Qiulae Wong may have failed to win her electorate seat in New Zealand’s general election on Saturday. Still, the Fiji-born political newcomer has achieved something that three previous leaders of her party could not — and she’s getting into Parliament anyway.

She has taken the Opportunity Party across the five percent threshold needed to enter Parliament.

With 5.96 percent of the preliminary party vote, the party is projected to secure seven seats, including one for Wong through the party list.

• READ MORE: A knife-edge result, three possible outcomes – what comes next after NZ’s election?
• Qiulae Wong says she will pick up the phone if Luxon doesn’t
• NZ’s next government hangs in the balance: 2026 election results at a glance
• Other NZ election reports

But behind the 38-year-old mother of two is a remarkable family story with deep roots in Fiji, particularly Lautoka.

Qiulae is the granddaughter of the late Eddie Yan Kong Wong, a successful businessman, former mayor of Lautoka and Fiji’s first senator of Chinese descent.

Her grandparents, Eddie and Sennung Wong, migrated from China and established a new life in Fiji.

Eddie became one of Lautoka’s prominent businessmen through Eddie Hin Limited, which operated in food distribution, supermarkets and soft-drink manufacturing.

He was also very involved in community affairs and served as Lautoka’s first Chinese mayor in 1967 and 1968.

First Chinese senator
Following Fiji’s independence in 1970, he became the country’s first senator of Chinese descent.

His public service extended to the boards of the Fiji Electricity Authority, Civil Aviation Authority and Tilak High School.

Interestingly, Eddie’s business legacy continues in New Zealand.

His grandchildren, Qiuchee and Qiujing Wong, revived the name Lūkbo for their Auckland-based food distribution company.

Meaning “six treasures”, Lūkbo was originally the name Eddie chose for a range of soft drinks manufactured in Fiji before his company began producing RC Cola and later Pepsi Cola.

The grandchildren say they revived the name to honour their grandfather and continue the family’s business tradition.

Qiulae’s father, Jilyin Wong, moved from Fiji to Auckland for his secondary and university education, where he met Margaret Malcolm, a Pākehā New Zealander.

Moved to Fiji
The couple subsequently moved to Fiji, where Qiulae was born in 1988, before relocating to New Zealand when she was just six months old.

Margaret also has a background in public affairs, served as a senior adviser to former National Party minister Judith Collins and was chief executive of the Auckland District Law Society.

Qiulae grew up in Auckland, the youngest of three children, in a household shaped by both Chinese and New Zealand cultures.

Politics was not her initial career choice.

After studying law and politics, she worked in sustainable fashion in London before returning to New Zealand and joining international consultancy firm KPMG.

Her political journey began almost unexpectedly in 2025 when she responded to an advertisement seeking a new leader for the Opportunity Party.

Despite having no parliamentary political experience, she applied and eventually secured the position.

Economic reform, housing
She subsequently led a campaign focused on economic reform, housing affordability and environmental sustainability.

Her rapid rise has come with personal challenges, including balancing political commitments with raising two young daughters, Malia and Cleo, with her husband, Grant Anthony.

She has also spoken about experiencing racism and personal attacks during the campaign.

But Wong’s sense of family history remains strong.

In 2013, she travelled to China with relatives to visit the villages her grandparents had left decades earlier, describing the experience as a pilgrimage.

Now, her family’s journey has reached another milestone, with Qiulae Wong poised to enter New Zealand’s Parliament as the leader of a party that has finally broken through under her leadership.

The official election results, including special votes, are due on November 27.

For the Wong family, however, the story stretches much further back — from China to Lautoka, and now to New Zealand’s Parliament. It is a story of migration, enterprise, public service and opportunities embraced across generations.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of The Fiji Times, Fiji Daily Post, Islands Business, Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.

“New Zealand has spoken,” Labour leader Chris Hipkins said to the party faithful on election night, before adding: “It may take us a little bit longer to figure out exactly what it is that you’ve said.”

There hasn’t been an MMP election quite (or even anything) like the one that played out tonight. With the ordinary vote largely counted, the incumbent coalition parties — National, ACT and New Zealand First — hold 67 seats to the left bloc’s 56, with the centrist Opportunity party getting over the parliamentary line for the first time with 7 seats.

The numbers are likely to shift again with the counting of special votes, which tallied nearly 600,000 in the last election.

• READ MORE: NZ’s next government hangs in the balance: 2026 election results at a glance
• Right bloc takes lead in NZ election, but senior National MPs ousted
• Other NZ election reports

But the big story of the night is the size of the overhang: New Zealand’s parliaments generally have 120 MPs, but it looks as if there will be 129 or 130 MPs in the next one. If so, the right bloc will hold a 1 or 2 seat majority.

It promises to be a long three weeks before final results are announced.

There is no way of predicting where the numbers will land, but on the basis of the election night’s provisional results, there are (at least) three possible scenarios.

Scenario 1: the right has a working majority
In this scenario, National returns to office at the head of a second-term coalition government. However, it is not quite the same government that was formed following the 2023 election. The same parties will gather around the cabinet table, but both the personalities and the balance of power will have changed markedly.

Most obviously, the parliamentary overhang created by National’s strong performance in the electorates — it looks to have held onto 41 of the 44 electorate seats it took at the last parliament — means Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s party has been shorn of its most senior and experienced ministers, including Nicola Willis, Paul Goldsmith and (in all probability) Chris Bishop.

As a consequence, when the prime minister sits down at the first cabinet meeting of the returning government, he will be accompanied by fewer and less experienced National Party colleagues.

He will also, of course, see more of the numpties and yahoos he derided not so many months ago.

If cabinet positions are shared proportionally based on election results — and Winston Peters and David Seymour are well placed to ensure that they are — then National’s share of all cabinet positions is going to fall below the proportion it held (67 percent) in the coalition’s first term.

Scenario 2: the coalition needs Opportunity
See above – only more complicated. Under this scenario, the coalition falls just short of a majority and needs the Opportunity Party’s (TOP) support to govern. Whatever their positions before the election, David Seymour and Winston Peters will entertain doing a deal with Opportunity.

The real question is whether or not Luxon will prove equally flexible. In all likelihood he will: even though he spent the entire campaign saying that he would not answer a call from Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong.

If he sticks with that position, and the alternative is a return to the opposition benches, Luxon will likely be replaced as party leader (and therefore prime minister) in short order by someone who is prepared to have the difficult conversation.

But Opportunity’s situation is not straightforward either in this scenario. There are real risks for Wong’s party if it opts to support a National-led government — and any preliminary decision to do so may, of course, be vetoed by the party’s board.

Her party’s supporters would prefer a centre-left administration and, if the party props up a government which takes the country out of the Paris Agreement, erases the Treaty of Waitangi and does away with the minimum wage, the odds that Opportunity will continue to exist as a parliamentary force in three years time will shorten considerably.

On the other hand, the party could position itself as the one that prevents the coalition from indulging its worst instincts. Opportunity will likely support the government on confidence and supply from the cross-benches — but it will have a veto over other legislation, which it could use to prevent the government from drifting too far to the right.

Scenario 3: the left plus Opportunity have the numbers
In this scenario, Chris Hipkins becomes the first prime minister to return to the top job following a spell as opposition leader since Keith Holyoake, who became leader of the National Party and prime minister two months before the 1957 election, and returned to power in 1960.

But quite what configuration of government emerges among the parties on the centre-left depends on other factors. Te Pāti Māori — which on last night’s results has five seats, creating a parliamentary overhang of their own in the process — has a choice to make. It can negotiate seats at the cabinet table, or support a Labour-led government on confidence and supply from the cross-benches.

For a kaupapa Māori party, the former comes with risks. The party may, therefore, opt for an enhanced confidence and supply agreement. This would leave the party room to push harder on Treaty-related matters than they could do from within a formal coalition.

Opportunity has a similar choice to make. The smart money is on the party also opting for an arrangement on confidence and supply, rather than a formal executive coalition. It seems prudent for the party’s new MPs to give themselves time to learn the rules of the parliamentary game before entertaining thoughts of ministerial office.

Are we there yet?
Whichever of these — or some other — scenario comes to pass will depend on special votes. This year, special votes — which typically break left — include an unusually large number of overseas votes.

Although the impact of specials on the party vote is generally the focus, the size of National’s overhang means that this time round, it will be their impact on seats that National held or took narrowly on the night that will count. If Labour or the Greens flip two or three seats, that could make all the difference.

Even then, there may be some final plot twists. Electorate candidates have three working days following the announcement of final results within which to lodge a request with the District Court for a recount (and the judge has a further three working days within which to commence the recount). In short, this could take some time.

Meanwhile, the political clock is ticking. Constitutionally, the next Parliament must meet no later than six weeks following the return of the writs. That means MPs must gather in Wellington by January 14 at the latest.

There is no formal constitutional requirement for a government to have been formed by that date, but the political imperatives to have done so are significant. The politicians are going to need to work fast.

Dr Richard Shaw is professor of politics at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article here.

With more than 90 percent of the vote counted in the New Zealand general election, the final result was still up in the air last night, but the lead governing coalition party National has been left bruised, losing some of its most senior and experienced MPs.

On current results the right bloc — National, ACT and New Zealand First — have the most seats and would be in a position to form a government.

However, National’s leadership would look very different with the loss of senior list-only National MPs such as outgoing Finance Minister Nicola Willis, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith and Speaker Gerry Brownlee.

• READ MORE: RNZ News live election blog
• Other NZ election reports

Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop has conceded defeat in Hutt South and also misses out on a return to Parliament.

National’s current coalition partners, ACT and New Zealand First both picked up support while the Greens had their strongest parliamentary showing in its history.

It is the third biggest party with 13.3 percent.

A new party, Opportunity, also had a strong showing — and is sitting on six percent.

Locked in tight battle
In terms of the party vote, National and Labour remain locked in a tight battle with only about 300 votes between them.

National was on 29.3 percent and Labour 29.2 percent.

Many of the results will hang on the estimated 700,000 special votes which are still to be counted.

Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins arrived at the Upper Hutt Cossie Club in his electorate to chants of “Chippy! Chippy! Chippy!” — his popular moniker.

“Tonight New Zealand has spoken. It may take us a little bit longer to figure out what exactly it is that you’ve said,” he joked.

“Every vote matters and every vote must now be counted.”

He thanked those who had put their trust in the Labour Party and given them their votes this campaign.

“As things stand tonight it’s clear that we’re not going to know the exact shape of our next government for a little while longer yet.

“But there are some things that are clear from tonight results; our next Parliament is going to require all of us to compromise, to work together and to find common ground.”

He said the people had spoken and it was now politicians’ responsibility to make things work.

‘Things on knife edge’
With the coalition looking like retaining a majority thanks to National’s four-seat overhang on current numbers, Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said it was still too early to call.

“Things are on a knife’s edge,” she said.

“I think that anybody who’s watching the results live right now and refreshing their browser will know that that is chopping and changing with every other minutes that passes,” she told reporters at the Greens HQ in Auckland.

“Right now, anybody who is trying to declare the tea leaves is kind of getting a bit too ahead of themselves.”

The vote count after reaching 90 percent:

National – 29.3 percent
Labour – 29.1 percent
Greens – 13.3 percent
ACT – 11 percent
NZ First – 9.8 percent
Opportunity – 5.9 percent
Te Pāti Māori – 0.6 percent

This story was first published on

The Free Palestine Party has criticised the NZ Electoral Commission for failing to take any action against what it says has been an NZME ban on key campaign messages from the party.

NZME reportedly refused to broadcast any of the Free Palestine Party’s advertisements on its ZB radio network.

NZME also refused to carry any campaign material with the wording “From the River to the Sea” in reference to expelled Palestinians’ right to return to their homeland.

• READ MORE:  A knife-edge result, three possible outcomes – what comes next after NZ’s election?
• Other NZ elections reports

In a statement, Free Palestine Party president Paul Hopkinson said the party had been established for the 2026 election, “not to get votes, but instead to have people vote for the political party with the best policies in support of Palestinian rights”.

“We aimed to raise public awareness of the most fundamental rights of Palestinians and how the current government was ignoring these rights and the news media never reported on them,” he said.

“That’s why we called ourselves, ‘The Free Palestine from the River to the Sea Party.”

Hopkinson said UN Resolution 194 had been passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, which demanded Israel to allow the 750,000 Palestinians it had just expelled from their homes in Palestine to return.

Right of Return vital
“That Right of Return applies to all of the Mandate Palestine, from the River to the Sea. But NZME, and by extension the Electoral Commission when we appealed to them, wouldn’t allow us to use that expression,” Hopkinson said.

“We are only allowed to describe Palestinians’ rights within the accepted and highly restricted self-serving framework of the Zionist-Front NZ Jewish Council.”

“We are not permitted to describe a right of return which every government of New Zealand has voted to endorse in the United Nations every year since 1948.”

“And this is just because some sympathisers of genocidal Israel, use a ‘hecklers’ veto’ on NZME and the Electoral Commission, when they claim they are ‘upset’ to hear a geographically correct description of Palestine”.

The American public’s outrage over Gaza just decided this week’s US midterms.

Democrats have now won control of both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate, taking them from a belligerently defensive Republican Party that not only did the bidding of Israel and its allies in America’s foreign policy commentariat, but went out of its way to smear and shame those who opposed that deeply unpopular choice.

