Opinions

On November 10, Gulf defence ministers approved the establishment of a forward command in Kuwait under the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Unified Military Command, with forces to be allocated to it. The decision marks another step towards Gulf states taking greater collective responsibility for their security.

One day earlier, after meeting Qatar’s prime minister, US President Donald Trump had said: “Iran militarily is effectively over.” He also said the US blockade would continue and left open further military action. His remarks fell short of announcing an agreed end to the war.

Any opening for diplomacy deserves support. But even a lasting agreement would leave the Gulf’s underlying security problems unresolved. The Kuwait command’s value will depend on implementation and on how it connects with the region’s other security partnerships.

The answer requires abandoning the expectation that one grand security arrangement can resolve every threat facing the region. That expectation assumes a degree of agreement about enemies, priorities and acceptable risks that does not exist.

Iran’s attacks on Gulf states during this war, together with Israel’s September 2025 strike on Qatar, demonstrate the breadth of the challenge. A security architecture designed around only one adversary will leave serious gaps. Armed militias and terrorist groups add other risks, alongside cyberattacks, maritime disruption and the consequences of state failure in the neighbourhood. The erosion of international restraints on the use of force makes all of these problems harder to manage.

The most credible response to this complex set of threats is a security architecture that is both layered and networked. Gulf states are already moving in this direction. The task now is to make those arrangements work together and sustain the effort when the immediate pressure of war recedes.

Layering starts with the recognition that different partnerships do different jobs. National capabilities and cooperation within the Gulf Cooperation Council provide the foundation. The relationship with the United States remains central, while additional arrangements address needs that a single partner cannot meet.

Cooperation with US Central Command supplies an operational layer. The air and missile defence coordination cell opened at Al Udeid in January, for example, was designed to improve regional coordination, share threat warnings and prepare for contingencies.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed in August by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan, adds a collective defence commitment among its members. The Badr memorandum, signed in October by Qatar, Turkiye, Pakistan and Indonesia, sets out cooperation in defence manufacturing, research and technical training.

These arrangements should be judged by the gaps they fill. Collective defence, operational coordination and industrial capacity reinforce one another, but none can substitute for the others. Buying an interceptor, producing its components and deciding who will use it in a crisis are separate problems.

The next step is to connect these layers so that capabilities developed through one partnership strengthen what countries can do through another. This is what makes the architecture networked.

Qatar offers a useful example. It shares GCC membership with Saudi Arabia and participates in Badr alongside Turkiye and Pakistan. It therefore connects to all three Mecca signatories through other arrangements, despite not being a party to Mecca itself.

Those connections create opportunities. Stronger production capacity or better coordination among shared partners could improve the capabilities available to Qatar through its own relationships. A more effective deterrent against attacks on a neighbour could also improve the wider security environment.

Such benefits depend on deliberate cooperation. Qatar acquires no automatic Mecca guarantee through association. Information, equipment and expertise travel through a network only when governments agree to make that possible. The connections need as much attention as the agreements themselves.

This is also where the Gulf’s interests converge with those of a wider group of countries. European states, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and Pakistan all have reasons to resist a world in which force routinely overrides sovereignty and access to trade depends on political coercion.

Energy exporters and importers face different consequences when shipping is disrupted, but both need these routes to remain open. Countries need not share a political system or an identical relationship with Washington to recognise the costs of an international order becoming less predictable.

There is already a diplomatic basis for cooperation. The EU and GCC have jointly defended freedom of navigation through Hormuz. ASEAN and GCC ministers have reaffirmed sovereignty, the protection of civilian infrastructure and the need for diplomacy.

These states should become more active defenders of the basic rules on which their prosperity depends. They have an opportunity to shape the emerging international order collectively. Their combined economic, technological and diplomatic resources can give weight to rules that individual states struggle to defend alone. The same networks that help protect infrastructure can support coordinated diplomacy when those rules are violated.

Credibility will require consistency. Sovereignty must matter when the aggressor is a partner as well as an adversary. Civilian protection must apply in Palestine, Ukraine and the Gulf. Mediation must remain possible even when the parties at the table are politically inconvenient.

At the operational level, the immediate task is to connect existing security arrangements. Gulf governments and their partners should agree on how warnings can be shared across arrangements, which capabilities can be made available, and who has authority to request assistance. Joint exercises should test those connections under pressure, including when one partner cannot participate.

The next priority is protecting the systems that allow societies to function. Energy and water facilities, ports and communications networks deserve sustained cooperation on protection and repair. A partnership that can restore an essential service quickly contributes directly to security, even if it has no mutual defence clause.

Diplomacy to prevent escalation must form a layer of its own. Channels with Iran, arrangements to prevent incidents at sea and mechanisms for managing escalation remain necessary alongside stronger defences. Gulf states should use any opening created by the current talks to pursue reciprocal, verifiable restraint.

This wider security architecture would give Gulf, European and Asian partners practical work around which to organise. Some can contribute defence technology, others maritime expertise, industrial production, financing or diplomatic access. Cooperation should allow states to contribute where they have both the capacity and the political willingness to act.

The difficulty is that every participant remains sovereign. Gulf states themselves do not have identical interests. Their external partners face different constitutional requirements, domestic pressures and relationships with other powers. Some constraints are enduring; others reflect political choices that can change.

A government willing to provide intelligence may be unwilling to deploy forces. Another may support maritime protection but oppose an operation on land. Those limits should be understood before a crisis, when there is still time to plan around them.

Overlapping partnerships also carry risks. They can duplicate effort, create false expectations or draw countries into disputes they intended to avoid. Clear responsibilities and consultation procedures are essential. Adding agreements without clarifying what they deliver would produce more complexity without more security.

Nor should we promise that such an architecture will deliver a long peace. The rivalries and political grievances shaping this region will not disappear because its governments cooperate more closely.

A more attainable objective is relative peace and security: fewer opportunities for coercion, crises contained before they widen, and civilian life less exposed to each new confrontation. That means reducing the frequency and consequences of violence while continuing to work towards durable settlements. Permanent emergency cannot become an acceptable destination.

Gulf states should use this moment to connect their partnerships, strengthen their own capabilities and establish clearer limits on escalation. The aim is a region with more partners able to act together, and fewer crises capable of dragging everyone into war.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Poland’s two main political camps are locked in an escalating fight for control of the Constitutional Tribunal, each claiming to defend the rule of law. In the process, they are undermining the legitimacy of the Polish state in the eyes of its own citizens, playing directly into Putin’s playbook.

The roots of the dispute go back more than a decade. In 2015, the outgoing centre-right Civic Platform-controlled parliament attempted to appoint judges to the Constitutional Tribunal for vacancies that should have been left to the incoming parliament. The newly elected conservative Law and Justice government used this controversy to intensify its efforts to pack the Tribunal with party nominees rather than independent judges.

Now back in power, Civic Platform is trying to bring new judges into the Constitutional Tribunal. But President Karol Nawrocki and the Tribunal’s leadership, both aligned with Law and Justice, have blocked several of the newly appointed judges from taking office. Last month, one of the newly elected judges ordered the suspension of the Tribunal’s president and deputy, and police were deployed to the building. Nawrocki denounced the move as a forcible takeover, while Prime Minister Donald Tusk defended it as an effort to restore the rule of law.

Moscow has already seized on the confrontation to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Poland’s institutions. On November 3, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev described the intervention as a “coup”.

A decade ago, it was the conservative Law and Justice government that sought to pack the Constitutional Tribunal with party nominees, disregarding legal constraints. Today, it is the coalition of the centre-right Civic Platform and the liberal Left that is acting unlawfully. We see the main parties becoming mirror images of one another. Conservative Law and Justice is calling on its supporters to take to the streets to defend the rule of law, a slogan previously used by the liberal opposition when Law and Justice was in power. Now it is the liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk who is playing the strongman, with police carrying shields and wearing helmets deployed around the Constitutional Tribunal during the operation. He presents himself as an effective leader who gets things done, with little regard for legal subtleties and doubts raised even by some liberal-leaning experts. Against this backdrop, a photograph of Tusk reading an issue of the philosophical journal Kronos devoted to Carl Schmitt has recently circulated widely on social media. Schmitt, a theorist of decisionism, famously declared, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”

Law and Justice’s efforts to politicise the Constitutional Tribunal pushed middle-aged supporters of the liberals in big cities onto the streets a decade ago. It seems, however, unlikely that Poles will again take to the streets in their millions to support either political bloc. The public is tired of the tug-of-war between politicians, not only because both main blocs demonstrate considerable hypocrisy when invoking the rule of law over force, but also because the fight does not speak to people’s chief everyday concerns: the cost of living and the safety of a country with an aggressive neighbour waging a hot war on its border and a hybrid and cognitive war inside the country.

What has changed drastically compared to the protests that took place a decade ago, when the main forces occupied mirror-image positions, is the geopolitical context: Russia’s full-scale war in neighbouring Ukraine, alongside its hybrid and information warfare aimed at weakening Poland’s position on the global stage.

In the worst-case scenario, this struggle over the legitimacy of state institutions could extend to elections. A precedent can be found in Romania, where, on December 6, 2024, the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential election following intelligence reports of alleged foreign interference, social media manipulation and campaign financing irregularities, and ordered the electoral process to be repeated.

What we might see in other Central and Eastern European countries, including Poland if the situation deteriorates, is, on the one hand, the liberal establishment adopting measures that override electoral outcomes, such as courts annulling elections in response to genuine foreign interference through social media campaigns. On the other hand, the opposition could become increasingly anti-establishment, effectively delegitimising the institutions of the state. The problem will be aggravated by the fact that foreign interference may be real rather than invented by the establishment.

These two opposing forces are squeezing the middle ground on which democracy depends: on one side, social media platforms controlled by foreign superpowers algorithmically manipulating the emotions of the populus and fuelling distrust in the state; on the other, the decisionism of an establishment governing in a state of exception through politically subordinated courts. Both leave less space for thoughtful civic self-determination.

A large part of the commentariat in Poland, however, still sees this dynamic as another round in the familiar two-party struggle between Civic Platform’s EU-oriented liberals and Law and Justice conservatives backed by the US. Beyond this rivalry, Russia- and China-inspired, supposedly anti-establishment radical influencers and parties, both anti-European and anti-American, seek to portray the state as a foreign occupation. The wilder the theories delegitimising the state become, the more pretexts the ruling establishment will have to delegitimise the opposition.

The danger is no longer simply that one political bloc might gain control of the Constitutional Tribunal at the expense of another. It is that, as both sides continue to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, growing numbers of Poles may cease to see those institutions as their own. What is being weakened is not just the authority of a particular government, but the bond between citizens and the state itself.

No one could be happier about this kind of self-reinforcing dynamic, which weakens Poland’s position, than Putin.

If any healing is possible, it will not come from the existing political forces.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

As the Russian-Ukrainian war, which long ago entered a phase of attrition, grinds on, Russia, Ukraine and the United States began a new round of US-brokered trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, on November 10. The talks are scheduled to continue on November 11.

The talks follow a successful humanitarian operation in Oleshky, a southern Ukrainian town that has been occupied by Russian forces since 2022.

Starting in December 2025, Oleshky experienced a food crisis that worsened dramatically in the summer of this year. Over the years under Russian occupation, its population declined from 25,000 to 2,000 people, and the food crisis threatened the survival of those who remained. In the summer, however, Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services agreed to work on a local ceasefire in order to evacuate Oleshky’s inhabitants – if they wanted to leave – either to Ukraine or to Russia.

The humanitarian mission went surprisingly smoothly. Both sides stood by the ceasefire agreement, hundreds of people were successfully evacuated (mostly to Ukraine) from the long-suffering town, and it was extraordinary to see the Ukrainian and Russian human rights representatives, Dmytro Lubinets and Yana Lantratova, coordinating the humanitarian mission peacefully and with mutual respect.

Can this successful mission lay the groundwork for – or at least contribute to – progress in the Abu Dhabi peace negotiations brokered by the US between Russia and Ukraine? Several factors suggest that this is unlikely.

One immediate indicator is that the success of the mission in Oleshky was driven not by Moscow’s desire for peace but by its willingness to pander to Donald Trump’s vanity against the background of his animosity towards Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

It has long been known that Trump wanted to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. However, despite his claims that he has ended countless wars around the world, Trump is unlikely to receive this prestigious award. Today, it seems that the Trump family’s plan is to try to secure the Nobel Peace Prize for Melania Trump.

The Oleshky humanitarian mission seems to be a case in point. A few days before the ceasefire, the White House announced that it was Melania Trump – in “her formal role as Exclusive Intermediary” – who had initiated discussions on the ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, thus dismissing not only the Vatican’s efforts to secure the Oleshky ceasefire, but also the fact that Ukrainian and Russian intelligence services had already begun discussing the temporary armistice in the summer. Moscow, however, readily backed Washington’s version of Melania Trump’s critical role in the agreement, and Kyiv had to align with that version, too.

Both Russia and Ukraine are seeking to win Donald Trump over to their side, but while both countries eventually agreed to play along with the White House’s promotion of the US first lady as a “peacemaker”, Moscow presumably considered that the success of the Oleshky humanitarian mission would benefit it more than Kyiv. Putin’s apparent reasoning here is that Moscow’s apparent willingness to cooperate may deepen Trump’s disaffection with Zelenskyy and strengthen his delusion that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is blocking the path to the end of the war. For Putin, winning Trump over would be a way to continue the aggression against Ukraine under more favourable circumstances – not a way to come to peace with Ukraine.

Another factor suggesting that the Abu Dhabi talks are unlikely to result in progress towards lasting peace is that Moscow appointed Vladimir Medinsky, Putin’s aide, as the head of the Russian delegation for the talks in the UAE. Medinsky headed the Russian delegations for the negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul in 2022 and 2025, and his reappointment as the delegation’s leader for Abu Dhabi suggests that the Russian position on Ukraine has not changed since the Istanbul negotiations. The only acceptable outcome of the war for Russia remains Ukraine’s surrender, and surrender was unacceptable to Ukraine in 2022 and 2025, and remains so today.

