movements across the world. The recent CPAC Hungary summit was attended by several of these leaders including France’s Marine Le Pen, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders,who called Orbán “a lion on a continent led by sheep.” Latin American leaders close to Trump , including Javier Milei of Argentina and Jose Antonio Kast of Chile, also attended. Milei, who gave the longest speech at the summit, said Orbán was “a beacon for all… who refuse to accept that the West's destiny is one of managed decline.” This international network, with the United States and Russia included, has a vested ideological interest in seeing Orban continue to remain a thorn in the EU's side. 

But what can Brussels do? The answer, it appears, is not much. The EU is consensus driven; it needs all its parts to act in concert, giving holdouts like Orbán considerable power to hold the whole bloc hostage. But given Orbán’s prominence as an ideologue, when Hungary blocks sanctions or delays support for Ukraine, it is more than a single nation going rogue. Alice Weidler, co-chair of the far-right AfD, the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag, was among those who spoke at the CPAC Hungary conference last month. Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, is an Orbán ally. On April 19, Bulgaria will have its eighth general election in just five years. Former president Rumen Radev’s new Progressive Party leads the polls and shares Orbán’s pro-Kremlin, anti-EU inclinations.

So polarized is the Hungarian election, that right wing groups are deploying their own observers from Argentina, Austria, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Serbia, Tanzania and the United States to monitor proceedings. EU observers have said the Hungarian government controls the national media and a recent documentary alleges that a desperate government is resorting to vote-buying, gerrymandering and intimidation tactics. It’s hard to see how either Orbán or Magyar will accept the election result without protest, unless the margin is crushing. But, given Trump’s disdain for NATO allies and the EU, an Orbán election defeat would be a much-needed victory for European unity. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Few tiny details are more consequential than the rules around democratic processes, and particularly those that define who pays for them: just look at the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in a dull-sounding case in 2010. A lot of other democracies are looking at the U.S. right now and thinking they’d like to avoid replicating this experiment with endless money, which is one reason why the UK has a new ‘Representation of the People Bill’.

As it stands, it looks like a big missed opportunity.

Much of the requirement for the tighter rules proposed in the bill is the need to tackle foreign interference, a concern stoked by suggestions that the Kremlin helped secure victory for both Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Although I can see why we don’t want Vladimir Putin near our political systems, I’ve always thought these concerns missed the point: home-grown oligarchs dislike democracy as much as Russian ones do and, since they are more numerous, richer and far better-connected, we should worry about them more.

So, it is a great shame that the UK’s new bill hasn’t imposed a cap on political donations to prevent the kind of funding arms race that has infected the United States, and which is gearing up in the UK too, or stripped away a lot of the unnecessary complexity in the existing regulations that create the kind of loopholes exploited in the Brexit referendum. Most importantly, it has failed to address the growing threat of cryptocurrencies and impose the same kind of ban on crypto donations that Ireland has.

A democracy is sovereign, and a crucial defence of that sovereignty is ensuring only actual voters fund its operations. British law enforcement agencies acknowledge that they already don’t have the resources they need to keep up with what bad actors are doing with crypto, so why would politicians take the risk of allowing crooks to buy influence by making it easier for them to hide what they’re doing?

“If you put an element of crypto in what is already a complicated and sometimes lengthy trail to hide the true source of the funds, you are just adding another layer of complexity. Anything we can do to take away that friction is good,” said Rachael Herbert, director of the National Economic Crime Centre, to a parliamentary committee.

It is not too late to close this gap in the bill, and to prevent it from becoming one of those little details with huge consequences. Blocking cryptocurrencies will not solve the problem caused by oligarchs’ assault on democracy, but at least it would help not make it worse, and it is always easier to mend things before they break.

On that note, credit to Daniel Lobo-Lewis for trying to use some of the mechanisms of the unregulated U.S. political funding system for a good cause (“Give us money to get money out of politics. It makes sense if you don't think about it too hard”) by creating the political integrity project. He’s built a tracker so you can see how much cash different candidates have raised, and which of them have pledged to try to get money out of politics, and it’s a lot of fun to play around with. 

Here’s what it looks like when there is unfettered money in politics. Lobbyists for crypto firms are planning to spend $263 million on the midterm elections this year. That is not only more than the entire oil and gas industry spent in 2024, but more than double the total spent by all parties in the UK’s last general election. This is not healthy.

I’ve largely avoided writing about the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, because I don’t feel like I have anything to add to what everyone else has already said, but they do spectacularly demonstrate the size of the threat posed to girls in particular and society in general when the political, cultural, financial and economic elites of a country become entangled, give each other money, do each other favours, and generally take over the world. 

Preventing this kind of collusion is why it’s important to keep big money out of politics, so at least there is a source of power in society that’s independent of the oligarchs.

Crooks thriving in chaos

While on the subject of human trafficking, Chainalysis has produced this alarming report on how crypto helped traffickers move their profits last year, including from child sexual abuse material (CSAM), with a staggering 85% increase in them dong so over 2024.

“CSAM networks have evolved to subscription-based models and show increasing overlap with sadistic online extremism (SOE) communities, while strategic use of U.S.-based infrastructure suggests sophisticated operational planning,” the report notes.

The report gives more evidence for how Chinese money laundering networks based in Southeast Asia are using cryptocurrencies to expand their influence globally (as they also are in fraud), with business deals coordinated via the encrypted messaging app Telegram, and laundered via sophisticated techniques beyond the reach of law enforcement even at the best of times.

And this is not the best of times, what with the United States having abdicated its traditional role as the only country serious about investigating, prosecuting and convicting financial criminals.

“Enforcement is now solely in Washington’s hands, allowing politically driven cases to proceed or be stifled,” noted John Lothian in this scathing commentary contextualised by the FT. “Given the pardons issued by President Trump, there has never been a better time to be a crook. This chaotic formula for enforcement is a disaster or a cluster of disasters waiting to happen, given the explosive growth in retail futures trading, prediction markets, and legitimized crypto trading… ‘God help us’ is the last defence.”

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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The first two rounds, which began last month, have seen the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the party of the military junta, grab a substantial lead, putting it on course to form the next, notionally civilian, government. Only 131 of the country’s 330 townships are holding the elections in full, a further 118 townships are holding partial polls in areas the military controls, while polls in 65 townships have been canceled or suspended because of fighting. Opposition parties, including Aung Saan Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the last election in a landslide, have been forcibly dissolved. Criticism of the election has been criminalized.

ASEAN, the 11-nation regional bloc of which Myanmar is still officially a part, has said it will not recognize election results. The United Nations said the election “seems nearly certain to further ingrain insecurity, fear and polarization throughout the country.” And the European Union described the election as a “sham” before it even began. But Myanmar’s military junta does have powerful support. China has propped up the military regime in exchange for access to resources, and the Myanmar election was only announced after discussions between Xi Jinping and Min Aung Hlaing. Election observers include officials from Belarus, Russia, India and Nicaragua. And in September, Hlaing visited Moscow, signing agreements to cooperate on nuclear energy and space exploration, and to protect each other from international justice. 

This month, Myanmar’s military was forced to defend its conduct in the Hague, as hearings began at the International Court of Justice where it stands accused of of perpetrating a long-running genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Already, by 2018, as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had described the situation as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” In 2019, The Gambia approached the ICJ to file a lawsuit against Myanmar, the first filed on behalf of a persecuted people by a third party. The hearings, which have only just started and could take years to conclude, will nonetheless still have implications and set judicial precedents for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the ICJ.

Not that it has stopped Myanmar’s military from continuing to use methods, since deposing the democratically elected government in 2021, such as “arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians”  that Human Rights Watch said amounted to “war crimes.” Even now, the country is embroiled in bloody conflict. Over 170 armed resistance groups have coalesced to seize 42% of the country. Heavy bombing and artillery fire are commonplace throughout the country. Over 3,5 million people have been displaced into the likes of Thailand and India, 7,700 have been killed by the military, and over 30,300 arrested of which 630 are children.

A local medic from the mountainous Chin State, large swathes of which are rebel-held, told me she had been detained by Myanmar military forces while giving medical assistance to rebels. “My ankles and wrists were chained,” she said, “and wooden blocks were used as restraints.” She was beaten and threatened with sexual assault and said she could smell the dead bodies of other detainees.

This is the backdrop in which Myanmar goes to polls for the final phase of the elections. Despite ASEAN’s rejection of the results, China insists elections are a way out of the civil war and towards stability. In a recent column in the “South China Morning Post”, an analyst argued that “China is the only country with the clout, experience and contacts to talk and make deals with all sides.” Myanmar is a critical supplier of rare earths to China.

Given the transactional foreign policy that has become a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States, it’s perhaps not surprising that the White House too has been warming to Myanmar’s military government. As the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela and acquisitive, imperial interest in both Greenland and Canada show, all relations with foreign countries are seen exclusively in terms of economic and strategic value. Normalizing relations even with Myanmar’s authoritarian regime would be palatable if it delivered access to rare earths and caused unease in Beijing.

The United States, through USAID, played a strong supporting role in Myanmar’s elections in 2015 and 2020 and in 2024 warned about the deteriorating “human rights crisis” in the country. But in July last year, Myanmar’s military leader Hlaing sent Donald Trump a letter complimenting his “strong leadership.” It was a response to a letter from Washington outlining the tariff imposed on exports from Myanmar, a communication that the military junta treated as acknowledgement of its status as the legitimate government. The Trump administration then appeared interested in a dialogue with the Myanmar military junta about access to rare earths. Just weeks later, in what the Trump administration said was a coincidence, it lifted sanctions on individuals and companies connected to the junta.

Also in July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable to U.S. diplomats advising them to refrain from criticizing foreign elections as “consistent with the administration’s emphasis on national sovereignty.” And in November, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that Myanmar had “made notable progress in governance and stability” and had “plans for free and fair elections.” It was a remarkable statement of faith in a junta accused of genocide and of overthrowing a democratically elected civilian government, but consistent with the Trump administration’s prioritizing of transactional partnerships over moral principles. From January 26, Myanmar nationals will no longer be eligible for temporary protected status in the U.S., with the Trump administration citing the elections as evidence that Myanmar was safe.

With Russia, China and the U.S. in the Myanmar military’s corner, the implication is clear. The new Great Game is the global tussle for minerals and resources, making Venezuela, Greenland, Canada and Myanmar, among others, the new spheres of superpower hostility.

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Argentina’s president Javier Milei greeted news of Kast’s victory with a map of South America, divided neatly into red (left wing) and blue (right wing) halves. Lined up on the blue side were Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, with Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela prominent in red. “The left recedes,” posted Milei, “freedom advances.” Not surprisingly, president-elect Kast’s first trip after the election was to Buenos Aires this week where he embraced Milei and posed with a chainsaw, a reference to their shared promise to slash budgets and the size of their governments. Kast also found time in Buenos Aires to support Trump’s desire to force regime change in Venezuela. “It solves,” Kast said, “a gigantic problem for us.” 

This year has been terrible for incumbent left wing governments in South and Central America. In Ecuador and Bolivia, right-wing candidates were recently elected to office. Last month, Hondurans voted between three candidates; left-wing candidate Rixi Moncada trailed a center-right and a Trump-backed far-right candidate locked in a virtual tie as the country sent soldiers into the streets to calm tensions. Next year, both Colombia and Brazil will head to the polls in highly-anticipated elections. Kast, who lost in two previous attempts to become president, is arguably the most right wing politician to be elected president in Chile since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1990. Kast’s brother was a central banker during Pinochet’s rule and his father was a member of the Nazi party. “In a way,” Chilean academic Victor Muñoz Tamayo told me, “this is an election of our political moment.”

On Wednesday, Donald Trump posted that “Venezuela is completely surrounded” and will be “until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Alongside oil, the U.S. government prizes access to critical minerals. In the vast desert region known as Norte Grande lies an expanse of salt flats on the borderlands between Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. It is known as the “lithium triangle.” Here, roughly one-third of the world’s supply of lithium sits beneath the surface of the earth. Extracting this rare element, a key component of electric vehicle batteries, requires large quantities of water: roughly 500,000 gallons per ton of lithium carbonate. While the incumbent Chilean government sought to regulate the extraction of lithium and nationalize its production, Kast has said he favors a market approach. “They don't believe in climate change. They don't believe in protecting the rights of nature. They don't recognize ancestral communities,” says Daniela Rodriguez, a local “journalist and activist” in the town of San Pedro de Atacama. 

The choice of location – the upscale Santiago neighborhood of Las Condes – for Kast’s victory speech was no accident. In front of a crowd of thousands in this area of sleek high rises and banks nestled just below the nearby mountains, Kast said “Chile won. And the hope of living without fear won.” 

In the first round of voting in November, Jeannette Jara, who ran on a coalition platform that spanned from Communists to Christian Democrats, came out on top – garnering around 27 percent of votes. She beat out Kast, populist Franco Parisi, far-right libertarian Johannes Kaiser and center-right Evelyn Matthei. Originally from Conchalí, a poor commuter suburb of Santiago, Jara highlighted her working-class roots and accomplishments as labor minister under president Gabriel Boric. In this role, Jara passed laws to raise the minimum wage, gradually reduce the work week and partially reform the country’s private pension system – a legacy of the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship. In Chile, Boric was elected on a wave of popular discontent that coalesced in the nationwide 2019 social movement known as the estallido social (social outburst), but once in office, he struggled to impose his transformative vision, including a rewrite of the 1980 constitution. Jara’s party affiliation and her connection to Boric (whose approval rating sits around 30 percent) hampered  her candidacy. 

In campaign spots, Kast frequently red-baited Jara, playing on long-held fears of the Communist party that still persist in Chile. “Vote 5 [Kast’s ballot number], without communism, without communism,” went the lyrics of one popular campaign jingle. Kast has also minimized his previous support for Pinochet, whose regime arrested, tortured and disappeared thousands of opposition members and leftists. As a candidate in 2017, Kast said he would have voted for the dictator and has said Pinochet “saved” the country from communism. Though he was once known for his extreme policy positions, Kast successfully moderated his tone when campaigning. “In the past,” Muñoz Tamayo explained, “he talked about things like eliminating the Ministry of Women. Now, he focuses on public order, crime, and uncontrolled migration. They’re right-wing, radical issues, but also very popular.” There are an estimated 336,000 undocumented refugees in Chile, many of them from Venezuela. 

It’s an issue that has made some voters ignore Kast’s praise for Pinochet. I traveled to Los Vilos, a couple of hours north of Santiago by bus, where I met former student activist Joaquín Vidal at the seaside bed-and-breakfast he runs. Vidal showed me tokens he kept in a box from his eight-month spell in prison for participating in a protest against Pinochet’s rule. He went into exile in 1982. One of the items he’d kept in the box was a leather belt signed by his fellow inmates. “Normally, I’d give these items to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights,” he told me. “But I’m worried the far-right might shut it down.” 

In parliamentary elections on November 15, right-wing parties gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, giving Kast an unprecedented mandate. While campaigning, Kast was able to reassure a country paralyzed by fear that he was focused on the issues that mattered to them. But executing on his promises, which include forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and implementing austerity measures will be difficult. Over seafood in a Santiago restaurant, Jorge Heine, Chile's former ambassador to China, South Africa and India, told me that Kast “does not have a proper team of experienced public policy specialists and professionals to run the country.” This, he added, “does not bode well.” 

Despite the tenor of the election, Heine told me, “the truth is Kast will be handed a country that is in pretty good shape and by no means ‘in crisis,’ as he likes to say.” The question is, “will he act like [Italian prime minister Giorgia] Meloni or Trump?” Chile’s election of a Trump-supporting right wing president comes at a time that the White House has revealed its extensive plans for the region. 

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” posted Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property.” It's an attitude that informs current White House policy in Latin America, even though the United Nations enshrined the principle of “permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources” in 1962. Miller is effectively saying that countries like Venezuela should not be sovereign, but instead vassal-states. The ‘Trump Corollary,’ the U.S. government’s updating of the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, claims “as a condition of our security and prosperity” the right to “assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.” Its actions in Venezuela are a demonstration of this intent. 

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Our reporting on the Big Lie:

There's a particular satisfaction—and unease—that comes with watching a pattern you've tracked for years suddenly manifest in your own neighborhood, before your mayor-elect even takes office.

In January 2022, we published "The Year the Big Lie Went Global," documenting how election fraud rhetoric had become a transnational phenomenon—from Trump to Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Fujimori, and Germany's far-right. The piece traced what seemed, at the time, like a disturbing but spreading phenomenon: politicians losing elections and refusing to accept the results, citing voter fraud without evidence.

We're republishing that piece alongside this essay, not because we've run out of stories to tell, but to show how the infrastructure documented then is now operating in real-time. Read them side by side to see how the pattern has evolved.

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. According to research from Equality Labs, over 1.15 million Islamophobic social media posts about Mamdani have circulated since January 2025, with user reach exceeding 150 billion impressions. Another 1.43 million posts have labeled him "communist." Forty-five Republican officials from 18 states amplified attacks. Twenty-six international politicians from 14 countries joined in.*

Within hours of his victory, this machinery of disinformation went into overdrive. A viral false narrative spread claiming pro-Trump "hackers" had infiltrated his election night party—the reality was simply a television screen showing election coverage. Texas Republican Alexander Duncan, running in the 2026 Senate race, falsely claimed a noncitizen had traveled to New York to illegally vote for Mamdani, misinterpreting what was clearly a joke post on X. The claim was promoted repeatedly within Elon Musk's "Election Integrity Community" on X.

Then came the ISIS fabrications. Accounts began circulating a fake statement purportedly from ISIS's propaganda apparatus, alluding to attacks in New York on Election Day. Laura Loomer, a self-described "Islamophobe" and Trump confidante, amplified it: "The Muslims can't think of a better way for the Muslims to celebrate the victory of a Muslim mayoral candidate today than by committing an ISIS attack in NYC." Her post gathered 203,000 views and was picked up by the former CIA agent Sarah Adams, who added credibility to the fabrication: "ISIS is threatening New York City today. If you still think appeasing terrorists will make them stop, you clearly haven't gotten the memo." Adam’s post, now deleted, reached 200,000 views and was re-posted by Duncan, who claimed it proved "ISIS is openly supporting [Mamdani]." That iteration received 1.3 million views in a single day.

By the next morning, Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, was calling for federal investigation into Mamdani's citizenship, urging the Justice Department and DHS to act immediately. "If the guy lied on his naturalization papers, he ought to be deported out of the country immediately and put on a plane to Uganda," Bannon told POLITICO. Mamdani was born in Uganda, moved to the U.S. at age seven, and is an American citizen. 

But here's what makes Bannon's response dangerous: he recognized exactly how Mamdani won—the ground game, the turnout operation, "the Trump model"—yet still questioned his legitimacy. You no longer need to deny victory to undo it. You question whether the victor deserves to govern at all. This normalizes permanent contestability, where democratic outcomes are never final, just opening moves in a longer battle over who gets power.

At Coda, we don't chase daily headlines. We track what we call "currents"—the underlying forces that shape multiple issues across different contexts. In 2022, we documented election fraud rhetoric as transnational. What was reactive then—politicians refusing to concede—is now pre-emptive: attacks before the winner even takes office.

That original piece showed us something: Bolsonaro declaring fraud "the only possible explanation" for potential defeat. Netanyahu calling an election transition "the greatest election fraud in history." Germany’s far-right spreading US conspiracies about voting machines they don't use. Each seemed isolated. Together, they revealed something systematic. The speed, coordination, and pre-emptive nature of these tactics was becoming operational by 2022. Now it's refined.

This is why we want you to read the 2022 piece: not as vindication, but as a baseline. The infrastructure that was built then is now operating in real-time against a New York mayor.

The 2022 article ends with Keiko Fujimori's supporters in Peru, bulletproof vests, calling for military intervention rather than accept election results. Three years later: coordinated attempts to delegitimize a US mayor-elect begin before he takes office, with calls to investigate his citizenship and threats of federal action.

From Lima to Harlem, the logic is identical: delegitimize before governing, and you can frame every decision as illegitimate from day one. When Mamdani announces his first appointment, proposes his first policy, makes his first budget decision, the machinery is already positioned to question not just the decision, but his right to make it.

Make democratic outcomes feel perpetually contestable, and power flows to those who control the machinery of doubt, not to those who win votes.

Reading the 2022 piece now, you'll recognize this logic operating around you—not as disconnected controversies, but as infrastructure serving a purpose.

Essay by Natalia Antelava

Our 2022 story, republished

The year the Big Lie went global

From Brazil to Israel, politicians are flirting with election fraud conspiracies and undermining faith in democracy

By Erica Hellerstein

25 January 2022

Close your eyes, for a moment, and imagine the evening of November 7, 2012.

Barack Obama had just won reelection in a hard-fought presidential race and the celebrity host of “The Apprentice” was stewing. Back then, Donald Trump was a mere reality TV star and a staunch proponent of the birther conspiracy, the baseless claim that Obama was born abroad, and therefore ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Those were also the days when Trump was still on Twitter, and he took to the bird app to voice his dismay with the U.S. electoral college system. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he declared, in a series of now belligerently familiar tweets. “We are not a democracy!”

Fast-forward a decade. That Twitter tantrum that generated a few eye-rolls from coastal media in 2012 now reads like foreshadowing to the kaleidoscope of election fraud myths that have metastasized since the 2020 election and proven ever more resilient. Some 60% of Republicans believe that the last presidential election was stolen. 

This “Big Lie” – the meritless claim that the election was hijacked by voter fraud and President Joe Biden was its illegitimate victor – has had tangible policy consequences, leading to the introduction of a slew of state house bills in the U.S. that would restrict voter access, and inspiring Trump acolytes in swing states to run for offices that oversee elections, a development one Democratic secretary of state characterized as a “five-alarm fire.”

The Big Lie reshaping America’s electoral landscape is also providing fertile ground for politicians abroad, who are adopting the rhetoric of widespread voter fraud over the inconvenient realities of legitimate electoral loss. From Brazil to Israel, accusations of rigged elections are gaining momentum, animating conspiracists, and undermining faith in the democratic process. Here are four examples:

Brazil

Trump fanboy and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro defended Trump’s allegations of voter fraud the day after the disastrous January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol. “What was the problem that caused that whole crisis, basically? Lack of trust in the election,” he hypothesized. “There were people who voted three, four times. Dead people voted. It was a free-for-all.” It’s not just the U.S. electoral system Bolsonaro railed against. For months, the Brazilian president has been leveling fraud claims against Brazil’s electronic voting system and already questioning the legitimacy of the country’s upcoming 2022 presidential race – but only if he loses, naturally.

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Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s electoral system come as polls consistently show him trailing the candidate most likely to run against him, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Recognizing the importance of the upcoming election, Trump allies – including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon – have thrown their weight behind Bolsonaro and are faithfully propping up his voter fraud allegations. According to the New York Times, Bannon argued Bolsonaro “will only lose if ‘the machines’ steal the election.” Bolsonaro, too, has preempted a loss to Lula by declaring fraud as the only possible explanation for his defeat, and has suggested he won’t concede the election if that happens. “I have three alternatives for my future,” Bolsonaro explained of his electoral prospects in August. “Being arrested, killed, or victory.” 

Israel

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded downright Trumpy in June as a coalition of opposition lawmakers were poised to remove him from office. “We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in the history of the country,” he declared, arguing the coalition that later succeeded in ousting him was in league with the “deep state” and the journalists covering the news were “taking part in a propaganda machine enlisted in favor of the left.” The rhetoric became so heated in the country’s online spaces in the lead-up to Netanyhau’s ouster that the directory of the country’s security agency, the Shin Bet, released an exceedingly rare statement warning of “ a serious rise and radicalization in violent and inciting discourse” that could lead to political violence, drawing comparisons to the warnings that preceded the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Although Netanyahu did eventually step aside for his replacement and the country was spared from the alarming prospect of an Israeli version of the QAnon Shaman, the former prime minister has yet to walk back his earlier allegations of election fraud.