To take as a sample the nation’s most hotly contested and watched election, what we saw in Michigan was the defeat of a candidate who disregarded that public outrage by a candidate who sympathised with and substantially addressed it.

• READ MORE: ‘This is catastrophic’ – Gaza hit hard by UN food cuts and lack of humanitarian aid
• PSNA ‘outraged’ over NZ suspension of UNRWA aid, calls for immediate restored funding
• Caitlin Johnstone: Israel claims it had nothing to do with Trump’s decision to attack Iran . . . and other notes
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed beat out Republican Mike Rogers there. And this was a victory that really showed just how committed voters now are to ridding themselves of the influence of apologists for the tragedy of Gaza.

Before the US Senate vote in Michigan, El-Sayed was targeted for defeat with a record-breaking amount of political spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group that has made it its business to play surrogate to the regime of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even as his government’s violent campaigns in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and the West Bank draw mounting international condemnation.

In fact, not only did AIPAC and its affiliates spend nearly $30 million to defeat El-Sayed in the Democratic primary by backing self-proclaimed “Zionist Democrat” Haley Stevens — their largest-ever investment in a single race — but AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC, an organisation in the US allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money for political advertising, continued spending against El-Sayed after the primary, benefitting Rogers.

And finally Stevens, explicitly citing El-Sayed’s campaign messaging against Israel’s military actions and US taxpayer funding for it, baffled her own party by endorsing his Republican rival just days before the election.

Acknowledged by Vance
Vice-President JD Vance himself acknowledged the morning after the elections that the same coalition that voted President Donald Trump and himself into office in 2024 had just decided the results of 2026.

Citing his own best advisers, Vance said voters were motivated by four priorities:

1. ending the war on Iran;
2. the rising cost of living/inflation;
3. putting America First; and
4. changing the US relationship to Israel

“Our voters showed up,” the Vice-President said. “And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats.”

And Vance is hardly going out on a limb with that analysis. Donald Trump Jr, the president’s own son, publicly endorsed Vance’s admission of the GOP’s failures. Hours later, President Trump himself called Vance’s analysis “good” although he stood by the disastrous war nonetheless.

That’s because it is impossible to obscure or erase the impression the whole drama of this year’s elections leaves us with. The impression of a hostile faction embedded in our political class whose commitment to Israel-right-or-wrong is directly, undemocratically and contemptuously opposed to the growing consensus of the American people.

It is also impossible to miss, however, that the American people this year showed themselves willing and able to oust that faction. And it is impossible to miss why. To paraphrase the immortal maxim of Democratic political strategist James Carville: “It’s Gaza, stupid.”

The Gaza genocide scandal
As I’ve argued repeatedly over the past few years, the scandal of the Gaza genocide itself has profoundly reshaped Americans’ attitudes towards foreign policy, war and military aid — particularly when it comes to the Netanyahu regime.

Over the past year, Trump and other politicians have compounded that genocide with the disastrous Iran war and Israel’s new military campaigns in Lebanon — all while an increasingly antiwar America watches with growing outrage as its political leaders use our tax dollars for violence.

The coalition that elected Trump in 2024 was built around a rejection of what he called “forever wars” and “stupid wars”. On the campaign trail, he even spoke explicitly about ending the violence in Gaza.

As I wrote at the time, when a voter in Dearborn, Michigan, asked him about the Gaza genocide, Trump replied: “It’s gotta stop. What we want is peace.” So there is no denying that the initiation of the US-Israeli war against Iran this year was a betrayal and a reversal of the will of those who voted this administration into office.

Democrats had already received this warning in 2024. The Jerusalem Post reported in February that Democratic National Committee officials had acknowledged that the Gaza policy of President Joe Biden’s administration was a “net negative” in that election. The party’s defeat should have warned Republicans against treating public outrage over Gaza as politically irrelevant.

It is also no secret that this war would likely not have happened were it not for Israeli operatives (including Netanyahu himself) and neoconservative figures like Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin pressing for it.

Poll after poll has shown growing American disapproval of Israeli military actions. A valuable election night poll also showed a stunning 62 percent of voters explicitly calling the joint US-Israeli initiation of a war with Iran “wrong” while 74 percent identified the war as a crucial or major factor in their votes.

Concerned about ‘affordability’
But more broadly, the polls have shown clearly all this year that the American public is concerned about affordability. What showed less clearly was that, in the public mind, “affordability” concerns were always synonymous with the war and the war synonymous with the influence of Israel and Israel synonymous with the Gaza genocide — that is, with a warlike military policy that is as thoughtless of its cost to the American taxpayer as it is of the sanctity of innocent Palestinian lives.

And all this is to say nothing of the final scandal that, in a way, hits particularly close to home for American Christians: the Israeli terrorist campaign to ethnically cleanse the West Bank — including by attacking the ancient Christian communities who have lived there since the first century.

One can imagine how central that drama will be to the next major American election season. November is not far from December, after all, and asking Americans in 2028 to approach Christmas with few (or no) Christians left to celebrate it in Bethlehem thanks to Israel-backed settler terrorism against our coreligionists in the Holy Land would spell the end of whatever remains of the GOP after Tuesday’s midterms.

The effect of the Gaza genocide and its hideous, snowballing effects on American public life are unmistakable to those with eyes to see, even if invisible to the few pollsters and prognosticators who have somehow managed to remain too out of touch with common sentiments to rightly quantify them.

But that leads to a final consideration that leaders in both parties must now keep in mind: It is the coalition that Trump rallied in record numbers two years ago that won last night.

Not a political party and not a small, elite group in a strategy meeting who now might go on to manage and fine-tune that coalition as if it were their own man-made invention.

GK Chesterton once observed that the American way of life is not based on the clumsy ambitions of a tribe, on ethnic identity or even on some fragile truce between such groupings. Rather, America is united by the creed expressed in our Declaration of Independence – a creed of belief in the dignity of every human person, based on a reverence for immortal nature and “Nature’s God”. In this way, Chesterton wrote, America is “a nation with the soul of a church”.

The outrage over Gaza is a phenomenon as real and as unwieldy as that soul. Democrats should take no comfort in imagining that this outrage belongs to their party. It belongs to Americans who want their leaders to stop financing the slaughter of innocent people.

If the politicians entrusted with power now refuse to listen, they too can be replaced. The demand remains what it was when Trump spoke in Dearborn: End the violence.

Jason Jones is an American human rights activist and author. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters — a veteran of 18 general elections — has called this long and sometimes fractious campaign “the worst of my career, easily”. But whether you agree with him or not, tomorrow night still promises exciting live entertainment.

Will Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and his three-party coalition be removed from office after just one term? Will they be replaced by a left-wing coalition led by Labour’s Chris Hipkins — the same man who lost to Luxon in 2023?

Will the Opportunity Party make it over the 5 percent threshold for seats in Parliament, potentially holding the balance of power?

• READ MORE: Election Policy Tracker: your guide to what the parties are promising during the 2026 election campaign
• Other NZ election reports

More technically, will the various campaigns to have voters split their two available votes (one for their electorate candidate, one for their preferred party) have a bearing on the result?

Normally in New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) system, the election numbers that really count are the party-vote percentages. This time, however, individual electorates will matter more than usual.

With polls promising a very tight race, here are some numbers and possible scenarios to track on the night.

Overhangs on the left or right
A parliamentary overhang happens when a party wins more local electorate seats than it would have been awarded in proportion with its percentage of the party vote.

The overhang seats are added (above Parliament’s normal 120) to accommodate those extra winners of single-member districts. Overhangs of one to three seats have occurred before.

But this election campaign has seen organised efforts on both the left and right to deliberately use the overhang rule to increase the number of seats their respective sides can win.

Te Pāti Māori is ignoring the party vote entirely and asking supporters to deliver wins in the Māori electorates but give their party vote to Labour or the Greens (which would increase the overall party vote on the left).

Winning three to five Māori electorates would greatly outweigh Te Pāti Māori’s party vote entitlement, which could go below 1 percent. The number of overhang seats produced on the left will be a major talking point on the night.

A counter-strategy on the right (not officially endorsed by the National Party) assumes National can win more electorates than its party vote (possibly below 30 percent) would warrant.

The campaign is asking right-wing voters to keep the left-wing parties out of office by party-voting ACT or New Zealand First, and giving electorate votes to the National candidates. By some calculations, if that works, it significantly increases the odds of a right-coalition victory.

Tactical voting and skewed results
It’s impossible to predict how many voters will heed the calls for tactical vote splitting. In the 2023 election, 35.51 percent of voters split their votes, compared to 27.33 percent in 2020. National voters were the least likely to do so.

Nonetheless, the overall impact of these opposing strategies to maximise the overhang could increase the size of the next Parliament and alter the balance of power.

On the night, watch the numbers of electorate seats won by National and Te Pāti Māori.

In 2023, National won 44 electorates and 38.1 percent of the party vote. Five MPs from the party list then made up its proportional share of seats. If National’s party vote falls to around 30% this time, we’d normally expect its number of electorate seats to fall, too — maybe below 30.

But if ACT and New Zealand First voters do split their votes, National could win more local electorate seats than the party vote would normally deliver overall.

If National wins 29 percent of the party vote, for example, that would normally entitle it to 35 seats. Predictions are hazardous, but National could conservatively win 39 or more electorates.

One peculiar outcome could be that Labour gets a higher party vote than National, but National wins more seats than Labour. That’s the kind of disproportionate outcome that brought the old first-past-the-post system into disrepute after the 1978 and 1981 elections.

Palestinian-Israelis are entitled to vote — sort of.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners apparently considered this an alarming development.

So alarming, in fact, that Netanyahu’s Likud party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party announced plans to deploy approximately 2000 far-right bozos into Palestinian communities to monitor polling stations.

• READ MORE: No clear winner in Israel election with nearly 90 percent of votes counted
• Why Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote, but can’t expect any change
• UN puts media giants on notice over Gaza as journalists’ death toll spirals
• Other Palestine reports

Not ordinary election officials. Not neutral observers. Far-right activists, with no formal electoral oversight function.

Some were carrying firearms.

לא ניתן שיהיו זיופים במגזר הערבי! כ-2,000 משקיפים יוצבו בקלפיות הערביות.

בשיתוף פעולה עם ראש הממשלה נתניהו והליכוד, אנחנו נערכים למהלך חסר תקדים למניעת זיופים בהצבעה ובספירת הקולות, על רקע זיופים במערכות הבחירות הקודמות.

בנוסף, הקמנו מטה משותף להעלאת אחוזי ההצבעה בימין באמצעות מעבר מדלת לדלת, טלפניה ושיחות עם מצביעים בקלפיות.

יש לנו חשש גדול ממפלגות שלא יעברו את אחוז החסימה ויביאו לעליית שלטון השמאל. אסור שזה יקרה. פשוט אסור.

הפעם לא מהמרים. מצביעים הציונות הדתית!

— בצלאל סמוטריץ’ (@bezalelsm) October 15, 2026

On October 1, Israeli police had issued a directive permitting licensed polling-station personnel and party representatives to bring their personal weapons inside polling stations.

The Palestinian civil rights organisation Adalah and the Joint List challenged this arrangement in Israel’s Supreme Court.

They warned that armed far-right “observers” could intimidate Palestinian voters and provoke violence.

On October 25, the court rejected their petition.

Apparently, a ballot box is no place to be underprepared for armed confrontation.

And that was before polling day.

The election-day obstruction
On October 27, reports emerged from Palestinian communities of voters encountering extraordinary difficulties exercising their democratic rights:

• In Tira, a Le Monde reporter documented long queues and an observer controlling entry to a polling station. A Palestinian lawyer accused a Likud observer of deliberately slowing the voting process.
• At Segev Shalom High School in the Naqab, Israeli police and National Guard personnel reportedly restricted access while approximately 200 people waited outside.
• The Association for Civil Rights in Israel urgently appealed to election authorities over significant and unexplained delays at polling stations in Arab communities.
• Adalah recorded complaints involving missing Arabic ballot papers, police checkpoints, interrupted voting and difficulties faced by elderly, disabled and veiled women voters.

Meanwhile, Haaretz reported that Likud had spent millions of shekels recruiting teams to film Palestinian voters outside polling stations, transmitting information to party headquarters.

A remarkable amount of money, manpower and police attention devoted to the supposedly straightforward business of allowing citizens to vote.

The ‘danger’ of Palestinians voting
Netanyahu was not particularly subtle about the political message.

Reuters reported that vehicles displaying Likud flags drove through Jerusalem broadcasting the Islamic call to prayer and warning that Arabs were voting.

Netanyahu himself circulated warnings about a high Palestinian turnout.

Consider what was being presented as an emergency.

Citizens. Standing in queues. Exercising their right to vote.

Palestinians were voting.

This was not a new tactic.

In 2015, Netanyahu warned that Arab voters were heading to polling stations in droves.

In 2019, Likud deployed concealed cameras at polling stations in Palestinian communities, provoking accusations of voter intimidation.

In 2026, the operation involved thousands of proposed partisan monitors, permission to carry firearms, surveillance teams and reported obstruction of voters.

The common feature is unmistakable: Palestinian political participation repeatedly becomes the object of suspicion, alarm and extraordinary scrutiny.

The democracy test
Palestinian citizens of Israel have the legal right to vote.

That right is not a favour granted by Netanyahu. Nor is its exercise an act of aggression against Jewish citizens.

A democratic franchise means very little if a minority population must exercise it under the scrutiny of hostile partisan activists, with the possibility of firearms at the polling station and police obstructing access.