However, Putin appears to believe that Russia is in a stronger negotiating position than Ukraine, and his belief is grounded in both erroneous and realistic assumptions.

On the one hand, it is a mistake on Putin’s part to assume that the constant Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, including energy and water supplies, can undermine Ukrainians’ resilience to the point where they will demand that the authorities surrender to Russia or rebel against the government. Ukraine is fighting an existential war, in which surrender means death, torture and ethnic cleansing – practices characteristic of Russian rule in the currently occupied Ukrainian territories. Ukrainians simply have no choice other than to resist the Russian aggression.

On the other hand, Moscow is correctly assessing developments across the West, where continuing support for Ukraine is being challenged on several fronts. While European nations keep financing weapons supplies for Ukraine’s defence, a large share of the weapons the country needs comes from the US. The joint US-Israeli war against Iran depleted some US stockpiles, and US capacity to restock them is limited, which creates a significant gap in Ukraine’s offensive and defensive efforts, especially when it comes to air defence. The Democratic Party’s victory in the US midterm elections will hardly change the situation, even though the party has been more favourable to Ukraine than the Republicans: the shortage of weapons that the US can sell to Ukraine via its allies is a material rather than a political issue.

Moreover, the continued military and economic support that Ukraine receives from its European and other allies depends not only on the political consensus among those allies about the need for such support, but also on the individual positions of those allies. France will hold a presidential election in the first half of 2027, potentially followed by snap parliamentary elections, and the right-wing nationalist party National Rally has a good chance of securing both the presidency and the premiership of the French Republic. Its informal leader, Marine Le Pen, who has announced that she will stand for the presidency in the spring of next year, has already said that France can no longer provide financial assistance to Ukraine, implying that she would stop that financial aid if elected president. Despite the fact that France is the second-largest economy in the EU, it is only the fifth-largest bilateral EU donor to Ukraine; but France is an influential European country, and if it stops financial support for Ukraine, this may produce a domino effect among some other EU countries and create more economic and internal political pressure on those EU governments that continue to aid Ukraine.

Marine Le Pen, whose party received financial support from Russia in 2014 and who met Putin personally in Moscow in 2017, is most likely Russia’s best bet for 2027 with regard to weakening Ukraine’s defence. But this is not the only bet. In Germany, the right-wing nationalist party Alternative for Germany is surging in the polls, and it is the largest openly pro-Putin and pro-Trump party in the EU. And Trump himself, despite his Republican Party’s losses in the 2026 US midterm elections, remains one of Russia’s important bets in the context of the Russian war.

The fact that Russia participated in the trilateral negotiations in Abu Dhabi is not a sign that it is ready for peace with Ukraine. It is not – Russia hopes that Western support for Ukraine will wither away, and believes it has the resources to wait for that hypothetical moment.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

There are two ways to read the results of the Israeli elections. One way would be to see them as a defeat for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. From holding a solid majority in the 120-member Knesset, the Netanyahu bloc has been reduced to a minority of 53 members. Anti-Netanyahu lawmakers, by contrast, hold 67 seats.

Had Israel been a democracy, we would have seen scenes of celebration similar to the ones we saw this year in Hungary, Brazil and Serbia, where political forces with undemocratic tendencies were defeated. But Israel is not a democracy, and Netanyahu was not necessarily defeated.

The second, more relevant way of reading the results of the Israeli election would necessitate accepting the apartheid nature of Israel and seeing the electoral arithmetic through that prism. In this case, Netanyahu won because he secured 53 seats in the Knesset – five more than the anti-Netanyahu Jewish bloc.

To form a government, a bloc needs to have the support of at least 61 members of the Knesset. The only way Netanyahu can do it is by enticing parties or lawmakers from the anti-Netanyahu bloc to join his bloc, as he has succeeded in doing many times in the past. Working with Palestinian parties, which secured 19 seats, is out of the question for him.

The obvious path for government formation for the anti-Netanyahu bloc would be to form a coalition – one that would include the two Palestinian parties. But to do so would mean to challenge Israeli apartheid. The main leaders of the Jewish anti-Netanyahu bloc, including Gadi Eisenkot, have promised not to do so under any circumstances.

There is another option: seeking the support of the religious Orthodox parties, which have so far been part of the Netanyahu bloc. To secure their backing, the anti-Netanyahu bloc would have to promise to exempt religious Orthodox youth from military service and guarantee funding for their learning centres.

However, Eisenkot’s main election promise was forcing young Haredi Jews into the army. So this is not a very likely scenario, but in politics, never say never.

There is also the option of a “unity government” led by some sort of rotation between the leading figures of the anti-Netanyahu bloc and Netanyahu. The problem here is that, according to a law passed a few years ago, as long as Netanyahu is still a defendant in an ongoing trial, he cannot serve as a minister; his coalition made sure that the legislation ridiculously would not apply to a prime minister.

Given that Netanyahu’s corruption trial is destined to go on for a very long time, the rotation would make it impossible for Netanyahu to be part of a government under Eisenkot as prime minister. That means he would demand to hold the rotating premiership first and leave open the option to collapse the government once his rotation is over.

Netanyahu has already done that before. In 2020, without any hesitation, he broke a rotation agreement with Benny Gantz, who had naively believed that after two years he would be the prime minister. This resulted in new elections, which Netanyahu won.

Finally, a very possible scenario is that neither of the two blocs would be able to form a government, which would mean new elections in six months. Netanyahu and his government would remain in office until the new polls, albeit with more limited authority.

This would give them the opportunity to reignite a war with Iran and Hezbollah and continue with their violent policies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in an attempt to attract more public support and win the elections.

This is the preferred option for Netanyahu because his relative defeat in the October 27 elections had a lot to do with the unprecedented galvanisation among the Palestinian voters in Israel and the more liberal Jewish Israelis living abroad who came back home in huge numbers to vote.

These possible scenarios tell only part of the story and are not enough to fully understand what the election results mean for Israel, the Palestinians and the region. Here are the more important conclusions one should draw from the results:

The first pertains to the future of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. They still could turn out to vote in large numbers if new elections are held soon. But if they are once more ignored and sidelined by the other political parties, they will never try it again.

In this case, it would be difficult for the leadership of this community to continue to delay a strategic decision: choosing which political space Palestinian citizens of Israel belong to – the Israeli or the Palestinian one?

Until today, they have given a chance to the Israeli political system despite its racism, apartheid tendencies and criminal policies towards Palestinians. Palestinian parties recommended Eisenkot for the premiership to President Isaac Herzog, who has now tasked him with forming a government.

If I can venture a prediction – and it is only a prediction – the anti-Netanyahu bloc would not engage meaningfully with the Palestinian parties. Its message, therefore, will be that the Palestinians of Israel are not legitimate players in the Israeli political field.

If I am wrong, this would be an incredible and transformative moment in the history of both Israel and Palestine, but there seems to be very little hope for such a development.

There are other lessons we can learn from where we are now with the knowledge that this is a very volatile moment in the history of Israel.

The first and most important one is that whoever forms the next government of Israel will continue the incremental genocide in Gaza, the intensified ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the aggressive policies towards the region. These policies as before can only be stopped or tamed by the region and the international community sending a clear message to Israel that there will be a price tag attached to such policies.

The second lesson is that the Israeli Jewish society is as deeply divided as ever, to the point that it is impossible for it to maintain a stable political system, a thriving economy and a positive strategy towards the region and the world.

The third lesson is that Israel’s international isolation will increase as a result of this trajectory, including the continued dissociation from Zionism among young Jews around the world, including in the United States.

Finally and most importantly, this can have an impact on the global discussion about Zionism. The move by the Green Party in Britain to define Zionism as racism – despite being currently an exception and widely condemned – will gain validity with time.

These elections and future developments are making clear that Zionism in the current Israeli politics means the exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel from politics – first by ignoring them and quite possibly in the future by denying them the right to vote

Moreover, many in the international community will associate the term Zionism with a consensual Israeli policy of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

The outlook in the short term is worrying. The overall message from the Israeli elections is that the future policies of the state will continue to threaten the lives of the Palestinians in occupied territory, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the people of southern Lebanon and Syria. There will be more instability in the region.

In the long run, however, as bad as it is, the fundamental cracks in the Zionist project will widen, which might lead to its demise. One can only hope this will also lead to the beginning of a political reality that would benefit everyone who lives in historical Palestine and the region.

A version of this oped was first published by Al Jazeera Arabic.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On Tuesday, the United States held midterm elections. Every one of the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives was up for election and 35 of the 100 US Senate seats were on the ballot.

The result of the elections was overwhelmingly in favour of the Democratic Party, or the blue team, as the US media has taken to referring to them. It was a blue wave. A blue tsunami. Democrats flipped at least 40 House seats and seven Senate seats. It was a clear message to Washington that much of the US is unhappy with the direction the country is headed.

Texas had not elected a Democrat in a statewide race for more than 30 years. Democrats dominated in Texas. Kansas hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Come the first week of January, there will be one representing it. Susan Collins, the powerful Republican chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the most bipartisan voting Republican in the US Senate had been Maine’s senator for 30 years. She was voted out. The depth and breadth of the Democratic victory stunned many.

The war with Iran clearly had an impact. It wasn’t the conflict itself nearly as much as the economic impact it has had on the average American. Virtually every American uses an automobile and the price of petrol has skyrocketed during the war. The high fuel prices have impacted every other segment of the economy because nearly every product, especially food and grocery items, is delivered using the roadway system, which, of course, means petrol and diesel prices add to their cost.

The Democrats taking control of both the House and the Senate will dramatically change the next two years in Washington. They will restore the oversight functions of Congress and will investigate Trump and his team for countless violations, real or imagined. Congressional priorities will change. Impeachment will be a word that is commonly used again. If a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court, the president will have a much more difficult time filling it. The impact of the elections is very real.

Is it historic though? In a word, no.

Losing seats to the opposition party is actually quite common in the midterms. Dozens of House races are still being counted, so the final tally may yet grow, but since World War II there have been at least seven midterm elections with seat losses comparable to or larger than what the Republicans have experienced so far in 2026: 1946, 1958, 1966, 1974, 1994, 2010 and 2018 when President Donald Trump’s party lost about 40 House seats in his first midterm.

The largest midterm loss belongs to President Barack Obama’s party in 2010. The Democrats lost 63 House seats and six seats in the Senate. The Democrats would then lose nine seats in the US Senate in the midterm elections held during Obama’s second term.

The Democrats under President Bill Clinton also took a beating in 1994 when the opposition Republicans gained 54 seats in the House, taking a majority for the first time in a generation, and flipping eight seats in the Senate.

The pundits at the time wondered aloud if it was the end of the Democratic Party. The losses were staggering. Both presidents, however, went on to govern effectively and find ways to work with the opposition. In fact, Clinton worked with the Republican Congress to pass the first balanced budget in memory. In that case, the split in government forced them to work together and produced a benefit to the American people.

None of this is new. President Harry Truman’s Democrats lost 55 House seats and 12 Senate seats in 1946. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Republicans took it on the chin in 1958, losing 48 House seats and 13 Senate seats. Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and George HW Bush all took big losses. Even Ronald Reagan lost 26 House seats in his first midterm elections.

The point is the American public has always demanded accountability from Washington. No one should be surprised that at a time when only 14 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job and the prices for basic necessities are increasing, Americans demand change. They have done it over and over, regardless of the party in power.

The next logical question is where do we go from here? Is Trump’s reign as leader of the GOP over? Has he lost his influence?

There will not be a great deal of time spent trying to decipher what went wrong. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have already acknowledged the war in Iran and its economic effects are the primary reasons for the loss. This acknowledgement will hasten the healing process within the party, as will the need to push through a number of agenda items together in the remaining weeks the Republicans have control of Congress.

Because the US Constitution limits a president to two terms, any time any president enters his final two years, he is known as a lame duck. His influence, while still enormous simply by the reality of the office, begins to wane. The closer it gets to the end of his final term the less influence he has, particularly on the domestic agenda. Many presidents spend the majority of their time near the end of their term on foreign policy.

As of January 3, Democrats will set the agenda on Capitol Hill. They will control every committee. They will control virtually every vote. Congress controls the purse strings, so their impact is large, but don’t count Trump out yet.

His personality and his outward embrace of even the most difficult conflicts are unique. Whether in business, in election wins and losses, in courtroom clashes or in international affairs, Trump doesn’t back down. Admittedly this sometimes works to his detriment, but it is a trait that will likely serve him well as he battles with a Democratic-controlled Congress.

The president has veto authority over any legislation Congress passes. Rather than sign the legislation, he can reject it. If he rejects it, two-thirds of both the House and the Senate must vote to override his veto or else the legislation does not become law.

If Trump feels the Democrats are pushing an agenda too radical or too far left, he will wield the veto pen with great regularity.

Ideally the two sides understand the power each holds, and they will work together, as did a Republican-dominated Congress and Democratic President Clinton. If they do work together, all Americans will benefit. If each side digs in and refuses to compromise, it will be a long, unproductive two years.

Speaking of two years, 2028 is the next presidential election, and the question of who will be the nominee for each party is already being kicked around – and, in particular, how these midterm elections will impact the potential Republican candidates like Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The stark reality is that two years is an eternity in politics. Anything can happen, despite the Republican defeat on Tuesday. The biggest question is whether the American public will be feeling “Trump fatigue” during the 2028 presidential election season.

If the public has grown weary of team Trump, anyone affiliated with his administration may be tainted goods and face a bigger challenge getting the party’s nomination. Vance, Rubio and others directly tied to him have the greatest name recognition right now, but that may prove to be baggage rather than an advantage.

Outsiders such as a state governor or a past political figure may generate public enthusiasm for a different direction. The list is long. Even Trump has said his party has a deep bench, and it’s true.

Trying to predict the 2028 nominee now, in such a volatile political time and with two years to go, while entertaining, is a fool’s errand.

Some in the media have begun to write the Republican Party’s obituary after Tuesday’s losses. The final numbers are not yet in, and in the Senate, the seven seats already lost exceed the six Obama’s party gave up in 2010.

Still, history shows that parties and presidents have come back from setbacks of this scale before, as Obama and Clinton both did. Trump and the Republicans can do the same.