Germany

Even Germany hasn’t been spared from the abyss of election conspiracies. As Coda reported in the fall, the Big Lie found an eager audience among a number of leaders within the country’s far-right movement, who have amplified Trump-inspired false claims about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the country’s 2021 parliamentary elections. Unsurprisingly, some of the conspiracies were well outside reality. While the country doesn’t use voting machines, one researcher found U.S-originated conspiracies about rigged voting machines circulating through the country’s right-wing social media outlets over the summer. “These alternative realities that are created in the United States, and are really popular there, have a huge impact on countries that the U.S. is allied with,” he explained. At a campaign event in eastern Germany, a politician with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party urged supporters to vote in person rather than by mail, citing the possibility of election fraud and warning them to “stay alert.” The election, a voter told Schultheis, “is going to be manipulated.”

Peru

Keiko Fujimori promotes the election fraud myth that just wouldn’t quit. In June, Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, lost the country’s presidential election to leftist rival Pedro Castillo, and then refused to concede the race, leveling unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and demanding tens of thousands of ballots be thrown out, leading to massive pro-Fujimori rallies in which supporters donned bullet-proof vests and prophesied about civil war. 

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Though Washington and the European Union called the election fair and international observers found no evidence of fraud, the claims delayed the country’s election certification process by a nail-biting six weeks. Castillo was eventually declared the winner, but experts worry Fujimori’s Big Lie amplification has deeply damaged faith in the country’s democratic institutions and radicalized elements of the country’s right. Consider this disturbing New York Times dispatch a month after the election:

“In the crowd at one recent Fujimori rally, a group of young men wearing bulletproof vests and helmets marched with makeshift shields painted with the Cross of Burgundy, a symbol of the Spanish empire popular among those who celebrate their European heritage. One man flashed what looked like a Nazi salute.

Ms. Fujimori, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, part of a larger Peruvian-Japanese community, has allied herself closely with the country’s often European-descended elite, just as her father eventually did.

A number of her supporters have talked casually about their hope that the military will intervene.

“Just for a moment, until the military can say: ‘You know what? New elections,’” said Marco Antonio Centeno, 54, a school administrator. “The alternative is totalitarianism.”

Original story by Erica Hellerstein

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The dictatorship I was born in – the Soviet Union – was old and senile, much like the succession of its fossilized leaders who would appear at a plenary session one day and drop dead the next. By then, the bankrupt communist system was in its final throes, allegorically lampooned in film and literature while the nomenklatura played a desperate game of whack-a-mole with the ideas of freedom and nationalism that popped up in every corner of the exhausted empire.

Now in my forties, I’m watching a dictatorship return, watching it metastasize across the body of my country, Georgia, and eat away at the precious freedoms gained in the intermission.

“Georgia will never be Belarus,” was our presumptuous little mantra. We Georgians were too rambunctious, too freedom-loving to allow autocracy back in our midst. Since 1991, Georgia has had several  presidents and a dozen prime ministers. The Belarusians have had one bewhiskered man in charge for the last 30 years. Perhaps our post-Soviet peers up north are simply not feisty enough to put up a proper fight. But to put us temperamental southerners under some mustachioed strongman’s thumb? Ooh, we’d like to see you try.

We even chanted this Belarus refrain when we poured into the streets of our capital, Tbilisi, last fall to tell our all-powerful oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, that he does not own our country. We do. Squaring up to riot police, we held up posters and shook our fists, denouncing the oligarch-controlled government’s betrayal of the constitutionally-mandated pathway towards integration with the European Union and, with it, the betrayal of the promise to build a modern democracy.

After many arrests and fractured facial bones, we no longer chant that mantra with the same certitude in our voices. Dozens of young protesters are locked away in prisons, some still showing signs of the brutal beatings they suffered while in custody. Meanwhile surveillance technology, including facial recognition software, has been used to track down demonstrators and drown them in hefty fines.

Courts churn out guilty verdicts robotically and an opposition-free parliament is cranking out repressive laws to choke off dissent. From the prime minister down, Georgian government officials kowtow to Ivanishvili, the oligarch-in-chief and founder of the ruling party, who does not sport a mustache or have a formal position in the government but does own this country.  

IIt is true that Georgia was never a blossoming democracy. My country was indeed institutionally ill-equipped to resist privatization by one (extremely) rich man. But most of us also thought that we were way past the stage when a regress into authoritarianism and isolation was possible. Ironically, it was in fact a democratic breakthrough that brought us to this juncture. 

Thirteen years ago, when the nation’s richest son came down from his futuristic, hilltop castle in Tbilisi to announce his political ambitions, too many were fooled by his promises of freedom and prosperity. Political groups of every hue and stripe joined the army of the discontented that Ivanishvili raised to unseat President Mikheil Saakashvili, a pro-West reformer who caught the autocracy bug toward the end of his rule.

The oligarch’s alliance, Georgian Dream, became an unstoppable juggernaut as it rolled towards parliament, with respectable opposition figures and intellectuals hopping onboard in anticipation of key posts in the prospective new government. The billionaire’s manner suggested that he was not, as Russians are wont to say, exactly scarred with intellect. So his complacent new allies assumed that he did not have the experience, the sophistication, and the vocabulary to run the country on his own or bend it to his will. 

A few Cassandras did offer routine warnings that behind a simpleton’s façade was a tough man with a Machiavellian mind. It shouldn’t have been hard to guess. After all, Ivanishvili managed to make his fortune in the dog-eat-dog world of 1990s Russia and, unlike many from that crop of oligarchs, lived to tell the tale.

Aware of Ivanishvili’s penchant for philanthropy, voters across our cash-strapped nation were overcome by hope that the billionaire’s riches would trickle down to them. He encouraged these expectations. In one campaign stunt, his lieutenants placed glass boxes in the streets, asking passers-by to write their wishes on little cards and put them in the boxes for the wealthy Santa Claus to review at his leisure. Lines quickly formed and the boxes brimmed with Georgian dreams.

Saakashvili, though, was not going down without a fight. But Georgia’s American and European friends took him aside for a lecture on democracy. You can’t be serious about joining the democratic club, they said, without ensuring something as basic as the peaceful transfer of power. Saakashvili accepted defeat. And Ivanishvili took note: maintaining friendships with the West and accepting their rules was problematic to anyone planning to acquire and hold onto power.

The election of 2012 resulted in Georgia’s first-ever democratic transfer of power – previously, revolutions and civil wars were the preferred modes of operation. The country soon came to boast of a highly pluralistic environment. Groups and individuals of all backgrounds and political persuasions filled legislative and executive seats. A cacophonic multitude of media outlets became free to pursue every story and angle.

In contrast to Saakashvili, who shunned critical media, Ivanishvili spoiled us journalists with hours-long, everyone-is-welcome press conferences, where he fielded every question and told awkward jokes. Soon the EU agreed visa-free and customs tax-free deals with Georgia, and the popular desire for membership in the bloc finally seemed within reach. Freedom and democracy were here to stay and there was no going back. 

Fast-forward a decade and you will find journalists and opposition politicians in prison. Critical media, human rights groups and corruption watchdogs are harassed and demonized. Politicians with values and minds of their own are banished from governance, and the Georgian Dream party has been reduced to a featureless monolith of yes-men.

The bid for EU membership is suspended. Georgia’s longtime partners, the EU and U.S., have been shown the door and requested to end their long-running support for democracy-building in Georgia. Moscow, once public enemy number one for Georgia, has become a source of inspiration for repressive ideas and pinches Tbilisi’s cheek in affectionate approval. 

Kremlinesque laws raise the cost of political dissent and threaten to scatter Georgia’s once vibrant civil society – a key driver of democratic change for years. One of the laws that Georgian Dream borrowed from Russia’s playbook requires international donor-sponsored civil-society organizations and media to register as foreign agents – a label that in the local sense primarily connotes a foreign spy – or go to prison.

In a classic authoritarian move for this part of the world, the oligarch’s government styles itself as a guardian of the heterosexual integrity of the nation in the face of gender confusion and sexual incontinence supposedly foisted upon our proud Christian nation by the West. Homophobic laws and rhetoric further demonize and disenfranchise Georgia’s long-suffering LBGTQ community. 

Somewhere in the corridors of power in Tbilisi, gathering dust, are the glass boxes full of Georgian dreams written down on cards by ordinary people filled with hope. A source with access to Georgian Dream’s offices managed to extract a handful of these cards and hand them over to me.

In these cards, people ask the oligarch for jobs and apartments, to sponsor tuition fees and medical treatment. Reading through these requests, I began to see how easy it was for one absurdly wealthy man to trick a whole country into surrendering itself to him. 

Perhaps the most painful part of Georgia’s rapid descent towards dictatorship is that you now see people you know – friends, relatives, colleagues – becoming a part of the system, or at least refusing to resist it. 

When the dictatorship of my childhood imploded, an entire generation, including university professors like my parents, found themselves lost and unneeded in the strange new world that the shattered superpower left in its wake. That world belonged to opportunists like Ivanishvili, who made fortunes in murky waters. Those who could not, migrated, streaming abroad to make a living. They drove cabs and cleaned homes in foreign cities, complaining to their eye-rolling clients that they were educated professionals – teachers, engineers and musicians – back in their obscure homeland.   

Maybe people in those cities, even now, look at Georgia and say “that could never happen to us.” They have, they reassure themselves, democratic traditions that go way back and institutions in place to guard against encroachments on their freedoms. “We will,” they might say, “never be a Georgia.” They would be wrong.

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On May 18, Romanians will vote in the second and final round of elections to pick their president, with Simion, a decisive first round winner, the favourite, albeit current polling shows he is running neck-and-neck with his opponent Nicusor Dan, the relatively liberal current mayor of Bucharest. Also on that day, the first round of Poland’s presidential elections will take place. Nawrocki, analysts suggest, is likely to lose to the more liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski. 

But Simion’s appearance in Warsaw did cause anger, with one Polish member of the European parliament describing both candidates as representatives of “Putin’s international”. Simion denies being pro-Kremlin, but wants to stop military aid to Ukraine. An ultranationalist, he promotes the rebuilding of a greater Romania, raising the prospect of potential territorial disputes with Ukraine, Moldova, and Bulgaria. Indeed, he is already banned from entering both Moldova and Ukraine. 

Rather than Russia, the association Simion prefers to acknowledge is with Donald Trump and MAGA. As he said of his visit to Poland and support for Nawrocki, “Together, we could become two pro-MAGA presidents committed to reviving our partnership with the United States and strengthening stability along NATO’s eastern flank.”

Certainly, Simion’s MAGA love was on show during the first round of Romania’s election on May 4, and MAGA reciprocated that love. 

At the party’s Bucharest headquarters, on a warm, triumphant election night, with Simion having won over 40% of the votes, a MAGA hat-wearing American took to the podium. He asked the cheering crowd if they wanted their own "Trump hat", and threw one (and only one) towards a section chanting "MAGA, MAGA, MAGA." Brian Brown, a prominent conservative activist, was in his element, expressing solidarity with jubilant Simion supporters. 

"You, my friends," he said, "are in the eye of the storm. What happens in this country will define what happens all over Europe. And Americans know it and more and more are waking up to the truth that we must stand together. We must never be silenced." Meanwhile, a protester screaming “fascists” was quickly removed. 

Brown, who leads the anti-LGBTQ group International Organization for the Family and has been described by human rights organizations as an "infamous exporter of hate and vocal Putin supporter," was celebrating a seismic political shift. In response to Simion’s large first round victory, Romania's prime minister resigned. His own party's establishment candidate didn’t even make it to the May 18 second round. 

Simion, a 38-year-old Eurosceptic and self-described "Trumpist," had founded his far-right nationalist party, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) just over a decade ago. At the AUR offices on election night – with Simion himself only appearing by video – Brown drew explicit parallels between Romania's situation and that of America, extolling the "friendship of true Romanians and true Americans, people that stand together against a lie." Right wing leaders in other countries echoed the sentiment. Italy's deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, for instance, declared on social media that Romanians had "finally voted, freely, with their heads and hearts." 

Romania's election became a right wing cause célèbre after the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential polls in December last year, ruling that it had been vitiated by a Russian influence operation. U.S. vice president JD Vance accused Romania of canceling the election based on “flimsy suspicions” and Elon Musk described the head of the Constitutional Court as a “tyrant”. This is why MAGA supporters took a keen interest in the May 4 do-over. It was, according to  Brown, a litmus test for freedom, for the voters’ right to choose their president, no matter how unpalatable he might be to the establishment. 

In November, 2024, far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won the first round of Romania’s presidential elections. The polls were scuppered though after intelligence revealed irregularities in campaign funding and that Russia had been involved in the setting up of almost 800 TikTok accounts backing Georgescu’s candidacy. He was also barred from participating in the rerun.

Distrust and disapproval of Romania’s political system have been growing ever since. When I got to Bucharest, my taxi driver, the first person I met, told me he wouldn’t even bother voting in the rerun. The ban on Georgescu was portrayed in right wing circles as anti-democratic. And the support he received from leading Trump administration figures such as Vance was in keeping with their support for far-right parties across Europe. 

Before Friedrich Merz won a contentious parliamentary vote to become German Chancellor, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Germany was a “tyranny in disguise” because its intelligence services classified the anti-immigration AfD, now Germany’s main opposition party, as “confirmed right wing extremist[s].” Vance said the “bureaucrats” were trying to destroy “the most popular party in Germany.” It proved, he added, that decades after the West brought down the Berlin Wall, the German establishment had “rebuilt” it. The outspoken nature of this intervention in the internal politics of an ally shows that the Trump administration would rather maintain ideological ties with far-right parties in Europe than follow traditional diplomatic protocols. 

Simion, for his part, has said that he’s a natural ally of the U.S. Republican Party, and that AUR is “almost perfectly aligned ideologically with the MAGA movement.” Just two weeks before the Romanian elections, Brian Brown met with Simion and his wife in Washington, D.C., with both men propagating their affinity to “the free world” and “Judeo-Christian legacy” in an Instagram video. Simion is also currently being scrutinized over attempts to hire a lobbying firm in the U.S. for $1.5 million to secure meetings with key American political figures and media appearances with U.S. journalists. 

In Romania, the president has a semi-executive role that comes with considerable powers over foreign policy, national security, defence spending and judicial appointments. The Romanian president also represents the country on the international stage and can veto important EU votes – a level of influence that might be considered handy on the other side of the Atlantic too.

The fact that both U.S. and other European far-right leaders came in person to offer their support to Simion after the first round of the election, or paid obeisance online, shows how it’s becoming increasingly important for the far-right to to be seen as a coherent, global force. As Brown put it in Bucharest: “We need MAGA and MEGA. Make America great again. Make Europe great again.” 

With Canada and Australia swinging to the center-left in their recent elections – in what many have called “the Trump slump” – the Romanian election offers Trump and MAGA hope that it can continue to remake the world in its own image. The irony is that MAGA, with its global offshoots, is arguably the most effective contemporary international solidarity movement, despite railing against globalism and being so apparently parochial in its outlook. 

A version of this story was published in last week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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In Damascus, as over half a century of iron-fisted dictatorship crumbled to dust, journalist Zeina Shahla described the atmosphere:

• "I have lived in Damascus through all the years of the war, and this week has been like nothing else. The first two days were really violent. Now, though, people are back at work, shops are open, somehow life is becoming normal.  The future is still ambiguous. We got rid of a dictatorship that was ruining the country. We’re waiting, though, for news about the detainees. There are  more than 100,000 disappeared persons in Syria but only a few thousand have been freed. I’m still meeting each day with people who say ‘we’re searching for our loved ones. In prisons and hospitals.’ And there are many things to worry about – the economy, education, freedom of speech, freedom for women. But we have a rare chance to build something that unites all Syrians and to ensure that the Syria we are dreaming of is going to be inclusive.” 

Dialing in from a night bus making its way to Kyiv from Damascus, Oz Katerji, a British-Lebanese war correspondent and documentary filmmaker who is based in the Ukrainian capital, told us that what happened in Syria “really did feel like a slide backwards for autocracy”:

• “The story of the last 10 years has been autocrats in the ascendancy, with the interventions of Russia and Iran. So for all this to be undone in 13 days has sent a shockwave through the international community. What I saw in Damascus was a people free and expressing themselves in public for the first time in their lives. It has struck a hammer blow at Vladimir Putin’s ‘Dictatorship Protection Service’, putting a dent in his projection of both hard and soft power not only in the Middle East but also in Africa where he has been propping up dictatorships and involving himself in civil wars.”

The fall of Bashar al-Assad, as Katerji points out, has implications far beyond Syria's borders. Not least in Tbilisi, where protests have been continuing for over two weeks against the Kremlin-friendly government’s decision to suspend EU integration. According to Batu Kutelia, a former Georgian ambassador to the United States:

• “Georgia is more than Georgia. It’s not only about a tiny nation on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. It’s part of a bigger equation and it is in the pragmatic interests of the democratic world to make democracy inspiring again and not to let authoritarians claim another success story.” 

Kutelia was echoed by the Georgian photojournalist Mariam Nikuradze, a co-founder of the English-language news platform Open Caucasus Media who just days ago discovered that she was on a police wanted list for her coverage of the nightly demonstrations:

• "I don’t see the spirit of protestors dying anytime soon. Being a journalist  in Georgia has never been so dangerous. So many of my friends have been injured. But it just makes people angrier and they are not giving up. It’s very hard to predict what will happen but it’s getting harder and harder for this government to hold onto power.” 

What happened in Syria, Nikuradze told us, “gives hope.” But, as the Ukrainian human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate  Oleksandra Matviichuk pointed out, the path ahead is long and fraught:

• "We are losing freedom. This year, half the population of the Earth had elections. But don’t be naive, 80% of the world lives in non-free or partially free societies. This means that people who have a real right to vote are in the minority. The problem is not just the fact that in authoritarian countries the space for freedom is shrinking to the size of a prison cell, the problem is that even in democracies people start to question the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom is very fragile. We have to support each other in our fight for freedom because we live in an interconnected world and only the spread of freedom makes the world safer.”

Writer Peter Pomerantsev, a contributing editor at Coda, is currently in Kyiv, where he was born though he was educated in Britain and lives in Washington, DC. Picking up on Matviichuk’s remarks about interconnectedness, he argued:

• "If you listen to someone like [U.S. vice president-elect] JD Vance, he says ‘we need to get away from the foreign policy of values, that’s been a disaster. We need to just think about our self-interest and security.’ But these things aren’t necessarily opposed and they don’t need to be opposed. Ukraine’s freedom will make the West more secure. If Georgia can maintain its freedom, it is so important for counterbalancing Russia’s ability and China’s ability to dominate possession of natural resources and dominate the Black Sea therefore undermining America’s security and economy. I wonder if we’re at a point here where we can get beyond this very, very cruel but also stupid idea that you should split apart values and interests, that they’re antithetical.” 

Edward Lucas, a London-based former journalist and prospective parliamentary candidate in the 2024 British election, did, however, strike a note of caution:

• "There’s a kind of wishful magical thinking that it ought to be obvious to everybody that Georgia is at a geopolitical crossroads and therefore it’s in the vital interest of the West to intervene to keep it out of Russia’s clutches and make it the fulcrum of Euro-Atlantic security in the Caucasus. I do worry that we’re in danger of thinking that people like JD Vance will eventually see reason because reason is ultimately reasonable but they’re coming from a different place.”

The post How did 2024 reshape our world? From Damascus to Kyiv to Washington, our experts weigh in appeared first on Coda Story.

I was at a dinner party in California, when one guest who clearly did not vote for Trump said: “My hope is that there will be such chaos, they won’t get anything done. They don’t seem to have a plan.” 

I’ve heard versions of this analysis a few times since that dinner, both in conversation and in print, and every time it has  baffled me.

Of course there will be chaos. But isn’t that the plan? It certainly seems so now that Trump’s proposed cabinet features an alleged Russian “asset” as national intelligence chief, an alleged sexual predator as attorney general, thus leading a department that recently investigated him for sex-trafficking, and as health secretary an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who does not believe HIV causes AIDS. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense sports a tattoo associated with white supremacist groups, doesn’t believe in women serving in combat or, bizarrely, in washing his hands and has never run anything bigger than a small non-profit. These nominations are designed to cause a flurry of noise and chaos, and this has long been deliberate. 

Disruption, noise and chaos was most certainly Steve Bannon’s plan when I met him in 2019.  I had been invited to speak at the annual Eurasia Media Forum. The vanity project of the daughter of Kazakhstan’s former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the conference still managed to bring together an eclectic and fascinating group of people. I accepted the invitation mostly because I had heard a rumor that Steve Bannon was going to be the keynote speaker.  

“I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.”

Right up to the last minute, Bannon kept the organizers guessing. Eventually he showed up, wearing his signature black button-downs, one on top of the other, and gave a performance that was equal parts chaotic, thought-provoking, disturbing and entertaining. He was, I thought to myself at the time, perhaps the best public speaker I’d ever encountered. 

After the panel, Bannon agreed to an interview. The three of us – Bannon, myself and British journalist Matthew Janney who was reporting for Coda from the event – rode up the elevator to his hotel suite on the 26th floor of a glitzy skyscraper. Along the way, we chatted about gay rights and racial equality: Bannon was enthusiastically “pro” both. He told me he was worried for his gay friends who had to live in a hostile world. It was the first of many inconsistencies in his approach that we never managed to resolve.

This week, as the initial contours of Trump’s new cabinet take shape, I keep circling back to that experience, that conversation with Bannon and Matt’s insightful piece that emerged from it. 

“Revolution is coming,” Bannon said on the stage in Almaty, addressing his fellow panelists: a former EU Commissioner for Trade and a liberal professor from New York. “You are all finished,” he shouted passionately “From London to Frankfurt to Berlin, you are finished.” According to my notes, at that point the room exploded in applause as he raised his voice, drowning out the EU commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who was trying to say something in response. I listened closely to make out her words. She was saying: “Shouting is not good.” Even to those of us who agreed, her attempted intervention felt beside the point. 

Afterwards, in his suite overlooking the glittering skyline of Almaty, the economic capital of Central Asia’s largest petrostate, Bannon was friendly and engaged even as Matt and I challenged him on some very obvious discrepancies in his arguments and some ironies. Including the fact that he was calling for revolution in a country run by a corrupt elite which allowed no freedom of expression. He shrugged off every one of our counterpoints. What he wanted to talk about was the time he was spending working with the far right in Europe and Latin America. He was excited about the movement he was helping to build alongside Europe’s rising far right political stars. 

To my surprise, though, the one person he really admired, he said, was the person he vilified most: George Soros, bête noire of the global right. “I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.” 

Just weeks ago, Bannon was released from prison, where he apparently taught civics, continuing, I assume, to build that cadre. Bannon, pending further legal troubles, is now a free man and even though he is no longer in Trump's inner circle, he has a voice, a vision and a plan. A friend of mine, inadvertently, is part of this plan: he is on Bannon’s vast retribution list, the list of people on whom he wants to take revenge. 

“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call Mom and Dad tonight. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, last week.  He is excited, he says, for Attorney General Matt Gaetz to start rounding up journalists. 

Bannon built the cadres. They are in power now. And chaos is the plan.

A version of this story was published as a newsletter. Sign up here to be the first to get Coda’s stories delivered straight to your mailbox. 

Disclosure: This article is part of our ongoing coverage of the changing nature of modern day authoritarianism. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we are committed to transparency about our funding sources. The Open Society Foundations is among our many supporters. We maintain full editorial independence, and our funding sources are publicly disclosed to ensure accountability to our readers.

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That question of whether we will be left behind has stalked this American election. Democrats claim that they are all for old alliances–though of course it was the Democrats under Obama who first signaled they were becoming disinterested in us and wanted to think about Asia instead. Today, the more Trump-leaning Republicans now openly pride themselves that they, in the words of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, “don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” They claim it’s time to think about “America first.”