So much for “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

These sorts of antics would make a banana republic despot salivate.

• The Israeli Central Elections Committee said on Wednesday that it had counted more than five million votes as of 9pm local time (19:00 GMT). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc was on course to win 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, while the opposition bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot wass expected to secure 48 seats. Projections from Tuesday’s voting also showed that the Arab parties — the Joint List and Ra’am — could hold a record combined 19 seats.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

For the majority of Israelis, the general election today 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 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.

• READ MORE:  Opposition leads Netanyahu camp in Israel vote, Arab parties up: Exit polls
• Israel election 2026 live: Polls open as Netanyahu faces tough test
• Other Israeli election reports
• Other Gaza genocide reports

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.

Growing militarisation claims lives
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 today’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.

Mohamad Kadan is a Palestinian writer and PhD student in the Department of History at Rice University. His scholarly work has appeared in Middle East Critique and Interventions. He has also published essays and commentary in Mondoweiss, Al Jazeera English, Middle East Eye, and the Hampton Institute, and writes in Arabic for Romman Cultural Magazine and many others. He is a co-founder of the Edward Said Forum at Tel Aviv University. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

Count the hands the footage passed through. Whakaata Māori reported the video first. RNZ said it had independently obtained the same material. Newsroom published a still photograph from the event showing people in Mongrel Mob regalia making hand signs.

The Post added that the gathering had been advertised online as a fundraiser for a Mob chapter, a claim Chris Hipkins said he had been reassured was wrong, and which by then had already done its work. The New Zealand Herald put a Labour minister on camera to answer for it.

On Wednesday, Kerrin Leoni was a candidate defending her seat in an electorate debate. By Friday morning she was finished, with her name still on the ballot because nominations had closed and there was no mechanism left to remove it.

• READ MORE: The real reason Kerrin Leoni had to go is not about the gangs
• Other NZ election reports

Forty eight hours is about how long this takes now. The machinery runs without anyone in it making a decision they would describe as political. A clip surfaces. A second outlet obtains it.

A third finds the still that works better than the clip, because a photograph of men making hand signs needs no context and cannot be argued with. A fourth adds a detail about money that turns a family gathering into a transaction. A fifth books a Labour MP and asks her to account for a colleague.

Somewhere in the middle of that chain the thing stops being a story about an event and becomes the event itself, and the party reads the coverage, calculates the damage, and acts on the coverage rather than on anything that happened in that room.

Not one outlet in that chain appears to have asked the question that any reporter who had read the last decade of this country’s own inquiries would ask first. Where did the men in the photograph come from? Who put them in the institutions that produced them? What does the Crown owe them?

A question of candidate conduct
The story was reported instead as a question of candidate conduct, which is the safest possible framing and the one that requires the least work, because it needs no history, no interviews outside Parliament, and no contact with anybody in Tāmaki Makaurau who was actually at the gathering.

The video and the photograph were taken at the same gathering and they carry opposite cargo. In the video a patched man argues that the gangs should stop fighting each other and put their attention on the government, and a candidate tells a room that people who are not enrolled hold the power to change who governs. That is footage of political organising, and any newsroom that wanted a story about democratic participation among the most excluded citizens in the country had it handed over free.

The still photograph carries none of that. It shows bodies, patches and hand signs, and it travelled furthest, because an image requires no reading and permits no reply.

The caption vocabulary gives the game away. Regalia. Hand gestures associated with the gang. Those are the words of a police file transposed into news copy, and they work by telling the reader that what they are looking at is evidence.

Parliament has already made the patch an offence to wear in public, so the photograph functions as a charge sheet while the outlet that published it makes no accusation at all and takes no responsibility for one. The men in that frame are not named, not interviewed, not asked why they were there, and not treated as people who might have a view about the government they were discussing. They appear as a visual condition attaching to the woman standing near them.

Think about what never happens. A candidate photographed at a Federated Farmers breakfast is not asked to account for the nitrate in the Manawatū. A candidate at a corporate box is not asked whether he endorses the firm’s tax structure. A minister photographed with a property developer is covered as a diary item. Proximity becomes contamination only when the bodies in the frame are Māori and poor, and the newsroom knows this without ever having to say it, which is precisely how a shared set of assumptions does its work. Nobody had to instruct anybody. The picture editor simply knew which image would run.

Oriini Kaipara is in this story, which makes it almost too neat. A few years ago she was the first person to read primetime news in this country with a moko kauae, and viewers wrote in to tell the newsroom her face was offensive. She is now Te Pāti Māori’s candidate in Tāmaki Makaurau, and the same industry that once relayed complaints about her chin has spent this week staging a contest between two Māori women over which of them stood nearer to a gang pad.

Lively moment in a tight race
Leoni attacked Kaipara over it at the debate on Wednesday. Kaipara put it straight back. The coverage carried the exchange as a lively moment in a tight race, and the structure that made two wāhine Māori prosecute each other on camera went unexamined by every outlet that profited from it.

The record here is long and consistent. A Māori MP’s tie became a national story. A Māori foreign minister’s face was discussed as a diplomatic variable. Every Māori politician in this country gets asked, sooner or later, to account for a relationship no Pākehā politician is ever asked about, and the question is always framed as a reasonable one about standards.

The reason it is always framed that way is that the people framing it have never had to explain their own cousins to a camera. Senior editorial judgment in New Zealand newsrooms sits overwhelmingly in Pākehā hands, and the judgment in question is not malice. It is the plain inability to see that a room full of Māori men might contain anything other than a threat, combined with an institutional certainty that this inability is neutrality.

Whakaata Māori reported the footage first, and that fact deserves to be stated rather than stepped around. A Māori broadcaster is still a broadcaster, working under the same commercial logic, the same political pressure and considerably more funding risk than the outlets that picked the story up.

What happened afterwards is where the whiteness lives. One report became a saturation event because the rest of the industry recognised the material instantly as the kind of thing that performs, and pushed it until a party leader had no room to move. The first report is journalism. The 48 hours that followed is a removal mechanism, and no individual inside it has to intend the outcome for the outcome to arrive on schedule.

The figure that would have reframed the entire story has been sitting in the public record for years. The Waitangi Tribunal estimates that 80 to 90 percent of Mongrel Mob and Black Power members were once wards of the state, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care carried that estimate into its own findings after sitting with gang members who described what was done to them as children in Crown institutions.

Every newsroom in the chain has covered that inquiry. Not one of them reached for it this week. The men in the photograph are the state’s own product, documented at enormous public expense, and the press that reported the inquiry found no reason to connect the two stories when a connection would have cost a political party something.

The press played its colonial role
The press in this country was built into the land taking from the beginning. The settler papers of Auckland and Taranaki spent the early 1860s telling their readers that Waikato Māori were arming, that the Kīngitanga was a standing threat to settler life, and that the government had to move.

The invasion came, the confiscations followed, and the newspapers had supplied the public reasoning that made both appear defensive. Newspapers were as much a part of that apparatus as the survey chain and the militia, and the people who ran them understood themselves throughout as reporting the facts.

The technology changed and the function held. The Dawn Raids were covered as a crime wave. Bastion Point was covered as an occupation to be cleared. In 2007 newsrooms ran police allegations about training camps in Te Urewera for months, in detail, and the case against almost everyone arrested collapsed, after which the coverage simply stopped rather than reckoning with what it had helped do to a community that is still living with it.

In each of these the press produced the Māori body as a question of public order first, which is the step that makes everything the state does next look like a measured response to a situation it did not create.

What happened to Kerrin Leoni belongs in that sequence. No outlet in the chain published anything false. The video was real, the photograph was real, the advertisement for the event existed. The violence is in the selection, the sequencing and the frame, in which still ran and which three seconds of footage did not, in the decision to make candidate conduct the story and state care no part of it, and none of that is actionable before any media standards body in this country.

Watched a woman being publicly destroyed
A complaint can test accuracy. There is no complaint available against an industry’s shared sense of what is obviously a scandal, which is the thing that actually ended her candidacy.

Set out the week’s ledger. Labour lost a candidate and kept its standard. The newsrooms had a running story through a slow stretch of the campaign and will have forgotten it by the time the votes are counted.

The men in the photograph, who were abused by the Crown as children and have since been told that the clothing they wear is itself an offence, watched a woman be publicly destroyed for standing in a room with them and telling them that their vote could change the government.

They were the only people in this whole affair with nothing to gain and they paid for it anyway. Any newsroom could have written that story this week. The material was in their own archives. They ran the hand signs instead.

Professor Mohan J. Dutta of Massey University, Aotearoa, publishes the blog The Margins Review – Culture-Centered Approach featuring critical intellectual opinions from Aotearoa to the world. The views expressed are personal. This article is republished with permission by the author.

The Kingmakers debate on TVNZ last night was won by the two Queens, Chlöe Swarbrick (Greens) and Qiulae Wong (Opportunity), but I think Te Pāti Māori’s co-leader Rawiri Waititi landed a killer blow to Winston Peters (New Zealand First) that he won’t recover from.

By throwing into Winston’s face his infamous 1975 quote about Māori losing their land, culture and language and becoming “kahki” Europeans, Rawiri reminded the entire country that Winston has been around so long that he has become a political hypocrite.

That is devastating because very few would remember that quote and resets Winston more recent Treaty of Waitangi bashing with the radicalism of his youth.

• READ MORE: Other NZ 2026 general election reports

That moment alone allowed Rawiri to land a knock out punch while Winston spent the rest of the debate reeling.

It was New Zealand vs Old Zealand.

The TVNZ polling clearly shows Māori voters understanding the Te Pāti Māori candidate strategy and the rush to the Greens continues to back up that vote splitting strategy.

Māori strategic voters will decide the 2026 Election.

Martyn Bradbury is publisher and editor of The Daily Blog. This article was first published by TDB and is republished with permission.

People running foodbanks in South Auckland say poverty is deepening among the Pacific community, and the high demand they are seeing is the just tip of the iceberg.

Persistent high rents and basic living costs, plus nagging debt, continue to leave Pasifika families facing tough decisions on whether to pay bills or feed their children.

As New Zealand gets ready to head to the polls on November 7, and the cost of living looms as the biggest issue for voters, the government has been touting its stewardship of the economy and signs of recovery.

• READ MORE: Other New Zealand election reports

But it is a different picture at the frontline of foodbanks such as Vinnies Tāmaki Makaurau – based in Onehunga – which is part of the national organisation of the Society of St Vincent de Paul.

Households from the Pasifika and Māori communities make up the majority of families who come to their foodbank or to access budgeting support, counselling, youth development or help with employment pathways.

“We used to see people come once every three months. Now we’re seeing people try and register with us and apply every week, every fortnight, and we just wish we weren’t the capability to do that,” Henry Elliot, a triage coordinator and financial mentor with Vinnies, said.

He said while housing insecurity, chronic illness, disability, mental health difficulties, domestic violence and other factors contributed to food insecurity, Vinnies did not have enough resources to meet the high demand.

The Onehunga base had 31,000 engagements last year — that is, people reaching out and getting responded to, either by phone, face to face meetings, online engagement, workshops, sessions, or programme participation.

Post-pandemic deprivation
According to Elliot, Vinnies has seen the level of need among Pasifika deepen since the covid-19 pandemic.

“Covid brought the need up, and then when covid kind of disappeared, and we were supposed to go back to normal lives, for lots of people their jobs were never there again; they had no work.

“Some of them still have no work, or they’re on part time, or their hours are cut. So while covid disappeared and the funding disappeared, the need for food did not.”

Meanwhile, the government this term introduced a host of sanctions on beneficiaries, which he said had left a number of people in the Pacific community needing help from Vinnies.

“Two three years into those those new rules, we’re seeing the effects. People are coming in unsure why their benefit was cut or why their benefit was slashed altogether, and then finding out that it’s because they missed a meeting, a conference, a phone call, and those sanctions that are imposed on them happen very quickly.”

A new survey by the New Zealand Food Network found that one in every three households is struggling to provide affordable, nutritious meals, with the burden falling heaviest on single parents, Pacific communities, disabled people and renters.

‘The gap is widening’
Vinnies Tāmaki Makaurau general manager Delphina Soti said it was increasingly clear that many Pasifika families were struggling to afford basics.

“Like we understand that the cost of living has gone up, inflation’s gone up, like all sorts of different things have gone up, but what people are getting paid is not going up,” Soti noted.

“So it’s 9 percent that rent’s gone up, and then cost of living — 5 percent. Then you look at income, Work and Income, our most vulnerable, 2.2 percent; and then you look at how much the incomes have gone up, it’s like 4 percent.”

She said that only about 16 percent of Pasifika in New Zealand owned homes, compared with 42.1 percent of all New Zealanders, while around two-thirds of Pasifika were renting homes.

“So if the rent is shooting through the clouds, their income is coming down, and Work and Income is coming down, what kind of planning is this as a government?

‘The poor are becoming poorer, and the gap is widening.”

This is echoed by Mangere Budgeting Services Trust CEO Lara Dolan, who said in each of the past two financial years, her organsation supported around 4000 families with food support and budgeting advice.

She said Pasifika made up 60 percent of those people.

‘Struggling big time’
“The demand for our services, financial mentoring services, has increased by 61 percent in the last two years, and the demand for food has increased by more than 100 percent, which tells me that people are struggling big time.”

Dolan said people coming to them for help were often working people drowning in debt and the high cost of living.