A version of this piece was first published by Al Jazeera Arabic.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Disagreements between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) over the formation of a new government have led to the threat of two rival administrations emerging in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, analysts say.

The dispute between the two dominant political forces in the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, which traditionally has operated under a power-sharing agreement, escalated after a parliamentary session was held last week in Erbil without the PUK’s participation.

PUK leader Bafel Talabani responded by withdrawing his party from the government, and a threat is growing that a rival administration could be formed in the party’s Sulaimaniyah base.

Independent Kurdish politician Yasin Aziz said the latest developments have deepened the historical divisions between the KDP and PUK.

“I believe the spectre of two administrations in Kurdistan is now very close, and the outlines of such a scenario are becoming clear. … The events have been painful and rapid. The differences between the two parties were significant and have now led to a breakdown in relations,” Aziz told Al Jazeera.

“There had been hopes that the two sides would reach an agreement, but activating parliament without the PUK deepened the divisions between the KDP and PUK.”

The KDP, which is led by Massoud Barzani, is the biggest party in the region, and its strongholds are in Erbil and Dohuk.

Two powers

Since the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991 and the establishment of a US-led “no-fly zone” in northern Iraq, Iraq’s Kurds have largely governed themselves, separate from the national government in Baghdad.

The Iraqi Constitution enacted after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq recognised the northern Kurdish region as a federal entity with its own legislative, executive and judicial powers.

There is a historical precedent for the possible separation of powers in this region between two rival authorities. When a conflict erupted between elements of the KDP and PUK in the 1990s, the two parties formed separate local governments in Erbil and Sulaimaniyah, respectively.

While there have been no recent violent flare-ups between the two parties, political distrust remains deep.

During the sixth parliamentary elections in the region on October 20, 2024, the KDP won 39 seats and the PUK 23. This left a 16-seat gap between the two parties.

But the KDP’s ability to form a new government was still dependent on reaching an agreement with the PUK and other parties, such as the New Generation Movement, which secured 15 seats in the last election.

The PUK has so far refused to collaborate, so after a two-year wait, the KDP reactivated the regional parliament on Wednesday without its rivals.

Divisions but no conflict

Although the rivalry between the two parties is longstanding, Aziz argued that the current crisis is more serious and deeply rooted than previous political disputes.

“Given the political stubbornness of both parties, I do not expect an agreement or understanding to be reached soon,” he said. “Both sides must make concessions to each other. The party willing to make greater concessions will demonstrate greater concern for the Kurdistan region.”

Aziz was clear in laying blame for the deepening divide.

“The responsibility for deepening this conflict lies with the leaderships of Kurdistan’s two main parties,” he said. “Their failure to recognise the risks posed by continuing these disputes is one of the reasons we have reached this point.”

Subhi Mandalawi, a member of the KDP, blamed the current impasse on the refusal of the PUK to form a new government with the KDP.

“Following the Kurdistan parliamentary elections, the PUK delayed the formation of the new government. They were counting on the KDP being unable to secure the legal quorum needed to convene a parliamentary session,” Mandalawi told Al Jazeera. “But we held a parliamentary session without the PUK in 2018 as well, and they subsequently joined the government and parliament.”

Mandalawi insisted that the door remains open for the PUK and other political parties but warned that prolonged divisions would lead to deeper problems for the Kurdish region.

“Continuing to obstruct legislative institutions two years after the elections is unacceptable and harms the Kurdistan region domestically, regionally and internationally,” he said.

“Threatening to divide the Kurdistan region is a hasty, ill-considered and unrealistic decision. No party leader can take such a step, and the PUK would be the biggest loser if it went ahead with it.”

Despite the differences, there is little risk of a return to conflict between the two parties. “We are brothers, and there can be no fighting among us,” Mandalawi said.

Separation threats

Mahmood Khoshnaw, a senior PUK official, said the KDP’s decision to convene parliament without his party has worsened political tensions in the region.

“Activating parliament without the PUK represents a departure from the principle of partnership and from political realities, and there will be consequences. If a prime minister is appointed in Erbil, we will take the same step in Sulaimaniyah. Whatever the KDP does, we will do the same in Sulaimaniyah,” Khoshnaw warned.

“The situation in the Kurdistan region is heading towards chaos unless the crisis is addressed rationally and realistically. Activating parliament without reaching an understanding with the PUK has had a negative impact on relations between the two parties.”

Despite this, there are questions about whether Sulaimaniyah could legally separate from the Kurdish regional government.

Ramadan Albadran, an independent political analyst and constitutional affairs expert, said the dispute is not a constitutional issue about the KDP’s convening of parliament but a deep political crisis with the potential to create security repercussions for the region.

The Iraqi constitution also provides no mechanism for dividing the region into zones of influence between the KDP and PUK.

“If the PUK moves to separate Sulaimaniyah from the Kurdistan region, that would not be a legal or constitutional act,” Albadran said.

“If it takes place without a mandate from the elected Kurdistan Regional Government, it would be closer to an act of rebellion since there is no legal provision permitting withdrawal from or the dismantling of a region in this manner.”

“I think it’s safe to say that we are tired of being pitted against each other. We are tired of being told to hate each other. It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport. Politics as trolling and owning. Politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships, and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time.”

So said Senator-elect James Talarico in his victory speech on election night after he won the first United States Senate seat in Texas for the Democratic Party in almost 40 years.

I don’t like Talarico or his policies, but I agree with him on one thing: The American people are tired of being pitted against one another. We need more uniters and fewer dividers in the Republican Party and US politics in general.

This is the conclusion many American voters seem to have reached after 10 years of Donald Trump dominating the right.

A decade ago, he forcefully entered the political scene with a radically different approach and provocative rhetoric. He won his first US presidential election by attacking his opponents with clever and cutting nicknames. Crooked Hillary. Low-energy Jeb. Pocahontas. Little Marco. Crazy Bernie. Lying Ted.

All were aimed at diminishing his rivals in ways that only a rapturous crowd of adoring MAGA fans could really appreciate. His attacks played well on social media and reflected an American culture that was far less deferential to the political establishment, far coarser in its language and far more interested in being entertained than being informed.

Trump’s attacks, performed live at his raucous rallies, had all the earmarks of a professional wrestling bout. It was blood sport at its most basic level. And Trump’s supporters ate it up, loving how he stood up to an elite that obviously despised them.

His opponent in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, called half of his supporters a “basket of deplorables”.

Seven years before Trump formally entered the race for the White House, Barack Obama in a speech in San Francisco had said that people like them “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.

Trump gathered up these angry voters, many of whom had protested during the Tea Party movement, and created “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). They loved the visceral way Trump communicated. They loved that he promised to end illegal immigration and free-trade policies that destroyed manufacturing jobs.

Trump’s rhetoric, coarse as it was, seemed honest, authentic, unscripted, and totally real, not poll-tested, not AI-generated, not written by expensive speechwriters. Trump was talking to them, not at them. He had listened to their fears and promised to fight back with a vengeance.

When Trump claimed the political establishment had stolen his re-election, he didn’t sit idly by, accepting the results. He consulted his lawyers, came up with a dubious legal strategy and then unleashed his supporters on Capitol Hill, hoping upon hope that their pressure would bend the hallowed traditions of presidential succession to his will. It didn’t work, but it also didn’t disqualify him.

Over the four years of President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump survived legal attacks, threats of imprisonment and assassination attempts to become an invincible force who seized power again in 2024. His ascent seemed like destiny.

But as it often does, the fickle winds of the electorate changed direction. They used to love his unconventional approach to politics, but now they wanted him to deliver on his promises to lower inflation and gas prices. He had once promised to keep us out of foreign wars, but that promise was broken, too. Perhaps he had a good reason to attack Iran, but he failed to make a convincing case to the American public, and voters quickly grew disenchanted with another broken promise. The vice president himself said that the war is what cost the Republicans the election. But it was more than just the war. Voters were tired of the whole act.

When Trump told his voters to imagine that he was on the ballot, it wasn’t just his supporters who made this election a referendum on Trump. So too did angry Democrats, disgusted independents and more than a few former MAGA minions.

They said this election was about affordability, but it really was about an undisciplined president who refused to colour inside the lines, who blundered into a costly war, who didn’t stop his administration from detaining and deporting high school baseball coaches and Uber drivers and domestic employees, and harboured too many white supremacists within his ranks.

He alienated women, Hispanics, Asians, Arabs, African Americans and offended well-educated Midwesterners who couldn’t stomach his language or his antics any longer. The great MAGA coalition that he assembled for his historic 2024 victory dissipated in one election night, tired of the nonsense and wanting a change in direction.

Things are so bad for Republicans that they lost all kinds of members, from House leaders like Richard Hudson, to tremendously flawed MAGA warriors like Ken Paxton to seasoned and effective Appropriators like Susan Collins. Conservative Republicans lost. Traditional Republicans lost. Moderate Republicans lost. All kinds of Republicans lost. It is a total and complete rejection of the GOP, top to bottom. An unmitigated disaster.

There are two questions that remain. What will happen to the MAGA movement now? And can we ever return to the good old days before Trump made politics a blood sport more akin to Ultimate Fighting than to the World Wrestling Federation?

The answer is this: Unless Republicans fundamentally change how they communicate to voters and what they promise to do for them, they will not win another election. MAGA will be lost forever. Governing is about building coalitions, not about belittling potential allies with sophomoric attacks and needlessly partisan rhetoric.

Like Andrew Jackson, President Trump has forever changed American politics, and it is highly unlikely that we will ever completely return to the good old days of disagreeing without being disagreeable. But voters showed that they had grown tired of Mr. Trump’s brand of disagreeableness by delivering to the Democrats a huge political victory.

This election was not an endorsement of Democratic policies. It was a referendum on Trumpism and his caustic brand of politics. We will see if he got the message.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Messages popped up on my WhatsApp account from New York, Gaza, Pakistan and Australia. Friends and colleagues were following Michigan’s Senate race, talking excitedly about Abdul El-Sayed. As the results from Wayne County sealed his victory on Tuesday, I felt something I had rarely felt before in American politics: not a muted relief that someone had lost but genuine joy and hope that someone had won.

El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, defeated Republican Mike Rogers. He will be the first Muslim ever elected to the United States Senate. As a Muslim American from Michigan, this hit home.

Like many in Michigan’s Muslim community, I knew of Abdul long before he became a fixture in national headlines, from his 2018 gubernatorial campaign to his Friday sermons in local mosques. As Ramadan began this year, I attended one of his town halls for Muslim constituents. Before a few dozen community members and leaders, Abdul pledged to fight for all Michiganders. His sincerity and commitment to that pledge remained evident even as the pressures of the campaign intensified. I have seen him attend funerals for community members near my home and watched him go from person to person, greeting people with kindness. Even in the final days of an exhausting campaign, he responded personally to messages from the community, including mine.

We attended the same university, the University of Michigan, where he once helped lead the Muslim Students’ Association. I later served as a college student body president there. Just days before the election, Muslim alumni (including me) invited him to a football tailgate party with students, parents and graduates. His former teachers and students have spoken to me with pride about the person they knew.

Muslim Americans are often asked to celebrate any politician who occasionally says “salaam” or appears in a mosque before Election Day. Abdul was not an outsider to our community coming to court us. He belonged to it.

During the campaign, I welcomed hundreds of local Muslim community members, out-of-state political candidates canvassing for him and members of his staff into my home. People heard from those closest to him what this race could mean for Muslim Americans. The enthusiasm felt different from the familiar, dispiriting bargain of voting mainly to stop someone worse.

Two years ago, I wrote about why I would vote against genocide in the 2024 presidential election. That decision was shaped by my work with Palestinian healthcare workers, by witnessing the realities in Palestine firsthand and by outrage at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Neither I nor many of Michigan’s Muslims have forgotten. But this time, the ballot offered something other than just a protest vote: a candidate who had opposed Israel’s genocide against Palestinians from the outset while also caring about the range of issues affecting Michiganders.

His willingness to speak truth to power attracted immense hostility from Washington’s elites. President Donald Trump repeatedly mocked Abdul’s name, treating “Muhammad” – his middle name, meaning “the praised one” – as an insult. Political opponents and even some voters insinuated that his faith alone made him suspect, recycling unsubstantiated allegations tying him to groups and movements he did not belong to.

Abdul responded with dignity and directness. When critics made his name the issue, he spoke about groceries, housing, healthcare and affordability. When challenged over his opposition to genocide, he questioned the premise that wanting children to live free of bombs was somehow hateful. He did not accept the proposition that a Muslim must disown his community or Palestine to qualify for public office.

And most importantly, he fought back. Many Muslim voters I spoke to felt they had found someone willing to fight for them, to challenge the presumptions and racism of journalists, pundits and media outlets rather than accept their unjust framing.

His victory speech began with the words his opponents had tried to weaponise: “My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.” He recalled having said “inshallah” – “God willing” – whenever he was asked about winning. Now, he said, it was time for “alhamdulillah”, or “Praise be to God.”

That moment was electric, not because Arabic phrases alone are a sign of solidarity – even former President Joe Biden said “inshallah” in a debate before proceeding to commit genocide against Palestinians and aid the bombing of mosques and burning of Qurans – but because his Muslim identity had survived a countrywide effort by special interest groups and racists to make it disqualifying. His faith, Islam, is a value system he actively chooses every day, a commitment he strives to live out in public life. His being Muslim mattered to me more than his Arab ethnicity or ancestral origins, a simple happenstance of birth.

There was money behind the attempt to stop him too. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC’s) affiliated super PAC spent roughly $30m in Michigan’s Democratic primary, an extraordinary investment to defeat someone who openly opposed US support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid. In his victory speech, Abdul thanked AIPAC for the chance to beat it twice. One loss will not dissolve the lobbying group’s power. But Michigan demonstrated that AIPAC spending need not amount to a veto over who can win.

After Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York, sceptics suggested that a Muslim candidate outspoken about Palestine could only win in a liberal metropolis, not a state that Trump carried in 2024. El-Sayed travelled from small towns and villages to industrial cities and suburbs, visiting churches and mosques, and he won statewide.