But what’s at stake here is not just a geopolitical choice between Europe or Asia–a choice that has been debated in Washington for a hundred years. It’s not just a choice between being outward looking or isolationist–a choice that has been debated in America even longer. There’s something else at play, namely, what sort of country America is and what kind of country it wants to become. Giving in to Russian autocracy in Europe is intertwined with giving in to autocratic tendencies at home. The outer and the inner are co-dependent. It’s not just “us” America is leaving, it’s leaving a version of itself. 

I am not unbiased. I grew up in the provinces of the American project. I was born in Ukraine. My parents were political dissidents arrested for advocating freedom of speech and human rights in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s they were exiled, moving first to London, then Munich and Prague. They moved because my father worked in all three places for Radio Free Europe–the US Congress funded stations that aimed to help end the Soviet dictatorship–and he moved as RFE changed its headquarters. Our journey was literally inseparable from America’s mission. In this context America was intertwined with ‘the good’: in the sense of being the Superpower that here, in the region I knew best, aligned itself with basic dignity, truth and self-determination. Across the world–from Latin America to South Asia to the Middle East–America’s track record is often pernicious and often justifiably maligned. But in standing up to Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union it became more than just another shithole Superpower. It could claim to be good too–or at least better than the autocratic alternatives. 

It was the historian Anne Applebaum who first pointed out to me, on a podcast series we worked on for The Atlantic, that this projection of ‘good’ power had a transformative impact inside America as well. Being in an alliance that claimed to support democracy made America more democratic; tamed its own traditions of autocracy. You can see this in the dynamics around the civil rights movement. Part of the impetus for enacting anti-racist legislation was to ensure that America’s self-declared Cold War position as the leader of the free world also aligned with what it did at home. 

In the 1950s, Soviet propaganda was successfully hammering America for being dishonest: backing democracy abroad while oppressing African-Americans at home. America’s allies were dismayed too. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case at the Supreme Court, which rolled back segregation in schools, the Department of Justice filed a brief arguing that the law should be changed not only for domestic reasons, but also because racist laws were causing “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”

Earlier, in 1947, the Harvard professor and leading civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois capitalized on America’s claims of promoting freedom around the world, post World War II, as a way to raise the issue of its lack of human rights towards African Americans at home.

Imagine an alternative history in which America had aligned itself with totalitarian powers in the 20^th Century–Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Or what if the US had just not taken a strong position against them. It may not have copied their systems fully–but it would also have removed part of the impetus for ruling elites to deal with their own autocratic practices.

During the Cold War, Washington defined itself in opposition to the Kremlin. This in turn could have some positive consequences domestically. Now, however, what you hear in both Moscow and Washington can sound all too similar.

In the first decade of Putin’s rule I lived in Russia, and saw how Communist ideology was replaced with a new propaganda playbook. First you seed doubt in the very idea of truth, spreading so much confusion and conspiracies people don’t know who to trust. Then, you obliterate any notion of there being a difference between good and bad with an extreme relativism and a triumphant cynicism. And in this moral and epistemic wasteland you create  propaganda that legitimizes the nastiest emotions: conspiratorial, paranoid identities, and a politicized, theatrical religiosity that has less to do with ethics and everything to do with supremacist groups belonging and the desire for submission to authority and controlling others. And finally, you use all of this as an excuse to engage in strategic kleptocracy, so that the purpose of running the state becomes corruption.

Ever since Putin first fine tuned this strategy, versions of this practice have been sprouting up around the world. Moscow may have lost the global ideological race in the Cold War, but it looks increasingly like it might be on the winning side this time.

Donald Trump has always been the obvious manifestation of the American strain of this phenomenon. But while Trump embodies a post-truth, post-values worldview, it’s left to those around him to rationalize it. JD Vance is the most eloquent. Vance is a successful writer, whose memoir was lauded by liberal critics. He is one of the finest debaters in America. Everyone who meets him says he is clever, pleasant and witty. In many ways he now plays the role that Putin’s eloquent, shape-shifting courtiers played in Moscow. When Trump spread blatant falsehoods about immigrants “eating cats and dogs”, Vance argued that evidence didn’t matter and that it was right to “create stories” if they get “media attention” for what he termed the sufferings of Americans. A total disregard for evidence was reframed as a higher calling–and makes possible all sorts of rollbacks of rights and truths. It makes placing immigrants in detention camps easier. It makes denying the results of elections possible.

Vance’s explanation of why America should abandon Ukraine is also telling. Twice now Vance has made the point that there are no “good sides” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “fairy-tale mindset” to apply categories of  “good versus evil.” Each side is to blame: Russia was wrong to invade, he argues, but Ukraine has corruption problems. Everything is relative.

It’s the sort of extreme moral relativism that Moscow’s spin doctors have long perfected. It goes against what most Americans, and what most Republican voters, think. Evangelicals especially are supportive of Ukraine. But by obliterating the confrontation of good versus evil in Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine, it gives an excuse to erode the sense of right or wrong at home too. This is not about us, it’s about the US.

So where does that leave those of us who still need America? Of course it’s long past time that Europe, or more realistically North Eastern Europe, arms itself and learns to fight. The Ukrainians have shown us how to do it. But  there is no way to avoid America’s role in this fight. It’s still the only superpower that can on occasion wield a blow against evil–if it can still recognise evil.

Part of the work will be the business of skilful and grubby diplomacy. There are many reasons why America–even a triumphantly cynical, utterly relativistic America–should stand up to Russia. Economically, it keeps their main trading partner, the EU, secure. Militarily, it degrades an adversary and keeps the main enemy, China, wary of adventurism. Diplomatically, it creates a global coalition of partners. And just showing American primacy and resolve brings vast benefits including everything from trust in the US dollar to the desire of “swing countries” like India or Saudi Arabia to play along with Washington.

But if we acknowledge that the drama here is not just about its own foreign interests, but also about the battle within America itself, then the field for action becomes bigger. Standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in Russia is part of standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in America. Standing up to bullying, hate and lies in Russia is about standing up to bullying, hate and lies in America. Standing up to Russia’s mafia state turned mafia Empire means standing up to the potential of a mafia state in America.

For those of us who were raised in the provinces of the American project but now dwell or engage with its core, the aim can’t be to simply scrape and beg for security. America made us. And many of us are now literally Americans or integrated into the American conversation. Sometimes those who have come from the periphery see the issues clearer than the capital. If the center has lost its purpose, then it’s up to those who have come from the provinces to help remake it.

The post How to make M.A.G.A. mean ‘Make America Good Again’ appeared first on Coda Story.

In Moldova, the pro-European president failed to secure victory in the first round, but the referendum, which will enshrine Moldova’s pursuit of EU membership in the country’s constitution, narrowly passed with 50.38%.  

In Georgia, the country’s pro-Western path is already ingrained in the constitution but the ruling Georgian Dream party, led by a pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has turned increasingly anti-Western and threatens to reverse it. Tens of thousands of protesters waving EU flags in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, worry they are about to lose the promise of independence that generations prior have fought and died for.  

“The subsequent days and possibly weeks in Georgia is something that sometimes generations pass without experiencing. The quest to save your country is a terrifying responsibility, a debilitating endeavor, a great privilege, and an unparalleled sense of fulfillment,” writes opposition supporter Marika Mikiashvili.

Polls have consistently shown that around 80% of Georgians want the country to join the European Union and NATO. The ambition of being part of the European family is seen as the only way to protect Georgia from Russia, whose military already occupies a fifth of Georgia’s internationally recognized territory.

The results of the second round in Moldova and the upcoming Sunday election in Georgia are also part of a larger context determined by the election cycle in the US. The U.S. election result will have a direct effect on the war in Ukraine, which in turn determines the future of the entire region. Moscow is cheering for Trump. This week, the Russian state media widely quoted former president Medvedev who praised Trump as “the most significant US figure to admit Vladimir Zelensky’s responsibility for the Ukrainian conflict” 

Zooming out: Left and increasingly far right-leaning forces in the West often argue that Russia should have the control of their backyard and that Washington and Brussels need to stop interfering in the region. This argument is in itself colonial: just like in Ukraine, Moldova’s and Georgia’s fight for independence is also the fight against historic racism and colonial attitudes aimed at non-ethnically Russian people who have been forced into the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Read this piece for context.

Connecting the Dots: Georgia and Moldova (as well as Ukraine) are where the Kremlin mastered its election interference skills, including the strategies used in the 2016 election in the US. Tactics like mechanisms of vote buying or hacking, used by the Kremlin are often adopted by authoritarians elsewhere. Paired with an information system built to manipulate and spread lies, such tactics erode democracy worldwide. Some of the more egregious tactics used in elections in Moldova and Georgia include: 

• Open vote buying: The Kremlin has been openly paying voters in Gagauzia region of Moldova, a region known for separatist sentiments. 
• Voter fraud scheme: a large-scale scheme that involved $15 million being transferred to 130,000 Moldovans, financed by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, who currently resides in Russia. According to Moldova’s incumbent president, 300,000 votes were bought, plenty to sway an election in the country.
• Pushing Fear: the pro-Russian side launched a propaganda campaign that has framed Moldova’s EU integration as a path to war with Russia. This tactic has been effective in influencing votes, with pro-Russian figures promising to shield Moldova from conflict in exchange for abandoning its EU ambitions.

Fear has been a big weapon for the anti-EU side in Georgia too. The ruling party uses posters comparing bombed sites in Ukraine to newly constructed buildings in Georgia, suggesting that without their leadership, Georgia will face a similar fate. 

Already, the alarm bells of autocracy can be heard: foreign journalists looking to cover the decisive election are being denied visa and entry by the Georgian Dream. In what definitely does not seem like a coincidence, the campaign video for the Georgian Dream is a direct lift of Putin’s 2018 election video. 

Bloomberg recently uncovered documents revealing the scope of a previously unknown Russian cyberattack on Georgia ahead of its 2020 elections.Between 2017-2020, hackers infiltrated the country's foreign and finance ministries, other government departments, central bank, key energy and telecommunications providers, oil terminals and media platforms.One of the goals of the attack seemed to be obtaining the capability to tamper with Georgia’s vital infrastructure services in case the election results were not seen as favorable for the Kremlin.

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

The post Ground Zero of Russian Interference appeared first on Coda Story.

Nishita Jha: Doctor Saha, why do you think we are obsessed with cults and how did your own obsession with cults begin? Relatedly, why do you think they are a source of such deep fascination in the world of books and cinema and streamers? 

Poulomi Saha: I think cults are much more than just a pop cultural phenomenon, they are a phenomenon that has seeped into all parts of our life, popular, political, social and psychic. The class that I started teaching during the pandemic [Cults in Popular Culture] began because, like many other people, I was spending my days and nights watching docuseries and listening to podcasts on cults. In some ways, it was one of the singular forms of feeling connected to other people. I was getting a little concerned for myself and I was pretty surprised to see myself giving up on my own, long held, sometimes innate reactions to cults. In some ways, the class was an attempt to make sense of this with hundreds of other people. Around me too, I saw the attention and obsession with cults getting more fanatical. It seemed like it was time to move this kind of social analysis outwards.

NJ: One genre of TikTok videos I know your students keep sending you is “What would it take to get you to join a cult?” and it’s a question that’s been memed and stitched by millions of users — a mini-cult of people who love cults on Tik-Tok, which is a platform that spawns its own consumer cults of Stanley Cup users and beauty treatments and such. Did writing your book make you more aware of the many cults that surround us today?

PS: The meme on Tiktok you’re referring to is fascinating because you also have this remarkable effect that in the repetition (through stitching the videos) you are producing a structure that we might actually call cultic: to participate in this imagination together. In the meme, someone says “Would you join a cult if they offered you a free lunch?”, you respond “Well, I would join a cult. I don't even need the free lunch. I would take a donut.” But what is really happening is that the two people now have something in common. They are repeating the same words back to each other so that they recognize that they think in the same ways, they are announcing an affiliation to each other, and that is a powerful thing. Memes are a really interesting and new vehicle to produce a kind of group think. I'm trying very hard not to pathologize it or to suggest that memes are hypnotizing people into mindless repetition or some hypnotic state. I actually think the repetition is actually a way to articulate a long standing desire to simply be like other people. So we see a kind of second form of sociality being produced here in social media, and we also see it in the world of politics. 

NJ: How does that need for belonging play out in American politics? 

PS: I live in Northern California — so I am in some ways, at the epicenter of a particular version of the cult phenomenon. I have a theory which I'm delighted to have proven wrong, that America is a unique place when it comes to cults. America in its vision of itself as this great open space which drives the settler colonial fantasy, has long been obsessed with newness. Americans have really envisioned themselves as a new man, long before the advent of something called the State of the United States, and well into the early part of the colonial project. That fantasy is so compelling and it stretches to all parts of American life, from politics to economics to society. And what it gives birth to is a really unique phenomenon, where we say this is the only place where newness is celebrated as innovation and it's not condemned as heresy.

In most other societies, if you announce the advent of a new messiah it's not just that you're going to have, like, local resistance. There are often overarching religious and/or social and political structures that will limit this. I mean, imagine a new messiah announcing their advent in Italy. It's hard to imagine, right? 

NJ: I see what you mean, in that there is almost a uniquely American obsession with what the era-defining Big New Thing will be, in culture and spirituality, tech, health and of course politics.

PS: We see the ways in which these kinds of things flourish outside the mainstream. What popular culture has done has brought the outside, the fringe, not just into the mainstream, but literally into our homes. We're watching, we're listening, we're obsessing on the internet, and this is where I think we're seeing a new vision of what cult culture is. When you have people who watch a docuseries become quite obsessed, what do they do next? They're not largely going out and joining these groups in the world. Instead, what they are doing is joining subreddits. What they are doing is getting on social media and producing Tiktok, what they're doing is actually trying to reproduce the feeling of being fully immersed with other people.

Along with the invitation to newness, at the same time it is also a highly normative conformity seeking culture. So you have powerful guardrails in place that would claim to keep most people outside of these radical choices, these insular groups, these new religious movements, except the more powerful the guardrail, the more powerful the interdiction, the more powerful the draw. 

NJ: How does the cult of personality shape American politics? What we see now is this almost perfect and uncanny merging of political leaders with social media and reality TV. They are characters with narrative arcs and followers, we watch whether we love them or love to hate them. 

PS: The cult of personality is so interesting because there's a way in which it operates is a totally different thing than social cults, but they do have a couple important things in common. The term “cult of personality” actually comes out of the Romantic period where Immanuel Kant spoke about the cult of genius — that there was a way of thinking and being in the world that should make you exceptional, and that exceptionality was singular in your mind, but always producing a kind of collective. The cult of genius was about finding these figures who had a particular kind of understanding of clarity of the world, a kind of philosophical elevation and becoming their followers. Now, when you become a follower, of course you never become the genius. Within the cult of genius, there's only one genius, and you have inside these followers who go looking for profound truth….

You think about charismatic leaders, whether they are charismatic figures like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, but also Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King … you cannot know how a person comes to have this kind of power. Again, they aren't faster, stronger, necessarily smarter, and yet when they speak, you feel yourself elevated, transformed, transported. When you have a kind of charismatic figure, so much of the power comes from the fact that they will often tell the story about themselves, a kind of self mythologizing in which they'll say things often like either I am an ordinary person or I was born ordinary. My parents were normal. They were working class, middle class. I had no silver spoon. I had no great grace from on high. What I am before you is utterly ordinary. And of course, as they say it, their effect is so extraordinary that it really kind of burnishes this image of magic, of something you cannot explain and you cannot touch, and it is so compelling. What happens is they begin to develop a following, and the followers all recognize that they witness the extraordinary in this figure. 

So you feel as though you are in the presence of the Divine and all around you when you go home and you're talking to your family when you go to work, you're trying to describe the inordinate force of this person. And people are like — that person? They're a buffoon, they're not very smart, they're not very successful, they're not a real billionaire. That dissonance, rather than breaking through the mind of the follower, actually solidifies the sense of a kind of magical capacity that the charismatic leader has.

Now the follower is also imbued with it because they believe they can see the truth that no one else can. It produces a kind of fanaticism. If you believe that you have access to a new kind of messianic figure and people all around you don't see it, it is very easy to begin to feel like you too are chosen. You too have a kind of special capacity.

It's incredibly compelling, and especially for people who have historically felt as though they're disenfranchised or that their birthright has somehow been taken from them, to have it resurrected. I mean, that's a pretty good compensation to having felt kind of economically disenfranchised for a couple decades.

NJ:  You may not have the answer, but I wonder if that also produces a profound alienation from the rest of the world that doesn't get it. I'm thinking of politics, of how easily groups that are fanatic, or disenfranchised can become militarized or turned into violent mobs. Is the leap from one to the other made easier through disinformation and mass media, and how easy it is to spread the word of the messianic figure?

PS: It does produce a kind of alienation, and I think that there are many different ways that people cope with that. A lot of mass media really flattens the experience of it, we've gotten very good at diagnosing not just misinformation, but a kind of misunderstanding in the followers of these charismatic figures. Here I am really profoundly thinking of Donald Trump. You'll see again on social media, the phenomenon of young reporters, usually lay reporters who go to these Trump rallies and they try to catch the follower in a kind of gotcha moment, to sort of reveal the fundamental cognitive dissonance in a MAGA believer.

So they'll say things like, now, how do you feel about the fact that Joe Biden didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs? And you'll have a person who's like, “He's a coward! He's a disgrace! He cannot be commander-in-chief.” And then the reporter will say, oh, I misspoke. I meant to say Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs, and then the follower will say, “Well, you know, my father had dropped arches. It was so painful, and that's a real danger, not just to himself, but to his platoon.” This is actually a video that I watched recently, and of course, as the viewers watching this on Tiktok or on Instagram we are supposed to laugh. We're supposed to think —  look at this sad, pathetic person who doesn't even see that they're being conned.

It is really satisfying for those of us who believe that we see the truth. We see beyond the smoke and mirrors, but it doesn't allow us to actually contend with what is happening individually to those people, socially, within that group and as these people live in the world.

But it is not possible that the people at the MAGA rally are totally unaware of the gap between what they say and what they believe. But you have to find some kind of compensation. People do that by refusing information that refutes their beliefs and surrounding themselves with people who share those beliefs. So the phenomenon of the Trump rally is important, it becomes a place and time where you get relief from the barrage of being told no, you're not right, you're wrong, not true, not good. In the space of that rally, everyone around you is saying, yes, they're saying you're not crazy, you're not stupid, you're not being manipulated by someone smarter than you. Community is bound together by so many things, including a mutually reinforcing truth, and that truth becomes more and more potent.

NJ: I’d like to go back to what you said about the American obsession with newness, but also that it is a society that is conformist, or wants to protect the old, in a sense. You see that tension play out with the candidates right now, where someone like Harris must always find a way to balance the fact that she represents newness — there’s never been a US President that looked like her — with someone like Walz, who fits into the American ideal of an older, white patriarch. If you had to make a guess, will America choose the new or the old? 

PS: I do think that you are putting your finger on the pulse of something that really underpins a lot of this conversation around cults of personality and politics. Think about the MAGA project — Make America Great Again is about a return to a prior moment again. At these rallies, you have people being asked, When was America great? And the way in which they're struggling to find a moment is telling — it's always a moment before they were born, always a moment of a kind of mythic abundance and freedom, the 19th century or the industrial revolution. When you press on it and say, well wasn't that before women had the right to vote, or wasn’t that an era of racial segregation … you realize that the actual moment matters much less than the fantasy that there was a kind of reparative moment in America's past where the new man had all of this abundance before him.

Donald Trump, for a non believer, is a terrifying, sometimes funny, but a kind of monstrous figure. For his believers, he is a prophet, and he is a prophet who is able to see more clearly than anyone, a moment where America was great and return us there, with a kind of future oriented promise.

What we also see in world history across multiple generations of world leaders is that charismatic authority is never correct. When they die, or there's a transfer of power, the next leader is either a failed charismatic leader. That is, they cannot reproduce the same intensity, or they're a bureaucrat.

Many political scientists have been speculating on what will happen if Trump does not win this election. If he does not win this election, will Trump fade away, but Trumpism continues to flourish? What many liberal theorists want to believe is that the cognitive dissonance will be revealed. That Trump’s followers will think, “Oh no, I've been following this fraud and con man all along. I see clearly now I repent. Let me be reincorporated into this rational state.” I don't know what will happen in the election, but I do think that the latter is very unlikely to happen. I don't think that even if Trump loses, we are going to see the skies parting and the light of knowledge falling on the dark minds of MAGA. I think his influence has drastically changed what it is possible to do in American politics, and there are too many smart, canny, charismatic political figures in the machine who will want to capitalize on the fact that people are clearly hungry for that feeling of being together, believing in this impossible thing that on the outside is being laughed at, but where you know you have access the truth and freedom and Liberty. I mean, that's what drives American politics, rhetorically, at the very least. 

Dr. Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and co-director of the program in critical theory. They are currently at work on a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the gripping curiosity and fervent disavowal of what we do not ourselves inhabit or experience and yet cannot shake. We aren’t simply frightened of or repulsed by cults. There is a powerful draw to these groups, to the possibility of utter self-transformation. At its heart, the book FASCINATION is interested in how cults reveal what we truly hunger for—spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally. Not just for those who join but for all of us who believe we never would. In FASCINATION, Saha explains why we love, hate, and love to hate cults—why we can neither lean in nor look away.

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One of my last stories before I left Russia was an exploration of how the state had weaponized Big Tech to persecute Navalny’s followers, ordinary Russians who had registered their personal details on his website because they were fed up with the status quo. Among the dozens of people I spoke to were Liza, Dmitry, Kirill and Magda, whose compelling stories I wanted to tell.

I was reporting for Coda’s podcast series, “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” which featured the experiences of individuals around the world who had been caught up in the struggle between tech, democracy and dictatorship. In Russia, Navalny used social media to build a following. Many Navalny supporters gravitated towards him on Big Tech platforms — for instance, following his investigations into Kremlin corruption on his YouTube channel. 

Inspired by Navalny, Russians took to the streets to protest and donated to his Anti-Corruption Foundation,  or FBK in Russian. They signed up to use his “smart voting” app intended to consolidate protest votes around candidates in all of Russia’s electoral districts who could take on the ruling party. But both Apple and Google, caving to pressure from the Kremlin, removed the app from stores shortly before the 2021 election. Russia had completed the transition from authoritarian state to digitally savvy dictatorship.  

The police used Navalny’s database to knock on doors, to seek out people who had registered on the “Free Navalny” website. On the podcast, I found myself breaking the news to Liza, an old friend from school, that her name was on a list, including details such as her tax ID number, home address and employment status. It explained, Liza told me, why the police had come looking for her, asking her parents questions “as if I were a terrorist.”

I reached out to Liza again, as I did to other people I interviewed for the podcast, in the days after Navalny’s death. “Navalny’s death became for me the death of all hope that the Russia I remember could be saved,” she told me. A Ukrainian-born citizen of Russia, Liza now lives in Uzbekistan. Navalny, she said, was “like a key that you hide under a stone near your old house, just in case you have a chance to go back. Now there is no key, there is no stone, and there is no house.”

The police, Liza told me, still visit her parents in Moscow. The Kremlin, she said, “is still investigating the people who donated to FBK.” Five months pregnant now, Liza has lost hope that Russia will change. She is expecting a girl; her daughter, she told me, will be a citizen of Uzbekistan, not Russia.

I also followed up with Dmitry. He was a musician who registered on Navalny’s website and then suddenly found himself out of work, no longer welcome to perform at concerts. When he was not playing music, he drove around the city rescuing stray cats. He had, I said on the podcast, a “sweet round face and blond, hipster haircut.” Dmitry is still in Moscow, still singing in a choir and still rescuing stray cats. But like Liza, he too has lost hope that change is possible. “The feeling that you get living in Russia is that people are keeping a low profile,” he said. “They just wait.” 