“Everything is getting more expensive but salaries of people are not keeping up with inflation.

“We see a lot of people who are ‘working poor’, like teachers, builders, and health care workers coming in.”

Because Vinnies does not offer food deliveries, people need to come to them to get the food packages. But getting all the way to Onehunga is too hard for some families.

Elliot said another barrier is the shame some Pacific people feel about reaching out for help.

“It’s that sense of shame or whakamā. So we try and provide that safe space where it’s as simple as going to a New World or a Pak’nSave, they don’t have to feel like they’re coming to a charity.

‘Weight off their shoulders’
“We notice that when we give them the food, a small weight’s lifted off their shoulders every time.

“Every time the person puts food in their car or in their trolley or whatever, that small weight is okay — ‘of all the problems I have in my life right now, at least I know I’ve got a meal tonight, and so do my kids.'”

Soti said Vinnies was probably only seeing about 50 percent of the families who were in need of help.

“We’ve had people here who’ve struggled to come here. We watch cars do ueys [u-turns]. They keep on turning around and going back until somebody goes. Henry goes out and waves them down — ‘come’. and they come trembling.

“They don’t want to ask, but they are connected to a whole lot of other people who are doing it tough as well. We reckon about 50 percent. We only see the tip of the iceberg.”

Community ‘come to party’
Vinnies gets some funding from the Ministry of Social Development, and then other funding from private sources and church donations.

Soti said Vinnies was grateful government support for its foodbanks, but it was nowhere near the level they needed.

However, the Pacific community has come to the party as much as it can.

“Amidst all of this, there’s so much hope. We ask our young people, ‘hey, you can be part of this food system, you can really make an impact’,” she explained.

“So they turn around and collect cans, and they don’t just collect cans. They collect to the value of $30,000 worth of cans,

Elliot said the sense of community is strong within Pacific people, which gives them resilience.

“I will say this: they’ve known struggle and poverty their entire lives, especially if they’re from New Zealand. So they know how to make it work if need be,” he said.

Families in wider context
“And while they may be shy to come to us because we are a Pacific community, they do know that the community will rally around people that need support in the long run, whether that be through their church or their village communities that operate here in New Zealand, or their families in a wider context.”

Soti said that in Aotearoa there was enough to go around — and that no one should go hungry.

“I think there is enough. You got people who’ve got billions, and then you’ve got people with absolutely nothing, and so it’s just thinking, coming back to human beings.

“Poverty seeps in when we forget that we belong to each other on a really human level. If we remember that, maybe it’s time to pull some of those resources towards those who don’t have enough of the blanket.”

Vote for the three progressive parties — Labour, Green and Te Pāti Māori — in next month’s general election if you want to see a principled Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy stance based on international law and justice.

Here is how Aotearoa New Zealand’s political parties stand on the Palestinian solidarity movement’s four key demands this election:

This year’s election provides the movement a crucial opportunity to educate and encourage the public to elect representatives who will take a stand for justice and be accountable to us, the people.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Party reports

Rating footnotes:
However, Opportunity wants any goods and services produced inside the Zionist state to be “unaffected” by sanctions.

Te Pāti Māori, the Greens and Labour have committed to comprehensive sanctions, using a framework based on the Russia Sanctions Act.

The language of this Bill would offer the solidarity movement the possibility to organise together for wider-ranging sanctions (eg. targeting complicit states and international financial backers of the genocide and occupation).

While Te Pāti Māori has had the clearest and strongest position on Palestine and related issues throughout the past 3 years, their campaign is calling for electorate votes only.

Te Pāti Māori is encouraging voters to cast their party vote for the Greens or Labour.

The Opportunity Party’s commitment to sanctions targets goods produced in illegal settlements and travel bans on individuals. Opportunity would consider divesting public money if it fit UN criteria of supporting the illegal occupation.

This scorecard is endorsed by Justice for Palestine, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) and Dayenu.

27 February 1933 was a momentous turning point in German history; a lightning rod for what was to follow.

It enabled Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party to quickly transition Germany from a formal democracy (Weimar Republic) to a fascist dictatorship (inspired by Benito Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy).

On that day, an unemployed Dutch construction worker named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag (German Parliament) building, causing considerable damage.

• READ MORE: Trump says US will not strike Iran before midterm elections
• Other Donald Trump reports

The Nazis first falsely blamed the communists for the fire and then claimed emergency powers to crush all opposition, not just those it blamed.

The event was contrived by the newly formed Nazi government to turn public opinion against its opponents and consequently to successfully achieve these fascist objectives.

This began with the emergency law decree for the Protection of the People and State which restricted free speech and freedom of the press, and allowed the imprisonment of enemies without trial.

Scene setting for US-style ‘Reichstag Fire’
Fintan O’Toole is an advising editor at the New York Review of Books (NYRB). An award-winning journalist and recognised public intellectual, he is a former editor The Irish Times where he still continues as a longstanding columnist.

On 25 July 2025 he began an article (paywalled) in the NYRB on the direction of the United States under President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement with the above-mentioned “Reichstag Fire”: A show of force stepping stone towards a ‘Reichstag Fire’.

O’Toole analysed Trump’s endeavours to militarise American politics and politicise the American military describing them as unfinished business. This meant:

“…defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations [and] … dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the President but to the Constitution.”

This analysis continued on to the much reported brutally derogatory narrative and actions (including armed force) against immigrants (which got much worse since the article was published) and Trump’s dishonest delusional endeavour to portray himself as having known “military life”.

This delusional military self-image contrasts with Adolf Hitler’s actual record of being a decorated (Iron Cross) German soldier in the First World War.

It also contrasts with other past dictators; in particular, Benito Mussolini (Italy), Francisco Franco (Spain) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile).

O’Toole refers to Trump’s speech to his supporters at the 6 January 2021 insurrection;

“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Language and form to achieve absolute military obedience
At the time of the article’s publication in the NYRB, Donald Trump’s militarism was primarily about language and form, including supporting references to the Confederate insurrectionists of the American Civil War in the 1860s.

Pointingly, Fintan O’Toole notes that Trump:

“… is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience.”

This is the opposite of the military non-partisanship that is necessary in order to defend the US Constitution.

Fintan O’Toole has convincingly outlined an analysis that under Donald Trump’s presidency this emerging authoritarianism in the United States is evolving towards fascism.

In this process, Trump is seeking his own “Reichstag Fire”. This includes seeking in various ways to use his position to rig the mid-term elections in early November for the Congress (House of Representatives) and one-third of the Senate.

Currently he controls both but is likely to lose the former and possibly the latter. Losing control of both is a realistic outcome given popular feeling and mobilisation.

Desperation to seize mid-term US elections
Thirteen months after the above NYRB article was published, the UK newspaper The Independent discussed this endeavour further (August 18): Trump desperate to seize elections.

Journalist Alex Woodward outlined the Trump administration’s numerous roadblocks with courts in his attempts to seize control of these federal elections by establishing a national voter registration list that would be used to decide who is eligible to cast a ballot.

Trump has also not dismissed the idea of declaring a national security emergency to unilaterally enforce his takeover of federal elections. In his reported words:

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK. I’ll leave it at that.”

Woodward reports that Trump could also threaten to use federal troops or law enforcement “…to seize voting equipment or ballots, which would disrupt ballot collection and vote-tallying and insert a hunt for alleged fraud to satisfy his conspiracy theories.”

In another measure to rig the mid-term elections, the Trump administration has abruptly removed the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency tasked with supporting election officials.

The practical effect is to leave the key bipartisan agency effectively paralysed weeks before election day.

Election officials are behind-the-scenes public servants. However, they are increasingly on the frontlines of conspiracy theory-fuelled threats.

Woodward reports an annual poll of elections revealing that at least 38 percent of election officials have experienced threats, harassment and abuse because of their job, with more than 60 percent of those threats delivered in person. More than half feared for their safety.

Now is the right time to compare US politics to Nazi Germany
In response to the question “when is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era”, The Guardian said “now” on October 3: US politics today compares with Nazi politics in Germany.

Washington DC based British Guardian journalist David Smith writes about a book on the declining white Christian influence in the United States managing to fuel an alliance with Trump and working to reshape its “democracy”.

The book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn against Democracy, is by Robert P Jones arising out of a consideration of studied US demographic numbers, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s use of the language of racial purity. This led him to his inescapable conclusion that “This is our 1933”.

Jones began with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches.

He cites a Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, who was eventually imprisoned for opposing Hitler. Niemöller is famously remembered for the powerful poem “First They Came”.

For the first four years of Hitler’s reign Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Revival of white Christian nationalism strengthens drive to US fascism
David Smith argues convincingly that US democracy is experiencing a severe “backslide” that is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, including Donald Trump’s language on the campaign trail. Further:

“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes.”

Smith then refers to Trump’s repeated use of the concept of genetic inheritance. Addressing a mostly white crowd in Minnesota in 2020, Trump declared:

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

In his diagnosis, Jones links Trump’s language to the influence and activism of white Christian nationalism:

… white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country’s autocratic slide.

Jones notes that whereas in 2008 white Christian Americans constituted 54 percent of the US population, by 2026 it had dropped to 41 percent. The decline among white evangelicals is even steeper. In 2000, they represented 25 percent of all Americans; today it is 13 percent.

Jones then observes:

“Trump loves to talk about the art of the deal and, in many ways, there’s been a massive quid pro quo deal struck between a declining white evangelical population and Trump. His big appeal to them was less about policy and more anti-immigrant: I’m going to restore an America that looks like you, and I’m going to restore power to the Christian churches.

“He was literally saying on the campaign trail: this is a quid pro quo deal. Give me your votes and you won’t even have to vote again. I’ll fix it so you don’t have to vote again.”

And now for Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung is an interesting German word meaning synchronisation or coordination.

In the context of German history it was used to describe the process of Nazification in the mid-1930s; that is, establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society.

On 1 June, I posted on Gleichschaltung in Political Bytes: Gleichschaltung and the far right momentum:

“The NZ First party is a toned-down version of the MAGA movement with deputy leader Shane Jones the loudest proponent of its rhetoric.”

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, my narrative in this post includes the following observation:

“New Zealand is a long way away from Nazi Germany in 1933. We are also long way away from having a Gleichschaltung. But, when certain stars align, the unexpected can occur very quickly.

“Donald Trump has succeeded by both synchronisation and coordination over the past nearly 18 months in turning immigrants in the United States into the Jews of Nazi Germany in 1933-35.

“A tipping point leading to our own Gleichschaltung should not be dismissed out-of-hand even if the recipe’s ingredients might be different.”

‘First they came . . .’
It is appropriate to come back to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem (English translation of the original German version):

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest

In terms of Donald Trump’s “1933 trajectory” towards the mid-term elections, should he succeed then he will be well-placed to control the institutions necessary to ensure authoritarianism’s success.

This may well include declaring a national emergency based on a false manufactured pretext as was the case with the Reichstag fire in 1933.

However, his vote rigging attempts, along with the growing unpopularity of his presidency, appear to be arousing much public contempt; sufficient for him to lose control of both the Congress and Senate.

As a narcissist who is devoid of empathy, Trump sees strategic and tactical decision making through a limiting narrow lens.

Anything is possible over how responds to such a plausible mid-terms defeat; attempted dictatorial actions stronger than declaring a state of emergency should be anticipated.

In these circumstances concerted political opposition within the Congress and Senate are important, including impeachment moves and investigations into illegalities and corruption.

However, what will be most decisive is popular mobilisation against this drive towards a fascist state in the world’s strongest military power, whether or not Trump’s electoral vote rigging succeeds.

Organising the popular will is the critical task. “Power to people” as the old but permanently relevant slogan goes.

The final word
Meanwhile let’s leave the final word to Robert P Jones. In the epilogue to his above-discussed book he writes:

“Just as God asked Niemöller where he was between 1933 and 1937, God will ask us where we were between 2025 and 2028. Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing.”

Not just powerful words; very timely and directly relevant words as well. Time will tell whether Trump and his MAGA movement will achieve this endorsement; but it is not inevitable.

History does not have to repeat itself nor even rhyme a lot. Germany 1933 does not have to be United States 2025-28.

Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

ANALYSIS: By Shailendra Singh

In his address at last month’s Pacific Media Summit, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka highlighted his government’s repeal of Fiji’s Media Industry Development Act 2010, saying that it was in the interest of democracy.

While the Rabuka government has been rightly recognised for scrapping that Act in 2023, another piece of legislation with potential significant implications for journalism remains in force — the Online Safety Act 2018.

Like the Media Act, the Online Safety Act was enacted under the FijiFirst government and gives the state a role in regulating expression.

• READ MORE: Special fijivillage Straight Talk public forum on online safety
• Other Fiji online safety reports

The Online Safety Act was tabled in Parliament in 2018 in response to escalating social media abuse, but was controversial from the outset, especially the breadth of its provisions.

The backlash was such that the entire opposition voted against it, arguing that it undermined democracy. Rights groups were similarly alarmed, describing the Act as a “Trojan horse” for censorship.

However, because much of the attention focused on the draconian Media Act, and relatively few people were being charged under the Online Safety Act, the latter escaped sustained scrutiny.

That changed in 2025, as the unabated abuse of digital platforms and a spate of charges laid under Section 24 of the Act, which criminalises the posting of electronic communication that causes harm, brought it back into the spotlight.