Michigan has long been a centre of Muslim American life, from Dearborn’s famous Arab restaurants and coffee houses to Hamtramck, the first Muslim-majority city in the US. Generations have built mosques, schools, businesses and institutions while enduring suspicion and discrimination. There is irony in Michigan electing a Muslim alumnus of the University of Michigan, which has faced legal challenges over its treatment of antigenocide protesters. Some of the voices that were treated as dangerous on campus found a home at the ballot box for the first time.

Other Muslims across the country made history too. My mentor, friend and colleague Adam Hamawy, with whom I served on a medical mission in Palestine documenting harm to people’s health, won his congressional race in New Jersey and travelled to Michigan to support Abdul. Darializa Avila Chevalier, Aber Kawas, Nabeela Syed and so many others won seats in Congress and state legislatures across the country, refusing to accept that their silence on human rights abuses is the price of participation.

Yet our celebration does not mean we have suspended all judgement. Some Muslims I spoke with vehemently opposed Abdul’s decision to campaign alongside former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama. Their administrations’ policies, from facilitating the genocide in Gaza to conducting drone strikes against civilians in multiple Muslim-majority countries, remain at the forefront of people’s minds. I understood their anger and shared their apprehensions about normalising the killers of children. Yet many of us still voted for Abdul because we believed in his sincerity and because he had repeatedly made clear that he did not agree with every policy of those backing his campaign. I am under no illusion that one senator alone will end the systems and structures of exploitation that fund war machines abroad and fail their own communities at home. Muslim representation risks becoming hollow if mistaken for the only tool for liberation.

And that is precisely why the substance of his campaign matters. Abdul connected the fight against endless war to the fight for healthcare, clean water and a liveable wage. He spoke of a mother trying to keep her children on lifesaving medication and a worker fighting for a union. He insisted that the money spent destroying someone else’s children has a cost for children in the US too. His politics asked whether Americans could both recognise their own self-interest and show humanity towards others.

His election does not make US government policies any more just overnight. It does not bring back a single Palestinian child. It does not absolve the Democrats, Washington or any of us of complicity. And it certainly does not entitle Abdul to six years in the Senate without scrutiny.

But it destroys one convenient lie: that Muslim Americans must choose between being unapologetically Muslim and belonging fully to American public life.

For years, we were told to lower our voices, soften our names and reconsider what we advocate for if we wanted to succeed. On Tuesday, Michigan delivered its verdict. The man they tried to make unelectable will now sit in the US Senate. Alhamdulillah, he does not need to become less Muslim to serve his state – and the rest of us do not need to police who we are to demand a better future for ourselves and the generations to come.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is exercising power without appearing in public or allowing his voice to be heard. Since succeeding his father in March, he has governed through written statements and decrees, while reports of his meetings with senior officials offer a glimpse into how he exercises power.

The meetings announced in May and August appeared intended primarily to reassure Iranians that their new leader was alive and exercising authority. But a series of four meetings announced within 11 days in October, involving the heads of Iran’s parliament, judiciary and national security establishment, as well as senior military commanders, suggests something more: a new system of decision-making taking shape.

The meetings come as Tehran weighs its options between negotiations and renewed confrontation with the United States and Israel. They also invite comparisons with the consultations that preceded the 2015 nuclear agreement. The question is whether Iran’s new leadership is preparing for a similarly consequential decision, and whether this system is capable of making one.

The new Khameneism

For nearly 37 years, Ali Khamenei’s rule rested on his direct personal presence: speeches setting red lines, public meetings with commanders, political elites and ordinary Iranians. His son came to power in different circumstances. Injured in the February 28 strike that killed his father, he was advised, according to sources close to him quoted by Reuters, not to appear or release audio recordings for fear of being tracked.

His rule has taken shape through decrees rebuilding institutions, decisions channelled through a narrow circle of trusted officials, and the testimony of others in place of personal appearances.

The October meetings followed appointments to replace military and security commanders killed in the war. In August, Khamenei appointed his military adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, as his representative on the Supreme National Security Council; Rezaei later became its secretary. Six military appointments followed, including Ali Abdollahi as chief of the Armed Forces General Staff, Ahmad Vahidi as commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ali Azmaei as IRGC Navy commander. Abdollahi was also instructed to complete the merger of the General Staff with Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters.

The sequence of Khamenei’s reported meetings is revealing. Those announced in May with President Masoud Pezeshkian and Abdollahi, then head of Khatam al-Anbiya, and another with Pezeshkian announced in August, served chiefly to reassure Iranians that the new leader was alive and exercising his duties. October’s meetings appear to have constituted a systematic round of consultations reaching from constitutional institutions to the armed forces.

At his first reported meeting with the military leadership he had reconstituted, announced on October 31, Abdollahi, army commander Amir Hatami and Vahidi reportedly briefed Khamenei on military readiness in the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman.

Iran thus appears to be moving from reconstruction to operation: activating a decision-making system rather than merely establishing the leader’s presence.

These consultations unfolded alongside intensive mediation, with each stage of internal consultation following an external diplomatic development.

On October 20, Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, carried a Qatari-Pakistani compromise proposal to Tehran. According to Arab media reports, it envisaged unannounced inspections of nuclear facilities in exchange for Iran receiving the interest on its frozen funds in Qatar. Khamenei’s meeting with Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator, was announced the following day.

On October 26, Munir returned with Saudi Defence Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud and Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin. Their discussions produced an understanding that regional security was the responsibility of the region’s own states. Rezaei also announced that Tehran had sent Washington a proposal concerning the Strait of Hormuz with a seven-day deadline. Khamenei’s meeting with Rezaei, who had received a letter from US Vice President JD Vance, was announced the next day.

On October 30, Qatari mediators held 12 hours of talks in Tehran, coordinated with the White House, after US envoy Tom Barrack suggested an initial understanding was close. Khamenei’s meeting with military commanders was announced the following day.

This timing suggests that internal consultation has become the other side of external mediation.

The statements from these meetings carry two parallel, not contradictory, messages. In the meeting with Rezaei, Khamenei insisted on Iran’s conditions for ending the war, escaping the debilitating state of “neither war nor peace” and managing the Strait of Hormuz. In his instructions to the commanders, he demanded immediate retaliation against any threat without geographical limits, an expanded list of US and Israeli targets, and emphasised that Iran would decide when any renewed confrontation ended.

Repeated appeals for unity suggest an awareness of competing views within the political elite over war and negotiations.

Yet the meetings appear to have defined the upper and lower limits of Iran’s choices, rather than settled on a particular course: at one end, rejecting an intolerable continuation of “neither war nor peace”; at the other, preparing to widen the war if attacks resume. Between these limits lie a settlement on Iranian terms, pursued through Ghalibaf, Rezaei and the mediators, or continued mutual pressure while strengthening the domestic front.

The gap remains wide. Washington wants nuclear concessions before negotiations resume; Tehran first wants the naval blockade lifted, frozen assets released and oil exports restored.

Significantly, Khamenei spoke of conditions “set by the country’s officials”, not by himself. The wording distributes responsibility among institutions and preserves room for him to embrace or disown an eventual outcome.

The comparison with 2015

There are echoes here of the lengthy consultations before the nuclear agreement of July 14, 2015.

A secret channel in Muscat opened with Ali Khamenei’s approval. On September 17, 2013, he spoke to IRGC commanders of “heroic flexibility”, reassuring the military before negotiations. In June 2015, he set out his red lines, and in October he issued a letter of conditional approval. Responsibility for the nuclear file passed from the Supreme National Security Council to the Foreign Ministry under Mohammad Javad Zarif, a sign that the political decision had been made.

The resemblance is clear: a supreme leader establishes red lines, delegates negotiations to trusted figures and brings the military into the process before a major shift.

The differences are deeper. The earlier process lasted around two years under sanctions, not war. Today’s consultations were compressed into 11 days amid armed confrontation, a naval blockade and the approaching November 3 US midterm elections.

Ali Khamenei spoke in his own voice; his son speaks through written statements. Diplomats led the earlier negotiations; now two figures with IRGC backgrounds, Ghalibaf and Rezaei, play central roles. Where the earlier backchannel ran through Oman, today mediation involves Qatar and the countries of the Mecca Agreement, signed on August 7.

Above all, “heroic flexibility” was presented to commanders as preparation for an agreement. Today, conditions for a settlement sit alongside an expanded list of military targets.

The deficit of trust has also deepened. If the legacy of 1979 shaped Washington’s view of Tehran, and the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018 shaped Tehran’s view of Washington, the wars of June 2025 and February 2026 have added a layer of mistrust that no technical agreement can easily overcome.

The consultations thus resemble those of 2013 in form but not function. Then, they prepared the ground for negotiations; now, they prepare for a choice between negotiation and escalation.

The seven reported meetings suggest that the new Khameneism may be more than an attempt to fill a leadership vacuum. Its decision-making machinery appears to be in place and functioning, even though the supreme leader’s presence can be established only through others.

Yet every announcement intended to dispel doubts produces more of them, without photographs or details of exactly when and where the meetings took place. The legitimacy of decisions remains partly dependent on the legitimacy of the leader’s presence.

Can this system, with its new commanders and parallel messages of compromise and deterrence, make a decision as consequential as the one taken in 2015, when war has raised the political cost of flexibility beyond what a leader who has yet to appear publicly may be able to bear?

The father saw and was seen; the son makes his presence felt through endorsements and influence from behind protective barriers.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

As the dust settles on the 2026 US midterm elections, two facts are clear: First, the Democrats have achieved a historic victory – and second, Donald Trump remains president for the coming two years.

That means Congressional Democrats will have three legislative lanes to pursue: The first is constraining Trump. This includes doing what they can through Congress to bring the Iran war to a conclusion, blocking many of his nominations, particularly to the judiciary, ending ICE’s aggressive immigrant detentions, and pursuing oversight of Trump and his allies’ financial networks and alleged corruption.

The second lane will be about demonstrating a positive policy agenda to inform the 2028 cycle, when Trump will be off the ballot. This is more about “messaging bills” focused on social issues, but could also include economic measures such as tax reform proposals, as well as significant reforms of US global defence cooperation authorities and shifts to major foreign policy questions, such as aid to Israel.

The final lane will be that – perhaps narrow – set of issues where bipartisanship and cooperation with the White House is possible. Putting guardrails around America’s burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) sector may fit in that box, although some of Trump’s biggest funders are likely to do what they can to derail progress.

Many of the bills that will be put forward in the first and second lanes would be subject to presidential veto. Others will be toned down, as the Democratic establishment seeks to resist the progressive left’s ambitious agenda. These dynamics are likely to make the upcoming Congress less productive.

On foreign policy, in particular, Congress is able to pass just a slim set of acts without presidential endorsement, such as war powers legislation, limiting the president’s ability to wage war without Congressional approval; or measures like the recent Senate resolution advanced by Maryland Democrat Chris Van Hollen to demand reporting on Israel’s human rights record; or committee subpoenas, which can be used to investigate members of the Trump administration for wrongdoing. But they are likely to be ignored or stonewalled by the White House, leading to months, if not years, of fruitless litigation.

That is not to say that introducing “stand-alone” bills on issues, such as arms transfers to Israel, would not be important even if blocked by the president. They remain useful both for framing the conversation and for getting members of Congress on the record and establishing consensus positions.

In the Senate, where several incumbents are likely to throw their hats into the upcoming presidential nomination contest, such bills could be used to highlight the progressive credentials of some candidates – or to force more conservative members into awkward positions. That might ultimately make a difference in terms of the framing and debate for the 2028 election – and a potential Democratic administration thereafter. But it will not change anything in the immediate term.

There are at least three tools available to legislators where a fierce – and perhaps impactful – debate is likely to play out. The first is that enabled by Congress’ constitutional “power of the purse”.  If the current Republican majorities do not manage to pass an annual funding bill by the end of this calendar year, the Democrats will have both the current year and the next two years of US government funding under their control.

This includes, of course, Israel’s annual allocation of $3.3bn, which Trump himself put into doubt in a surprising and as yet unclarified statement on election day. If nothing else, the president’s call for an end to security assistance to Israel may accelerate what would likely have been a steady reduction under Democratic leadership.

The new Congress will also be able to reconsider a range of funding restrictions and requirements, such as the prohibition on funding the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), or the limitations on funding the Palestinian Authority.

Passing such bills will not be simply a matter of partisan rancour — we can expect some pretty tough battles to play out within the Democratic caucus itself on some of these issues. Then it is another matter of whether the Trump administration adheres to the law with the funding it ultimately receives.

The second area to watch is that of oversight. With the majority in hand, Democrats in the House and Senate can set the agenda – deciding which actions by the Trump administration are ripe for investigation, identifying witnesses, and using the committee gavels to drive the public debate.

Party leadership will be eager to focus on the issues that are most damaging to the current administration and its likely candidates for succession, such as Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio, while being least disruptive to party unity.

And because the system relies on seniority, control of the agenda of Congressional committees that can investigate the government would rest with Democratic establishment members who would be less likely than their newer or younger peers to be critical of the US-Israel relationship.

That said, it is hard to imagine a Democratic Congress that does not at least conduct oversight of Trump’s Board of Peace and its opaque sources of funding and influence. Another likely topic is the question of US involvement in the current war with Iran.

What the Democrats choose not to pursue via oversight will also be important: The weaponisation of anti-Semitism by the current and previous Congress to attack the US education sector and civil society should come to an end under the next Congress. Though certainly Democratic leadership will be keen to find ways to demonstrate that they still care about genuine concerns from the Jewish community, one would hope that these are pursued with a more concrete grounding in reality and shared security than as a tool for repressing pro-Palestinian speech.

But many in the Democratic base would like to see the party do much more – including holding hearings into the US role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a topic that would ensnare senior officials from the Biden administration in a very public accounting that the establishment is keen to avoid.

Here is where the details of the outcome of the midterms will truly matter. While there is no doubt that the centre point of the Democratic Congressional caucus has shifted to the left for the upcoming 120th Congress, particularly in the House, the size of the majority matters.