The people I interviewed on the podcast were among thousands, if not millions, of Russians who genuinely believed Navalny offered a democratic alternative to Putin’s increasingly Stalinist regime. That belief has been stamped out. Kirill, a train driver for the Moscow metro, told me he had registered on the “Free Navalny” website out of curiosity. At the time, he had begun to date Magda, a liberal with little patience for the Russian establishment. His curiosity cost Kirill his job. “You fucking registered on his website,” his boss shouted at him, denouncing Navalny as an enemy of the state. Kirill was sacked for being “insufficiently loyal to President Putin.” 

Now in Sochi, a town on the Black Sea about a thousand miles from Moscow, Kirill and Magda await visas that will enable them to leave Russia. “I can’t speak freely right now, I’m in a public place” Kirill told me when I called him after Navalny’s death. Magda said she “had a feeling of deja vu.” The shock of Navalny’s death echoed the shock she felt when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Two years ago, on February 24, she told me, “I received a message from a friend: ‘Are you awake? The war started.’” On February 16 of this year, the same friend sent Magda another message: “Are you awake? Navalny was killed.” Both events strengthened Putin’s regime, representing a decisive turn away from the country that Magda still hoped Russia could be. 

For a quarter of a century, Putin has controlled Russia. This weekend, he will extend his reign, with any serious opposition either dead or imprisoned. “The future is no longer frightening,” Liza told me, “because the worst is happening in the present.”

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The post In Russia, the ‘worst is happening in the present’  appeared first on Coda Story.

Navalny’s work with the Anti-Corruption Foundation reached millions using major platforms like YouTube and LiveJournal. But they built plenty of their own technology too. One of their most famous innovations was “Smart Voting,” a system that could estimate which opposition candidates were most likely to beat out the ruling party in a given election. The strategy wasn’t to support a specific opposition party or candidate — it was simply to unseat members of the ruling party, United Russia. In regional races in 2020, it was credited with causing United Russia to lose its majority in state legislatures in Novosibirsk, Tambov and Tomsk.

The Smart Voting system was pretty simple — just before casting a ballot, any voter could check the website or the app to decide where to throw their support. But on the eve of national parliamentary elections in September 2021, Smart Voting suddenly vanished from the app stores for both Google and Apple. 

After a Moscow court banned Navalny’s organization for being “extremist,” Russia’s internet regulator demanded that both Apple and Google remove Smart Voting from their app stores. The companies bowed to the Kremlin and complied. YouTube blocked select Navalny videos in Russia and Google, its parent company, even blocked some public Google Docs that the Navalny team published to promote names of alternative candidates in the election. 

We will never know whether or not Navalny's innovative use of technology to stand up to the dictator would have worked. But Silicon Valley's decision to side with Putin was an important part of why Navalny’s plan failed.  

Navalny’s team felt so abandoned by the companies at that moment that they compared it to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the time, photos of U.S. planes taking flight and leaving desperate Afghans behind on the runways of the Kabul airport were dominating global media.

“It felt like we’re people running alongside a plane that’s taking off. And here we are, being left behind,” Ivan Zhdanov told my colleagues investigating the fallout of the Smart Voting story for “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” Coda’s podcast about the role of technology in the rise of global authoritarianism. 

“We rely on YouTube, on Google Docs, on all these other tools, to spread ideas of freedom, of democracy. But right now we are in a game that has no rules,” he said at the time.

Why did these Big Tech behemoths, which claimed to support baseline human rights, bow down to the Kremlin? Neither company ever spoke publicly about the decision. The companies told Navalny’s organization that they were acting on a legal order. But what legitimacy does a legal order have when it’s clearly been written to target the government’s top adversary? 

This is the shaky ground on which these companies operate. If they want to keep doing business in a given country, they have to follow or at least pay lip service to the laws of the land. In a case like this one, it meant undermining the interests of regular Russians and democracy itself.

And then, just months later, the tables turned again. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, companies across Silicon Valley put out statements declaring their support for Ukraine and their intentions to go after Russian state propaganda on their platforms. Both Meta and Twitter (now X) were banned in Russia, and companies like Apple and TikTok began blocking select services within the country. Tacit signs of support for the opposition also popped up. The Smart Voting app even reappeared in the App Store. Whatever rationale had led the company to remove the app suddenly evaporated.

This week, I caught up with Tanya Lokot and Marielle Wijermars, two internet policy scholars who specialize in the region, to ask their reflections on how things have evolved since that time, especially in the wake of Navalny’s death.

“It may be a bit too deterministic to say that his team’s dependence on tech platforms was ‘their downfall,’” they wrote in a joint response, noting that Navalny’s organization had “accounted for the restrictions and possible censorship and built alternative infrastructures to support their work.” They also talked about how building this kind of resilience has become more difficult since the start of the war. 

“It is getting harder and harder to find these alternatives, as more and more platforms are exiting Russia and users are relying on VPNs and other circumvention tools,” they wrote. Pressure from sanctions and an overall lack of technology is compounding the issue and isolating Russians further. And they noted that for Navalny’s organization, which now works mainly in exile, there are new challenges around getting information into the country. While the last few years have offered new lessons on the promise and perils of using technology to try to bring about change, Lokot and Wijermars made it clear that these are all mere battles in a much longer war.

Just yesterday, another tech company became the site of the latest battle — X briefly suspended the account of Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya. The company cited “automated security protocols” as the reason for the error.
After years avoiding the spotlight, Navalnaya came out this week with a gut-wrenching speech in which she declared her intention to seize the torch and keep fighting “harder, more desperately and more fiercely than before.” But with its tools decimated and its ultimate netizen gone, the fight now may be more brutal and more dangerous than ever.

This piece was originally published as the most recent edition of the weekly Authoritarian Tech newsletter.

The post How Big Tech let down Navalny appeared first on Coda Story.

On August 21, officers from India’s Intelligence Bureau visited the campus as part of what was meant to be a routine procedure to renew Ashoka’s license to receive foreign funds. But the questions that the officers asked instead concerned an academic paper that had cast the country’s ruling party in a negative light. They also questioned the “intent” of the professor who had written the paper.

Even before the visit by officials, the professor had resigned from Ashoka. It is just the latest example of India’s shrinking space for research and criticism. 

Nandini Sundar, a writer and professor of sociology at the University of Delhi, told me that the Modi administration has censured and put pressure on academics it believes threaten its Hindu nationalist agenda. “Academic freedom in India is under attack,” she said, “and has been ever since 2014,” when Modi became prime minister. The Academic Freedom Index 2023, which assessed academic freedom in 179 countries, placed India in the bottom 30%. The report included India among 22 countries in which standards of academic freedom had fallen. 

The Index also traced the beginning of the decline in India’s academic freedom to 2009, when the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were not in power. But the report noted that “around 2013, all aspects of academic freedom began to decline strongly, reinforced with Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014.” It concluded that “India demonstrates the pernicious relationship between populist governments, autocratization, and constraints on academic freedom.”

Bolstered by India’s recent feats in space research – becoming on August 23 the first country to successfully land a craft in the southern polar region of the moon – Modi likes to describe his government as being devoted to science and innovation. But it has little time for the humanities, or the social sciences, or any research that does not fit its definition of “progress.” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi and prolific commentator on political and cultural affairs, told me that the “real challenge is self-censorship by academics due to legitimate fears of reprisal by university administrations and physical violence by right-wing groups.” 

He said academics rarely have the freedom to design their own curriculum, and research scholars are told to avoid certain subjects. “There has been an unprecedented ideological bias in new hirings,” he told me, meaning that the BJP has been eager to place friendly academics on faculties and in positions of power in universities across the country. Students at Indian universities have been some of the Modi administration’s most dogged and committed opponents, with even the United Nations noting the Indian government’s propensity for using violence and detention to intimidate student protestors.

On July 25, the paper in question, written by Sabyasachi Das, then an economics professor at Ashoka, was posted on the Social Science Research Network website which publishes “preprints,” that is, papers which await peer review and journal publication. Das had reportedly presented his findings at a talk in the United States. Titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy,” the paper claimed to document “irregular patterns in 2019 general election in India,” comprehensively won by the Modi-led BJP, and to “present evidence that is consistent with electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies.”

According to Das, the “manipulation appears to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against India’s largest minority group – Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers.”

Once news of the still unpublished, yet-to-be reviewed paper emerged on social media, it caused a political furor. M.R Sharan, an Indian economics professor at the University of Maryland, explained on X (formerly known as Twitter) that although Das’ “astonishing” new paper showed that the BJP had perhaps gained a dozen seats through electoral manipulation, this was a negligible number in an election in which the BJP won 303 seats, 31 seats more than the number required to win an outright majority in parliament.

But the impact on the results of the election or lack thereof was beyond the point, argued prominent opposition figures such as Shashi Tharoor, once a candidate for the post of secretary- general at the U.N. Das’ conclusion, Tharoor said, “offers a hugely troubling analysis for all lovers of Indian democracy.” The “discrepancy in vote tallies,” he wrote on X, needed to be accounted for by the government or India’s Election Commission “since it can’t be wished away.”

The BJP responded to Das’ paper with fury. On X, Nishikant Dubey, a BJP member of parliament, demanded to know how Ashoka University could permit a professor, “in the name of half-baked research,” to “discredit India’s vibrant poll process?” 

Das also became a target of online trolling by Hindu nationalists and BJP supporters. Ashoka tried to distance itself from Das, claiming it had no responsibility for “social media activity or public activism by Ashoka faculty, students or staff in their individual capacity.” By the middle of August, Das had handed in his resignation. It was quickly accepted by the university administration.

On August 16, student journalists at the university’s newspaper reported that a public meeting was held in which “students, alumni and faculty expressed their escalating dismay regarding academic freedom at Ashoka.” 

In an open letter to administrators posted on X, the economics department wrote that the governing body’s interference was “likely to precipitate an exodus of faculty.” The letter also warned that if Das wasn’t given his job back and the administration continued to interfere with research, the faculty “will find themselves unable to carry forward their teaching obligations in the spirit of critical inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth that characterize our classrooms.”

But only a couple of days later, the fledgling protest fizzled out. The promised exodus or strike never happened. Only one professor resigned. Instead, the administration told students that the economics department had “reaffirmed its commitment to holding classes, a sentiment echoed by almost all other departments.”

The episode with Das isn’t the first time that the university has been embroiled in matters of academic freedom. The tacit acceptance of Das’ departure suggests that Ashoka, set up as a U.S.-style liberal university with private donors, continues to have  little stomach for confrontation with the government. 

In 2021, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a professor and former Ashoka vice chancellor, resigned from the university. Mehta, a public intellectual steadfast in his opposition to Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, was told that his presence at Ashoka was turning into a “political liability.”  His “public writing in support of a politics that tries to honor constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, [was] perceived to carry risks for the university,” he said. 

As far back as 2016, just two years after Ashoka University was founded, the Indian magazine Caravan revealed that the administration might have forced the resignation of staff members who had signed a petition protesting state violence in the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. 

Few academics at Ashoka are now willing to speak to journalists about Das or the issues of academic freedom that have surfaced since  the BJP’s angry response to his paper. Economist Jayati Ghosh, another prominent critic of the Modi government, wrote on X that she was “truly shocked at the lack of solidarity displayed by senior faculty” at Ashoka. “They have so little to lose from defending basic academic freedom,” she added. “Silence enables injustice, and it spreads.”

A professor at Ashoka who asked to remain anonymous told me that there were “plenty of caveats in Das’ paper and it had yet to go through rigorous peer review but the outsized reaction shows that the paper hit home.” Another liberal intellectual, who also asked to speak anonymously, told me that the paper questions the “most fundamental aspect of India’s claim to being a democracy – free and fair elections.” By continuing to send a message that academic insubordination will not be tolerated, they added, “the BJP is warning universities to control areas of research.” 

Mehta, who resigned from Ashoka in 2021, was also a former president of the Center for Policy Research, a well-respected Delhi think tank. In July, The Hindu reported that the center’s tax-exempt status and license to raise foreign funds had been revoked. Nearly 75% of its funds were raised abroad. In the absence of an official reason for the decision, the media has speculated that what might have led to the crackdown were the frequently combative articles that CPR staffers publish about Modi administration policies and the independent research that the center undertakes, which  has often contradicted the official government line. 

The BJP appears determined to stamp out criticism of Modi. In January, when the BBC broadcast a documentary in the U.K. examining Modi’s actions as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots in the state, the Indian government banned it from being screened in India. When students tried to organize public screenings in defiance of the ban, they were allegedly detained by the police and suspended by their universities. 

Academic freedom and the need to ask questions, it appears, is less important to Indian universities than appeasing the government of the day.

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The post In India, academic freedom is at stake in a row over research appeared first on Coda Story.

The authorities had made a similar decision in June after a Senegalese court handed Sonko a two-year prison sentence in absentia, a decision his supporters believed was a politically motivated attempt to prevent Sonko from running for president in 2024. At least 16 people died when Sonko’s supporters and Senegalese police clashed on the streets of the capital Dakar. The subsequent July protests left at least two people dead.

Last week, Sonko was hospitalized after going on a hunger strike to protest his arrest.  

“We fear the government,” Mohammed Diouf, a Dakar school teacher told me. “The government does not want the world to know what is happening in our country.” He said the internet shutdown left him unable to communicate with other protesters. “There is brutal oppression, and many young demonstrators have been killed and injured. The security forces use live fire, that is the situation,” said Diouf, who opted to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal.

On August 2, the day before Diouf and I spoke, the Senegalese government announced an indefinite ban on TikTok, the app that young people have been using to document violent encounters between demonstrators and the security apparatus.

Fueling public anger is a widely held fear that Senegalese President Macky Sall, currently serving his second term in office, may try to run for president again in 2024. In 2016, a public referendum on presidential term limits reset the period a president can stay in power to a maximum of two five-year terms. Sall, who had, at the time, begun serving his second term, argued that the constitutional amendment “reset the clock to zero,” making him eligible to run again. 

In an address to the nation after the June protests, Sall vowed he would not run for a third term. But experts say he is to blame for the ambiguity that has fueled unrest.

“This problem has to be put at the feet of Macky Sall. For a long time, he made the potential of him running for a third time ambiguous,” said Ibrahim Anoba, an African affairs analyst and a fellow at the Center for African Prosperity. “You can imagine what the populace will feel,” Anoba told me. “More so, if the president becomes intolerant of opposition leaders.” 

Current political anxieties have been compounded by the economic downturn resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and the food shortages triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Senegal’s poverty rate was 36.3% in 2022, according to the World Bank, and the economy has also been hampered by rising debt.. 

The future looked much brighter in 2014, when newly discovered oil reserves appeared to set the stage for Senegal to become a major oil producer. But this oil, too, is now a source of public anxiety: Senegalese citizens fear that Sall will cede these riches to European companies.

Protesters, galvanized by Sonko amid concerns that Sall might indeed pursue a third term,  worried that Sall, a geological engineer before he became president, wanted to preside over the anticipated oil boom. It tipped public discontent into violent unrest, particularly among the country’s youth, who decried massive corruption, the overbearing influence of France and the slowdown of the economy. 

“We are fighting that the country retains the sovereignty of its wealth and natural resources which the government wants to sell off to oil firms. And for that, we will go until the end because it is our future that is at stake,” Diouf, the Dakar school teacher, told me. It is to Sonko that voters like Diouf look to reform Senegal’s system.

Sonko’s PASTEF party started in 2014 as a fringe party composed of political newcomers. Sonko, a young former tax inspector had shot to national recognition when he became a whistleblower in 2016, exposing the use of offshore tax havens by foreign companies to avoid paying taxes in Senegal. He became a member of the national assembly in 2017 and ran for president in 2019, trailing third behind Sall and Idrissa Seck Rewmi.

His criticism of Sall and his larger-than-life internet presence have endeared Sonko to young voters. He rapidly became the main threat to the ruling party. And it is that threat, say Sonko’s supporters, that is driving the criminal charges Sonko now faces, including rape (for which he was acquitted), formenting insurrection, creating political unrest, terrorism and theft.

State measures to control protests led by Sonko supporters have been violent and draconian. The internet shutdowns also pose a threat to Senegal’s already floundering economy. In the first quarter of 2023, Senegal’s unemployment rate stood at 21.5%, and Net Blocks estimates that each day without access to mobile internet costs the country nearly $8 million.

Financial and cryptocurrency trades, as well as ride hailing and e-commerce businesses, are all seeing losses due to the network shutdowns. “With the restriction of the internet that is becoming recurrent these days, we no longer have the opportunity to sell or buy USDT,” said Mady Dia, referring to Tether, a cryptocurrency “stablecoin” pegged to the U.S. dollar. “That is an abysmal shortfall,” Dia, who works with a cryptocurrency exchange, told me.

Dia and Diouf both said they’d withdrawn money when the protests began, expecting that the banks would likely close and that financial services would be crippled were the authorities to impose an internet shutdown. 

The political situation, Dia said, and the internet shutdowns have left him contemplating options for leaving Senegal altogether. 

“Many young people are ready to abandon their country if Sall remains in power in 2024,” he told me. In the past decade, thousands of young Senegalese have sought to move to Europe in search of better fortunes, often on small boats. These perilous journeys have claimed hundreds of lives. Last month, at least 15 people drowned after a boat carrying migrants and refugees capsized off the coast of Dakar.

In a West Africa beset by political instability – the most recent example being the coup in Niger – Senegal has been cited as a model of democracy. That reputation is starting to wear off. 

“This is really bad for the region itself,” said Anoba, the analyst at the Center for African Prosperity. “As you know, Macky Sall is one of the leading figures in West Africa, and right now [as] we are trying to quench the fires of coups that are changing the political terrain, this is the last thing we want.”

Threats against Senegalese media represent another sign of democratic backsliding in the country. In June, a television channel offering live coverage of the protests was suspended for 30 days. And Papa Ale Niang, a journalist with the prominent daily newspaper Dakarmatin, was charged on August 1, like Sonko, with “inciting insurrection.”

Internet shutdowns are also a sign of faltering democratic values. “Cutting off the internet is tantamount to denying the right to information, which is a constitutional principle, not to mention international laws,” said Emmanuel Diokh, the Senegal lead at Internet Sans Frontières, an international organization that defends access to the internet. 

Since 2017, internet shutdowns have become an increasingly common tactic of information and social control in Africa. Cameroon’s long-serving president, Paul Biya, imposed an internet ban in the English-speaking region of the country in 2017 that lasted three months. In 2019, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa also imposed an internet shutdown in response to protests. Governments in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea have also imposed strict internet regulations in the past five years.

All of these countries have used the same rationale: The actions were intended to curb hate speech or to avoid the breakdown of order. Sall has shown one thing to the Senegalese people — the internet is not safe from government control. Instead of curbing hate speech, shutting down the internet is a sign that he is prepared to use any means necessary to decimate the opposition before the elections in February. Still, protesters like Diouf say they will not relent.

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The post Senegal is stifling its democracy in the dark appeared first on Coda Story.

After the February earthquakes that destroyed so much of the region, Syrian refugees became the targets of resentment, hate speech and violence. Politicians were quick to seize upon the public mood. Exploiting the anger directed at refugees became a key tactic for candidates in tense, often ugly campaigns. Turkey will vote in the first round of the presidential election on May 14, and, for the first time in two decades, it appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could lose his hold on power. 

In Antakya, three months after the earthquakes, hollowed-out homes with cracked walls hang precariously over a sea of rubble, trinkets and clothing. In Hatay province alone, over 23,000 people died in the earthquakes. Many in the area still live in camps. The luckier ones live in homes made out of shipping containers provided by the state. As Turkey faces repair bills totaling tens of billions of dollars, container homes — indeed, whole container cities — will be required as construction gets underway.  

Across the region most affected by the earthquakes, Syrian refugees are still living in makeshift tent colonies. NGO workers and Syrians I spoke to said they had been pushed out of official, state-run campsites by Turkish citizens and even the local authorities.

In April, Amnesty International accused the Turkish police of beating and torturing alleged looters in Antakya and reported that Syrians were targets of xenophobic abuse by Turkish officials.

Mouna, a Syrian refugee in Antakya whose home was destroyed in the earthquakes, told me she’d been forced to leave a state-run camp by the Turkish residents. She now lives in a tent she has set up beside the ruins of her former home. Resourcefully, Mouna has built an extension to her tent that contains a kitchen and a toilet. A washing machine and a fridge are powered by electricity rerouted from a nearby power supply. Her neighbors are all Syrian refugees who go in and out of the crumbling buildings around them to retrieve possessions to put in their tents. 

A 46-year-old single mother of two sons, Mouna left Syria in 2012, during the early phase of the Syrian civil war. She has been slowly building a life in Turkey. Her job in a dessert factory paid enough for her to afford rent and keep her family safe. 

After the earthquakes struck in February 2023, Mouna and her sons were housed in an official camp but were soon driven out by Turkish people who resented having to share scarce facilities with refugees. She says Syrians were bullied and told that they could not use the toilets. A little girl, Mouna says, hit her and told her that “Syrians should go home.” The authorities did little to help. Mouna and her neighbors rely on a Syrian NGO for water and food.

Syrian refugees in Turkey are “caught between two earthquakes,” says Murat Erdogan, a professor at Ankara University. “One is the physical earthquake,” Erdogan (no relation to the Turkish president) told me, “and the other is a political earthquake.” Even before the disaster, he adds, “social cohesion was not easy because of the number of the refugees.” There are over 3.5 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey, and for nearly a decade Turkey has hosted more refugees than any other country in the world. 

Unpublished data Erdogan collected in January 2023 for the “Syrian Barometer,” an annual survey he conducts, showed that 28.5% of Turks see Syrians as the number one problem in Turkey, an increase of 3% from the year before.

But now, Erdogan believes, the earthquakes have cemented in people’s minds the image of Syrians as criminals and a drain on public services.

Throughout Antakya, Syrians living in camps dotted around the city told me stories that echoed Mouna’s experience of discrimination. One woman, heavily pregnant, was hit so hard in the stomach by a group of Turkish men that she lost her baby. Another woman told me her son was beaten by military officers who accused him of stealing. She showed me photos on her phone of a child’s mangled and bruised limbs.

But there are also many stories of Turks and Syrians helping one another to deal with the aftermath of the earthquakes. Mouna told me she knew Turkish people who remained kind and supportive. But the rise in anti-Syrian sentiment is evident and impossible to ignore.

A Turkish man I met in Hatay province boasted that he had shot a looter in the leg. He suspected the man was Syrian. “How could you tell?” I asked. “From his mustache,” the man replied.

The earthquakes have caused a massive spike in anti-Syrian hate speech online, said Dilan Tasmedir, who runs Medya ve Goc Dernegi, an organization that monitors rhetoric about migrants in the Turkish media. Slogans like “We don’t want Syrians” and “No longer welcome” trended on Twitter. The comedian Sahan Gokbakar wrote to his 3.7 million followers on the platform: “Health, shelter and all our material resources should be used only for our own people, not for foreigners.” While some criticized the comment for its divisiveness, the tweet racked up more than 280,000 likes.

When protests against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria erupted into a civil war in 2011, millions fled the country. Turkey’s tiny refugee population mushroomed as the Turkish president welcomed Syrians into the country as guests. “When a people is persecuted,” Erdogan declared, “especially people that are our relatives, our brothers, and with whom we share a 910 km border, we absolutely cannot pretend nothing is happening and turn our backs.”

When Erdogan allowed Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey, he was breaking with a long nativist tradition in his country of not accepting high numbers of refugees. But he also now had a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Europe.

In 2016, a year after Europe faced its largest migrant crisis since World War II, the European Union signed a deal with Turkey in which the country received six billion euros to help with improving conditions for refugees. Turkish nationals were granted visa-free travel to Europe, and, in return, Ankara agreed to prevent refugees from leaving Turkey illegally for Greece and to take back refugees who had left Turkey illegally and been turned away at EU borders. The aim was for the EU to process the asylum requests of Syrian refugees while they awaited a decision in Turkey instead of trying to cross illegally into Greece. But the EU was slow to hold up its end of the bargain, keeping the flow of immigrants granted entry into European countries to a trickle. 