Expecting stronger legislation
Currently, the Act is under review and Information Minister Lynda Tabuya, under whose ministry the Act falls, has told Parliament to expect stronger legislation by the end of this year.

To some extent, Tabuya’s call for tougher laws is understandable. The misuse of social media platforms is a global problem, but the threat is considered greater in fragile democracies with multiethnic societies, such as Fiji.

The Online Safety Commission received 1609 complaints in 2025 alone, with more than 50 percent involving cyberbullying, harassment and defamation.

More broadly, policymakers have warned that online misconduct poses a serious national security threat.

In March 2026, Tabuya flagged the increased prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, stating, “A single lie can divide a nation”.  Likewise, Fiji’s National Security Strategy 2025-2029 warned the malicious use of emerging technologies for misinformation and disinformation posed a threat and could “undermine the credibility of national leaders and erode public trust in governance structures”.

Even before the proliferation of social networking platforms, there were concerns in Fiji about the mainstream media’s alleged role in fomenting societal conflict, with some analysis even suggesting that the media acted as a catalyst in the 2000 and 2006 coups.

The increase in digital penetration has added a new dimension to these security challenges.

Young people particularly, the most avid consumers of online networks, risk exposure to disparaging and damaging online discourses, including racism and hate speech.

While these trends are serious and require a firm response, they do not negate legitimate concerns about the flaws in the Online Safety Act.

Implications for media and press freedom
While the aim of the Act is not specifically to regulate media — Section 4 stipulates the law applies to the “whole of Fiji” — media are, nonetheless, caught in its crossfire.

The Act contains no protections for the practice of journalism. Professional journalists using social media platforms in the public interest are lumped with ordinary citizens who may be using them with malicious intent.

This renders journalists and media organisations particularly vulnerable to the Act due to the broad provisions of “electronic communication” that causes “harm” (defined in the Act as “serious emotional distress”), as most of their work is published online and can require critiquing the actions of private individuals and public officials.

The Act also does not differentiate between public and private individuals. In general, public figures such as politicians enjoy a lower level of privacy compared to private citizens. The scrutiny can extend to their private lives should they overlap with, or endanger the fulfillment of, their public duties.

Under the Online Safety Act, media could be held culpable if their reporting causes individuals “serious emotional distress”, which could be a consequence of, for example, news coverage of actual or alleged wrongdoing.

Then there is Section 2’s treatment of electronic communication as “any information, whether truthful or untruthful…”. This suggests journalists publishing legitimate and verified information in the course of their professional duties could face the same criminal liability as bad actors posting untruthful content with malicious intent.

Section 6 raises concerns about the independence of the Online Safety Commission, including the ministerial-appointed Commissioner, which introduces the risk of a political appointment.

Indeed, the appointment of Anne Dunn as the first Commissioner by the then Communications Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was controversial for this very reason. Dunn contested Fiji’s 2018 election under Sayed-Khaiyum’s FijiFirst Party.

The potential conflict of interest could render the Commission vulnerable to political pressure, and have consequences for the Commissioner’s role as an independent and unbiased authority.

The Act does outline seven factors the courts may use to determine whether an offence has occurred, including: the extremity of the content; the age and characteristics of the victim; whether the posting was anonymous; the repetitiveness and extent of circulation; and its truth or falsity, along with the context in which it appeared.

However, it does not provide specific defences based on public interest, truth, reasonable error, or the absence of malice.

An opportunity for reform
The fact that no journalist or media organisation has been charged under the Act in the eight years since its inception is of little consolation. No journalist or media organisation was charged under the now-repealed Media Act, but we are all aware of that legislation’s deleterious effect on the media sector as a deterrent to robust journalism and a catalyst for self-censorship.

Some criticisms of the Online Safety Act — including its open-ended provisions, the Minister’s role in appointing the Commissioner, and the potentially chilling effect on freedom of expression — are uncannily similar to those expressed about the Media Act.

Against this backdrop, Rabuka’s remarks at the Pacific Media Summit are pertinent. The Prime Minister emphasised that the media are “not a threat to democracy” but a “part of” it.

The reviewers of the Online Safety Act would do well to heed his words, as well as those of Rabuka’s deputy, Manoa Kamikamica, at the same event. Kamikamica stated that while this government was committed to media freedom, there was no guarantee future governments would share the same mindset.

In other words, the weaponisation of the Online Safety Act might not be a present danger, but it cannot be ruled out as a future one.

Associate Professor Shailendra Singh is head of journalism at The University of the South Pacific. This article is derived from his submission to the review of the Online Safety Act 2018 and was first published by Pacific Security. It is republished with the author’s permission. Dr Singh’s views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer.

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

Benjamin Netanyahu’s whirlwind visit to the United States late last month to address the United Nations General Assembly was further evidence that the Israeli prime minister is now a universal pariah.

He is being abandoned even by his closest allies.

It was perhaps not surprising that 77 nations, including a handful of European states, walked out of the chamber in protest that a wanted war crimes suspect — a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) — was being given a platform to speak on the world’s largest stage.

• READ MORE: Map of Middle East redrawn after October 7
• Other Gaza, West Bank reports

Far more notable was what happened — or rather, didn’t — away from the podium. Netanyahu spent just eight hours in the US before heading back to Israel. It is hard to believe that that was his choice.

He was denied his usual moment in the sun with US President Donald Trump at the White House, and could not even secure a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

There was no invitation to address the US Congress, and with it familiar scenes of legislators rapturously celebrating his anti-Palestinian incitement.

Israel’s former Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Reuters: “I don’t recall a time when the prime minister came to the United States and didn’t meet with the president.”

Stark contrast to Xi
The shunning of Netanyahu stood in stark contrast to the reception of Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader was personally greeted at the airport by Trump with a red carpet and military flyover.

Netanyahu’s UN visit was exploited by both sides — by Israeli officials and Western leaders — to advance their separate, and conflicting, agendas.

Netanyahu is less than a month away from a hotly contested general election in which, for the first time, his failures to prevent Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 are under intense scrutiny.

According to a growing number of recent reports, he was warned by Egyptian and Gulf leaders of a major event — an “earthquake” — coming from Gaza in the days and weeks preceding Hamas’ breakout, but failed to act.

Netanyahu had scheduled his UN speech for Israeli prime time, to attract the largest domestic audience possible. He took the opportunity to call out other world leaders as “moral cowards” and “hypocrites”.

As Israeli analyst Jonathan Ofir notes, Netanyahu also used the UN platform to smuggle in a biblical phrase in Hebrew that was designed, for listeners back home, to serve as a dog-whistle: a call for Israel to carry out genocide to the bitter end.

Netanyahu’s goal was to demonstrate to voters that he is still a force to be reckoned with on the international stage, and that he alone can make Israel safe from a world supposedly mired in “antisemitic”, anti-Israel sentiment.

Nudging Netanyahu out of office
Western leaders, by contrast, wish to demonstrate the precise opposite, hoping to nudge Netanyahu out of office by suggesting to Israelis that their leader is a spent force, that he has gone too far.

Time to be rid of him.

This may prove no simple matter. Netanyahu is the great political survivor, serving a record near-two decades as his country’s prime minister — longer even than Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. He has used that time to whip up much of Israeli society into an ever greater, ultra-nationalist, genocidal fervour.

The current antipathy in Western capitals to Netanyahu is most certainly not based on any kind of ethical assessment of Israel’s recent actions: a three-year genocidal rampage through Gaza; the violent expansion of Jewish settlements and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank; the bombing and ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon; and the Israeli leader’s starring role alongside the US in launching a catastrophic war on Iran whose fallout has destabilised the global economy.

Washington — backed by its European client states — has been an ardent partner to these crimes, supplying the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic leverage to help Israel carry them out.

But Netanyahu now looks to be a political liability, even for Trump.

The US President, nosediving in the polls, needs a scapegoat — and the Israeli prime minister appears the only one suited for the role.

The antagonism is, in part, personal.

Netanyahu seduced Trump on Iran
A number of recent reports indicate that Netanyahu pulled out all the stops to seduce Trump, against the advice of his generals, into launching an unprovoked and illegal war on Iran.

The promise of a decisive victory persuaded Trump he could secure his place in the history books as the president who “remade the Middle East”. Once Iran was out of the picture, the US would enjoy unchallenged control over the region’s oil.

And all of this would supposedly take place weeks after Trump had cemented his command over Venezuela’s oil, following an illegal operation at the start of the year to kidnap President Nicholas Maduro.

With Iran’s defeat, and Venezuela subjugated, economic rival China would find itself utterly dependent on the US for access to the main lubricant of the global economy. Trump could avoid a direct military confrontation with Beijing, bringing it to heel simply by threatening to turn off the oil spigot.

But, of course none of this came to pass.

Washington is now in an unwinnable war with Iran that has clarified to Tehran the extent of its power over the Strait of Hormuz — and of the parallel power of Ansar Allah, its allies in Yemen, over the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Together, they can inflict unmitigated damage to the world economy.

Soaring petrol prices on US forecourts are likely to be a critical factor in the collapse of the Republican vote in November’s mid-term elections and the likely loss of both Houses to the Democrats, turning Trump into a lame-duck president.

Supremely vulnerable
Meanwhile, the war has educated Washington’s client states in the Gulf that they are supremely vulnerable to any retaliation from Tehran and from Yemen — a fact they are reminded of every time Trump orders another reckless round of strikes on Iran.

For all its military might, Washington has shown it is unable to defend its Gulf allies.

But Netanyahu is not facing a reckoning just because of his role in engineering a disastrous war on Iran.

Despite the best efforts of Western political and media classes over the past three years, the reality of Israel’s destruction of Gaza — and the murder and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children — has become ever harder to hide or rationalise.

Even among those parts of the public little interested in world affairs, the truth is gradually sinking in, aided by battles in mainstream cultural spaces that have swung conclusively against Israel.

NAZA standing ovation
NAZA, a new documentary on Gaza made by Israeli film-makers, won a record, 25-minute standing ovation at last month’s Venice Film Festival. In it, anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers document in detail how they engineered genocide in the tiny enclave. It is scheduled to be available to stream for free in November.

Ireland’s team, forced to play Israel in the Uefa Nations League at the weekend, did not hide their feelings. They wore black armbands in a show of solidarity with Israel’s victims in Gaza and refused to shake hands with their opponents. Irish captain Dara O’Shea pledged to donate his match earnings to humanitarian causes in Gaza.

Superstar musician Ed Sheeran has found himself unexpectedly painted as the bad guy for failing to stand by his support act, the rapper Macklemore, over the latter’s comments opposing genocide in Gaza.

Predictably, when faced with pro-Israel stadium owners threatening to pull the plug on the tour, Sheeran caved and dropped Macklemore. But Sheeran is reeling from a widespread backlash that clearly took him by surprise.

And leading British politicians, such as former prime minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretaries David Cameron and David Lammy, are for the first time facing serious critical scrutiny in the mainstream over their conduct towards Gaza.

Last month, a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, revealed that British officials had imposed a deeply flawed methodology, apparently so they could ignore mounting evidence of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

As a result, they were able to duck out of their legal obligations to take action against Israel, including by ending arms sales.

Rising tide of revulsion
Western capitals are finally realising this rising tide of revulsion at the Gaza genocide cannot be staunched.

In the US, where bonds to Israel are invariably described by politicians as “unbreakable”, 62 percent of respondents told Pew in July they had a negative opinion of Netanyahu’s government.

Meanwhile, a poll last month found 60 percent of American Jews want the Israeli prime minister voted out at the forthcoming election.

As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper observed: “Trump is well aware of the consistent, dizzying decline in support for Israel among Americans.”

Which is why he and other Western politicians are desperate to reframe the conversation. Singling out Netanyahu over Israeli atrocities in Gaza does not get them off the hook because they so obviously partnered with him every step of the way.

Instead Western leaders want to switch focus to the West Bank, where their role is more easily obscured and Netahyahu’s law-breaking is unmistakable.

Since October 2023, he, along with his self-confessed fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have given both violent Jewish settler militias and the Israeli military greater freedom to terrorise Palestinian families off their land in preparation for the West Bank’s annexation.

Illegal West Bank settlements role
In the West’s new, self-serving narrative, Netanyahu isn’t a pariah because he is sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in starving the people of Gaza.

Nor because the International Court of Justice is currently investigating his government over “plausible” allegations that it is committing a genocide in the enclave.

Nor because his government has overseen the killing of at least 21,000 children there — and most likely, far more.

Nor because he continues to violate a sham “ceasefire”, one in which Israel has killed more than 1400 Palestinians penned up in the ruins of their enclave since the fighting supposedly ended. A further 4900 of Gaza’s residents have been maimed over the same period.

No, Netanyahu is not a pariah in the eyes of Western leaders because of any of these savage crimes — crimes they have been fully complicit in.

His offence — the one they are now determined to focus attention on — is Netanyahu’s role since October 2023 in intensifying the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank to expel Palestinians from their lands.

But this narrative works only if Western politicians and media studiously ignore the context: that for more than half a century, all Israeli governments sponsored settlement expansion, with the aim of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population.

Exploited the opportunity
Netanyahu is not an outlier in doing this. He simply exploited the opportunity to accelerate West Bank expulsions on the back of world sympathy after Hamas’s single-day attack in October 2023.

The most likely explanation for why Britain and 11 other Western states, including France and Canada, declared their intention last month to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements is that they had received signs from the Trump administration for the first time that there would be no serious repercussions for doing so.