As recent Republican Houses have demonstrated, a small majority is a challenge for the speaker, as it empowers a small group of members to exert significant leverage through the threat of withdrawal of their support for basic procedural steps that are typically decided on a partisan vote basis.

As a result of the midterms “blue tsunami”, however, the Democratic majority is secure enough that leadership will have to make few real concessions to the left of their party, likely teeing up some tense, and almost inevitably public, tussling in the coming two years, particularly when it comes to appropriations bills.

In short, the Democrats’ campaign for legislative power has been a success, but particularly in the face of an imperious White House that has shown little interest in even longstanding legal precedent in its deference to Congress, it remains incomplete.

At the same time, being the party locked out of power has enabled the Democrats up to this point to dodge some degree of the internal wrangling that is already long overdue on key issues, such as foreign policy on Israel.

A majority in Congress may not give them complete control – but it does mean they will now own the legislative branch’s decisions. Whether they demonstrate a meaningful and proactive shift – or let themselves be constrained by establishment conservatism – may define the viability of their path to further electoral success in 2028.

Either way, the American people will be watching what Democrats do and do not do – as will the Republicans who, as Trump enters his “lame duck” years, are likely to undergo an evolution of their own on these key issues.

This makes progress in the coming Congress all the more acute an issue for the Democrats. The challenge for them is simple: take credible leadership on driving change or face the very real possibility of being outflanked by the “America First” right.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

To understand the coming collision between President Donald Trump and a Democratic Congress, one must first discard the textbook formulas of US governance. The United States is about to witness a political experiment for which there is no modern precedent: a purely transactional populist, entirely unmoored from traditional ideological orthodoxy, forced to share power with a legislative branch unified in partisan hostility.

The conventional wisdom predicts immediate, paralysing gridlock. That is a misreading of the terrain. Trump does not view politics through the lens of conservative dogma or constitutional restraint; he views it through the lens of the deal. Consequently, his governance will not be characterised by passive stagnation, but by an aggressive, volatile mix of transactional bipartisanship and raw executive unilateralism.

Domestically, the ideological lines will blur. For decades, the Republican Party was defined by its commitment to limited government and free markets. Trump has spent a decade dismantling that consensus. Confronted with a Democratic House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate, he will feel no tribal loyalty to standard conservative policy. Instead, expect him to seek out areas of populist overlap.

When it comes to massive infrastructure spending, protectionist trade policy and aggressive state intervention to protect domestic manufacturing, Trump is often closer to the Democratic centre-left than to the ghost of former President Ronald Reagan. He will dare the opposition majorities to vote against legislation that pours millions of dollars into their districts or levies tariffs that protect their blue-collar constituents. It will be an unholy, ad hoc alliance — issue-by-issue, fleeting, and transactional — designed to deliver the optics of victory for both a populist president and a vulnerable congressional majority.

Where such transactions fail, however, the venue will shift from the legislative chamber to the administrative state controlled by the executive. Trump will not accept the traditional boundaries of a divided government. If necessary, he will govern by decree. Executive orders, emergency declarations and expansive interpretations of federal statutes will be deployed to bypass a stubborn Capitol Hill. The administration will dare the Democratic leadership to tie up the government in the federal courts, turning the slow wheels of the judiciary into a political weapon.

Yet, the true test of this fragile constitutional architecture will not occur on the domestic stage. It will happen abroad, specifically in the volatile expanses of the Middle East, where the executive branch enjoys its greatest constitutional latitude.

The immediate flashpoint is Iran. The Trump doctrine rests on a foundation of maximum economic pressure backed by highly unpredictable, asymmetric tactical deterrence. It is a posture designed to keep adversaries off balance. But a Democratic Congress, historically wedded to the framework of multilateral diplomacy and deeply wary of congressionally unauthorised foreign entanglements, will view this unpredictability not as a strategic asset but as an existential danger.

The US is likely headed for a historic constitutional showdown over the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Democratic majorities will also aggressively use the power of the purse to place statutory fences around the commander-in-chief, attempting to defund military manoeuvres or explicitly prohibit unilateral escalations against Tehran. Trump will treat these attempts at legislative constraints with open contempt. Asserting an absolute, almost unrestrained reading of the Constitution’s Article II executive authority, the president will argue that modern geopolitical threats require executive agility, not governance by congressional committee. When the rockets fly, the president will act unilaterally, leaving Congress to meaningless academic debates.

Hanging over this entire drama is the ultimate constitutional weapon: the threat of impeachment by Congress. In a Washington where both the House and the Senate are controlled by the president’s opponents, oversight will cease to be an instrument of governance and become an engine of partisan political destruction.

Democratic congressional committee chairs will launch a relentless, multifront campaign of subpoenas and investigations. Every member of Trump’s cabinet will live in a permanent state of interrogation; every foreign policy decision will be audited for high crimes and misdemeanours. The House will almost certainly draft articles of impeachment, not as an extraordinary remedy for rare misconduct, but as a routine penalty for political nonconformity.

Yet, this strategy carries severe risks for the opposition. Trump does not fear institutional warfare; he thrives on it. He will transform the spectacle of congressional investigations into the theatre of public grievance. To his base, a hostile Congress will be framed not as a coequal branch of government performing its constitutional duty, but as an illegitimate, obstructionist cabal subverting the will of the forgotten American voter.

Because the structural math of the Senate requires a two-thirds majority for removal of the president, actual eviction from the Oval Office remains a statistical fantasy. Impeachment will therefore achieve not displacement, but a permanent state of institutional friction.

What the US is about to enter is not two years of legislative inactivity, but a phase of perpetual brinkmanship. It will be an era in which governance occurs only in the narrow, volatile intervals between constitutional crises. The US system was built to withstand institutional tension, but it also requires a basic reverence for institutional boundaries to function. With a transactional populist president in the White House and an adversarial army on Capitol Hill, those boundaries will be tested as never before. The architecture will hold, but the foundation will shake.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

On November 3, as Americans vote in the midterm elections, the United States faces a defining test of presidential power, constitutional accountability and democratic resilience. The election will determine control of Congress, but its stakes extend far beyond partisan fortunes. At issue is whether constitutional checks and balances can constrain President Donald Trump, whether election officials can withstand political pressure, and whether the government will respect the voters’ verdict when the outcome threatens its interests.

The battle for control of elections

The administration’s efforts to reshape election procedures have encountered substantial judicial resistance. According to an October 20 review by the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 34 federal district court decisions had temporarily or permanently blocked administration initiatives involving election procedures and demands for voter registration records. The rulings included decisions by judges appointed by presidents of both parties, including Trump himself.

These decisions demonstrate that judicial oversight remains an important constitutional safeguard. Yet repeated litigation exposes a vulnerability: courts often intervene only after disputed measures have been introduced, leaving states to challenge policies that can generate uncertainty close to Election Day.

The controversy intensified on October 26, when a federal appeals court declined to order California to set aside ballots from approximately 20,000 registered voters whom the Justice Department alleges may be noncitizens. The court ruled that the lower court had not been given adequate opportunity to consider the government’s request. The underlying dispute remained unresolved.

The administration maintains that its actions protect electoral integrity. But investigating credible allegations of wrongdoing is fundamentally different from restricting eligible voters on the basis of unverified suspicions. Election security requires accurate voter rolls, but it equally requires protecting citizens from erroneous challenges.

Repeated allegations of fraud can undermine confidence even when evidence fails to establish that an election has been compromised. The danger is that routine election administration becomes suspect in the public mind, regardless of the facts.

Congress as a constitutional check

Republicans hold narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, placing control of the House and potentially the Senate within reach of Democrats.

A Democratic House majority would strengthen the opposition’s ability to investigate administration policies, subpoena officials and scrutinise executive decisions. Immigration enforcement, election procedures, federal spending and the implementation of executive orders could face intensified oversight.

Such scrutiny could expose misconduct where evidence supports it and compel officials to explain decisions otherwise shielded from meaningful examination. Yet investigations do not automatically produce accountability. Subpoenas can trigger prolonged legal battles, and congressional hearings alone cannot force policy changes.

Control of the Senate would give Democrats greater influence over presidential nominations and judicial appointments. Nevertheless, Trump would retain his veto power and substantial executive authority. Even unified Democratic control of Congress would not automatically reverse his agenda.

The deeper question is whether Congress will exercise its constitutional responsibilities independently or allow partisan loyalty to take precedence over institutional accountability. Checks and balances cannot function effectively if one branch declines to challenge another when circumstances demand it.

The test after election day

Perhaps the most consequential confrontation will come after the ballots are cast.

Trump’s response to his 2020 presidential defeat remains a critical precedent. He challenged the result, made unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, and pressured Georgia officials to find enough votes to reverse his loss. On January 6, 2021, a mob attacked the Capitol as Congress met to certify the presidential election.

That history does not establish that similar events will recur in 2026. It does, however, make scrutiny of potential election disputes essential.

The danger may lie not in a single intervention capable of changing the result, but in successive confrontations: challenges to ballot counting, pressure on state officials, demands for investigations and attempts to portray ordinary procedures as evidence of fraud. Even unsuccessful efforts can delay resolution and weaken public confidence.

Candidates have every right to pursue legitimate legal challenges. Courts must consider credible evidence, and election officials must correct documented irregularities. But allegations are not proof, and no president can simply declare an unfavourable result invalid.

An election can also be damaged without a single vote being changed. Intimidation of election workers, unfounded accusations and efforts to discredit established procedures can erode public acceptance of legitimate outcomes.

The distinction between lawful scrutiny and political interference is therefore fundamental. Electoral integrity depends on evidence, consistent procedures and respect for the law – not on whether the outcome favours the governing party.

Courts cannot defend democracy alone

Judicial intervention demonstrates that constitutional safeguards remain operational. Courts can invalidate unlawful executive actions, but they cannot independently administer elections across thousands of jurisdictions or guarantee that political leaders will respect every ruling.

Nor can judicial decisions alone restore public confidence after sustained efforts to discredit electoral institutions. Democracy depends on Congress exercising oversight, election officials counting ballots accurately, courts acting impartially and political leaders respecting lawful outcomes.

The willingness of judges appointed by presidents of both parties to rule against administration initiatives reinforces a fundamental principle: constitutional protections cannot depend on partisan alignment. Their effectiveness rests on whether institutions apply the same rules regardless of who benefits.

The broader danger is institutional erosion. Repeated confrontations can weaken public confidence, discourage election workers and normalise the idea that constitutional constraints are obstacles to political power rather than obligations governing its exercise.

A verdict beyond the ballots

The November 3 midterms will not resolve the struggle over presidential power. If Republicans retain Congress, Trump will continue to benefit from congressional majorities, although judicial and state-level checks will remain. If Democrats gain one or both chambers, the administration will face greater scrutiny, but substantial executive authority will persist.

Neither outcome guarantees effective constitutional government. The decisive issue is whether institutions exercise their lawful responsibilities and whether political leaders accept that presidential power is neither unlimited nor permanent.

American democracy has survived profound crises, but resilience should not be confused with invulnerability. Checks and balances work only when institutions enforce them and political leaders respect their limits.

The midterms are therefore about more than congressional arithmetic. They will test whether votes are counted according to law, disputes are resolved through established procedures and electoral outcomes are respected regardless of partisan consequences.

The ballots will determine who controls Congress. What follows will reveal whether American institutions can still uphold a principle fundamental to democratic government: no president stands above the law, no party owns the electoral process, and no exercise of political power is beyond accountability.

On November 3, Americans will vote to determine the composition of Congress. The aftermath will test something more enduring: whether the constitutional restraints that have sustained American democracy remain binding when their enforcement carries the highest political stakes.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

In the October 27 Israeli elections, 38 parties ran for office. Of these, only two supported peace, equality and an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories. Both were “Arab parties” – made up of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

These two parties earned a historic result, securing 19 seats in the Knesset, after some 80 percent of Palestinian citizens cast a vote.

This unprecedented turnout contributed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to secure a majority.  His bloc won 53 seats, while the Jewish-led opposition won 48.

The electoral mobilisation of Palestinians was immediately spun as a threat and Palestinian communities now face intensified incitement by members of Netanyahu’s camp. The pro-Netanyahu camp has alleged that the election was “stolen” and is now calling for restrictions on the “Arab vote”.

Thus, Palestinian electoral success exposed an uncomfortable question for Israeli politics: what happens when citizens who are informally isolated on the political scene but whose vote is formally equal become powerful enough to determine who governs?

Palestinian citizens face a fundamental question: Can they truly determine the political outcome and if they can, does that make them equal citizens?

Formal inclusion, informal exclusion

Palestinian citizens of Israel have long faced a dilemma over voting. If they do not mobilise to vote, the risk is that the Jewish right would come to power is high. If they do vote, there is no guarantee that their participation would translate into policies that protect or benefit their communities.

In 1999, Arab turnout reached approximately 75 percent in the elections and Palestinian citizens overwhelmingly supported Ehud Barak of the Labour Party against Netanyahu. A year later, after Ariel Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa compound and the outbreak of the second Intifada, Israeli police killed 13 Palestinian citizens. Outrage and disillusionment contributed to an Arab boycott of the 2001 election, when turnout fell to about 19 percent. Sharon won.

Today, Palestinian electoral participation still retains its sway. Higher turnout among Palestinians means fewer seats for two main blocs – the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps – which could tip the balance in the Knesset. This is what happened on October 27 .

But this potentially powerful position of the Palestinian parties has been diminished by the refusal of Jewish-led parties to work with them on government formation.

The logic of this exclusion was made clear in April 2021, when far-right politician Bezalel Smotrich rejected Netanyahu’s attempt to establish a government supported by one of the Palestinian parties, Ra’am. Smotrich argued that doing so would encourage greater Palestinian turnout which would allow the Palestinian community to enable the return of the left to power in Israel. Accepting Palestinian parties would therefore challenge the Jewish right’s political dominance.

Ra’am eventually joined the short-lived coalition government formed by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, without making any national demands, but its participation came at the cost of significant concessions on national issues. For the first time, Palestinian political leaders recognised Israel as a Jewish state and were even willing to set aside the national question in favour of addressing civil and socioeconomic issues.