Erdogan temporarily reneged on the deal in 2020, letting migrants pass through Turkey to Greece. He said that the EU was providing inadequate support. By 2021, about 28,000 Syrians had been resettled in Europe, well below the maximum threshold of 72,000 outlined in the original agreement.

The EU deal prompted a shift in attitudes inside Turkey, as it dawned on many Turks that their Syrian “guests” were in fact not there temporarily, but permanently, said Tasmedir of Medya ve Goc Dernegi. More than 200,000 Syrians have been granted citizenship in Turkey since 2011. And many will vote for the first time during the May 14 general election. Opposition groups claim that Erdogan granted these Syrians citizenship in an attempt to expand his own electoral base.

Erdogan could use all the extra votes he can get. Public frustration over Turkey’s economic crisis, botched earthquake relief efforts and endemic corruption have all weakened Erdogan’s appeal to the point that defeat in the first round seems like a distinct possibility. The pressure of the election on both the government and opposition parties is extremely high, and the hot button topic of much of the campaigning has been the nationwide hostility toward Syrian refugees.

Regardless of political ideology, Turkish political parties are now promising to send refugees back to Syria. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a 74-year-old economist and social democratic politician, is Erdogan’s main contender for the presidency. He’s promised to “fulfill people’s longing for democracy,” repair strained relations with the West and unseat Erdogan. He’s also said that returning Syrians to Syria within two years is one of his top goals. Kilicdaroglu’s party,​​ the Republican People’s Party, is the largest in a coalition of opposition parties called the National Alliance. While Kilicdaroglu has a lead on Erdogan in most polls, the results of the first round of voting are expected to be close.

Then there’s the Victory Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant party formed in 2021, with only one representative currently in the Turkish parliament. But, Ankara University professor Murat Erdogan told me, it has had a “profound effect” on political discourse.

Last month, Umit Ozdag, the leader of the Victory Party and its sole representative, tweeted a video of a group of people he implied were Syrians. He depicted them as Arab invaders who, he said, would transport the “Middle East's understanding of religion, culture of violence, humiliation of women, rape of children, rape of boys, drugs” to Turkey. Ozdag’s central policy proposal is to expel all Syrians from Turkey within one year.

In January, the Victory Party began its “Bus to Damascus” fundraising campaign, in which it asked supporters to name people they wanted returned to Syria and to provide donations for bus tickets. As people across the region sought shelter just days after the earthquakes hit in February, Ozdag began accusing Syrians of looting and called for the police and soldiers to shoot looters on sight. In one instance, he shared a video on Twitter of a live news broadcast which he claimed showed a Syrian man stealing a phone during rescue operations. 

Ozdag later admitted he was wrong but refused to apologize, even after it emerged that the man was a Turkish volunteer helping with the search-and-rescue operations. One Turkish rescue worker became so frustrated with Ozdag’s divisive rhetoric that he confronted him on camera. “We, whether Muslim or Christian, are fed up with hearing this sort of talk,” the man told Ozdag.

In Europe and the United States, the question of how to deal with refugees has been highly polarizing, with voters’ views on migration often correlating with where they might be placed on the political spectrum. In the U.K., for example, voters on the left tend to be less hardline on immigration than voters on the right. But in Turkey, the desire to send Syrians back is now the status quo, receiving widespread support from an estimated 85% of voters. In some cases, I found that voters on the left express even more hostility toward refugees than those on the right.

At a May 6 rally held by Kilicdaroglu’s party, I spoke with several younger supporters of the social democratic candidate who saw Arab migrants as an existential threat to liberal secular values. Nida Koksaldi, a 21-year-old architecture student, told me she supports the Republican People’s Party because she supports women's rights, animal rights and LGBTQ rights. Had I met Koksaldi in California, I might have expected her to have included refugees in that list. But she agrees with Kilicdaroglu’s proposed policy of expelling Syrians. They are violent, she said of migrants generally, bad for Turkish society and bad for women’s rights. “They even rape us,” she told me. 

Friedrich Puttmann, a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics, believes that much of the resentment toward Syrians is rooted in Turkey’s own struggle for its identity. The Republican People’s Party was the party of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic who espoused a philosophy of secularism and encouraged Turks to look to the West as a model. Kemalists, who support Ataturk’s sweeping reforms, tend to be more liberal and firmly support women’s rights. Historically, voters who support the party have feared cultural influence from the Arab world, which is often painted by Kemalist politicians as uniformly conservative and patriarchal. 

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is more aligned with religiously conservative voters, and therefore, according to Puttmann, has historically been more closely linked with Arab culture. Prior to the Syrian civil war, in the early years of Erdogan’s leadership, the country had already become more economically tied to Arab states. So when hundreds of thousands of Syrians entered Turkey as refugees, supporters of the Republican People’s Party were already angry at what they saw as the “Arabization'' of Turkey.

Over time, as more Syrians have come to the country, voters in both blocks have become increasingly hostile toward Syrians. Supporters of Erdogan’s party, torn between their duty toward fellow Muslims and their resentment over cultural differences and the economic impact of migration, have begun reframing Syrians as bad Muslims. 

More secular Turkish people see the presence of Syrian refugees in Turkey as evidence of a cultural shift that has occurred under the Justice and Development Party, with Turkey becoming a more conservative, religious and Arabicized country. They see Syrians as part of a system that has eroded Turkey’s secular, liberal identity, Puttmann says. This perception seems to ignore the fact that many Syrians are also secular and liberal.

In an attempt to match the opposition’s rhetoric on returning Syrian refugees to Syria and in the face of mounting public pressure, Erdogan’s government has shifted its policies. Last year, Erdogan announced a plan to send up to a million refugees back to Syria, though the country is still at war. There have been reports that the Assad regime has tortured and disappeared refugees who returned to the country. Reports also emerged last year of Syrians being arrested and forced into northern Syria at gunpoint by Turkish officials. More recently, Erdogan has begun trying to negotiate with the Assad regime to reach a deal that would facilitate the return of Syrian refugees. Assad’s precondition for any settlement is that Turkey withdraw its troops from the parts of northern Syria that it has controlled since 2016 following successive military operations aimed at limiting Kurdish control of the region.

Kilicdaroglu says he will negotiate with Assad and is widely seen as a more appealing negotiating partner for the isolated dictator. Kilicdaroglu has also said he will withdraw Turkish troops from northern Syria, secure his country's border and repatriate Syrians — as long as Turkey’s security requirements in northern Syria are met.

Back in Antakya, the election feels like a battle fought in a distant land. Political posters with gleaming candidates are the only new and shiny objects in an empty, dust-covered city. Most Syrians living in the camps are too focused on surviving from one day to the next to concern themselves with elections they can do little to influence.

More than a decade after the first Syrians fled the civil war and arrived in Turkey, it is hard to find hope among the refugees in Antakya. What future they might have had, they say, has disappeared with the earthquakes.

Mouna told me she brought her kids to Turkey so that they could have a better future than in Syria. Now she fears they have none in a country that doesn’t want them. But Mouna also recalled that when she first arrived in Turkey, people were hospitable and she was able to make friends. “And I think this will happen again,” she said, “because not all the people are bad.”

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Not long after, the armed men came to her polling booth and began ordering people to leave. Godwin, a first-time voter, was frightened and confused. A woman standing close by was in tears. She asked Godwin if she was Igbo. “They’re chasing Igbo people away,” she told Godwin. The mostly Christian Igbos comprise between 15 and 18% of the Nigerian population and are the third largest ethnic group, behind the Yoruba and the Hausa. 

Across Nigeria that day, there were many such incidents of ethnicity-based voter intimidation. The 2023 Nigerian elections were reported to have been so marred by violence and vote-rigging that both major opposition parties immediately called for the results to be overturned. Legal challenges have been filed but the disputed winner, Bola Tinubu, will be sworn in on May 29. 

The elections may now be over, barring an unlikely overturning of the result by the courts, but millions of Nigerians are still reeling from the divisive campaigning. Since Nigeria transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1999, no Igbo has been elected president. And though there has been an informal arrangement to rotate the presidency between the Muslim north and Christian south of Nigeria in order to bring together a linguistically, religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse country, there has also been no president from the southeast, where Igbos are the dominant ethnic group. 

But by February 2023, it seemed likely that Nigeria’s new president would be Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria who is ethnically Igbo and who led most polls. Obi defeated Tinubu on his home turf in Lagos State, but Tinubu still won the election. That Obi would not be president — after all the hope and promise he represented for many Igbos — was a bitter pill to swallow. Even if the courts rule that there are no grounds to overturn the election results, the violence, the disenfranchisement of Igbos in particular and various flaws reported in the voting process are enough to conclude, as international observers did, that the “election fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ reasonable expectations.” 

“We now understand that we are not one in Nigeria,” said Ebuka, who was forced to leave his polling unit in Surulere because he was Igbo. He later came back and voted with the help of the police. “Left to me, if the Yorubas and Hausas aren’t comfortable with the Igbos ruling them, then there should be freedom. Biafra should come, and everybody should go to their land,” he said. Ebuka is referring to the secessionist state founded by the Igbo people in 1967, the creation of which led to the Nigerian Civil War. By 1970, when the war ended with Biafra’s surrender, more than two million people had died and millions more had been displaced. 

The campaigning in the presidential election this February, and in state elections in March, showed that tribalism is resurgent in Nigeria and that ethnic prejudice and division still run deep. Tinubu, the incoming Nigerian president, will find he is in charge of a country that is once again asking itself existential questions, asking what it means to be Nigerian.

At the polling booth in Surulere on February 25, there were only two people ahead of Godwin in the queue when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Two men told her to leave the queue. “As I was leaving, the men started laughing. They said I was very stupid and that I should have gone to Nnewi to vote,” she told me. Nnewi is a commercial and industrial city in Anambra State, where Igbos are in the majority. 

Godwin looked at the electoral officials at the booth for help but they were powerless. “I walked away feeling very sad,” she told me. “I’d never felt that useless before. I had looked forward to voting.”

The ethnic profiling targeted at the Igbos living in Lagos during the elections was deliberate and amplified by social media, says Timi Olagunju, a policy consultant. It was a whipping up, he told me, of Nigeria’s “primordial public.” This is a reference to the work of Peter Palmer Ekeh, a Nigerian sociologist, known for his 1975 paper, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa.” According to Ekeh, the African experience of colonialism resulted in “the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West.” Ekeh characterizes these two publics as primordial and civic. The primordial concerns private interests and attachments such as ethnicity, religion and tribalism, while the civic refers to national and civil structures, such as the military or the bureaucracy. “Many of Africa’s political problems,” Ekeh wrote, “are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics.” 

In the heat of Nigeria’s rancorous presidential election, politically motivated tribalistic disinformation spread like wildfire across social media. Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, who is a Christian, was accused of destroying Muslim communities when he was a governor and portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, the secessionist organization in southeastern Nigeria.

Online narratives were further spun to imply that Igbo people wanted to take over Lagos. On March 18, three weeks after the presidential elections, most of Nigeria’s 36 states went back to the polls to elect state governors. In Lagos State, WhatsApp groups lit up with messages that warned that the Labor Party gubernatorial aspirant Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour intended to empower the Indigenous People of Biafra. If Rhodes-Vivour came into power, the messages said, he’d lay off civil servants in Lagos and hire Igbos to replace them. Rhodes-Vivour is Yoruba, but his marriage to an Igbo apparently raised hackles.

Anti-Igbo messages and threats were widespread in the days before the Lagos gubernatorial election. A video went viral on social media of Musiliu Akinsanya, a well-known Lagos civil servant and political operative, telling voters to stay home if they weren’t planning on voting for the ruling APC party. 

“Tell them,” Akinsanya was filmed saying, “‘Mama Chukwudi,’ if you don’t want to vote for us, sit down at home. Sit down at home.” Mama Chukwudi is a reference to a typical Igbo name. After the video attracted outrage on social media, Akinsanya claimed it was just a friendly joke. And the Nigerian police backed him up. But during the presidential elections on February 25, Akinsanya had been caught on camera preventing Igbo voters from voting in a polling unit in Lagos. He was not even reprimanded, let alone punished.

“If Akinsanya had been arrested and questioned, even if not imprisoned,” the policy consultant Timi Olagunju told me, “it would have sent shivers through the APC camp and empowered people to come out to vote.” The violent rhetoric and bullying at the ballot box had its desired effect. The voter turnout for the presidential election was a record low of 27%, and the turnout for the gubernatorial elections just weeks later was equally disappointing.

Ugo Ude, a second-year English student at Lagos State University, showed up to vote in the presidential election at 7:05 in the morning. The booths opened at eight and within 25 minutes she had cast her vote. Not long after she voted, she says, a gang of “fierce-looking” men showed up, singled a man out from the queue and told him to leave. As he did, Ugo heard an elderly woman say, “let Igbo go to their states to vote Igbo, and let Yorubas do the same.”

For Ude, the woman’s words were an insight into the mentality of some of her compatriots. She herself was told to leave the booth. “Go away,” Ude says people, including the elderly woman, shouted at her. “You’re a stranger.” Something broke inside her that day, she told me. When she meets fellow Nigerians, she is wary: “I’m now asking myself, ‘Would you stand up for me or would you be part of the machinery that’ll be used to attack me?’” 

Ude, who runs a nonprofit organization that provides educational materials to children, says she’s “always been optimistic about Nigeria.” She acknowledged that she had been shocked by the bigotry on display during the elections but took solace in the messages she’d seen that rejected tribalism. 

“I will keep voting and I will keep doing my nonprofit work,” she told me. “Although there will be times when I’ll doubt the effectiveness of what I’m doing, I just can’t let it slide. If the kids want to grow up and become tribal bigots that’s up to them.”

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Almost two months later, Kocer is still being investigated and does not know if he will be sent to trial under a controversial law, the so-called disinformation law, which criminalizes the spreading of false or misleading information. If convicted, Kocer could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

Critics say the disinformation law, passed in October 2022, is the latest example of the gradual dismantling of democratic freedoms in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has run the country for over two decades now.

As Turkey approaches its presidential election on May 14, the disinformation law, which was used to silence journalists in the aftermath of the earthquakes, casts a shadow over free speech in what some Turkish people see as the most important election in the Republic’s 100-year history.

On election day, the state will use the law to suppress the reporting of what is happening at polling stations and justify detentions and arrests, said Baris Altintas, the co-director of the Media and Law Studies Association, a non-profit organization which offers legal assistance to journalists in Turkey. The Turkish government might also initiate internet shutdowns, website blockings and bans on Twitter accounts, she told me. 

One of the most controversial changes under the disinformation law was an amendment to the Turkish criminal code called Article 217. It states that people can be imprisoned for up to three years for disseminating false information related to the country's domestic and foreign security. The law specifies that the false information has to be related to the “internal and external security, public order and general health of the country” to be considered a crime.

What this means in practice is unclear — which may be the point.

“Such wording, within the Turkish context can refer to anything and everything and often concepts such as external security and/or national security as well as public order are taken lightly,” said Yaman Akdeniz, a professor of law at Istanbul Bilgi University.

The law states that disinformation must be distributed in a way that disturbs public peace, with the motive of creating concern, fear and panic among the public. But, Akdeniz explains, it does not define anxiety, fear or panic, leaving its interpretation up to public prosecutors who consider whether to bring forward a case, as well as the criminal courts if an indictment is issued.

Turkey has low levels of judicial independence, with most judges appointed by the president and the parliament, which is dominated by Erdogan’s party, the AKP, and its coalition of allied parties.

Unpublished research by the Media and Law Studies Association shows that six journalists were detained under Article 217 for their work covering the aftermath of the earthquakes. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only Iran, China and Myanmar currently jail more journalists than Turkey.

The earthquakes, which killed more than 45,000 people in Turkey alone and destroyed around 214,000 buildings, have put the AKP under immense pressure in the lead up to the elections. The party has been accused of undermining construction safeguards, thus worsening the impact of the earthquakes. It has also been criticized for overseeing a chaotic response to the disaster, fueling widespread anger against what many see as a corrupt government.

In response, the government has described its critics as “provocateurs” and shut down access to social media sites, including homegrown sites, on some service providers, all while people were using these platforms to search for survivors.

Two journalists arrested in February, Ali and Ibrahim Imat, were reportedly only released on Friday, having spent weeks awaiting trial for allegedly spreading fake news. The brothers had raised allegations that the Turkish authorities in Osmaniye were withholding tents from people made homeless by the earthquakes.

On at least two occasions, when reporting from the earthquake-affected region, Mir Ali Kocer said he was confronted by police officers in order to stop him from filming. One incident was caught on camera. This was something several journalists have reported experiencing.

When he was summoned to the police station, the policemen told Kocer he was being investigated for spreading disinformation for comments he had posted on social media. According to Kocer the posts that the police showed him included one in which he said he could smell dead bodies.

Kocer told me he was simply sharing information, obtained from survivors of the earthquakes or local officials and the police, which the government refused to share. He said his posts are usually supported with a photo, a video or an interview with someone. Kocer, who refers to the disinformation law as the “censorship law,” believes the police were just trying to intimidate him. But, he told me, he will continue to be a journalist even if he is forced to report from inside a prison.

Prior to the disinformation law, the state already had a wide range of legal tools available to target critical voices, including an anti-terrorism law that has forced dozens of journalists and dissidents to flee while many others have been imprisoned. 

Another law, forbidding people to insult the president, led to 33,973 prosecutions in 2021 alone. Schoolchildren and a former Miss Turkey, the 2006 winner of a national beauty pageant, have been prosecuted under the law. In 2016, a man was sentenced to a year in prison for posting images on Facebook comparing Erdogan to the Lord of the Rings character Gollum.

Often, the anti-terrorism law is used against journalists who make accusations against judges or police officials tasked with combating terrorism, says Ozgur Ogret, the Turkey representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. In cases where this charge does not stick, the disinformation law gives the state another way to target the same journalists and imprison them for doing the thing that is, by definition, their job — spreading information.

In December 2022, Sinan Aygul became the first journalist to be arrested under the disinformation law, after he posted a tweet accusing police officers and soldiers of sexually abusing a child. He later retracted the story for inaccuracies.

Aygul could have been charged by the police for making targets of those who are tasked to combat terrorism, said Ogret. But instead the state decided to use the disinformation law.

The impact of the law extends beyond journalists. Hundreds of people had legal proceedings initiated against them and dozens were detained for spreading “provocative” posts on social media in the wake of the earthquakes. It is unclear at this stage how many of these people were held under Article 217, but it is likely that a lot of them were detained using the law, said Altintas, the director of the Media and Law Studies Association.

Article 217 poses a bigger threat to NGOs, academics and ordinary citizens than journalists, who are more seasoned in dealing with the state and have been targeted for years using a mixture of laws, Altintas told me. Now the disinformation law means anything anyone tweets or says can be used against them.

The disinformation law also imposes heavy sanctions, including six-month bans on advertising, on social media platforms that fail to comply with content removal requests from prosecutors or the courts. These same companies are also obliged to provide user data, when requested, in relation to specific crimes, including when people are accused of disseminating fake news.

The authorities can limit access to social media platforms by slowing down the speed of the service for non-compliance with these requests. The platforms have been put in a further bind as they are now required to set up subsidiaries in Turkey, making them more criminally, administratively and financially liable. “The disinformation law forces social media platforms to be complicit in the state’s censorship regime,” said Suay Boulougouris, a program officer at Article 19, an international human rights organization that promotes freedom of expression.

The opposition in Turkey, after years of elections riddled with fraud, have become highly organized in election monitoring, in which social media plays a vital role, allowing citizens to share information on irregularities, including ballot stuffing, violence and the deliberate miscounting of votes. The new disinformation law makes it easier for the government to remove content en masse or to clamp down on the social media sites themselves — a real possibility, says Bolougouris, as Erdogan, who is lagging behind the opposition in the polls, scrambles to find a way to secure his presidency.

“The implications of these amendments go beyond Turkey,” she told me. “Because if Turkey is able to implement these amendments without a strong pushback from platforms, for example, it will set a dangerous precedent and it will have implications for the open functioning of social media around the world.”

Turkish government officials have over the years been keen to draw parallels between Turkey’s internet laws and a law in Germany, referred to as NetzDG. The German law has been heavily criticized for requiring social media companies to comply with content takedown requests from German authorities. But Boulougouris disagrees with the comparison, saying that the operating environment in Turkey, with its weaker institutions and judiciary, is totally different from Germany.

As the election approaches, the opposition is looking more unified, with six parties backing one candidate, Kemal Kilicdaroglu. The opposition have rallied around pledges to implement constitutional changes that roll back presidential powers, crack down on corruption and give state media organizations back their independence and impartiality.

But Yaman Akdeniz, the law professor, cautions against being overly optimistic that these changes will be implemented if the opposition wins. Turkey has a long history of censorship, he told me, “don’t expect this to be a smooth process.”

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It was, tweeted India's minister of law and justice, a member of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, a “childish attempt to bring pressure on the appellate court.” Opponents of the BJP, though, say Gandhi was handed a practically unheard-of maximum sentence for remarks he made while campaigning in 2019 that did not meet the threshold for criminal defamation. They also point to the political expediency of the two-year sentence, the exact period of time required to ensure Gandhi was disqualified from Parliament and potentially from participating in the next general election.

Outrage over what appeared to be political chicanery spread quickly. Several opposition parties united to condemn the expulsion of Gandhi. “I strongly condemn the fascist action,” said Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, of how quickly  the BJP moved to ensure Gandhi's disqualification. “I request all Indian political parties,” he added, “to realize that the action against Rahul Gandhi is an attack on progressive democratic forces and oppose it in unison.”

On April 3, while Gandhi was in Surat, Stalin was hosting leading figures from all of India's major opposition parties as part of a social justice conference he said would help create a united front to fight "bigotry and religious hegemony," a pointed reference to the BJP's Hindu nationalist politics. Academic and political commentator Apoorvanand wrote that the opposition to the BJP was unified because it considered Gandhi's expulsion from Parliament “an audacious signal by the government that it can go to any extent to cripple political forces who challenge it democratically.”

How much of a challenge Rahul Gandhi represents to the BJP is open to debate. He has been mocked for years as an impetuous, naive and entitled politician who believes leadership to be his inheritance. The BJP's caricature of Gandhi as a princeling fawned over by acolytes in the Congress party — more loyal to a dynasty than the nation — has been incredibly effective.  Regional leaders like Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh or Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal bridled at being too closely associated with Gandhi and  at the general assumption that he would lead any opposition coalition against the BJP.

Just before Gandhi was disqualified from parliament, Banerjee reportedly told her party workers that the BJP was deliberately making Gandhi out to be the face of the opposition because he was so easy for Modi to defeat. Now, Gandhi, as opposition parties rally behind him, might appear a more formidable figure. Spokespersons for the governments of both the United States and Germany have responded to the news of Gandhi's expulsion with cautiously-phrased references to the importance of “judicial independence.” The notoriously thin-skinned BJP government was angered by these tepid comments, with Jaishankar, the foreign minister, telling a sympathetic audience that “the West has a bad habit for a long time of commenting on other people.” They think, he said, “that it’s some kind of God-given right.” The urbane Congress politician Shashi Tharoor, a former United Nations official, joked that he would “strongly urge my friend Jai to cool it a little bit.”

In a year when  the BJP hopes to use India's presidency at the G20 as evidence of its growing influence on world affairs, the treatment of Rahul Gandhi appears to confirm a growing belief that Modi and the BJP use the law — whether the courts or investigating agencies — to stifle critical voices in politics, the media or online.