Britain’s new government under Andy Burnham also dared to describe what Israel has done to West Bank Palestinians as “ethnic cleansing”. Notably, and paradoxically, the UK has avoided using the term to describe Israel’s even more brazen ethnic cleansing in Gaza — a campaign of expulsions that have all too clearly been aided by Western bombs and logistics.

Officials under Mike Huckabee, the fervently partisan US ambassador to Israel, reportedly drafted a stinging rebuke in preparation for the British announcement of sanctions. It accused London of replicating the “playbook of the antisemitic boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] movement”.

That expected line of attack, favoured by Israel lobby groups, was presumably the reason why Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, went to such exaggerated lengths to publicly distance his new policy from BDS.

But in fact, no attack materialised from the Trump administration. Instead, Marco Rubio, Miliband’s US counterpart, stated innocuously: “I don’t have any comment on it [the sanctions policy] right now.”

The next day Trump appeared to buy time with a uncharacteristically non-committal response: “I want to find out why all of a sudden has that [the announcement of UK sanctions] happened.”

Trump and Rubio have said nothing more of substance on the matter.

Failure to listen to warnings
Then there is the recent flood of media reports suggesting that Netanyahu personally failed to listen to multiple warnings from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates that an unprecedented attack was coming from Gaza in the days before Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu has called on Abu Dhabi to deny the leaks. But it has so far failed to help out by doing so.

The two countries, among Washington’s closest client states in the region, have always appeared anxious to avoid openly defying a notoriously vengeful Trump.

In his address to the UN, Burnham noted the dilemma facing Western governments: “We live in an age of low trust in politics. If we were to continue to talk about the two-state solution, but fail to back those words with deeds, that trust will fall even lower — and our enemies will seek to exploit the alienation that follows from that.”

Burnham seems oblivious to the reality: that part of the reason trust is so low is because a succession of British governments have not only colluded in the genocide in Gaza but arrested critics of the genocide as supporters of terrorism.

Miliband demonstrated precisely the kind of hypocrisy Burnham had warned is alienating the public when he told the Labour Party conference last week — to great applause — that “millions of people in this country”, opponents of the genocide, “were right”.

The previous day dozens of protesters had been arrested outside the conference venue for silently holding signs stating: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Burnham and Miliband wish to have their cake and eat it. Neither has indicated that there is any intention to scrap the previous government’s decision to use terrorism laws against anyone who holds such a sign — or is “right”, as Miliband now admits.

Cynical theatre of distraction
What Western leaders are engaged in here is the cynical theatre of distraction.

The declarations of “You were right” and “We feel your pain”, the promises of sanctions and urgent calls for two states, amount to nothing more than virtue-signalling. They are designed to divert public indignation over Israel’s atrocities away from the complicity of Western capitals and direct it exclusively at Netanyahu.

The new spin suggests the gun-wielding, religious zealots in the West Bank settlements who have been growing ever more violent and politically powerful for over half a century — under successive Israeli governments — are solely Netanyahu’s creation.

The new spin argues that the growing confidence of these pogromists, who have long worked hand in glove with the Israeli military, is entirely unrelated to the West’s unconditional support for Israel over many decades.

In absolving themselves, however, Western leaders are necessarily crafting a new lie to deceive their publics: one that suggests the “settler terrorists” are some kind of personal Netanyahu militia that stands or falls with his premiership.

The implication of this new narrative is that, were Netanyahu to be prised from power, a more empathetic leadership would emerge, one that could be cultivated by Western powers to make peace with the Palestinians.

This is all patent nonsense.

Supremacist political spectrum
Like the Israeli public, leaders from across Israel’s narrow Zionist, ethnic supremacist political spectrum shared the genocidal logic that propelled forward the past three-year erasure of Gaza.

None dissented. All engaged in genocidal incitement.

There is no hope of their making peace with the Palestinians under illegal occupation when Israeli leaders cannot even allow their own Palestinian “citizens” — a much-oppressed minority comprising a fifth of Israel’s population – a meaningful voice in next month’s general election.

The central elections committee, a political body whose members are drawn from Israel’s main parties, voted to ban from standing all four factions representing the Palestinian minority.

Whoever wins next month’s election, whether Netanyahu again or one of his rivals, will keep the country heading on the same ethnic supremacist track Israel has been on for decades. Trump, Burnham, Macron and other western leaders understand this.

They want Netanyahu out of the way not so there is real change but simply so they can revert to what constituted business as usual before the Gaza genocide: a slower, more incremental pace to the eradication of the Palestinian people.

Rebranding the Gaza genocide
They want to be able to rebrand the Gaza genocide as one man’s historic folly, a tragic catastrophe that cannot be reversed but can be mitigated if he is gone.

They want us looking resolutely forwards, to real-estate deals and a distant two-state solution, not backwards: to their active role in levelling the homes of more than two million people – with mostly US munitions that unleashed eight times the explosive force of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Trump administration has already okayed the shipment of vast numbers of these mega bombs to replenish Israeli stocks, even before the result of the Israeli election is known.

Notably, the same Trump administration that allowed Netanyahu, a war crimes suspect, to travel to the UN in New York blocked the putative leader of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, from doing so.

In announcing his new sanctions policy targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, Miliband was keen to stress that it would in no way affect intelligence sharing with Israel — the kind of intelligence coordination that saw British planes carrying out surveillance operations over Gaza throughout the genocide.

And while Miliband promised a “double lock against arms exports” to Israel as part of the UK’s sanctions package, in practice not a single existing arms export licence has been revoked or suspended since.

The current fight is not against a genocidal Israeli state or for some illusionary Palestinian state — let alone for justice for the endlessly abused Palestinian people.

Engineering a reset
It is about engineering a reset in which the West gets Israel’s old guard back in charge.

Western leaders have been embarrassed by the froth-mouthed rantings of Netanyahu’s government. This week Smotrich called for Israel to unleash its genocidal Gaza policies on the West Bank — presumably using the very bombs Trump is about to ship them.

He told the Israeli media: “We should do there what we did in Gaza.”

Western leaders fear what that would do to their sinking credibility. And they have allies in Israel, among its opposition, whose vision — at least for the moment — is not Smotrich’s of a Gaza-style eradication of the West Bank.

Rather they envision continuing the current trajectory of gradually turning the West Bank’s small, surviving Palestinian ghettos, trapped in a sea of illegal Jewish settlements, into mini-concentration camps — replicas of Gaza before it was destroyed.

Those are the competing visions among Israelis for the West Bank: the absolute confinement of Palestinians in a series of cages versus their extermination.

That is what is really at stake — nothing more — in the West’s struggle to unseat Netanyahu and uphold its fabled two-state solution.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by Middle East Eye and republished from the author’s Substack with permission.

Labour will recognise Palestine, put in place economic sanctions on Israel, and join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

These are among highlights of Labour’s foreign policy stance and the action the party says it will take if elected as the government next month.

Labour’s foreign policy spokesperson Vanushi Walters made that clear in her recent speech alongside the Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, as part of Diplosphere’s foreign policy election series at Parliament.

• READ MORE: Labour sums up its foreign policy approach as ‘independent, principled and unafraid’
• The full Labour foreign policy speech
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Explaining what was meant by “restoring our independent foreign policy”, she said independence was pivotal to New Zealand’s foreign policy approach.

Independence was about agency.

New Zealand’s silence this term on breaches of the United Nations Charter “has been noticed” globally.

“This government’s silence as one after the other States recognised Palestine has been noticed.”

Silence over Palestine
She said the National-led coalition government’s “silence in failing to stand up [with] a sanctions regime, following the ICJ [International Court of Justice] decision on the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, continues to be loud”.

“New Zealand’s abstentions this term, on the floor of the UN whether it be about the reappointment of the High Commissioner of Human Rights or a vote abstaining on indigenous participation at the UN, have been met with confusion by our colleagues in the international space.

“We do not grow our agency if we stand for nothing because that too is a choice that has consequences.

“We lose our reputation as an honest broker and a consistent champion of international law. Make no mistake, the choice to shrink from the moral challenges we face will diminish our agency not expand it.”

Walters said a Labour government would “make full use” of the foreign policy tool box.

“There is a time for quiet diplomacy and there is a time when quiet diplomacy must bend to moral clarity — that is undeniably the case when the scale of human rights abuses is so stark that it amounts to genocide, to ethnic cleansing.

“Labour will recognise the State of Palestine. Labour will place economic sanctions on Israel and ensure the NZ Super Fund and ACC divest from holdings on the UN list of companies operating in the occupied territories.

Labour to join South Africa at ICJ
“Labour will intervene in support of South Africa’s case at the [ICJ] in respect of a breach of the Genocide Convention.”

Walters said that in this time of tension, “we must also remember there are seeds being planted”.

“International Courts continue to perform with diligence the duty of their statutes, people protest with astonishing courage in defence of their rights, humanitarians place everything on the line in the pursuit of development and peace for all, like-minded countries have begun acting on their desire to revisit creative diplomacy in defining new alliances,” she said.

She acknowledged Foreign Minister Winston Peters for his service during this term and under prior governments.

“We disagree on critical aspects regarding the role New Zealand must play in a fraught world, but not on all aspects of foreign policy, and I want to acknowledge in particular the breadth of his travel and the relationships he has maintained in the Pacific as hallmarks of his time in the role.”

Words matter in politics. They matter even more when a country is debating the document that will determine how it is governed.

That is why remarks by Justice Minister and Acting Attorney-General Siromi Turaga about Fiji’s constitutional review deserve some thought.

Speaking about the journey that has brought the government to this point, Turaga repeatedly invoked God.

• READ MORE: Sweeping changes to Fiji’s governance recommended by Constitution Commission
• Other Fiji constitution reports

“We got here through the miracle of God,” he said.

He spoke of people fasting and of prayer groups, including people who had travelled from Nadi and were praying at his office.

Then came perhaps the most striking part of his remarks when he recalled that the government had initially failed to secure the parliamentary numbers required for constitutional change and had then gone to the Supreme Court.

“We thought we didn’t have the numbers, but God worked in a different way,” he said.

‘We got the numbers’
He then referred to what happened to FijiFirst: “They were deregistered . . . we got the numbers.”

Nothing unusual about a Christian politician expressing his faith. Fiji is a deeply religious country, and Christians are entitled to pray. So are Hindus and Muslims.

While those holding public office do not surrender their religious beliefs when they walk through the doors of Parliament or a government office, there is a difference between seeking God’s guidance and appearing to attribute a political outcome to divine intervention.

FijiFirst was deregistered on July 1, 2024, by the Registrar of Political Parties after failing to make required amendments to its party constitution within the prescribed period. That was an administrative and legal process.

Yet Turaga’s description places that development within a striking sequence:

• The government did not have the numbers;
• People prayed;
• “God worked in a different way”;
• FijiFirst was deregistered; and
• The government got the numbers.

Again, language matters when it comes from someone exercising considerable political and legal authority, and especially now, as Fiji considers fundamental changes to its supreme law.

A Christian should be able to support or oppose the proposed Constitution. So should a Hindu. So should a Muslim. So should someone who follows another faith or professes no religion at all.

Faith and political validation
And this is where Turaga’s words raise a difficult question: when does personal faith become political validation?

If a political leader suggests that God intervened to produce the parliamentary circumstances necessary to advance constitutional change, what message does that send to those who disagree with the changes?

And whose God was Turaga talking about? Whose faith?

When a cabinet minister speaks of God intervening in a political process, Christians may understand those words through their own faith. Yet Fiji’s Constitution does not belong to Christians alone. It belongs to the Hindu family in Labasa, the Muslim family in Ba, the Christian family in Lau and the citizen who believes in no God at all.

The legitimacy of a Constitution governing a democratic, multifaith nation must come from something shared by all its citizens — their consent to the system that governs them.

Again, words matter, especially at a time like this. Therefore, those entrusted with political power should choose their words carefully.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of The Fiji Times, Fiji Daily Post, Islands Business, Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.

Backers of the UK Green Party‘s landmark “Zionism is racism” motion celebrated the proposal’s passing into policy on Sunday, with supporters telling The New Arab that this is the start of a bigger movement.

Palestinian lawyer Muhammad Dahleh says moves to exclude Palestinian-led parties and candidates from Israel’s elections this month amount to “institutional discrimination,” arguing that the disparity is rooted in Israeli law, reports Al Jazeera.

His comments come as a hearing in the Israeli Supreme Court is under way this week to consider the decision to disqualify the country’s main Arab-majority political lists from the elections on October 27.

“Basically, it’s institutional discrimination, but it goes back to the legislation itself,” Dahleh told Al Jazeera in an interview from occupied East Jerusalem.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza, Palestine reports

He said Israel’s Basic Laws barred parties that denied the country’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, as well as parties or candidates deemed to support armed struggle by a hostile state, or an organisation designated by Israel as a “terrorist organisation”.

“That’s what they are using now against the Arab or the Palestinian parties inside Israel,” Dahleh said.

He contrasted their exclusion with the treatment of extremist Israeli politicians accused of making inflammatory statements against Palestinians.

“This discrimination, as I said, it’s institutionalised. It’s set in the law itself,” Dahleh said.

Gaza death toll hits 74,000+
Meanwhile, the eath toll from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has risen to 74,040, according to the Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Eight people have been killed and 26 wounded in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip over the latest 24-hour reporting period, according to the ministry.

The ministry said 1439 people had now been killed and 5052 wounded since a “ceasefire” took effect in October.