Despite these concessions, the Bennett–Lapid government ultimately collapsed following the resignation of two coalition members who opposed sitting in a government alongside Palestinian representatives.

Netanyahu then realised that to prevent the formation of any future government of change, he needed to delegitimise the Palestinian parties and limit their political representation.

Following October 7, 2023, Palestinian citizens experienced a sharp contraction of political space. Students faced disciplinary proceedings over social-media posts; employees lost jobs; antiwar speech prompted police investigations and arrests.

The electoral process itself reflected this climate. Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted to disqualify both Palestinian electoral lists, along with lawmaker Ofer Cassif and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh. The Supreme Court eventually reversed the bans on the lists.

Meanwhile, attacking Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, became a political staple. Ahead of this election, media outlet Arabic Post conducted an analysis of more than 10,000 election-related social-media items. It reported that 40 percent of posts by candidates from Netanyahu’s camp concerned Arabs or Palestinians, and that 94 percent of those were hostile.

More troubling were the police raids on the homes of Ra’am activists in the Negev, following suspicions of electoral bribery which led to the arrest of three men.

Police acknowledged searches without warrants and later reports questioned the strength of the evidence. All three men were released. But the ripple effect of those allegations helped shape a narrative of suspicion against the Palestinian community.

Attacks on the Palestinian vote

In this election, after years of repression and incitement, Palestinian citizens did not retreat. They organised, voted in unprecedented numbers and achieved a remarkable result. They took a gamble by taking their citizenship seriously and by asserting their right to full political equality and a meaningful say in shaping the country’s future.

However, the parties they voted for face isolation unless they fulfil the conditions set by the Jewish-led opposition: namely, recognising Israel as exclusively Jewish, labelling Hamas a “terrorist” organisation and accepting compulsory military or national service, from which Palestinian citizens are now exempt.

In other words, Palestinians can access the political power they should have only if they fully capitulate on the Palestinian question, embrace Zionism and accept their own status as unequal citizens.

In parallel, the Palestinian community also faces intensified incitement, particularly by the pro-Netanyahu camp. Politicians and public figures are throwing claims of electoral manipulation, insisting “the Arabs stole the election”.

Former Deputy Knesset Speaker Moshe Feiglin went as far as declaring that the Palestinian electoral mobilisation was the “October 7” of Israeli politics. Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, called Palestinian citizens of Israel “the greatest danger to the survival of the State of Israel—aside from the Iranian nuclear threat”.

Many Palestinian citizens now fear that political success could bring further intimidation, restrictions or violence rather than recognition.

Thus, the high voter turnout among Palestinian citizens has forced Israeli society and its political establishment to confront the inherent contradiction between Israel’s identity as a Jewish state and its claim to be a democracy.

This fundamental dilemma may ultimately be resolved in favour of Jewish political dominance, leading to legislation that further undermines Palestinian civil rights and expands the system of apartheid and Jewish supremacy.

It would not be surprising if a bill were introduced in the next Knesset aimed solely at restricting Palestinians’ voting rights. There are already calls on social media for such a move.

A July survey by Israel Democracy Institute found that only 46 percent of respondents in the right-wing Jewish camp supported Palestinian citizens’ right to vote.

In the current reality, following the genocide in Gaza, there is a growing sense among Jewish Israelis that there are no longer any limits to what they can do, pushing the state to act with virtually no restraint towards Palestinian citizens.

If Israeli society does not change direction, its pretence of democracy may soon no longer hold.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats are being contested on Tuesday.

Within a week, two of the three largest cloud computing companies in the world signed 20-year contracts for nuclear electricity. Amazon has taken 690 megawatts from Constellation’s Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, including 190 megawatts of additional generating capacity expected between 2030 and 2032. Google has signed an agreement that will bring 890 megawatts of additional nuclear capacity into the United States. Constellation is investing more than $4.3bn to upgrade 11 reactors across Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Neither agreement, however, involves building a new nuclear reactor. Rather, they are paying to generate more output from reactors that already exist – some of which are even older than the companies themselves.

A few years ago, such agreements would have seemed inconceivable. Nuclear power had fallen out of favour following accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chornobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Germany phased out nuclear power, while Japan shut down its reactors after Fukushima, although it has since begun restarting them. In many democratic countries, advocating for nuclear energy became politically difficult.

Today, an undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island is being brought back into service, with Microsoft contracted to buy its output for 20 years. The US Department of Energy is providing up to $4.4bn in loans to support the restart of three shuttered plants, with the aim of restoring about 2.25 gigawatts. Palisades in Michigan, which was closed in 2022, is contracted to be generating again by March 2027. If successful, it would become the first US commercial nuclear plant to restart after entering decommissioning.

What has changed?

The quiet reversal

In the last decade, the industry’s answer to AI’s energy problem was efficiency – things such as better chips, smaller models and smarter cooling seemed appealing and feasible. Industry conferences featured discussions about performance per watt, with modern artificial intelligence (AI) chips performing more computation per unit of electricity than their predecessors.

Yet those efficiency gains did not reduce overall electricity demand. Instead, each gain was quickly put towards something larger. Even when DeepSeek demonstrated that a competitive model could be trained at a fraction of the computing cost many had expected, the result was not a reduction in industry spending. Instead, laboratories continued planning more training runs, models that reason for longer, agents that work continuously in the background, and video generation.

This would not be the first time something like this has happened in history. In 1865, William Jevons observed that more efficient steam engines made Britain burn more coal, not less, because cheaper power created uses that had not existed before. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data centre electricity demand will more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, even assuming continued improvements in efficiency.

Hence, the industry has changed strategy – unable to shrink demand, companies are now buying up supply.

The arithmetic of waiting

Money, however, cannot solve every problem quickly.

A new large reactor takes a decade or more from decision to electricity. Tech companies are investing in small modular reactors to power their data centres, although many of these projects are not expected to deliver electricity until the early 2030s. So far, very few of these have been built anywhere in the world. Thus, while reactor restarts and upgrades are the faster option, the “fast option” still means 2027, 2028, 2029, or beyond.

AI capital expenditure, however, does not operate on that same calendar. The chips being installed this year could be overtaken by newer technology long before the 20-year electricity contracts powering them expire. This discrepancy underpins all of these announcements, yet the industry has not addressed the implications if demand weakens while contractual obligations remain.

Who pays in the meantime

This is where the story stops being about technology.

Most of these deals sit inside PJM, the grid operator serving roughly 67 million people across 13 American states and Washington, DC. PJM uses capacity auctions to secure sufficient electricity-generating resources for future demand, with the associated costs ultimately passed on to consumers through their electricity bills. Capacity prices have reached the regulatory price cap in three consecutive auctions. According to the grid operator’s independent market monitor, data centre demand contributed approximately $29.4bn in capacity costs across the four most recent auctions. In the latest auction alone, around $6.3bn of these costs were attributed to data centre demand, including forecasts for facilities that have yet to be built.

In effect, households are already paying higher electricity capacity charges, partly because of projected demand from facilities that may never become operational. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that, by 2028, the typical household within PJM could face an additional $70 per month in electricity costs if current trends continue. These rising costs are also having political consequences. Recent US polling shows growing public dissatisfaction with data centres, with electricity bills among the main concerns. In response, Virginia has established a separate electricity rate class for data centres, Ohio has introduced minimum billing requirements, and Illinois is debating legislation.

The aim of the Google agreement is to tackle this objection. Its underlying principle is that major new electricity consumers should bring additional generation capacity rather than compete with existing users for an already constrained supply. This approach represents a constructive step towards mitigating the pressure that data centres place on electricity systems.

However, the arrangement remains voluntary. In October 2026, US federal regulators rejected most of PJM’s proposal to require large new electricity consumers to provide their own generation capacity. As a consequence, the industry is voluntarily offering a commitment that regulators have so far declined to impose through PJM’s proposed rules. This poses the question: how long will such voluntary commitments remain viable if the costs of fulfilling them begin to rise?

What the Gulf should take from this

For Gulf countries preparing their own AI infrastructure expansion, the US experience offers a warning about the costs of getting these arrangements wrong.

For countries with abundant energy resources, the expansion of AI infrastructure presents a significant opportunity.

Qatar’s sovereign fund has committed to a $20bn joint venture with Brookfield for AI infrastructure, beginning with a first phase of roughly 300 megawatts and potentially expanding to near 1.5 gigawatts. Abu Dhabi is pursuing plans for up to five gigawatts of AI data centre capacity. Saudi Arabia is targeting almost two gigawatts through HUMAIN. The region’s competitive advantage is substantial. As demand for AI computing grows, access to electricity is becoming an increasingly important factor in determining where computing infrastructure is built. The Gulf is well positioned to capitalise on this demand.

However, the scale of the proposed developments warrants scrutiny. If the proposed 1.5-gigawatt build-out is completed in Qatar, it would represent electricity demand equivalent to approximately 12 percent of the country’s installed generating capacity. Electricity allocated to AI infrastructure cannot simultaneously serve other purposes, meaning the opportunity costs of these projects deserve serious consideration.

In the United States, the debate over AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly centred on who ultimately bears the cost of its electricity demands, with many of the major commitments already in place. The Gulf is in a rare position of being able to settle that question first: what the industrial tariff is, who funds the new generation, what happens to the contracts when the hardware ages, and what long-term economic benefits the country would see beyond energy revenues and a limited number of jobs.

While hosting AI infrastructure can generate considerable economic value, the greater strategic opportunity lies in determining the conditions under which that infrastructure operates. For Gulf countries, the opportunity to establish these terms exists now, before large-scale commitments constrain their options.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi surprised observers when he recently announced his intention to leave office after his third presidential term ends in April 2030.

El-Sisi had been widely suspected of moving to amend the Egyptian constitution to allow him to serve another term, or possibly indefinitely.

But speaking at a graduation ceremony at the Egyptian Military Academy, el-Sisi insisted that his departure was a settled matter and that “no one would tamper with” the constitution.

So what is behind the decision? There has been much speculation that el-Sisi may use this declaration to rally popular support for a fourth term or preempt a move by the military against him. But there is also the possibility that he is setting up the next phase of military rule in Egypt.

It is important to point out first that voluntarily leaving power is a risky proposition for any authoritarian leader.

In el-Sisi’s case, his 2030 departure would leave open the possibility that a future Egyptian government could seek to use him as a scapegoat for the country’s problems, possibly even holding him to account for alleged crimes committed during his presidency.

El-Sisi led a coup in 2013 against Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, which was accompanied by massacres and the jailing of tens of thousands of politicians, activists, and journalists.

El-Sisi’s economic record has also been the subject of criticism, with detractors accusing him and his government of corruption, poor fiscal policy and lavish spending on vanity projects. Egypt’s debt stands at 81 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), with interest payments alone exceeding combined spending on healthcare, education, wages and subsidies. Meanwhile, the Egyptian pound has lost more than 80 percent of its value against the US dollar since 2014, while cumulative inflation exceeds 460 percent.

In this context, el-Sisi’s announcement that he plans to step down in 2030 was rather unexpected. Some have speculated that he has no intention of actually leaving office and could go back on his statement, as he has done before.

In 2013, following Morsi’s overthrow, el-Sisi denied that he would run for president.

After telling the media in 2017 that he was committed to “preserving [the constitution’s] two four-year terms and not changing it”, he helped lead the drive to amend the constitution in 2019.

A judicial source told Mada Masr last week that el-Sisi’s announcement left open the door for a “popular call” for the president to remain in office.

A second possibility is that with this move, el-Sisi may be attempting to preempt a possible military intervention, which could become more likely if the economy continues to falter.

In 2011, the military responded to popular protests against former President Hosni Mubarak by forcing him to step down.

The army could attempt to defuse public anger by presenting el-Sisi as a scapegoat, forcibly removing him from power, and replacing him with someone who can preserve a measure of stability as well as secure its vast economic interests.

In that context, a member of parliament said recently that he has heard el-Sisi say in private meetings that he would rather step down than wait for the military to force him out.

But a third and much more likely possibility deserves particular attention: el-Sisi may be preparing to leave the presidency while ensuring that Egypt’s military-dominated political system survives his departure.

It is perhaps not coincidental that during the announcement, he cited Article 200 of the constitution, which gives the armed forces an extraordinary role in Egyptian politics.

The article, amended in 2019, makes the military responsible for maintaining the country’s “democracy” and the “gains, rights and freedoms” of the Egyptian people.

According to el-Sisi, the aim of the article is “to protect the Egyptian state from any attempt to infiltrate it or allow people to take it over who cannot handle the responsibility of this country or who do not even understand the meaning of ‘state’”.

Article 200, combined with Article 234 — which requires that a president secure approval from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces before appointing a defence minister — gives the military significant control over Egyptian political life.

El-Sisi’s vision for the selection of Egypt’s next president gives the military an outsized role. His proposal includes setting up a committee of experts to draft legislation for selecting hundreds of highly educated Egyptians to undergo specialised training at the Egyptian Military Academy.

Applicants, el-Sisi proposes, should hold doctoral degrees, be between 40 and 50 years of age, and be prepared to spend 30 months at the academy learning about the Egyptian state.

The programme would also train future ministers, governors and members of parliament.

Combined with Articles 200 and 234, this proposed mechanism seems intended to preserve the military’s dominance long after el-Sisi leaves office. It could be favourable to him as well.

A genuinely independent, civilian president could seek to investigate massacres overseen by el-Sisi, allegations of corruption, or other alleged crimes. A transition process closely managed by the military is highly unlikely to yield such a result.

The open question now is how an increasingly frustrated and critical Egyptian public will respond to a political process managed by the military that effectively wipes out the need for a popular mandate.

For now, el-Sisi and the military appear determined to shape Egypt’s political future. But the people may have the last word.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Almost 45 percent of Israelis had cast a ballot by mid-afternoon, but questions have been raised about possible voter suppression in Arab towns.

Almost 45 percent of Israeli voters had cast a ballot by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, according to Israel’s Central Elections Committee, marking the highest election turnout by 2pm (12:00 GMT) in 50 years.

The figure was 6 percent higher than at the same time in the last elections in 2022.

Mitchell Barak, a pollster and former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Al Jazeera that voter turnout “is really high and that’s good”.