The BJP seems particularly sensitive to criticism in the foreign media or on foreign soil. For weeks now, both houses of India’s Parliament have barely functioned. Proceedings are adjourned within minutes of the start. Incidentally, it costs the Indian people a little over $3,000 per minute to maintain their parliament, making any time wasted very expensive. At least part of the deadlock was caused by BJP representatives demanding an apology from Rahul Gandhi for criticizing India on a recent visit to the United Kingdom. In a talk at Cambridge University last month, Gandhi said India faced “an attack on the basic structure of democracy.” This was interpreted by the BJP as a demand for foreign interference in India's internal affairs.

It was against this backdrop that Gandhi was convicted by the court in Surat for the remarks he made in 2019. Speaking in Hindi at an election rally, Gandhi asked in a sarcastic aside why the names of prominent Indian frauds, men who’d stolen large sums of money, all happened to be Modi. He mentioned three Modis, including the prime minister, and said, roughly translated, “If you search a bit, a lot more Modis will come to light.”

This was enough for the magistrate in Surat to pronounce Gandhi guilty of defamation, an offense in India under both civil and criminal law. Indian criminal defamation law appears, in both letter and spirit, to have become only more regressive since it was first enacted in 1860. Truth is not an absolute defense. Even the relatives of a deceased person can claim defamation. Since the law criminalizes “any imputation concerning any person,” it means that even if the statement in question did not directly name the complainants, they can still initiate criminal action.

In Rahul Gandhi’s case, the complainants were not the three Modis he named but a BJP legislator from Gujarat named Purnesh Modi. He complained that Gandhi had defamed all 130 million people in India who bear the last name Modi, an apparently preposterous charge with which the Surat court agreed.

India and other major democracies have taken two different approaches in the area of defamation law. In the U.K. and U.S., defamation law has been transformed.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan transformed the law of defamation around the world, tilting the balance in favor of uninhibited, robust and wide-open speech. Justice William Brennan ruled that for free speech to survive it needed “breathing space.” Erroneous statements or even vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials were inevitable in a free debate, the court ruled.

The First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were used to extend constitutional protections in favor of free speech and bar elected officials from seeking compensation, even for false comments made about their official actions unless those statements were made with “actual malice.”

A plaintiff had to demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that false or inaccurate statements were made with knowledge of their dishonesty or with a reckless disregard for the truth under the “actual malice” standard. It also shifted the burden of proof from the defendant to the plaintiff. The court rejected the common law presumption of damages and asked aggrieved public servants to prove actual damages. In the same year, in Garrison v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held that criminal defamation laws must be narrowly tailored to target only speech intending to lead to group disorder or inciting a breach of the peace. The court noted that, generally, criminal law is reserved for those crimes that threaten the security of society, and criminal sanctions cannot be justified merely because  defamation is evil or damaging to a person.

Common law criminal libel was abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 in Ashton v. Kentucky. Since then, the criminal defamation laws in 38 U.S. states and territories have either been repealed or struck down as unconstitutional. Once the Supreme Court set the precedent, other former British colonies and common law countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, followed. A consensus emerged that if speakers were threatened with criminal prosecution for speaking out on matters of public concern, it would have a chilling effect on public discourse.

In 2009, the U.K. Parliament abolished the offense of criminal defamation. The 2013 U.K. Defamation Act introduced a requirement for claimants to show that they had suffered serious harm before suing for defamation. It also introduced a defense of "responsible publication on matters of public interest” and new statutory defenses of truth and honest opinion. 

Meanwhile, even after achieving independence from British rule and adopting a republican constitution, India has continued to uphold legislation designed to protect the colonial elite. By amending the Code of Criminal Process in 1955, India also placed public officials into a separate class and established for them a special procedure involving the state machinery to sue private parties for making defamatory statements.

The Indian Constitution contains a chapter on fundamental rights, styled after the American Bill of Rights. Chief among the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms is the right to free speech and expression, subject only to limited restrictions. One of these restrictions is defamation. The key is that the restrictions have to be reasonable. But the Indian judiciary has continued to interpret and apply these restrictions narrowly. In 2016, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutionality of criminal defamation. “Criminalizing defamation,” noted one lawyer, “serves no legitimate public purpose.” And, he added, “the court's reasoning is wooly at best.”

As a result, India's influential politicians and corporations are the ones who most frequently invoke criminal defamation, typically against either political opponents or journalists. India's criminal defamation laws closely resemble 19th century libel laws in England. But there is a major difference. In England, defamatory libel always involved publication in writing. Even if they were malicious, spoken words or gestures weren't considered libel. Verbal slander, though, can result in criminal charges under India’s penal code.

Rahul Gandhi has been convicted by a court in Gujarat for spoken words. Unless his conviction is stayed by the appellate court on April 13, he will continue to be barred from parliament, from doing the job he was elected to do for his constituency. If he were living in England 170 years ago, he would not even have faced criminal proceedings, let alone the possibility of imprisonment. 

The dangers that India's criminal defamation laws pose to Indian democracy are evident in Rahul Gandhi's conviction — they appear to exist to protect the ruling class and intimidate critics into silence.

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The videos were fake, said the Tamil Nadu police. A controversy had been manufactured, said the Tamil Nadu government, by politicians from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. “The spread of fake videos,” said the state’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, on March 10, “was initiated by BJP leaders from North India.” He accused these unnamed leaders of having an “ulterior motive,” of trying to create unrest just after he had “spoken about anti-BJP parties uniting.”

With the BJP, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, firm favorites to win a third consecutive national election in 2024, most analysts deem the formation of an ad hoc alliance of regional parties and the fast-fading Congress — which has governed India for the vast majority of its 75 years as an independent nation — as the opposition’s only hope.

If Modi remains by far India’s most popular politician, there is little love lost for him in Tamil Nadu. For years, whenever he visited the state, he would be greeted with signs that read, “Go back Modi.” But the BJP, which has never had an electoral presence at any level in Tamil Nadu, surprised observers last year by winning several seats in municipal elections in the state. It led the party’s state chief to declare his intent to turn the BJP into a third political force in a state that has been dominated by two parties since the 1960s, both of which emerged from an equal rights movement for oppressed castes. Despite the progress made last year, the BJP is currently in disarray in Tamil Nadu, with 13 party workers quitting dramatically just last week.

Meanwhile, Bihar is currently led by an anti-BJP coalition. In August 2022, the state’s chief minister walked out on an alliance with the BJP and formed a new government with other partners including the Congress. The fake videos of Bihari laborers being attacked in Tamil Nadu were spread by BJP supporters, politicians from both states said, to drive a wedge between parties in both states that were opposed to the BJP.

Sylendra Babu, the extravagantly mustached head of the Tamil Nadu police, told me that he had to form 46 special teams to coordinate with the Bihar police to combat the viral spread of videos and social media commentary about attacks on Bihari laborers. “It was a war-like situation,” Babu said. 

Arrayed against the police in both Tamil Nadu and Bihar were right-wing influencers with followings of up to 60 million people, local BJP politicians and even some media. The Hindi-language Dainik Bhaskar newspaper — the largest circulated daily in India and by some estimates the fourth largest in the world — reported that more than 15 Bihari laborers had been murdered in Tamil Nadu. The article was based on a single phone call with a laborer and the accompanying video showing clips of unrelated violence.

Following up on the report, a BJP spokesperson tweeted that Bihari laborers were being attacked and killed for speaking Hindi in Tamil Nadu. To counter the misinformation, the Tamil Nadu police took to Twitter to threaten legal action against anyone it found to be deliberately making false posts. Babu himself posted a video on Twitter describing the claims that Bihari workers were being attacked in Tamil Nadu as “false and mischievous.” 

Bihar, linguistically and culturally, is part of India’s so-called “cow belt” — including the Hindi-speaking states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in particular. Back in the 1980s, an Indian academic coined the pejorative acronym BIMARU to refer to these states, a pun on the Hindi word “bimar,” meaning ill or sick. These states lag behind the rest of the country, particularly the south, in terms of prosperity and education.

Tamil Nadu is a southern state. Like its neighbors, it outperforms the North when it comes to providing healthcare, education and jobs to its residents. But the Hindi-speaking northern states dominate national politics, a dominance that has become even more stark since the Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, gobbling up votes in the region at an unprecedented scale.

States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala have always been fiercely vigilant that their languages be recognized as integral to the Indian union. Many in the South prefer to communicate in English as their pan-Indian link language rather than Hindi. But Modi, critics point out, has not disguised his ambition to make Hindi the country’s national language. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, while giving Hindi and English “official” language status. English, therefore, is equal to Hindi as a language of government communication. 

By trying to further privilege Hindi, Modi and his closest political ally, Home Minister Amit Shah, have been accused of inflaming tensions with the south. Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister, has himself written to Modi to demand that the latter stop his “continuous efforts to promote Hindi in the name of one nation.” Stalin described attempts to “impose” Hindi as “divisive in character” and warned against provoking another “language war.” Tamil Nadu has a long history of resisting the adoption of Hindi as the language of government.

While Hindi is by far the single most spoken language in India, there are hundreds of millions who do not speak it and who fear being at a disadvantage were learning Hindi to become compulsory. The rumors and fake videos tapped into the prejudices and resentments of both Hindi speakers and those in the south who speak entirely different languages and write with a different alphabet. The videos made national headlines because they appeared to expose yet another historical division still resonant in contemporary India.

S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, told me that the politics of the BJP is inherently opposed to the federalism that has long characterized politics in Tamil Nadu. The BJP, she said, “is against autonomy, democratization of language, and plurality of culture and religion.” 

The fomenting of social media outrage over the last couple of weeks provides an insight into what campaigning might look like over the next year as the general election approaches. The journalist Arun Sinha, author of “Battle for Bihar,” an inside look at the state’s politics, told me that the level of organization shown over the last few weeks, as fake videos were spread about anti-migrant violence in Tamil Nadu, suggests that the BJP wants to establish itself as the voice of the large population of disenfranchised Bihari migrant workers.

Spreading rumors about anti-migrant feelings in states like Tamil Nadu and maligning the non-BJP coalition government of Bihar as unresponsive, he said, “is like killing two birds with one stone.” And, as ever, the BJP’s tight control of the social media narrative in India helps it to advance its electoral goals. The question is whether the opposition can, as it tried to do in Tamil Nadu, effectively marshal social media to stop the spread of disinformation.

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Several voters had waited to ensure that the process — a digitized election tally, the first to be used in a nationwide election in Nigeria’s history — was complete and sound. After hours of waiting, their patience evaporated. Some began to accuse the officers of sabotage. 

“The e-transmission application was not properly configured on the device, so we could not upload the [tally],” said Bolaji Abdulganiyu, one of the officers on duty. The small team at the polling unit was unable to transmit the votes through the digitized system, as stipulated by the Independent National Election Commission’s new and highly-touted guidelines. Instead, they had to carry the sheets to the election commission’s IT center by hand.

Abdulganiyu was expecting the new voting and identity verification system to work better. “We were very confident because we had training,” he said. “It worked perfectly.” But when the votes actually began coming in, the system began to crash under their weight.

The problem Abdulganiyu and his colleagues were trying to solve was playing out nationwide. Throughout the day and into the night, the centralized system buckled and machines malfunctioned at various polling places across the country, frustrating the millions of voters who had gone to the polls expecting to choose a successor to President Muhammadu Buhari, who will soon reach the end of his two-term limit. 

A voter from Onishita, in eastern Nigeria, told me that the machine at her polling place began malfunctioning due to overheating. “[Voters] had to contribute money to get fuel for a generator to power some fans to cool the machine,” said Stephanie, who was only willing to share her first name.

Four days after polling day, Nigeria’s election commission called the election for Bola Tinubu, the candidate for the ruling All Progressives Congress party, despite having uploaded only 30% of votes. Officials claimed that a full manual count had taken place but only 30% of the results could be seen through the digital system. The announcement sparked widespread anger among citizens and analysts alike, as they decried the lack of transparency and accused election workers of tampering with the results.

Nigeria’s election commission had promised that digitization would make for a safer, more transparent and fair election, but it has done the opposite. The country’s recently updated electoral law encouraged digitization and allowed the commission to introduce the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, a system that verifies registered voters and is intended to prevent over-voting but also includes digital applications for transmitting vote tallies.

The system’s failure on election day blew a hole in the already-beleaguered election that was fraught with polls opening late, long delays to vote and violence in many parts of the country. It has undercut people’s confidence in the vote count and helped to fuel a scourge of misinformation online about who may or may not have won. And it has set the stage for a court battle between opposition parties and the ruling party, which was declared the winner.

Fadekemi Abiru, an expert at the Lagos-based intelligence company Stears Intelligence, explained that the election commission had sought to minimize manipulation by streamlining the process. Prior to this election, results were counted at polling units, transferred to the ward and then to a local government office. The local government would then deliver those counts to the state and then onto the federal body for a full count to render a final result.

“Along the way, there is a lot of manipulation that could happen. They were trying to cut out that part and make that a bit more digitized,” Abiru said. “But it was quite uncanny that the next day, we were looking at the portal, and it was less than 10% of the results that had been uploaded, so that was a cause of alarm.”

In some cases, there were incidents of electoral officers uploading selfies or posting results for states other than their own. This became a theme among the critiques that Nigerians posted on social media. 

“The objective was transparency, but I don’t think it lived up to that expectation,” Abiru said.

Several local and international election observers have also condemned the election process. An international observer mission stated that “the Electoral Act 2022 introduced much-needed reforms aimed at increasing transparency in results collation and timely organization of pre-electoral processes; however, the elections still fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ legitimate and reasonable expectations.”

Experts say that the effort to use technology in Nigeria’s electoral process is commendable, but until the country’s corruption record improves, it will be difficult to increase trust in election processes. Abiru described Nigeria as a “low-trust society” and explained that people are generally wary of technology.

“Nigeria's electoral umpire isn't only eroding trust in itself, it's also giving tech a bad name,” wrote tech policy leader G’benga Sesan on Twitter.

Nigerians will go to the polls again in the near future to elect governors and state legislature members. The elections have been postponed further due to the electoral commission’s court request to reconfigure the voter accreditation system machines. Nevertheless, for millions of Nigerians who had expected an improved election, the damage is done.

Looking ahead, the question remains whether the system can be fixed and made to work properly when it actually needs to. “I think [the commission] put in a good infrastructure and arrangement but the implementation [was] the problem,”  said Ismail Bello, a digital technology expert. 

Over 300 billion naira (about $652 million) was budgeted to hold general elections. Of the 93 million registered voters in Nigeria, only 24.9 million people appear to have voted, marking the worst turnout in Nigeria’s electoral history.

For that amount of money, Bello said, “I expect them to have a very good portal. Technology will only do what you ask it to.”

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“It is an honor to be with Obrador!" 

"Women for AMLO!" 

"AMLO: best president ever!”

Hundreds of Mexicans living in the New York metropolitan area had come together to mark a historic moment — for the first time, they could vote in a referendum that would determine the country’s future. In this case, they would help decide whether President López Obrador would end his presidential term prematurely. Leading the Obradorista effort in this part of the U.S. is Morena New York Committee 1, an organization made up of fervent supporters of the president, his party and his ideals. They adhere to a political edict of social and economic progress known as the “Fourth Transformation” that imagines a future in which government employees no longer abuse their power in order to enrich themselves and protect their allies.

That Sunday in April, as Mexicans went to the polls, Morena New York Committee 1 staged three processions in New York City to show their support for the sitting president. At a rally in Union Square, an AMLO impersonator wore a larger-than-life papier-mache replica of the president’s head, shaking hands and bowing in front of the crowd. The committees encouraged those who didn’t or couldn’t register to vote to cast “a symbolic vote” during a ceremony scored with traditional music.

Since Morena’s inception in 2011 (and with the help of the president’s party), dozens of what are known as “affinity groups” have sprung up in the United States and organized ardent popular support for the Mexican president. Today, AMLO has a loyal base among Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. Most seem to perceive López Obrador as a restorative force in Mexican democracy, one who has put the most vulnerable communities first — including Mexican immigrants living abroad. For years, these groups have tried to amplify the voices of migrants through civic organizations and to exercise their voting rights in both Mexico and the United States.

“We are not fighting for ourselves, but for the next generations. [We] want to give them a better country full of opportunities so that they do not have to emigrate, like us who come here to suffer cold, hunger, political persecution and racial discrimination,” said Jose Luis Ramírez, a long-time supporter of the president at the rally in Corona, Queens. 

While some individuals have followed AMLO throughout his political career of nearly four decades, many only became active after years of living in the U.S. Empowered by AMLO’s critiques of “neoliberalism” and the “corrupt nature” of the governing parties before him, Morena sympathizers living abroad say they feel like they finally have representation in their country of origin. 

Guillermo Lucero, who joined the Morena New York committee in 2018, put it simply, “López Obrador has given us back our identity as Mexicans.”

But AMLO is not universally loved. Since he assumed the presidency in 2018, he has been criticized for gutting public institutions, lambasting the opposition and putting democratic institutions at risk. Most recently, critics have focused on López Obrador’s proposal to defund the National Electoral Institute that was created in an effort to clean up the electoral process in Mexico, which has seen its share of fraud. 

AMLO says that he wants to avoid expenses and the duplication of functions and claims that in its first year, the proposal will save up to $271 million in government expenses. But it is also well known that in 2006, AMLO lost the presidential election by a very small margin, and has since targeted the organization, accusing it of perpetrating fraud.

Last week, this proposal — known as “Plan B” — passed by a margin of 18 votes, though it will likely face a challenge before the Mexican Supreme Court. On February 26, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans took to the historic center of Mexico City to protest AMLO’s Plan B, members of Morena Committees staged their own counter-protests across the U.S. Waving Mexican and American flags, from Placita Olvera and Huntington Park in California to Times Square and Brooklyn in New York City, hundreds of Mexicans once again rallied to support the president. 

Plan B also purports to expand voting access to Mexicans living abroad, allowing them to vote with a passport and a consular ID, in addition to their voting card. But it also will bring big cuts to the electoral watchdog’s budget and will remove 85% of its workforce. Critics worry that the elections will no longer be as supervised or safeguarded and that even basic voting services (like staffing at polling places) will be in short supply. Some view the electoral Plan B as a blow to Mexico's fragile democracy. 

“[Plan B] is not about access, it is a means of meddling with [the National Electoral Institute’s] powers and weakening it as an institution,” said Dr. Rafael Fernández de Castro, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. According to Fernández de Castro, the Mexican vote abroad has never determined an election and there is reason to believe that it won’t for many years. But now, some think otherwise.

Voting for Mexico, from the US

The number of Mexican individuals who are eligible to vote in the U.S. has doubled since 2005, and it’s a community that political parties in Mexico appear eager to tap into during the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. 

“Establishing the right to vote for Mexicans who left Mexico for any reason was extremely important,” said Claudia Zavala, an electoral councilwoman for the National Electoral Institute. “As Mexicans, we do not lose these rights regardless of where we are.”

Between the 1980s and 2007, the number of Mexicans living in the U.S. increased from 2.7 to 11.9 million people, though that figure has since plateaued to a little over 10 million. Today, nearly 10% of the Mexican population lives in the United States. But for most of that period, Mexicans living abroad were sidelined from politics altogether and unable to vote in federal or local elections, until 2005.

Today, only 2% of the foreign population holds voter identification cards. Less than 1% participated in the elections of 2018, according to a recent study co-authored by political scientist and former National Electoral Institute staffer Andrés Besserer Rayas. As of 2015, Mexicans can claim voting IDs in Mexican consulates at no cost. But even as officials have removed barriers to casting a ballot, for example by expanding Mexicans’ ability to vote online and by mail, participation remains low.

“There is very little information about partisan identity in the Mexican diaspora in the United States,” Besserer said, and, among migrants, there is a general distrust of authority figures. Mexican political parties and their candidates are also prohibited, by law, from campaigning abroad.

This has not stopped individual parties or presidential hopefuls from traveling to the U.S. to meet with Mexican migrants or from bolstering the creation of political affinity groups abroad, especially when elections are on the horizon.

In the late 1980s, presidential candidate Cuahtemoc Cárdenas of the Democratic Revolutionary Party famously visited migrant communities in Los Angeles. Vicente Fox, candidate for the National Action Party whose victory ended the 80-year single-party rule in Mexico in 2000, praised migrants as the "heroes of Mexico'' and promised them the vote.

Earlier this month, Ricardo Anaya, the presidential hopeful for the conservative National Action Party, visited Dallas, Texas to inaugurate his party’s first “Committee for Migrant Action,” along with the party’s president, Marko Cortés. They told a small crowd that they hoped to visit other states in the near future.

AMLO’s Morena party has proven increasingly popular among the diaspora living outside of Mexico. Voting registration figures for Mexicans abroad have almost quadrupled, from just over  40,000 voters in 2006 — when AMLO first ran for president, unsuccessfully — to over 180,000 in 2018 when he was elected. In 2006, he only won 34% of the foreign vote. In 2018, that number spiked to 64%. 

Now, there are dozens of groups sympathetic to Morena in the United States, especially in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego. But Morena New York Committee 1 tops them all, boasting the largest digital footprint with a quarter-million followers on Facebook. The committee maintains a formidable presence online and broadcasts live events on its Facebook page.

‘We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries’

Since AMLO’s presidential victory in 2018, members of Morena New York Committee 1 have met regularly across New York City boroughs to celebrate new reforms or stage pro-AMLO demonstrations in parallel to events held in Mexico. Morena committees are also conceived as organizations to further voters’ political literacy. In the past year, Morena created the National Institute for Political Formation, an in-person and virtual academy that says it aims to provide a civic education to Mexicans everywhere. Course offerings include a primer on geopolitics, neoliberalism and the limits of capitalism. The Institute has held town halls in cities such as San Diego, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

According to Alina Duarte, who leads the Institute’s efforts abroad, Mexican citizens living in the U.S. have been celebrated for their financial contributions to the country but have otherwise been politically sidelined. In 2022, Mexican migrants living in the U.S. sent back $58 billion in remittances, a number that is often invoked by AMLO during his daily press briefings. 

“Our migrant communities have this double responsibility. Not only do they sustain two nations economically, but they also play a fundamental role in the politics of both,” said Carlos Castillo, a former Morena representative from Mexico City who attended a meeting of the Institute in New York City last November.

To some, there is reason to believe that Mexicans living in the U.S. can set the political agenda for two countries at once. In recent years, several non-partisan groups have formed a bridge between organizers and bi-national institutions, including Fuerza Migrante, a bi-national organization based in New York.

“We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries — it is simply a matter of organizing,” said Avelino Meza, the director of Fuerza Migrante. 

Many of these organizations have helped to enact legislation that pushes for greater representation of immigrant Mexican communities in the Mexican government. In 2021, Mexico’s electoral court introduced the migrant representative whose main function is to represent individuals from Mexico living abroad. Morena has three sitting representatives. Ironically, those living abroad were not able to vote for any of them.

Though new measures have been introduced to encourage migrant participation, such as setting up physical voting booths in places like Dallas for upcoming state elections, some claim these actions are insufficient. And with Plan B enacted, some processes intended to ensure the integrity of elections may falter or be eliminated altogether.
But Morena supporters are hopeful. A poll conducted in November 2022 reveals that the president’s party is favored to win in 2024. “There is a historical debt owed to Mexican migrants, which the electoral reform barely begins to address,” said Alina Duarte of the National Institute for Political Formation. “But there is reason to believe that the migrant vote in 2024 will be historic.”

With reporting assistance from Gustavo García.

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With the sun beating down on them, a crowd of customers perched on railings or tiny seats, while others just sat on the ground. Some had been in the queue since 5 a.m., but the bank’s doors remained closed. They had no idea if, or when, the bank would open.

Long queues have become permanent outside banks and ATM machines across Nigeria in recent weeks, as Nigerians are struggling to get their hands on the naira, the country’s official currency. And with the country headed to the polls on February 25 to elect a new president, the lack of ready cash is a hot button issue.