Israel has killed at least 74,040 Palestinians and wounded 175,168 since October 2023 when its genocidal war on Gaza began, the ministry said.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit back after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the UN General Assembly podium to accuse him of supporting Hamas and making Jewish New Yorkers “feel unsafe” — remarks that came after delegates from scores of countries walked out of the chamber to protest against the far-right fugitive’s presence.

Refuting allegations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — where Israeli forces have killed more than 75,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,500 children, since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023 — Netanyahu said: “To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you.”

“Mr Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” the prime minister claimed. “It’s no wonder … You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Pezeshkian speaks from the heart, but with legal, moral and strategic clarity
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

“And that’s exactly what Mr Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.”

Mamdani issued a statement later saying: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide of Palestinians.

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are accused of murder and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, but Israel assassinated them.

Third country arrest
While neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute governing the ICC, the treaty states that people from nonsignatory states who commit alleged crimes in states that are party to the treaty — as Palestine is — can be arrested in third countries and subsequently tried by the court.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Abbas and Netanyahu address the UNGA     Video: Al Jazeera

Mamdani has said that Netanyahu should be arrested and brought before the Hague-based tribunal for trial, but that he lacks the legal authority to apprehend the prime minister in New York.

The International Court of Justice — also located in The Hague, Netherlands — is currently processing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

The case is based on what the ICJ called the “plausibility” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The court has issued a series of provisional orders for Israel to adhere to the Genocide Convention — orders that critics say Israel has simply ignored.

Last year, an independent UN commission of inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a conclusion shared by the International Association of Genocide Scholars and other experts, including many Israeli and diaspora Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others.

As Netanyahu prepared to deliver his UN speech on Thursday, delegates from a reported 77 nations walked out of the chamber in protest.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall — please do so now,” the prime minister said. “Thank you very much.”

While some observers applauded the display of solidarity with Palestinians, others expressed disgust that Netanyahu was allowed to address the world body and that he has not yet been brought to justice.

War criminal Netanyahu has completely isolated Israel at the world stage – When he came today to UN General Assembly podium to speak, there was mass walkout and he was booed. Shamelessly, he called them ‘moral cowards’! pic.twitter.com/w5Oo78SeJv

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) September 24, 2026

UN failure to stop genocidal war
“The head of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime, a fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, was allowed to enter the US and to address the UNGA today, without arrest,” said Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in protest of what he described as the world body’s failure to stop Israel’s genocidal war.

“Netanyahu insulted delegations, openly celebrated the regime’s many crimes, bragged about its terrorist pager attacks on Lebanon, repeated the regime’s debunked genocide propaganda, defended the illegal occupation of Palestine and Syria, lied incessantly, called violent, racist, illegal Zionist settlers ‘peaceful’ and ‘honorable people,’ labeled human rights defenders as ‘antisemites,’ even arrogantly attacked American citizens and officials for speaking out against the regime’s crimes,” he continued.

“This violent psychopath cannot hide behind [US President Donald] Trump’s skirts forever,” Mokhiber added. “He (and his collaborators) must be captured and brought to justice. And the UN must finally act to isolate the regime and hold it accountable. ”

Referring to Netanyahu’s address and Trump’s threat on Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran during his rambling, lie-laden General Assembly speech, University of Colorado Law School associate professor Maryam Jamshidi said on social media, “Between Trump threatening Iran w/annihilation and Netanyahu bragging about Israel’s pager attacks, the UN podium has become a venue for promoting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Meanwhile, people took to the streets of New York to protest Netanyahu’s presence in the city, US complicity in Israeli crimes, and to show solidarity with Palestinians.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside UN headquarters in Turtle Bay for a sit-in demonstration led by Jewish Voice for Peace. Demonstrators blocked roads while chanting slogans including, “Netanyahu you can’t hide, you are wanted for genocide!”

As Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday, more than 100 demonstrators were arrested.

Among those reportedly arrested were progressive congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier; actors Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, and Cynthia Nixon; New York state Assemblymember Emily Gallagher (D-50); Democratic New York City Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés; former Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; and Palestinian American political activist Linda Sarsour.

“I will never, ever be silent,” Sarsour said on Facebook. “I will never just accept the world as it is. I want history to record for future generations of Palestinians that we fought. At every turn. In every way. When it was easy and when it was hard.”

“I want Palestinian girls in Gaza to see me in my hijab and my unapologetic Palestinian blood fighting for them to live FREE,” she added. “This is bigger than all of us. Netanyahu is a war criminal and belongs in The Hague, not the United Nations.”

Netanyahu faces a general election in Israel on October 27.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished from Common Dreams on a Creative Commons licence.

Thousands took part in today’s Greenpeace-led March for Nature in the heart of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Tāmaki Makaurau.

Critics of the coalition government’s controversial proposed Conservation Amendment Bill say this would allow selling off of conservation land, weaken environmental protections, and put short-term profit ahead of people and endanger the future of the planet.

“If Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” said Greenpeace Aotearoa executive director Dr Russel Norman, a former Green Party MP.

“This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Organisers of the rally — partnered by Forest and Bird — in Albert Park followed by a march down Queen Street say 35,000 people took part.

Placards and banners declared “Honour Te Tiriti [of Waitangi],”More hoot, less loot,” “Hands off conservation land”, “You can’t rehabilitate exploited land”, and “I’m $hane . . . bribe me!” in apparent reference to an unpopular minister.

Plenty of Palestinian flags were among the marchers. This rally coincided with the 155th consecutive week of protest over Israel’s genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

• Photographs: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
  
• More images/videos

Greenpeace March for Nature

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“If Luxon wants a fight over conservation land, he has one,” he said. “This huge turnout today shows people are not prepared to stand by, while a government tries to rewrite conservation law to make those places easier to exploit.”

Greenpeace was supported at the march by Forest and Bird.

“The message to every political party from the people of New Zealand is clear — if you stand up for nature, we will stand with you, but if you sell off our conservation land, weaken environmental protections or put short-term profit ahead of our future, we will not stand by and let it happen,” said Forest & Bird policy and advocacy group manager Richard Capie.

Greenpeace claimed about 35,000 people attended the protest, although police reported a maximum of 6000, with no incidents resulting.

This story was first published on

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York joined by Democracy Now! cohost Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy, and welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us by the end of the decade.” That was the warning last week from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon that set off an escalating debate over how to regulate increasingly powerful AI systems.

• READ MORE: AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace
• Other AI reports

Coxon spoke to the BBC:

COXON: So it’s not at all an exaggeration to say that the people who were involved with both founding these companies and building the tech believe there is a possibility of human extinction.

And many of the people who are sort of deep in the weeds on actually coding the thing believe that there is like a greater than 10pc chance or even greater – some smaller, but they all have different numbers – for a probability that humans might die.

And they all keep this in their head on a daily basis while working on the technology.

AMY GOODMAN: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei also called for the pace of development of artificial intelligence models to slow down. In an essay, he wrote that within six to 12 months a swarm of AI agents could be capable of taking over the entire internet and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

He wrote, “The scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.” But President Trump has rejected growing calls for placing regulatory guardrails on the AI industry and has called concerns over AI a “hoax”.

On Monday, Trump called Jensen Huang, the CEO of the computer chip maker Nvidia, while Huang was speaking at an AI summit in Los Angeles. Huang put the president on speakerphone.

PRES. TRUMP: The data centers are great and they make people wealthy and they make states wealthy and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It’s bigger than the Internet.

And the AI, you know, much more so. And they are just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen.

And that could be political people; it could also be China. And we’re not going to let that happen. It’s a hoax. And [crosstalk]—

JENSEN HUANG [laughs] You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir.

AUDIENCE: [applause]

PRES. TRUMP: No, we’re not going to let it happen. The robots are not going to be taking over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: As the debate over AI intensifies, the award-winning journalists and writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have a new book out today that is connected to all of this. It is titled End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

It examines how wealthy elites, including tech CEOs, are preparing for the end of the world even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability, wars and the climate crisis. They will join us in a minute but first, here is a short excerpt from a video that was released with the book.

ASTRA TAYLOR: End-times fascism is not a monolith. It’s a dangerous and fractious alliance of three main groups.

NARRATOR: Religious end-timers.

ROBERT JEFFRESS: From the very beginning it has been clear that god has a special plan and purpose for the nation of Israel.

NARRATOR: Tech end-timers.

SAM ALTMAN: You know, I think AI will probably like most likely sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime there will be great companies created.

NARRATOR: Ethnonationalist end-timers.

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: America is fighting with Israel for a common goal – to protect our future, to protect civilisation against these barbarians.

PERSON: That was a good take right there.

PERSON: Seig fucking Heil, let’s fucking go!

PERSON: You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

PERSON: Uh—

PERSON: You’re hesitant.

PERSON: Yeah, well, I—

PERSON: End-times fascists haven’t just given up on liberal democracy. They’ve given up on the possibility of a shared future for all of us.

PERSON: The most powerful people in the world –

PERSON: – are preparing for the end of the world –

PERSON:  – an end they themselves are both accelerating –

PERSON: – and profiting from.

ELON MUSK: [laughs]

PERSON: We have imagined Armageddon so many times it can almost feel inevitable. Except it’s not. So, which side are you on?

PERSON: The side of bunkering down, abandoning Earth and profiting from apocalypse? Or staying loyal to this planet and its people—

PERSON: Who are you aligned with? Who are you protecting?

PERSON: – and making life here better?

‘End Times Fascism’      Video: Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: A short video released in conjunction with the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World written by our guests in studio for the hour.

Naomi Klein, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, best-selling author of a number of books including Doppelganger and No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein is also an associate professor and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist and documentary filmmaker, the co-founder of the Debt Collective and author of several books including The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart and The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.

Thanks so much for spending the hour with us. Naomi, start off with a title, start off with End Times Fascism, why you chose this.

NAOMI KLEIN: First of all, thank you for having us here, Amy. It’s great to be launching the book on Democracy Now! It just came out this morning, as you said. And I think we have a long tradition of launching books together. We decided to call it End Times Fascism because we are trying to understand what is the same and what is different about our moment of far-right extremism.

We know that far-right parties with lineages to the fascists of the 20th century are rising to power around the world. We just saw a fateful election in a German state, the first time the far right has won an election since the Second World War. We’re seeing very disturbing polls in France, for instance.

And we’re seeing more and more open fascist expressions in the United States from very powerful people in government and in tech.

But we don’t believe that this is simply a rerun. We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop. We believe that we’re in something more like a sequel where the logics of fascism, which are the logics of dehumanisation, of othering, of racial supremacy and hierarchy, are now being applied in a time of global existential crisis. This is not news to Democracy Now! listeners and viewers that we live in a time of a climate breakdown and collapse.

We have tools like nuclear weapons, that were not known to Hitler and Mussolini, that have the ability to inflict apocalyptic levels of violence that were beyond their reach.

Fascism always emerges during times of systemic crises, and it actually emerges as a way to protect capitalism from systemic change. So if we think about 20th century fascism in Europe after the First World War, there was a rising socialist response to the wreckage of the First World War and then to the Great Depression.

And fascism rises up — we call it “capitalism threat response” or “capitalism with bared teeth” — to make sure all of that popular public anger is pivoted toward the scapegoat. In our time, as we see these global crises — that could lead to systemic change or there can be this what we are calling “end times fascist” response that says, “let it burn,” and now it’s a fight for who’s going to survive the future.

Now it’s about building — as you saw in that film that we were fortunate to work with a great team of filmmakers on — it’s about building the bunkers and the rocket ships and the escape hatches. For religious end-timers, it’s literally about the bunker in the sky; it’s about the idea of the rapture.

But that is almost like a template for these more secular stories that are also a kind of a rapture, but we call it in the book a “wealth rapture”. If you’ve got resources, you can rapture yourself away from the impacts of those threats that we are all in. So that’s why we call it End Times Fascism. It hasn’t won yet.

The reason we wrote the book is because people are fighting back. And we think if we are able to look at this very frightening reality with clear eyes, the more it is exposed to the light, the less popular it is because in fact those people cherish our one and only home and want to stay and want to make it better.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, how is this different, for example, if in the 1950s and 1960s when at the height of the Cold War there were Americans, especially upper-class Americans, building bomb shelters, convinced that there was going to be a nuclear war, and the rest of the population eventually began to organise in an anti-nuclear movement that peaked in the 1980s and that led really to capitalism being forced to restrain itself to some degree in terms of arms control treaties?

Why is this different than back then?

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, Juan, I guess it’s different because the people we’re calling end-times fascists are systematically dismantling that precise international infrastructure. One of the things that all those three factions all agree on — whether it’s the religious fundamentalists, the tech extremists that we heard from in that video, or the ethnonationalists — they don’t agree on everything but they all agree they want to get rid of the United Nations.

They all believe that that is the sort of antichrist of their story. Sometimes they literally call it the antichrist. And that chapter that you are describing, which we write about in the book, Juan — and I would actually love to bring Astra into the conversation because she went pretty deep into this research on the history of bunkering in the United States and how people shifted the tide, because we actually think that’s a really inspiring story that we need to know better.

Can I bring in Astra, my incredible co-author?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Sure.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Thank you so much. Again, thanks for having us. Yeah, it is — very quickly, in the 1950s, the government policy was to encourage people to build their own bomb shelters in their backyard, and that was the response to the nuclear threat. Only around 1 percent, 2 percent of households did that, in part because people revolted at the idea of protecting themselves and letting their neighbors perish.