“I think … it will probably pass its historic peak in ‘73 – when Israel was also involved in a huge war – so draw what conclusion from that you will,” he added.

The election is largely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s handling of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks and the wars that followed, the most intense period of combat for Israel since the 1973 surprise military campaign by Egypt and Syria.

“Those numbers are going to help the incumbent parties,” Barak said, “as the 3.25 percent threshold a party needs to get into the Knesset remains, the number of votes you need to meet that threshold increases dramatically.”

Israeli officials noted that several polling stations had faced exceptionally long lines, which were attributed to high voter turnout despite rainy and blustery weather in parts of the country, and a flood warning in some areas.

Arab vote

In a message more than five hours after polls opened, Netanyahu urged supporters to vote, saying turnout was high among his opponents on the left and among Palestinian citizens of Israel, about a fifth of the population.

“We need it to be high too. You all need to stream to the polls,” he said. “This is a fateful moment.”

Netanyahu had repeatedly warned supporters of the prospect of high turnout among Palestinian citizens in Israel ahead of the vote, seeking to mobilise his base under the slogan “the right or Palestine”.

Those voters were casting ballots in “unprecedented” numbers, Palestinian candidate Ahmed Tibi said.

Netanyahu and his main rival Gadi Eisenkot have ruled out partnering with Arab parties, citing a lack of shared values, although some possible scenarios envision them propping up a minority government to ensure Netanyahu is removed from office.

Meanwhile, an Israeli rights group has filed a complaint with the country’s election commission warning that widespread delays could be suppressing the vote among Israeli Palestinians.

Though delays could be a result of high voter turnout, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in its complaint to the Central Elections Committee that delays had been reported in at least 18 communities. It asked the committee to investigate “whether these delays are deliberate.”

The ACRI also reported “a large presence” of police and National Guard officers at a polling station in the Negev Desert, raising concerns that officers were using crowd control as a pretext to prevent people from entering to vote.

The Ballon d’Or is football’s most prestigious individual honour. On Monday, Bayern Munich striker Harry Kane became the first Englishman to win it since Michael Owen in 2001. But his victory also raises a fundamental question about the award: How can individual excellence be fairly assessed in a team sport?

For much of the past two decades, that question has been overshadowed by the extraordinary rivalry between Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. From 2008 to 2017, one or the other won the Ballon d’Or every year, turning the annual award into a contest between the two superstars. Messi eventually accumulated a record eight trophies and Ronaldo five, together accounting for 13 of the 17 awards presented between 2008 and 2025.

Their rivalry generated unprecedented excitement around an award first presented in 1956, when England’s “wizard of the dribble”, Sir Stanley Matthews, became its inaugural winner. But it also pushed several important questions into the background. Has the growing commercialisation of the Ballon d’Or distracted from its purpose? Why does it overwhelmingly reward attacking players? And why does a supposedly global award remain so heavily focused on European football?

The commercialisation of the Ballon d’Or reflects the transformation of football into a global entertainment industry, in which individual players have become brands in their own right.

“The whole dynamic of the Ballon d’Or has changed because the dynamic of the sports and entertainment industry has changed with the way individual athletes are marketed,” Steve Martin, founding partner of MSQ Sport + Entertainment, formerly of M&C Saatchi, told The Athletic.

“They’ve found a way as an individual athlete or player to build their own profile and their own fanbase, as opposed to relying on their clubs. They control their own destiny, and they market themselves.”

Former Switzerland defender Ramon Vega has been more critical of this development. “The commercialisation and monetisation of this award is not taking it in the right direction,” he told the writer.

The Ballon d’Or has undoubtedly become a bigger spectacle, but the attention surrounding the award should not obscure the question of what constitutes individual excellence. And commercialisation is not its only problem. The award has also long favoured players in attack over those in other positions.

A goalkeeper’s or defender’s performance is as important as that of midfielders and strikers, in a sport where a team is supposed to be as great as the sum of its parts. Yet Russia’s Lev Yashin remains the only goalkeeper to have won the award, in 1963, while Italy’s Fabio Cannavaro was the last defender to do so, in 2006, after captaining his country to World Cup victory. Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer and Matthias Sammer were among the few other defenders to have received the honour.

“Goalkeepers and defenders are also part of the spectacle. Attackers don’t just play amongst themselves,” Cannavaro told France Football after winning the award in 2006. “If a goalkeeper has saved 15 or so matches in a year, it’s only fair to highlight him.”

But the Italian’s observations have done little to change the pervasive bias of voters for the award, as strikers and midfielders on the European club and national team stage remain the yardstick for measuring global excellence.

That focus on European football points to another longstanding weakness of the Ballon d’Or: Its failure to adequately recognise outstanding players from elsewhere in the world.

For nearly four decades after the award was established, only European players were eligible to win it. This was a great injustice to exceptional footballers from other continents, even those competing in Europe’s leading leagues. The late Diego Maradona was perhaps the most notable victim of this exclusion.

The restriction was finally lifted in 1995, allowing players of any nationality at European clubs to compete for the prize. It took another 12 years, until 2007, for the award to be opened to players competing anywhere in the world.

It could be argued that when the award began, the club and national team game outside Europe was beyond the close observation and expert knowledge of the Ballon d’Or selectors. But that argument no longer holds water. Knowledge of the global game has grown exponentially, yet recognition of excellence beyond Europe’s leading competitions remains limited.

When Liberia’s George Weah became the first non-European player to win the Ballon d’Or in 1995, following outstanding performances for Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan, his victory was expected to open the door for exceptional players from parts of the footballing world that had long been denied recognition.

But 31 years on, the former president of Liberia remains the only person outside Europe and South America to have won it.

“When I started playing football, I never thought I would ever win the Ballon d’Or and emerge as the best player in the world. I just had a passion for the game and I worked hard. Every day. I would rather train than eat or sleep,” Weah told the writer in Monrovia.

“I am surprised that no other African player has won the award since I did so. I think there have been others that deserve to win. But it is down to those who select the winners.”

Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o, the former Barcelona and Inter striker, now president of his country’s football federation, is one person with a right to feel aggrieved that he didn’t win the award before retiring in 2019.

“It’s difficult to understand how Samuel Eto’o never won the Ballon d’Or with the impressive career he had,” Jose Mourinho, who managed Eto’o at Inter, said in a 2019 interview with Cameroon Radio.

“He played in three Champions League finals, winning two with Barcelona and scoring in both finals. He also won one Champions League at Inter and won many league titles. He was the best striker in the world for several years, and I think he deserved a Ballon d’Or, but these are things out of our control.”

Eto’o’s omission, like Weah’s continued status as the only African winner, raises questions about how the award’s selectors and voters assess the achievements of players from outside football’s traditional European and South American powerhouses.

The Ballon d’Or already has an international voting panel, with journalists from 100 countries selecting the winner from a shortlist of 30 players. But geographical representation among voters does not necessarily translate into recognition of the world’s footballing talent.

France Football, the award’s organisers, should ensure that the process of selecting nominees and winners draws on a genuinely global understanding of the game and gives due recognition to exceptional players, regardless of nationality or where they compete.

The award must also address its other shortcomings. Football is a team sport in which goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and strikers all contribute to success, and individual recognition should reflect that. Nor should the growing commercial appeal of the Ballon d’Or distract from the footballing achievements it was created to honour.

The Ballon d’Or should be a celebration of individual excellence across all positions and all continents, not an award dominated by football’s biggest stars and Europe’s leading competitions. Only then can it truly claim to recognise the best footballer in the world.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

For the majority of Israelis, the general election on October 27 is a choice between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the forces that oppose him, led by former general Gadi Eisenkot. But for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the population, the upcoming polls present a different dilemma.

As the political mainstream in Israel continues to shift to the far right, Palestinian citizens face growing threats to their political and collective rights. Palestinian communities in Israel experience increased violence, while settlers are encroaching on their boundaries. The recent push to expand policing and militarisation of civilian life is another source of growing anxiety within the Palestinian population.

In this context, the anti-Netanyahu bloc does not seem to offer the prospect of policy reversal or change. Therefore, the question on many Palestinian minds is whether voting in the Israeli elections can make any difference at all.

Recolonisation of 1948 Palestine

Since the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinians who managed to remain in their homes in what was declared as territory of the new State of Israel have had a different fate than the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. In 1952, they were granted Israeli citizenship, and in 1966, the martial law under which they were forced to live was lifted.

Although Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote and participate in politics, citizenship has not shielded them from the broader system of dispossession and attempts to reshape their Palestinian identity and national belonging.

Through land confiscation and the regulation of education and culture, the Israeli state has sought to detach Palestinians from their historical roots and collective past, promoting instead a model of the “Arab Israeli” as a citizen whose identity is separate from its Palestinian and Arab national context.

Formal citizenship has not secured substantive equality for Palestinians as they face discriminatory laws, systemic underfunding of basic services, and political and socioeconomic marginalisation.

Instead of engaging in direct violence towards Palestinian citizens – as it has done in the West Bank and Gaza – the Israeli state has instead “outsourced” brutality to criminal networks.

As a result, Palestinian communities have faced killings, shootings, bombings and arson while Israeli law enforcement has largely ignored the problem. More recently, this problem has escalated, as organised crime groups obtained advanced weapons reportedly stolen from Israeli army stockpiles or smuggled across borders. This growing militarisation of organised crime has claimed hundreds of lives.

In parallel, Israeli settlements next to Palestinian communities have expanded, accompanied by accelerated seizure of land. This process of “recolonisation” began in mixed cities, such as Jaffa and Lydd, where religious-nationalist settler groups started establishing themselves in Palestinian neighbourhoods in 2021.

Since October 2023, this process has accelerated. In August, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich unveiled his party’s plan to “Judaise” the Naqab and northern Israel. He proposes to add one million Jewish residents to the two regions, establishing 40 new settlements and dozens of farms, expanding existing settlements, and creating hundreds of thousands of new housing units.

The idea is to extend the model of territorial control from the occupied West Bank into the Naqab and northern Israel, where Palestinian communities are concentrated.

There are also indications that the policing of Palestinian towns and villages could increasingly fall under the National Guard, established under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The idea of creating the force was prompted by the May 2021 protests, known as the Dignity Uprising, which spread across Palestinian communities in Lydd, Haifa, Umm al-Fahm, and dozens of other towns and villages.

Ben-Gvir has advocated expanding the state’s capacity to suppress such unrest. Although the National Guard’s precise role and operational framework remain under development, its potential deployment against mass protests raises serious concerns about the right to protest and the protection of democratic freedoms.

The government has strengthened settler security squads and integrated them into a broader security framework, raising concerns about the growing role of armed civilian groups in enforcing control over Palestinian communities.

At the same time, Ben-Gvir has widened access to personal firearms, issuing 300,000 gun licences since taking office.

Together, these measures normalise civilian policing and deepen the militarisation of everyday life, reinforcing the unequal distribution of coercive power in a society structured on the dispossession and subordination of Palestinians.

The Palestinian response

Parties seeking to represent Palestinian citizens of Israel, such as the United Arab List (Ra’am), led by Mansour Abbas, have long argued that parliamentary participation and support for the anti-Netanyahu camp can help remove the far right from power and halt its settler-colonial agenda. But the party’s own track record proves this premise wrong.

Ra’am joined the coalition government formed after the elections in 2021, which excluded Netanyahu, but it failed to bring about fundamental changes in the conditions of Palestinian citizens. The coalition was fragile and often rocked by deep ideological contradictions.

In 2022, Mazen Ghnaim, a member of Ra’am, publicly acknowledged that he could not push through policies that would benefit the Palestinian population, despite his party being part of the ruling coalition and despite promises being made that such policies would be accepted. He also lamented the heavy criticism he faced whenever he was visiting Palestinian communities.

Ra’am’s experience in that coalition illustrated the challenge of sustaining Palestinian political participation in a government whose other constituent parties uphold exclusionary nationalist policies.

The problem, therefore, extends beyond Netanyahu himself: Palestinian support for the anti-Netanyahu camp cannot translate into meaningful policies that challenge the broader structures of discrimination and dispossession Palestinian citizens of Israel face.

Voting may offer a way to slow down this project, but it cannot reverse the deeper transformation taking place within Israeli society. The cultural shift towards fascism extends beyond the government and its political leadership, becoming increasingly embedded in social attitudes and everyday life.

That said, I believe another four years of far-right rule would pose an immediate threat to Palestinian communities and their rights. Therefore, I will vote in Tuesday’s election.

But Palestinians need to recognise that electoral participation must be accompanied by a more radical political response capable of confronting the structures and ideologies driving this transformation. This requires, among other things, reforming the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel and rooting it more firmly in Palestinian society through popular committees and grassroots organising.

It also demands a broader commitment to democratisation and de-Zionisation across historic Palestine, as part of a larger political project aimed at building a different future through alternative institutions, mechanisms, and forms of collective action.

Whatever the Israeli state might claim, the fate of the Palestinian citizens of Israel is tied to the fate of the rest of the Palestinian population. That is a realisation that Palestinian political leaders must finally embrace.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Eastern Libya spent nearly seven years denouncing the maritime memorandum Turkiye struck with its rivals based in Tripoli. Last week, it needed a single sitting of the legislature to embrace it.

On October 20, the House of Representatives (HoR) in Benghazi ratified the deal. The European Union condemned the vote, as did Greece, Israel and Egypt.

Yet the ratification was less a Turkish triumph than the final act of a sequence choreographed by Saddam Haftar, the son of Khalifa Haftar, the military commander who controls eastern Libya. The ultimate goal is the Libyan presidency.

The United States is currently trying to broker a power-sharing arrangement between Tripoli and Benghazi. Championed by Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, the deal could install Saddam as Libya’s president.

For that to happen, however, he needs the backing of Ankara, whose sway over western Libya gives it a decisive voice in any such settlement. The ratification of the maritime deal, therefore, is meant to secure Turkiye’s blessing.

The opening move in Saddam’s pursuit of the presidency was a palace coup: a fortnight before the vote, the HoR unseated its speaker, Aguila Saleh, who had spent 12 years in this position. It thus removed both Cairo’s principal ally in the east and the most stubborn obstacle to the memorandum’s ratification.