Chinedu folded his arms across his chest. “I am just tired of this country,” he complained. A week earlier, he had managed to get only 2,000 naira (about $4) out of the 25,000 naira ($54) he needed to pay his daughter’s school fees after five hours in the queue. Like financial institutions across Nigeria, the bank was rationing its cash reserves.

In October 2022, the Central Bank of Nigeria unveiled redesigned notes of the currency’s higher denominations — 200 naira, 500 naira and 1,000 naira. The rationale, according to the government of Muhammadu Buhari, was to rein in inflation, reduce crimes involving demands for ransom and curb vote-buying, a practice that had become a fixture in Nigeria’s electoral process. 

Buhari, who has held office since 2015 and reached his two-term limit, has promised free and fair elections. By redesigning the currency and ensuring fewer notes are in circulation, the government argues, it has effectively wiped out the undeclared cash it believes politicians have stockpiled in their homes to use while campaigning, to influence voters’ choices. 

The currency redesign also helped the Central Bank’s governor, Godwin Emefiele, put into motion his signature “cashless economy” plan. Controversially, Emefiele had hoped to run for president himself while still holding on to his position as the bank’s governor until a Nigerian court scuppered that ambition. 

Despite the criticism that the currency redesign received, Emefiele has stuck to his guns. According to a January circular, before the currency redesign, there was 3.2 trillion naira in circulation, of which only 500 billion was held in the banking system, with the rest of the money held largely in people’s homes. Within three months of the redesign, the Central Bank had collected 1.9 trillion naira, leaving 800 billion naira that had yet to be swapped for the new notes. 

Mallam El Rufai, the governor of Kaduna state in the northwest region of the country, claims that only 500 billion naira worth of new notes was printed. The bank did not disclose how many notes it has printed, but there has been an acute shortage of new cash in circulation leading to widespread frustration and violence, including banks being burned down in several cities. 

The impact of the Central Bank’s policy on the polls is uncertain. But some analysts have contended that it could be counterproductive. Rather than remove the influence of cash-rich politicians, “the cash shortage may make people vulnerable to selling their votes to whomever can pay for it,” Joachim Macebong, a senior analyst at Stears Intelligence, told me.

In Nigeria, 130 million people in a population of 210 million live in poverty. And only 40% of Nigerians have a bank account number. This makes the pivot to a cashless economy wildly impractical and a hugely unpopular policy among Nigerians, including the elites. The policy has sparked a Supreme Court tussle between 10 state governors and the presidency. Days ago, Buhari allowed the recirculation of the 200-naira notes, after a national uproar, until April 10 but has refused to shift grounds on higher notes. 

Since the policy went into effect, Nigeria’s online banking system has become extremely prone to technical failures, effectively shutting off all avenues for people to access money online and creating a gray market for currency purchases where those who do have cash are selling it at an exorbitant rate. 

Chinedu said that just to get access to cash at all, he was forced to pay an extra 20% of the amount he needed. Analysts say Nigeria does not have the existing infrastructure to sustain a cashless economy.

“In terms of the architectural structure of financial transaction, settlement and bills payment, on paper, we sort of have one of the best systems in the world but we do not have the infrastructure in reality,” said Ikemesit Effiong, the head of research at SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based think tank. In other words, the Central Bank neglected to ensure a smooth transition to cashlessness, to ensure that people were ready to make a sudden and drastic switch.

Iyabo Salami, who sells clothes in Lagos, decried the impact of the bank’s policy. “The cash scarcity has caused my business to nosedive,” she told me. “The cash I have will be used to eat.” Non-cash sales, she said, are unreliable. Transactions fail and banks are often uncommunicative. “I am very pained,” she told me. “I just cannot blame God for creating me in this country.” 

Politics aside, trust in Nigeria’s banking system is very low, Effiong from SBM Intelligence told me. “Why would anyone want to interact with the banking system, having experienced what they have experienced over the last couple of weeks?” he said.

But the immediate effect of the Central Bank’s policy will be on the upcoming polls. As Nigerians prepare to vote this weekend, the cash crisis will be a top concern. Macebong, the analyst at Stears Intelligence, believes that the anger people feel does not bode well for the ruling party “because the hardship will still be connected to the party in power.” 

If the precise impact on the election is uncertain, the Central Bank’s decision has at the very least injected an additional note of chaos into arguably the most unpredictable election since Nigeria transitioned from military to civilian rule over two decades ago.

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Now in her third year at Kozminski University, Wesolowska has a front row seat to observe what she describes as moral corruption seeping into Polish law facilities. Seasoned academics duel with opportunist colleagues willing to parrot the right-wing government’s line in order to collect low-hanging promotions. “There are two teams of professors,” she told me when we met in central Warsaw. “One that does things in the right way, and another more dangerous team. You learn how to accept that you can’t be outspoken because there is a possibility it could affect your exam results.”

This is a silent element of Poland’s descent into a rule-of-law crisis: the impact on law students and early-career professionals who, in trying to negotiate bewildering changes and political influencing, have been subject to academic whiplash and relentless government disinformation. The effect has been chilling. Many young Poles in the law field appear to have gone to ground.

Law and Justice came to power in October 2015 with the promise of improving the efficiency of the courts and ridding the country of the remnants of communism. It began to make its presence felt by seeking to influence the composition of the Constitutional Court, a powerful institution with the authority to assess the constitutionality of Polish laws. When five of the Court’s 15 judges were due to retire around the 2015 elections, Law and Justice tried to oust three candidates who had been legally chosen by the outgoing pro-EU Civic Platform party and push through five of their own judicial appointments instead. 

The new government had not only set out to dismiss elected judges but bypassed the Constitutional Court entirely while it was discussing the legality of the Civic Platform judicial candidates. In the end, the Court admitted only two Law and Justice judges, but the chain of events — and the government’s later decision to change the quorum in the Constitutional Court — brought hundreds of people out onto the streets of Warsaw in protest. The Law and Justice party and its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski took no notice.

With the Constitutional Court quickly falling under the influence of the government, Law and Justice turned to the Supreme Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, a body responsible for protecting the independence of judges and courts. In 2017, the government pushed through reforms that gave them control over the process of electing new judges, a key function of the Council of the Judiciary. Around the same time, steps were taken to reduce the retirement age of Supreme Court judges, a move that the Court of Justice of the European Union later said violated EU law. A Disciplinary Chamber was established in 2017, which critics argued was a scheme to intimidate judges who refused to walk the party line. Confronted by this illiberal sea change, the European Union has tried to fight back by withholding funds from the bloc’s sixth largest economy. The results have been mixed. The Disciplinary Chamber was disbanded in July 2022 and replaced with the Chamber of Professional Responsibility. Nonetheless, key legal institutions in Poland are still operating at the whim of the government despite the outcry from Brussels.  

This turmoil has trickled down into the halls of Poland’s public and private universities. A clear example is the approach to teaching. Some professors have continued to teach the law within its political, social and economic context. Others have become hesitant. A few have decided to teach their classes in a vacuum and avoid the rule-of-law crisis and its implications altogether. 

It’s not only teaching in the classroom that has become an issue. According to Dr. Aleksandra Kustra-Rogatka, an associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, in central Poland, the role of academia itself is also up for debate. In the pages of academic journals, a few Polish intellectuals have declared that their role is simply to present the facts and not opinions. Their peers have shot back, arguing that during a constitutional crisis the academic community is duty bound to actively participate in discussions and not hide behind a veil of neutrality. “We cannot say to students anymore that the law is objective and nothing changes, that it’s politically neutral. We must change our way of teaching and what we teach,” Kustra-Rogatka told me.

There have also been moments when political influence on universities has been spectacularly blatant. In 2021, Kozminski University broke off its relationship with Judge Igor Tuleya, 12 months after the 52-year-old was stripped of his immunity and suspended by the Disciplinary Chamber for ruling against the Law and Justice party. The call to suspend Tuleya came from the vice president of a district court in Warsaw, Przemyslaw Radzik, a government ally who is reported to have said that the judge could “demoralize” students.

To get a clearer sense of these events I spoke to Dr. Agnieszka Grzelak, a professor of European law at Kozminski University. We met at Green Café Nero, not far from Poland’s Palace of Culture and Science, on a rainy Warsaw afternoon. Direct in her assessment of the rule-of-law situation in Poland, Grzelak told me that when news emerged of Judge Tuleya’s dismissal, it sent shock waves through Kozminski’s law facility. Almost immediately 18 colleagues came together to write an open letter to the rector, Grzegorz Mazurek, calling for the university to change tack. The “autonomy of the university” was at stake, they wrote. Hours after receiving the correspondence, Judge Tuleya’s agreement with Kozminski was restored, but in many regards the reputational damage was done. “There is a collapse of the rule of law in every aspect. Starting from legislation to the way the law is adopted, to the situation in the parliament, to the situation in the courts, everything you touch there is some problem,” Grzelak said.

Watching these events unfold are Poland’s law students. If the expectation was for the next generation of lawyers to seriously refute the ruling party’s manipulation of democracy, those hopes have been put to bed by their professors. In several discussions I had while researching this story the conclusion by some faculty was that law students have generally shrugged off the rule-of-law crisis. One reason was their communication patterns, with today’s youth living more insular lives governed by the algorithms of TikTok and Instagram. Another was a lack of enthusiasm for proper legal sourcing, with students opting to reference short online texts rather than harvest information from the context-rich pages of legal journals. 

Adam Bodnar, the dean of the law facility at the private SWPS University, told me that students “treat freedom like air” and often struggle to connect the rule-of-law crisis to the future of the country. Of course, there are students, like Katarzyna Wesolowska, who are driven to be a part of the solution. 

I also spoke with Adam Buwelski, an impressive 21-year-old at the University of Warsaw, who, on top of a rigorous schedule of classes, finds time to sit on the law students’ association. He reluctantly agreed with the assertion that his generation could do more to engage with Poland’s constitutional crisis. “There is an anger in us that is often hidden because we are living with this day in, day out,” he said. “There are scandals all the time and as a group we are used to it. We don’t have heated discussions about everything going on. That’s a very different position to our parents and professors who are discussing everything all the time. We’re calm but, yes, I don’t think that’s a good thing.” 

Certain issues do arouse the attention of supposedly apathetic students. When the Constitutional Court outlawed abortion in cases of fetal abnormalities in October 2020, students took part in the nationwide protests. The issue of LGTBQ+ rights has also sparked outrage as the Law and Justice party and its close ally, the Polish Catholic Church, work relentlessly to strip away the rights of this community. The University of Warsaw has also been embroiled in scandal which ignited students’ frustrations. In January 2023, a lecture by the former deputy commissioner for human rights, Dr. Hanna Machinska, was canceled by the rector weeks after the academic was dismissed from her job. After student protests and a public outcry, the lecture eventually took place, but it was a worrying repeat of a pattern established by the Judge Tuleya case, signaling that critics of the government might not be welcome at universities either.

But the disengagement of students is also grounded in very practical challenges. For individuals wishing to enter the judiciary, the moral corruption of the Council of the Judiciary has the ability to undermine their hard work. In order to be nominated for a role in the courts, trainee judges must be proposed by the Council to the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, a close ally of the Law and Justice party. The fear among students is that when the Law and Justice party is finally voted out, they will be seen as tainted judges despite their education and personal beliefs. “[When] starting a career as a judge or a prosecutor, legal jobs connected to the public system of education run by the Ministry of Justice, the students doubt if they should start it,” Grzelak, the professor in EU law, told me. “They ask: What if I graduate from training, will I become a judge or will I become a fake judge?”

On everyones’ minds in Poland at the moment are the 2023 parliamentary elections. Should Law and Justice continue in office for another four years, the party will continue to damage to democratic values and institutions in Poland. Up against opposition parties who have so far failed to ignite any real fervor across the country, Law and Justice candidates are leading in the polls. For Buwelski and his peers at the University of Warsaw, many are getting ready to vote for The Left, a small political alliance of leftist parties. In some law students’ eyes, the salient issues affecting Poland’s younger generation, such as rising house prices and inflation, are not addressed to suit the needs of their generation. Law and Justice, Buwelski says, caters to their base, and the opposition to anyone who doesn’t like the ruling party. No one takes much time to think about the youth and their future. 

But even if the election spells the end for Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his band of spoilers, Poland won’t be out of the woods. The damage being done to the rule of law has been so great that it will take more than one term in office to rectify it. For Katarzyna Wesolowska, the student in Kozminski University who will graduate in 2025, that means the road to fixing her country won’t be easy.

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Then the new year came, bringing with it Heger’s determination to cobble together a new parliamentary majority to see out his party’s four-year term. However, after going cap in hand to all possible partners, Heger conceded defeat on January 17 and said he would begin discussions about early elections this fall.

For Robert Fico, the former prime minister and one of Slovakia’s leading populists, a return to the ballot box couldn’t wait. Fico, who resigned from office in 2018 following the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, has said multiculturalism “is a fiction” and called for Slovakia to cease all aid to Ukraine. Now buoyed by growing support in the polls, Fico’s Smer party initiated a referendum on January 22 that would have cleared the way for early elections by amending the country’s constitution. Despite these efforts the plebiscite failed to meet the 50% turnout needed to validate the results.

Now Slovakia, a small country roughly the size of West Virginia, is holding its breath. With elections likely to be held on September 30, 2023, the race for power is expected to be rife with disinformation and old-fashioned scare tactics. The shadow of populism also looms. Fico’s Smer party is second in the polls to HLAS–SD, a social democratic party founded in 2020 by former members of Smer.

There is also a lot at stake. Slovakia is facing a cost-of-living crisis and its health care is in disrepair. The country is also on the frontline of Russian disinformation in Europe and its 5.4 million residents share a border with Ukraine. To better understand the mood in Slovakia and why the country might take another populist turn, I spoke to Juliana Sokolova, a Slovak philosopher and writer based in the eastern city of Kosice. Her key message: Slovakia’s descent is not guaranteed. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

There has been a lot of political turmoil in Slovakia recently, but what is the general mood in the country?

At the moment, the political situation and the general atmosphere influence each other. To me, it feels like an intermediary period because we’re waiting for what’s going to happen. Of course, we know that there are people ready to vote because they are swayed by populist narratives but that is not something which surrounds me daily. There are also people who resist these narratives and have other views, so I wouldn’t say it’s completely bleak. It’s truly difficult to generalize at the moment because the situation is different depending on where you work or where you live.

If you look at the polls in Slovakia, there is support for populist narratives. Why is that the case?

Populism anywhere is successful because populists test issues and use ones that will resonate with people by arousing strong emotions, so it doesn’t arise randomly. It’s calculated and it’s the same in Slovakia. Of course, the issues are country-specific, but the mechanisms are the same. When I was growing up, the main nationalist and populist issue was around Slovak-Hungarian relations, they tried to create this idea of Slovak nationality away from the Hungarian minority and their language. Today, this topic no longer resonates, so they turned to the language of suspicion in relation to the LGBT community. They use the words “ideology,” or “agenda,” or “platform,” to create the idea that there is a scheme which is a threat to people.

The LGBT topic is one that has been pushed and massaged in Slovakia. It’s also a narrative across Russian disinformation media. It’s a mix of these factors, along with algorithmic targeting through the creation of sensationalist headlines, that have made the issue what it is. If you look back, 10 to 15 years ago people in Slovakia weren't saying LGBT was their main issue. It’s to an extent a created feeling.

Slovakia’s southern neighbor, Hungary, has become isolated on the world stage due to its position on Ukraine. Its Prime Minister Viktor Orban is also looking for friends. Could early Slovak elections help in this regard?

I do think Orban is waiting to see what is going to happen with Putin’s imperialist project and how it will impact the future of his own [illiberal] project. Fico dreams of being an Orban, that was always his ambition, but he wasn’t able to entrench himself in the same way Orban did in Hungary. Slovaks were also able to check Fico more than Hungarians were able to check Orban. But, yes, Fico is the same cut of populist with the same ambition. 

That said, Fico’s return to frontline politics is not a done thing. What is more likely in early elections is that the party that separated from Fico, HLAS, will make it. Now, that party is full of former Smer people who have tried to situate themselves on a more traditional spectrum, but we must remain suspicious of them. They have the ability to bend their views depending on possible power-sharing agreements. 

Slovakia is subject to a lot of Russian disinformation. Does this highly charged language and information pollution affect your work?

As a writer, you are very sensitive to the context in which you write, and even though it’s not always a conscious dialogue, it can affect your work. When the language of politics is stale and removed from life, you can feel the need to balance it out by using words that are fresh and strong. It’s also very useful to think about how we can describe the life we are living with different words. We often use clichéd or standardized sentences that block our thinking. A good example of this is the word “bubble,” as in social bubble. It has such a fixed meaning. So, we need other sentence structures and words that open new ways of speaking, and then maybe thinking. 

It’s also socially important to try and see how very manipulative and highly charged language can be neutralized or converted into something else. When it comes to Russian disinformation in Slovakia we have a big problem with the quality of education. I think our education system is not strong on fostering critical analysis of the media. This is very important. 

Given everything happening in Slovakia, a war next door, a contentious election coming up, disinformation swirling around, how do you see the country going forward?

It’s difficult because I’m not feeling gloomy, I cannot explain why. Of course, when you name all these things, our situation might not look great. But I do think that Slovak society is varied enough, that there are deeply entrenched progressive and educated groups and individuals operating throughout the country that can sustain us. The main thing for me is seeing what I can do to ensure that parties that employ controversial rhetoric have the least influence in the future government, that is a key priority. But I don’t have a sense that this country is heading to a dark place. 

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DJ Switch flipped to her Instagram story to livestream the chaos — gore, live ammunition going off and victims lying in pools of blood — at a protest site in Lekki, a wealthy suburb of Lagos, Nigeria. At least 12 people were killed in that shooting according to Amnesty International, and DJ Switch now lives in Canada, having had to flee Nigeria for fear of reprisals from the government. 

That October, thousands of young Nigerians had been protesting over 13 days across the country against police brutality. The protests, aimed at a rogue police unit called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, began after a video surfaced online of a police officer killing a young man in Delta, an oil-rich area of Nigeria. But what started as a protest against police brutality morphed into demands for better governance, which continued even after the government shut down the police unit.

Then came the atrocity at Lekki.

Nkemchor Guru, 20 years old at the time, watched the event unfold live in her Lagos residence. Now in her final year as a student at a Lagos university, she recalls the sound of gunshots. “I saw people writhing on the floor. The whole situation was just horrible,” Guru said. “It caused a very big pain and anger in me and I know that was the story for a lot of young Nigerians.”

The government has denied responsibility for the shooting and clamped down on activists calling for justice. But the mowing down of 12 protesters has upended Nigerian politics and the comfortable, business-as-usual environment for the two dominant parties, the All Progressives Party (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). A third force has emerged from the corners of social media, making the upcoming February 25 presidential election a three-horse race for the first time in modern Nigerian history.

Exhausted by the unprecedented level of insecurity, record inflation and unemployment rates and currency devaluation, among many other issues, young people in Nigeria are using social media to disrupt the system and support Peter Obi, a former governor and Nigeria’s insurgent Labour Party presidential candidate.

Unlike the two dominant parties, who have shared power between themselves since 1999, Obi and his Labour Party do not enjoy a political grassroots infrastructure and are instead being propelled forward in the race by angry social media users.  In 2021, the Nigerian youth now making up Obi’s base revolted when President Muhammadu Buhari banned Twitter for seven months after the company deleted the president’s genocidal post, catalyzing widespread anger among those who have relied on the platform to criticize the government’s policies and the state of the nation.

Buhari is term-limited out of participating in this year’s election. And several polls have called the election for Obi. “We desperately need a leader who is committed to changing things,” Guru said. 

Obi had been a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, serving two terms as a state governor in the country’s eastern region, and was once that party’s vice presidential candidate. He was an unlikely figure to challenge the politicians backed by the two dominant parties — Bola Tinubu, a two-term governor of Lagos and kingmaker in Nigerian politics, and Atiku Abubakar, a perennial presidential candidate.

Before moving to the Labour Party, a fringe party with no political reach, Obi had run in the Peoples Democratic Party primary. As the primary approached, it became clear that Obi would lose the race and lose the support of the party’s upper echelons, so he left the party and dropped out of the running. Without the political machinery available to the candidates of the big parties, a bid for the presidency of Africa’s most populated country and largest economy was viewed as quixotic at best.

But thousands of youth who had participated in the social justice protests were looking for a leader who would back their calls for a change in the government and mete out punishment for the October 20 killings.

Nigeria is currently reeling from record 22% inflation, an unemployment rate of 33% and insecurity that includes terrorism, deadly banditry, mass abductions and all manners of violence. This situation has made many Nigerians feel the country is at an existential tipping point and led to the death of thousands of people across the country since Buhari began his first presidential term in 2015.

At 61, Obi is the youngest of the major candidates. The youth movement propelling his candidacy calls itself “the Obidients.” It is a gathering threat to Nigeria’s political establishment — young voters make up the largest demographic voting bloc in this year’s elections at nearly 40% of the 93.4 million eligible voters. While especially pronounced in Nigeria, how younger voters respond to social media messaging is poised to play a pivotal role in other important elections around the world, in countries like Pakistan, Argentina, Bangladesh and Turkey.

“It is clear to everybody who will want to be very honest in their evaluation of the current Nigerian situation that Nigeria is headed in the wrong direction,” said Joseph Onuorah, a national administration member of Take Back Naija, one of the several youth coalitions working for the Obidient movement.

“We are mounting up debt at a rate that is simply unsustainable, the government does not seem to have a formula for what educational system they want to run, medical care is simply non-existent, insecurity pervades the entire country,” he added.

That the street-level protest movement would combine with social media to evolve into a major factor in presidential politics was all but inevitable, said Ifeomah Areh, a social media expert and communications consultant. This is despite the perception that Nigerian youth are apathetic in elections. 

“This model [of online mobilization] is new in some ways but also not that new. People are always looking for where they can come and rally together,” she said. “All over the world, young people are beginning to form communities that are standing against whatever inequality they perceive.”

“In 2015, young people did not endorse any candidate. But in this election, you will find young people are getting more partisan,” said Amara Nwankpa, director of the Public Policy Initiative at the Yar’ Adua Foundation, a think tank engaging citizens and policymakers on democracy in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.

In the din of Nigeria’s rancorous retail politics, disinformation has also been prominent. With social media as a major battleground for debates, online disinformation has been spreading with little in the way of restraint. For example, Obi, who is a Christian, has been accused of ransacking Muslim communities when he was governor and has been portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, a secessionist organization in the country’s east.

Onuorah, the administrator of one Obidient organization, told me the movement has an army of internet-savvy youth whose work is to debunk the accusations. “Every disinformation you throw at the movement, there are people that are able to go into data and history and bring to nothing that particular disinformation,” he said.

“People assume that [the Obidient movement] is totally organic but it is not, it is an effective use of young people. If you look behind it, there is always a concerted effort,” Areh, the social media expert, said of the movement’s use of social media.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if the Obidients can displace the two major parties and if social media advocacy will spur enough turnout among the youth demographic to be decisive.

Offline, however, hundreds of thousands are flocking to Peter Obi’s campaigns across Nigeria, catching the country by surprise. It is due to the work of young people like Guru, the university student, who work tirelessly online to sell their candidate and offline to bring more young people into the fold.

“Up till now, nobody has been held accountable, that is just the crazy part,” said Guru, who has now amassed tens of thousands of online followers in her constant campaigning for the Labour Party. “I hope Nigerians are able to choose right and look past tribalism, religion and everything that has held us back for years. I was 15 years of age when Buhari came to power and I felt like the past eight years of my life have been a waste.”

CORRECTION [01/19/2023]: This article previously said that Obi had lost the Peoples Democratic Party primary to Atiku Abubakar. Obi dropped out of the primary before it took place.

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A recent national survey on hunger in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit Brazil hard, found more than half of the country’s population, 125.2 million people, experienced some degree of food insecurity, with more than 33 million people going hungry.

Three times as many Brazilians faced hunger in 2022 than in 2013, a return to the kind of widespread hardship that had long characterized life for many in Brazil.