Yet Saleh’s ouster was never only about Egypt, and the same stone felled a second bird. As speaker and nominal supreme commander, he embodied the de jure authority from which Khalifa’s own command flows, and with a weighty tribal constituency among the Obeidat tribe, he was one of the few men capable of complicating, or even arbitrating, any transfer of power. Removing him cleared Saddam’s path to a handover already quietly under way, which the elder Haftar’s advanced age could hasten at any moment.

Saleh’s successor, Al-Salhin Abdulnabi, a fellow Obeidi, who chaired the HoR’s Libyan-Turkish friendship committee, is able to defuse the risk of tribal backlash while signalling where the chamber now takes its cues.

Whether the gambit pays off will be decided in Washington. Saddam is counting on the Trump administration’s appetite for a Libyan deal, sharpened by Turkish and Emirati lobbying and by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rapport with Trump.

He hopes it can prevail over the objections of Athens and Nicosia and the displeasure of Israel, which is uneasy about Ankara’s reach. This is directly pitting Trump’s transactional instinct against a longstanding US partnership with the Greek-Cypriot-Israeli axis.

The broadside against Israel may even pay a domestic dividend, allowing Saddam to pose as standing up to Israel while dispelling perceptions of a covert channel to it.

Europe, meanwhile, has sidelined itself into near-irrelevance: when Benghazi expelled the EU’s migration commissioner and three member-state ministers on arrival in July 2025, European capitals responded with something closer to grovelling than resolve.

Less than a year later, Athens was hosting Saddam, who duly sidestepped any commitment on an alternative maritime memorandum.

That deference flows from the EU’s navel-gazing fixation on migration that has reduced its Libya policy to counting the boats leaving Libya’s eastern coast for Crete. A Union that implores Saddam to police the very waters now in dispute is in no position to make him pay for redrawing them.

Abu Dhabi, for its part, has every reason to look the other way because it wants Saddam to succeed. None of Khalifa’s sons has been more faithful to the Emiratis, and seeing their most loyal client installed at the apex of the Libyan state would cap a decade of investment in the Haftar project. Whatever their past flirtation with Greece and Cyprus, a maritime line drawn in Ankara’s favour is a modest price for that outcome, though the closeness of that embrace may yet constrain him.

Egypt remains the real question mark: Cairo’s statement objected chiefly to the memorandum’s encroachment on Egypt’s exclusive economic zone and was framed almost entirely in legal terms, a sign perhaps that it is keeping its political options open.

Its relationship with Ankara has been transformed, with the two now aligned on Sudan and the Red Sea. A shared wariness of Israel’s expansionist ambitions has only drawn them closer.

Offering commercial deals could go some way towards softening Egyptian opposition. But Cairo could also lean on its rapport with Ankara to champion an alternative Haftar heir. It would not have to look far for a candidate: Saddam’s brother Khaled, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces’ chief of staff, is considerably closer to Cairo and publicly criticised the US initiative in April.

Should that happen, Saddam would have little left to bargain with, having cashed in his most valuable chip with the Turks, and the strongest card he still holds is one Abu Dhabi would never let him play.

Cutting off support for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces would win favour in Ankara and Cairo alike, both backers of the Sudanese army, but that would jeopardise the one relationship he cannot afford to lose.

Squeezed between a patron in Abu Dhabi he dare not cross and a partner in Ankara that has already pocketed its reward, Saddam is betting that he can keep both on side long enough for Washington to see the deal through. That he is prepared to run such risks may say as much about desperation as acumen, for the alternative to an institutionalised succession is one contested, perhaps violently, by his siblings or by the constituencies left out of the new order.

History, in Libya, has a mordant sense of humour. The maritime memorandum was the price Tripoli paid for the Turkish intervention that helped halt Khalifa Haftar’s offensive at the gates of the capital and sent his forces and mercenaries into headlong retreat in 2020. Where the father tried and failed to storm Tripoli, the son now hopes to be ushered in on a red carpet woven from the very document that sealed his father’s defeat.

Should he succeed, the instrument of the Haftars’ most humiliating setback will have become the cornerstone of their dynasty. Should Washington baulk, it may instead become the epitaph of the son’s ambitions.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

At 80, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pulled off an extraordinary political victory. After losing the first round to Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, by 47 percent to 45 percent, Lula defied the odds to secure a stunning second-round victory, with 51.8 percent of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent.

His triumph confounded every pre-election poll and crowned a dramatic campaign revival that few had anticipated.

Lula’s victory in Latin America’s largest country does more than halt the far right’s return to power in Brazil. It breaks a succession of right-wing electoral victories across the region and deals a major blow to United States President Donald Trump’s increasingly interventionist agenda in the Western Hemisphere.

When Bolsonaro unexpectedly defeated Lula in the first round, the result sent shockwaves across Brazil and beyond. For the government, the defeat was particularly startling given its strong socioeconomic record. What followed was an extraordinary three-week political mobilisation that transformed the sluggish first-round campaign of Lula’s Workers’ Party into an existential confrontation over the future of democracy and sovereignty in Brazil.

The economic record was hardly that of a government heading for defeat. Brazil’s economy grew by a cumulative 9.2 percent between 2023 and 2025, compared with an average of just 5.6 percent among its South American neighbours. Unemployment fell from 9.3 percent in 2022 to a historic low of 5.4 percent in 2026.

Brazil also exited the United Nations Hunger Map in 2025, after having returned to it under the Bolsonaro senior administration. In the Amazon, deforestation fell to its lowest level in decades, a sharp reversal of the trend under his predecessor.

Not everything has been rosy under the Lula administration. Millions of Brazilians have remained trapped in credit-card debt, struggling with extremely high interest rates, while an explosion of online gambling has devastated the livelihoods of families. The run-off result sent a clear signal that there was social discontent.

Lula responded with unusually bold measures: a sweeping debt-relief initiative and restrictions on online betting, as well as expanded social benefits, fuel subsidies, and the transition from a six-day to a five-day working week. These policies sought to reconnect the government’s macroeconomic achievements with the everyday economic anxieties of Brazilian voters.

Bolsonaro offered a radically different vision for Brazil: sweeping spending cuts, privatisations, lower taxes and, above all, an iron-fisted response to crime and insecurity. His proposals included building five maximum-security prisons modelled on El Salvador’s notorious penitentiary system and authorising lethal force against heavily armed criminals.

Bolsonaro also pledged to pardon his father, sentenced to 27 years for plotting to overturn the 2022 election, and to grant clemency to those convicted over the January 8, 2023 assault on Brazil’s democratic institutions. For his supporters, this represented an opportunity to reverse what they considered judicial persecution. For his opponents, it threatened to rehabilitate the attempted coup and undermine judicial independence.

Lula’s campaign came back re-energised, with many young Brazilians mobilising at the grassroots level. The campaign was able to overcome even algorithmic bias by social media giants like Meta, which favoured Bolsonaro.

Ultimately, the election became a battle not only over Brazil’s democracy but also its sovereignty. Trump’s administration has intervened conspicuously in Brazilian politics throughout Lula’s term, imposing punitive tariffs, sanctioning a Supreme Court justice involved in Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution and openly embracing his son’s candidacy.

In May, Trump received Flavio Bolsonaro in the Oval Office. Two days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Brazil’s two largest crime organisations as foreign terrorist organisations, a measure Flavio had publicly requested.

These designations carry implications extending far beyond electoral politics. They potentially open the door to US military operations on Brazilian territory under Washington’s expanding war on so-called “narcoterrorism”. The world saw how one such foreign terrorist designation enabled the US to intervene militarily in Venezuela and abduct its sitting president.

Whereas Trump seeks to draw Latin America’s largest country into Washington’s expanding system of hemispheric military dominance, Lula has defended Brazil’s strategic autonomy, insisting that cooperation against organised crime must respect national sovereignty.

He framed the election as a choice between a sovereign Brazil charting its own course and one subordinated to Washington’s geopolitical agenda. Sunday’s election result shows that the Brazilian people have made their choice.

Importantly, Lula’s victory may mark a turning point in Latin America’s rightward shift. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the right has scored a string of electoral victories in Honduras, Chile, and Bolivia, among others. But Lula’s re-election suggests that its momentum may be faltering.

The result comes just ahead of the US midterms and could deliver a significant setback to the strength of Trump’s leadership in the Americas. In Argentina, President Javier Milei — who regularly attacks Lula and threw all his weight behind Bolsonaro — has been sliding in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. In Chile, President Jose Antonio Kast has suffered an even more precipitous collapse in public support.

Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, for her part, has likely breathed a sigh of relief. A Lula defeat would have left her increasingly isolated in a region gravitating towards Mexico’s northern neighbour. Instead, Latin America’s two most populous countries and largest economies will remain firmly on the left for the foreseeable future.

It is too early to declare the region’s rightward turn over. But Lula’s victory raises the possibility that the wave has already crested. Brazil will not be joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas, and while the “Donroe Doctrine” remains a threat, its moment of greatest ascendancy may already be behind it.

Lula’s victory is a vindication of a lifetime spent fighting for society’s most marginalised and disenfranchised. And its significance extends far beyond Brazil’s borders. For defenders of democracy, multilateralism, international law, environmental protection and the sovereignty of the Global South, it sends a powerful message: the far right’s advance is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Not in Brazil. Not anywhere.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Images from the violent unrest in France have travelled around the world. Smashed shop windows, destroyed property, acts of looting and raging fires have rightly caused outrage and condemnation.

There is no single explanation of the motives of the perpetrators. There are certainly opportunistic “criminal elements” who take advantage of such situations. But there is also a lot of public anger that has boiled over after it had simmered for years as living conditions have deteriorated and demands for changes have been left unanswered.

The French government has taken full advantage of these violent acts, using them to justify the overly securitised response to the protests and to avoid public scrutiny for the failure to address its own failures. The images of chaos allow those in power to pose as the defenders of a public order they have actively helped undermine.

These acts of violence, however, cannot delegitimise the reasons behind the mass mobilisation of students across France. They also must not distract from the brutal police violence that has unfolded.

Fourteen-year-old Eden suffered a fractured jaw and had teeth knocked out by a tear gas grenade fired from a police launcher. Sixteen-year-old Mael lost the sight in one eye after a suspected hit from a police rubber bullet. Fifteen-year-old Evan had a hand blown off by a police stun grenade.

By October 14, 7,950 people had been placed in police custody since the protests began in September, 85 percent of them minors. A further 2,700 were taken into custody following the October 17 protests. Yesterday, police made another 1,000 arrests.

The staggering scale of detention and the mobilisation of tens of thousands of police officers make this one of the most heavily repressed protest movements of this century.

But there is also the quieter violence of social deprivation that the students are protesting and that has largely been ignored in the public narrative.

Across France, the sense of growing impoverishment deepens year after year. Poverty rates are the highest they have been since the 1990s, with 9.8 million people living under the official poverty line. Meanwhile, 53 French billionaires own as much wealth as nearly half of the French population, according to Oxfam.

Deteriorating socioeconomic conditions have hit the French educational system hard.

In Acoua, on the island of Mayotte, the Cite du Nord secondary school was blockaded as early as August 31. Long before protests in the Paris region attracted attention, parents and staff came out in protest to demand better learning and teaching conditions.

Built for 900 pupils, this school accommodates 2,300 in cramped, poorly ventilated classrooms. Alongside staff shortages, the school also struggles with water supply failures and unsanitary conditions in toilets.

In Sevran, a suburb of Paris, pupils and teachers at Blaise-Cendrars secondary school have complained since 2024 about water leaks, mould, unusable toilets, and shortages of tables and chairs.

At Marcelin-Berthelot secondary school in Pantin, another Parisian suburb, windows no longer open at a time when heatwaves can bring temperatures as high as 40C.

At Politzer secondary school in Bagnolet, also a Parisian suburb, staff, pupils and parents learnt in late September that the water was unsafe to drink, although it had been tested in June.

These are just a few examples of a countrywide trend of an educational infrastructure that is fast deteriorating, especially in impoverished areas.

This is compounded by the erosion of the level of education pupils actually receive. According to the education ministry’s own figures, 20.2 million teaching hours were not delivered in state secondary schools in 2024–25, excluding Mayotte: almost one in 10 scheduled hours. Of these, 15 million were lost because absent teachers were not replaced.

According to French economist Lucas Chancel, since 2017, when Emmanuel Macron came to power, government spending per student has declined by 20 percent.

This is the structural violence French students are asking those in power to end. Instead of listening, the government has responded with repressive tactics and narrative spin.

In his address to the public, Macron said he understood the students, but he did not express support for them the way he did for police officers. A meeting with 20 students on Friday resulted in a promise to reform the university entrance platform – not to address the students’ key demands.

Macron has doubled down on the security “solution”, deploying 70,000 police officers and pledging to ban protests. He has accused the “far left” of seeking to “bring down the republic”.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has called on the left to “choose a side”: the Republic equated with the police, or the rioters and their “violent agenda”. As if taking part in a protest amounted to an attack on the state.

Unsurprisingly, the far right is revelling in the chaos that appears to be engulfing the country, obscuring these needs by focusing on the presumed origins of people filmed committing acts of violence. Some far-right politicians have denounced the “hordes of thugs of foreign origin”, others have called for broader powers to strip people of their citizenship.

This rhetoric serves Macron’s political camp well as it allows it to present itself once again as the last defence against the far right, asking the general population to rally behind out of fear rather than because of its governance record. Voters are offered an increasingly bleak choice between those who have fuelled their anger and those seeking to turn it into racial hatred.

At this point, it is clear the government does not seem interested in genuinely addressing the demands of the students is in the cards. Doing so would mean confronting the priorities of Macron’s presidency: protecting the wealth of the few and abandoning the many.

Instead, the government will wait for the movement to exhaust itself, be weakened by fear or be discredited by unrest, until it dies out on its own.

This strategy, however, is a failed one. Even if this protest movement fizzles out, a new one will soon replace it. The French people cannot be scared into complacency forever while their living conditions continue to deteriorate.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.