The survey had found that nearly half of families experiencing severe food insecurity live in the country’s low-income northern and northeastern regions, and 65% of homes headed by a person of African descent have had to restrict their food intake. Nearly one in five households headed by women have gone hungry, primarily due to wage disparities; while families with children are worse off than those without.

The survey helped fuel an expectation that Bolsonaro’s chances in the October 2 general elections were poor. Polls showed former president Lula da Silva potentially winning the election outright, with Bolsonaro carrying just 33% of the electorate. The same polls showed that among families with household incomes of about $450, Lula registered 54% against Bolsonaro’s 26% with a two-point margin of error.

The polls were wrong. Bolsonaro’s conservative values and tough-on-crime discourse found traction, while the issue of hunger has been largely absent from election campaigning. The failure of Bolsonaro’s agricultural policy and social programs to slow the rise of hunger in Brazil hasn’t weakened support for his reelection even among the electorate made food insecure during his presidency — a remarkable reflection of contemporary right-wing populism and the power of social media messaging.

Bolsonaro often attacks low-income Brazilians as lazy or criminal. In 2012, he said northeasterners didn’t want to work because they would stop receiving their dues from the government’s income-transfer program, the Bolsa Família. The social welfare program was among Lula’s most celebrated initiatives and played a major part in reducing Brazilian poverty during his first term in office almost 20 years ago. Bolsonaro replaced Bolsa Familia in 2021 with his own program, the Auxílio Brasil.

As recently as September, Bolsonaro had said that government handouts had prevented low-income people from learning professional skills and that they had been “habituated over the years to not worrying” about how to support themselves. And in a rancorous debate with Lula on October 16, Bolsonaro implied that residents of favelas are criminals.

Meanwhile, his policies have exacerbated hunger. On his first day in office, Bolsonaro axed seven government ministries and eliminated the National Council on Food and Nutritional Security, which served as the nodal point for hundreds of state and local councils. “You eliminate the head and you cut all the space for discussion,” said Vera Villela, President of São Paulo’s Municipal Council on Food and Nutritional Security.

A system of food stocking that ensures supplies for public facilities like schools and hospitals shrank from 349 warehouses in 1991 to 92 last year, and the Bolsonaro government announced it will close 27 more. Meanwhile, the government supports export-focused production making Brazil one of the world’s leading exporters of commodities like soybeans and beef.

And yet Bolsonaro remains electable in large part with the help of this demographic that he so frequently scorns. Brian Winter, the Editor of Americas Quarterly, says Bolsonaro has wooed the country’s evangelical leaders, benefiting from waves of disinformation on social media and messaging platforms and calculated financial support to the poor and to truckers, in his attempts to sway voters to his side. The sheer complexity of the Brazilian electorate helps explain why growing poverty and hunger haven’t had the impact on voters that Bolsonaro’s opponents might have expected.

Doraci and Jurandir live in the Northeast. They moved in together as teenagers and had a roof over their heads but little else. “We didn’t even have bedsheets,” says Doraci Anunciada de Oliveira Silva, now 39 years old. “The ants would bite the baby as he slept on the floor.”

The couple met in 1999 when Jurandir, then 19 and three years older than Doraci, was hired to build a fence around her parents’ property. “He asked if I wanted to date him, and I almost said no,” Doraci recalls. “But he was so nervous and trembling in his agony, that I decided to give him a chance.”

They live in Alto do Rosario, a community of about 500 people in the state of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil’s semi-arid region. The bumpy red dirt road leading to the settlement rises and dips over hills, winding between scraggly trees and fences made from knobby, barkless branches and barbed wire.

Despite the material hardships they faced early in their relationship, Doraci and Jurandir have managed to build a small farm that not only provides for their needs but also enables them to sell products like cheese and butter at a pair of local markets.

Their good fortune stands in stark contrast with millions of other Brazilians, particularly in rural areas and in the country’s northern and northeastern regions.

But Doraci and Jurandir had no access to running water for years. Every day, Doraci would carry an empty jug over a mile to a watering hole where she would fill it and carry it back on her head. “I suffered a lot,” she says of the hard daily work of tending to animals, carrying water, and looking after the crops.

In 2004, during Lula’s first term as president, Doraci and Jurandir received a government grant to build a cistern. The simple structure has transformed their lives. It saves Doraci hours of work every day and also ensures that the family farm has a supply of water for the animals, plants and people.

During the pandemic, the Bolsonaro administration funded an emergency cash transfer program to try to guarantee that Brazil’s most vulnerable would be able to eat. As the election runoff comes closer though, critics alleged that the cash transfers amount to bribes. The Northeast has the largest number of emergency cash recipients — 9.75 million. A constitutional amendment in July allowed the cash transfers to continue after the height of the pandemic — and to increase. Yet Bolsonaro’s government has cut funding to programs such as the one that enabled Doraci and Jurandir to build their cistern and transform their family finances.

In 2008, they put a deposit of 500 Brazilian reals (at the time about $250) down on a second home one lot over from their own. Eight years ago, when Doraci was pregnant with their third child, she used a subsidy offered to low-income pregnant women to invest in a milk cow to produce cheese and two kinds of butter that she and Jurandir sell in local farmers’ markets. For years, Jurandir worked as a delivery driver in the nearby city of Surubim, giving them a cash income in addition to the foodstuffs they produce on the farm. 

A 2009 law, passed when Lula was president, requires state and local governments to spend 30% of their budget for school lunches and snacks on foodstuffs produced by family farms. Schools closed during the pandemic, and so did the spending. When most of Brazil’s states halted their purchases of family-farm products in 2020, it left farmers without a market for their crops. The state of Rio Grande do Norte may be the only one to have opted for a different approach: it expanded the role of family-farm produce. That state is now the most food-secure state in the northeast, and the fourth best ranked state in the country.

“The government of Rio Grande do Norte implemented an integrated policy involving several state agencies to combat hunger during the pandemic,” said Alexandre de Oliveira Lima. Lima runs the state’s rural development and agricultural program. “Here in Rio Grande do Norte, we had a big expansion,” he says, “a really big expansion of family farms” during the pandemic.

Beautifully shot and edited agriculture commercials fill ad breaks on Brazilian television. “Agro é top,” goes the slogan. Agro is the best. The ads reflect the deep political power wielded by Brazil’s agribusiness industry and the rural caucus in the Brazilian legislature.

Almost half of Brazil’s total exports in 2021, $120 billion, came from agriculture and livestock farming, a 20% increase over 2020 according to reporting by the Brazilian magazine Piauí. More than a quarter of Brazil’s GDP is attributed to agribusiness, although this figure includes ancillary activities like the sale of veterinary medicines.

“Agribusiness acts like a vacuum for resources that concentrates this wealth in a few pockets of prosperity,” wrote Marcos Emílio Gomes in Piauí. Foodstuffs exported from Brazil are exempt from export taxes thanks to the country’s “Kandir Law,” named after a former planning minister, which exempts raw and semi-elaborated export products from specific taxes. Agribusiness is the biggest beneficiary of this exemption. In contrast, family farms like Doraci's and Jurandir’s represent more than three-quarters of all farms and yet account for just 23% of the land farmed.

Yamila Goldfarb, Vice President of the Brazilian Association for Land Reform, says the contradictions in Brazil’s agricultural system are striking. “There are difficulties in accessing credit,” she tells me. “There are difficulties in obtaining technical assistance, and when you analyze who is actually producing food, it’s not on these big farms. The big farms produce commodities: soybeans, corn, cotton — products for export. They are large consumers of pesticides; they deforest. They participate in this process of grabbing lands illegally, of deforesting in order to appropriate land.”

The large farms have institutional support through think tanks, the rural caucus in congress, and other advocacy efforts. Subsistence farming, on the other hand, according to Goldfarb, is portrayed as backward and as unimportant. “But it’s not, in reality. It has huge significance because it represents food security for a large percentage of the population,” she said.

The Brazilian government’s statistical agency backs up Goldfarb’s claim, reporting that family farms produce 48% of the turnover for coffee and bananas, 80% of cassava, 69% of pineapples and 42% of beans.

Still, family agriculture is often dismissed. Alexandre Pires of the Sabiá Center, which helped Doraci and Jurandir bring their dairy products to market, pointed to a lack of political engagement with family agriculture.

“There’s an absence of a political strategy that values camponesa [small-scale farmer] agriculture, that values family agriculture,” he told me. This lack of engagement, Pires said, is draining people from rural areas.

Just two weeks before the second round of Brazil’s general election, polls showed Lula’s lead over Bolsonaro dwindling to five points, suggesting that the outcome of the runoff remains a toss-up. And with approximately 20% of the population, or nearly 33 million people, abstaining from voting in the first round of the elections, the couple’s activism takes on additional meaning.

“I know a place here where there are people with really a lot of needs,” Doraci said. “And they’re talking about Bolsonaro, which makes me want to spit. How is it that in a place like this, people want to vote for Bolsonaro?”

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"My darlings, my main mission here is to talk about Jesus, but I cannot look at how we are living and not open your eyes," said Leonardo on an Instagram video, endorsing the reelection of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. The video was posted on October 3, one day after the first round of the Brazilian elections. Leonardo ended with a plea: “Leftist ideology will destroy us. Have mercy on our country.” 

Up until that day, Leonardo, who has over 33 million followers across his social media channels, had nothing to say about politics. The 32-year-old from southern Brazil had only posted motivational speeches, messages about God and the Bible, and the itinerary of his national tour. But his social media agenda changed immediately following the first round of Brazilian elections. 

In a deeply polarized country, the election was close enough that neither the right-wing populist Bolsonaro, who received 43.2% of the votes, nor Lula da Silva, his main opponent from the leftist Worker’s Party who garnered 48.4% of the votes, could claim victory. A second voting round occurs on October 30. 

In the meantime, Brazilian social media has been transformed into macabre accusations of candidate transgressions. Fake news, disinformation and misinformation have spread quickly, invoking allegations of involvement with pedophilia, freemasonry, satanic rituals and cannibalism. 

One issue, however, has dominated public debate: religion. Bolsonaro’s campaign has accused Lula of hostility to Christianity. “Religions have been instrumentalized [for political purposes] for a long time, but never like now,” said Fernanda Faria Medeiros of the Center for Studies in Communication and Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais.

Influencers of faith go online to evangelize, but they also seek to strengthen and consolidate institutional ties between their audiences and their churches. “We think that we’re discussing religion, but what we’re actually discussing is the morals of the candidates,” said Medeiros.

Armed with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above all,” Bolsonaro has positioned himself as an envoy of a muscular Christianity, an ally of the growing evangelical electorate and the defender of their agendas, such as the non-decriminalization of drugs and abortion. 

“There is a very strong claim that runs through Bolsonaro's candidacy: that it is a candidacy that will build the kingdom of God,” said Jacqueline Moraes Teixeira, a professor at the University of Brasília. Bolsonaro sells himself as a politician guided by Christian ethics, said Teixeira, and that resonates with evangelicals. 

Bolsonaro has also courted evangelicals as part of his digital mobilization strategy — a centerpiece of his campaign activity. He has addressed them online and invited influencers of faith to the presidential palace on several occasions.

Yudi Tamashiro, an actor who wants to become a pastor and has millions of followers said in a video “If you follow me here, you know that every week I go to church, every week I am preaching. You already know what my vote is. My vote is for Bolsonaro.”

In the runoff, 61% of evangelical voters said they will vote for Bolsonaro, versus only 31% who say they will vote for Lula, according to a recent Datafolha survey. This could provide a decisive margin of victory for Bolsonaro. The evangelical vote is significant in Brazil: evangelicals represent 31% of Brazil’s 210 million population, and are expected to outnumber Catholics in a decade. 

The numbers should worry Lula and the Brazilian left. After the election’s first round, one of the biggest evangelical congregations, the Assembly of God, announced it will punish worshipers who “defend leftist agendas within the Marxist worldview.” Less than two weeks before the run-off, Lula issued a public letter to evangelicals stating that it was a "sad scandal" to use faith for electoral purposes, and made a commitment to the freedom of worship in the country while promising not to use symbols of faith for political gain. 

An alliance between Christian nationalism and authoritarian governance helped sweep Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency in 2016, secured majority support in Hungary to Viktor Orban, and fueled the popularity of French far-right leaders Marine le Pen and Éric Zemmour. 

Online audiences have demanded Brazilian evangelical influencers articulate this alliance out loud. On social media, the public demands a point of view, said Issaaf Karhawi, a researcher at the University of São Paulo specializing in social media. Audiences develop expectations and begin to make demands, and influencers feel compelled to reveal their politics to maintain their bond with the majority of their followers.

Influencers of faith are also modeling others’ success. In the first round of the Brazilian elections, mainstream celebrities such as the singers Anitta and Caetano Veloso supported Lula. Their campaigning had significant reach and was incorporated into Lula’s digital messaging. But their support also generated a response: influencers of faith, country singers, and others, eyeing the celebrity success in endorsing Lula, publicly embraced Bolsonaro.

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Many influencers of faith are staking out ultra-conservative, nationalist and far-right positions. These messages resonate with evangelical influencers who had never been shy about their political inclinations. “It's not a war of men, it's not a war of [political] parties, I don't even get into politics. It's just that this has gone beyond politics, it's a war of agendas," said Tiago Brunet, an evangelical pastor with five million online followers.

Evangelical support for Bolsonaro has been accompanied by accusations of a personal profit motive. Rede Super, a TV station that broadcasts evangelical programming owned by André Valadão, who has over five million followers and has preached in favor of Bolsonaro for a long time, received approximately $140,000 from Bolsonaro’s government, according to an investigation by Agência Pública.

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Other evangelical influencers have been dogged by allegations of impropriety entirely separate from politics. Evangelical pastor Ivonélio Abrahão da Silva and his influencer son Patrick Abrahão are being investigated by the Federal Police's Operation La Casa de Papel under the suspicion of a financial scheme using cryptocurrencies and emeralds that would have deceived more than one million investors in 80 countries. 

Teixeira, the professor who studies evangelical profiles and voting inclinations, said that evangelicals are not satisfied with Bolsonaro but vote for him because they are against Lula and The Worker’s Party at all costs. “They think he is the least worst in this electoral dispute, but he’s not a comfortable vote,” she adds. 

Bolsonaro’s campaign seems to know that evangelicals are not completely happy. “Don't look at my husband, look at me who is a servant of the Lord,” said First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro in October to a group of evangelical women at the Assembly of God Victory in Christ. 

Despite what it may seem, not all influencers of faith are animated by opposition to Lula. Yago Martins, head of Two Fingers of Theology, has announced that he will not vote for any candidate. Prominent pastors like Paulo Marcelo, Sérgio Dusilek and others, have publicly expressed support for Lula. 

"The digital world is built from communities of interest, or when you trigger a value that brings people together," said Karhawi, the researcher. She highlights that because of the internet’s attention span, influencers of faith can publicly support Bolsonaro now and right after the election, regardless of the result, go back to doctrinal posts about Christianity, as if nothing ever happened. Because the public is relentlessly presented with new information in social networks, there’s no time to register and elaborate, said Karhawi. Consuming social media “is going to be superficial. It's not going to generate a memory, a deep connection.”

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Erica Hellerstein

The post In the Brazilian runoff, evangelical influencers flock to Bolsonaro appeared first on Coda Story.

As early as 9 a.m. on May 17, Bashir had already seen up to four corpses pulled out of the wreckage of a building that once stood in the Sabon Gari area of Nigeria’s populous northern Kano state. He’d seen crying children in bloodied uniforms spilling onto the streets. He’d seen body parts scattered around those same streets and agonized families searching for their loved ones.

The businessman, who asked me only to use his first name, had been on his way to work when a blast thundered through the dense neighborhood. He rushed towards the sound, recorded the carnage on his phone and posted the footage on Twitter.

Eyewitnesses told him how minutes before, a suspected suicide bomber, who, failing to get past a primary school gate, detonated the explosives in a structure opposite the school. “Bomb blast in Kano,” Bashir tweeted.

He was unprepared for the ferocious response from his compatriots. Bashir had found himself on the wrong side of an information war that highlights the Nigerian government’s sometimes desperate attempts to muddy narratives around the country’s worsening insecurity. And he is still reeling from the impact.

While the government can be frustratingly opaque and unpredictable in its responses to crises, Bashir did not realize that there was an entire online community of trolls, many of whom were based outside Nigeria, who made it their business to spread the government’s version of events, even if it meant denying the lived experiences of other Nigerians.

Government authorities arriving at the scene that day immediately denied there was any attack at all, let alone a suicide bombing. Kano police chief Sama’ika Dikko told reporters that “it was a gas explosion,” and redundantly scolded those who were spreading “false lies” about a bomb.

That was when the social media army that supports the government decided to attack Bashir. “Agent of darkness,” one wrote, accusing Bashir of escalating tensions in a country on edge from alarming increases in violent incidents in recent months.

“I swear it was a bomb,” Bashir tweeted again, trying to impress on the doubters that he was a witness, that he had seen for himself the barely-there bodies that looked as if they had been turned inside-out, that he had seen for himself the massive damage at the epicentre of the blast. 

It didn’t work. As major media houses ran with the government line about a gas explosion, Bashir was tagged across Nigerian Twitter as a liar.

Then, days later, after the news agenda had moved on, Nigeria’s police released forensic “findings” — a jumble of words that neither confirmed nor debunked the bombing but that carried a line Bashir seized on as validation of what he knew to be true.

Materials “suspected to be used for making Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs),” were found at the site, the statement read, and “some arrests have been made.”

“I received so many abusive messages,” Bashir told me, still pained by his experience. “I jotted down the handles of all the people who accused me, but when I wrote to them all after the police report, no one replied.”

It hurt him that, in an ethnically and religiously fractured Nigeria, many people on social media seemed to discount the news specifically because it had affected one of Kano’s minority Christian areas, where tribes from the country’s south live — Sabon Gari loosely translates to “stranger’s quarters” in Bashir’s Hausa tongue.

“It felt like this is the truth of what is happening but officials were trying to change it,” Bashir said. “And seeing people twisting the narrative really demoralized all of us in the neighborhood.”

The Kano incident is only one of many in response to which Nigerian officials have chosen to stick their heads in the sand. They are aided in their efforts by partisan social media debate in which attitudes and ideological positions are far more important than facts or witness accounts.   

But this is not a new tactic nor is it unique to this administration, argues Cheta Nwanze, the lead researcher at SB Morgen, an intelligence firm in Lagos that has been tracking such violence. 

“Nigerians love to look at things going wrong and pretend that it’s not happening, so this has been a systematic thing,” Nwanze points out, referring to what some scholars describe as a culture of impunity in the country. 

There is little accountability, few consequences and seemingly no appetite to discuss a fraught history. And attacks such as the May 17 bombing that are perceived to be targeting southern Igbos in Nigeria’s Muslim-majority north could lead to chaos — they are too reminiscent of the beginnings of the 1967 civil war.

Many of Nigeria’s contemporary convulsions stem from that war in which the majority Igbo and Christian south attempted to create their own separate state of Biafra. They were pummelled with bombs, isolated, and starved. By the end of all the fighting, in 1970, two million people had died.

Little time if any is spent on the civil war in Nigerian schools, nor has a process of reparation and reconciliation been instituted. In fact, since the war, Igbos have been politically marginalized in a country where it is the third largest tribe and constitutes over 15% of the population. 

Yet there is no meaningful national dialogue on these issues. Instead, silence permeates. And many other groups and tribes claim to have been wronged in similar fashion, with only simmering anger and resentment in place of justice.

“What we do is hope that if we sweep it under the rug it will go away and that has been entrenched in the way our governments operate” Nwanze continues. “What has happened now is that the bottom of the rug is full.” Denial as a mode of official communication is a form of disinformation. It is designed to mislead.

A June 2022 study on fake news by the Abuja-based Center for Democracy and Development (CDD) notes that Nigerian authorities often knowingly employ rebuttal tactics on social and traditional media platforms, or in some cases, stoic silence, as a way to save face.

In the Kano case in particular, experts believe the aim was to reduce panic, although it inadvertently caused confusion. 

In an eerily similar case to the one in Kano, officials denied a suicide attack in Lagos at the height of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2014, refusing to admit that the terrorists, whose home base is up in the country’s northeastern fringes, had infiltrated Nigeria’s commercial nerve center.

Boko Haram has been seeking to create a caliphate in Nigeria since 2010 and has been behind many suicide bombings and kidnappings. But the Lagos explosion was blamed on gas canisters too — a fairly common cause of accidents in the country.

But the worst case of government denial — or more accurately, disinformation — would come in October 2020. Nigerian youths protesting the brutality of a notorious, bribe-collecting police unit popularly called SARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad), were gunned down by security forces in Lagos.

Authorities denied then — and still deny — the killings, despite video evidence from eyewitnesses who streamed the shootings on Instagram.

The incident spurred a worldwide social media campaign, with millions using “#ENDSARS” in solidarity with Nigeria’s youth, shaming President Muhamadu Buhari and his government. 

“ENDSARS was when the government deployed all their fake news arsenal,” says Idayat Hassan, lead at CDD and co-author of the fake news report. As with Bashir, government trolls discounted witness testimonies online, gaslighting even the wounded who barely survived. “They went all out,” adds Hassan.

The consequences of official lie-peddling online could be far-reaching in a presently divided Nigeria with 122 million internet users, 24 million of whom are active on social media. Already, the discourse, online and offline, brims with tribal and religious sentiment as citizens experience both rising violence and a deteriorating economy under Buhari.

His leadership has failed to emphasize unity in the multi-ethnic nation and has led to calls for secession in several quarters. Fake news, separate from the fake news spread by the state, has flourished, sometimes leading to deaths.

The spreaders of disinformation are often everyday users, online influencers, hired foreign companies or Nigerians in the diaspora. One of the persistent recent conspiracy theories is that  Buhari is in fact an impostor, and that the real president died after he traveled abroad for medical treatment in 2018. The much-better looking man who returned to Aso Villa, the president’s home in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, is actually a Sudanese man named Jubril, or so the theory goes.

As Buhari’s eight-year term ends in 2023, the race to succeed him is in full throttle as are the fake news campaigns. In previous elections, politically-motivated groups and troll farms were  fixtures, churning out propaganda for their favored candidates. Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s supporters were known to have hired the infamous U.K. firm Cambridge Analytica to run their election campaigns.

In the larger west Africa region, disinformation tactics are becoming normalized too. Although internet penetration is at a low 17% in the region, many west Africans online and offline are vulnerable to fake news. News spreads rapidly from platforms like the Meta-owned messaging app Whatsapp to having an effect on real life, notes Hassan, the CDD researcher. Online rumors are often fodder for serious debates on TV news stations.

Sometimes, official gaslighting tactics escalate into repression. Abuja resorted to banning Twitter in 2021 after a tweet by President Buhari was flagged for incitement. Indeed, save for Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, all 15 West African nations have ordered internet shutdowns in the last decade, according to CDD. 

Nine people were killed and 27 injured in the Sabon Gari blast — the highest civilian fatality count of Nigeria’s 14 IED explosions this year. The last bomb attack in Kano was in 2015, at the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency.

But no group has so far claimed responsibility for the bombing in May. The silence adds to the confusion surrounding the incident. Even government officials, who admit in private that there was a bomber don’t know who to blame it on, says Hassan.

Bashir’s neighborhood still bears the scars of May 17. The primary school building is now empty — the school authorities have moved the kids to another location. Opposite it, the building in which the bomb exploded remains a wreck.

The Kano police chief who initially swore there was no bomb could not be reached for comment. There is little indication that authorities will ever state clearly the results of their analysis.

As the February, 2023 general elections roll around, heated ethno-religious political campaigns rely on the spread of disinformation. “No one knows what the truth is anymore,” Hassan says. “And it might only get worse.”

Bashir, so alarmed by the scale of the trolling he faced, would no doubt agree.

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