And there was a massive debate in magazines like TIME magazine, LIFE magazine that was around the idea of “gunning thy neighbor”. People said, “We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to be hiding in a hole in the ground with guns pointing outwards and turning the people we care about away.”

That is part of the genesis of the movement for nuclear disarmament. It was ordinary people who put the right solution on the table, which is let’s get rid of nuclear bombs; let’s not turn on each other and bunker down. There’s a lesson in that for today.

NAOMI KLEIN: It’s so interesting because what they understood at the time is like either you bunker — either you just protect you and yours — or you get at the root cause of the crisis and you say, “Actually, we can’t live with these weapons.” Right? It’s just—”It’s too dangerous.”

As you both know, the nuclear disarmament movement had tremendous successes. In many ways, we argue in the book that it was a victim of its own success because many people in the disarmament movement believed that they had won so many victories that now the people in charge were just going to finish the job, because so many thousands of nuclear warheads were successfully disarmed that it seemed like there was a new era.

The majority of the stockpiles were disarmed but not enough, and now there is a rearming and AI is being embedded in the nuclear arsenal. Which is why at the end of the book we call for a triple disarmament movement.

In fact, Juan, we have something that you might be interested in — a new coinage in the book — which is “the Stephen Miller test”. Basically the argument that we’re making is that eventually, the most powerful tools, the most powerful weapons, will meet the worst people in the world, and if you don’t want those tools to find themselves in the hands of Stephen Miller, then the tools should not exist.

That applies to nuclear weapons. It applies to AI. It applies to the wealth concentration itself, which we believe should be now understood as a WMD. That this level of wealth that has accumulated at the top of our economy has itself become a weapon of mass destruction.

And so we need to be disarming the wealth bombs, the tech bombs, and of course, the bomb-bombs. Because we are now seeing that these very dangerous, completely immoral people who seem to have such a casual attitude — and we see this from Donald Trump’s most recent post, just a kind of shrug in the face of apocalypse — they will find — they exert a magnetic pull towards one another.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to follow-up and ask either one of you if you want to answer this, because I did read the book in the last couple of days and really found it to be tremendously well written. At the same time, though, there were some concerns I had. For instance, there is very little mention of the rise of a multipolar world, of how the rise of East Asia, especially, the shift of the world’s industrial working class to China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, along with Brazil and Mexico — in the view of many, that is the single biggest impediment to US economic dominance, of the capitalist markets’ expansion.

And that’s also the biggest threat that many of these end-timers, as you label them, are concerned about. They are concerned about China, yet China and its impact on US hegemony and capitalism is not mentioned at all in the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think that the threat of China is really, really central to the unimpeded AI rollout. It’s really the only argument they have. We do write about that in the book, but you’re right, it’s not the central focus of the book. We are more focused on the United States and the way in particular this is being pushed through Latin America, because we think there — and Europe.

But the threat of the multipolar world I do think is central, because the only argument that Donald Trump really has in the face of the threats that are now being articulated from inside the house, from inside the companies, is “But China, but China; if we don’t build it, they will.”

It’s completely untrue that deregulated AI has to be built the way it’s being built or else China will build it. China is much more open to regulating these technologies, to rules within the multilateral system. It’s the US that has been blowing up these agreements.

And when the Doomsday Clock was reset this year, it was a really — I mean, it’s always pretty harrowing, but this year it was particularly so; they moved it forward four seconds — and described not just the threats, whether it was biological weapons, nuclear weapons, AI, but the way the US government under Donald Trump was going after all of the international agreements that governments like China had been a party to, and just saying, “We don’t need them.”

So I think it’s the tools and the dismantling of any attempt to constrain those tools.

ASTRA TAYLOR: It’s also about the narrative that the people in power are telling themselves. We’re tracking how there’s a certain embrace of apocalyptic narrative, of Armageddon, of the end times, that doesn’t — every government in the world doesn’t have that narrative, right? It’s something that’s very powerful in certain branches of the United States political class, in Israel, in parts of Latin America.

We’re not saying that it applies to every country around the entire world, and so that’s one reason that that isn’t — there are some very powerful international players that aren’t central to the thesis.

AMY GOODMAN: Astra and Naomi, you write about Peter Thiel, saying, “Today a staggering number of his former colleagues and acolytes occupy powerful positions in every part of the Trump Administration. The most consequential of them is JD Vance.” If you can explain, who is Peter Thiel? What does it mean to have his inner circle populating the inner circle of the United States?

And talk about all of these figures that are so much in the news now, that were standing behind President Trump during his inauguration, people who were opposed to him before, who took him off their platforms. We are talking about people like Jeff Bezos, people like Mark Zuckerberg and others.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yes. Peter Thiel is a powerful billionaire and venture capitalist who has been in Silicon Valley for a long time. He is part of the PayPal mafia so he founded PayPal with David Sacks, who was Trump’s former AI and crypto czar. And also Elon Musk, of course, who is now the president of SpaceX; everybody will know him.

Peter Thiel is quite interesting because he has been on the far right very proudly for a long time since he was an undergraduate at Stanford when he and David Sacks actually wrote a book against political correctness. And he has been on the vanguard of being very much against democracy, very — quasi-libertarian but now just explicitly authoritarian — and has written things like “Democracy and freedom are incompatible.”

He was one of the first figures in Silicon Valley to come out for Trump in 2015.

And as we write in the book and, as you said, many of his protégés are now in positions of power and the most influential one is JD Vance. JD Vance has written about how his life changed when he saw Peter Thiel give a lecture. This lecture inspired Vance to go to Silicon Valley to become a venture capitalist — not a very illustrious one — and that’s where he met critical figures who would fund his political rise, including Thiel who gave what was a record-breaking donation of $15 million and kind of launched and made possible Vance’s bid to become a senator of Ohio.

And it was Peter Thiel who also brokered the meeting at Mar-a-Lago where Vance was able to apologise for calling Donald Trump “Hitler”. So Vance is of course one of those figures who used to be opposed —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that? That Vance said —

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, Vance was once — he was once for green energy. He was against Donald Trump who he said misleads people and offers empty promises like building a wall which won’t actually improve people’s lives. But he’s also quite an opportunist, and Peter Thiel brokered peace among those two, and now we know Vance as the VP.

J.D. Vance is also critical in our book because he is who helped bring together the AI industry and Donald Trump. We remember from Donald Trump’s first term that he was against Big Tech. He was railing against Big Tech all the time. Thanks to JD Vance who hosted a dinner at David Sacks’ house, Trump got on the AI train. It was a fundraiser but it was also a pitch session.

Vance’s Silicon Valley brethren told Donald Trump that AI would be good for the economy but it would be very good for the fossil fuel sector. And now we see that the Trump administration is all in on AI and not much else.

So when we look at the famous image of the second Trump inauguration and we see all those tech execs given their front seats and they’re lined up, our position is that it was the promise of generative AI eating the economy that actually turned them fascist and caused this incredible alliance with the Trump regime that we’re seeing.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, that alliance has served them incredibly well. It has produced the first trillionaire. It has produced companies that are claiming valuations roughly equivalent to the entire US economy. And what they wanted from Donald Trump was exactly what they got: a frontier.

You hear this phrase used all the time now — ”frontier AI” — but if you think about what a frontier is, a frontier is a Wild West. It has no rules. And what they were upset about under the last administration was that there were some, you know, not radical, very simple rules like you have to label deepfakes, guardrails against precisely the scenarios that they are now talking about in terms of integration with weapons systems, and the prospect of a rogue AI.

So all of this was on the table years ago. There were discussions at the United Nations.

It’s interesting that they’re always using China as the bogeyman of why they have to roll out AI without rules. China has many more rules regulating AI than the United States has,
including rules around not allowing children to have these like personal relationships with AI where there’s confusion about whether or not you are talking to a friend or a robot or a therapist or whatever it is.

First of all, that’s a lie, and that’s just the fact that people are not educated about what China is doing that is allowing people to fall for this line of, like, “Oh, no, if we don’t do it, China will.” They just simply don’t know how China is regulating this.

But one of the things I’ve been thinking about is — and we have to be aware of how active this push was for the frontier, because now of course these CEOs are all coming forward and saying “Please regulate us, we’ll regulate ourselves, we know we need to be regulated,” as if they weren’t the ones who not only demanded this Wild West frontier but bankrolled it and created the strategic alliance with Donald Trump so that he would deliver it to them.

And now they’re realising, “OK, maybe we’ve gone too far and have to look more credible.” And Donald Trump is going, “No way.”

Why is he saying, “No way”? Because he has tanked the entire US economy and the only thing he has going for him is the AI stock bubble, and he’s terrified of this bubble bursting all over him before the midterm elections or before the next presidential.

He also is very invested in it personally. He’s richer than he has ever been because of the rampant corruption of this administration, the money he has made from crypto but also many different ways that he and his family are invested in AI.

So that’s why he’s doing these frantic things like calling Jensen Huang on stage to say, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to do anything.”

But if you’ll allow me, I was really struck because there’s this myth that — these sort of parables of the technology slipping out of the hands of the men who built it, right? The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein. Creating a monster right?

That’s the myth that they’re all telling. “Oh no, we’ve created this powerful monster. It’s out of our hands and now it’s going to destroy us.” I would argue that that myth really is coming true but the monster is not AI; it’s Donald Trump.

They created Donald Trump, he is their monster, he’s out of control and he just won’t stop. And they’re like, “Wait a minute, maybe it is going too fast.”

[MUSIC BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. We are spending the hour with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. I want to go back to the video that was released in conjunction with the book.

NAOMI KLEIN: On a mountaintop in the dead of winter, a group of faithful men gathered an audience to share their vision. They had seen a gleaming city bathed in golden light.

The city would be filled with buildings so beautiful they would seem to float above the earth as if descended from heaven. Their vision already had a name.

PERSON: New Gaza.

JARED KUSHNER: So, we’ll see if these things work. They never usually work.

NAOMI KLEIN: The mountaintop in question was the resort town of Davos. The faithful men presenting their vision were US real estate moguls Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, this is a very exciting day. See, I’m a real estate person at heart and it’s all about location. Look at this beautiful piece of property.

PERSON: Let’s just plan for catastrophic success.

NAOMI KLEIN: Out of the horrors of a live-streamed genocide, an exclusive paradise was about to emerge fully formed.

PERSON: We’ve already started removing the rubble and doing some of the demolition.

AMY GOODMAN: Part of the video that was released with the book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World. It is by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. I want to talk about Gaza right now. We are coming off — in Venice right now you have two Israeli filmmakers, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, who just came out with a film called NAZA and now members of the Israeli government are threatening to take away their citizenship, and it was based on the commentary of high-level Israeli officials, unnamed, talking about the killing in Gaza deliberately. Naomi Klein?

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, and the use of AI to do so. I actually haven’t seen the film. I’m definitely looking to see it. But it underlines what we already know thanks to Palestinian journalists at huge personal cost in the documenting of a livestream genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Over 250 of them killed in this last two years.

NAOMI KLEIN: And as we say in the film, this is the story that the Trump administration is telling, is that out of apocalypse there will be this paradise. There will be what they are calling “New Gaza”. We begin the book with it because it is such an extreme distillation of the story.

And I believe it’s the most dangerous story ever told. It’s a biblical story. It’s deeply encoded in our culture whether we’re religious or not. And the story is first comes the flood, first comes the apocalypse, first comes the mass death — and out of the mass death, the great cleansing, the fury of god, comes the golden city, the paradise, for the chosen few.

That story, which — it’s the story of the flood and the ark; it’s told in its most violent form in the book of Revelation — for people who believe in it literally, it has confused the difference between bad and good. It has kind of flipped the switch, where when we see the things in our world that should be warning us, telling us we need to act, we are in a time of crisis, it is an emergency — whether it’s climate disasters, whether it’s covid, that things are breaking down — that what is seen instead are signs.

“Oh, no, what it means is that we’re entering the end times.” And while that may be bad for many people, it’s actually very good for the chosen few.

That’s why we started with this myth of New Gza . . . there is no paradise that is coming out of the apocalypse in Gaza but that is the story that the Trump administration is telling. It’s a privatized paradise that they’re proposing to build. They are using this kind of biblical narrative but of course it’s all for profit because it’s the Trump administration. They want to build luxury condominiums over a mass grave. And you saw there that it’s a literal story.

We do think that the Board of Peace is significant in the sort of evolution of the privatisation of the state, the fact that the Trump Administration is not just attacking the United Nations and defunding the United Nations but trying to replace the United Nations with something called the Board of Peace, which Trump would be head of for life, that they would control — they would give themselves immunity.

This is part of what we mean by bunkering, by escaping. It’s like they see the state as a mine site. They see the United States as a place that they can extract from. Not just extract wealth and resources — and we’re watching them do that — but also extract other things that matter to them, like legal immunity. Right? I mean, the Board of Peace gives them that.

So that’s why we start with that. And it brings together these different parts of the coalition. Because there are religious extremists, both Christian Zionists and messianic Jews, who really do believe that Gaza, Iran — mean that the Messiah is coming. Like the more violent, the better.

And you’ve covered on the show officers in the US military lodging complaints that their officers are telling them that they should welcome apocalyptic levels of violence in Iran because it means that Jesus is returning.

But it’s not just the religious extremists. It’s also the secular versions of the story. We don’t think Trump believes in the biblical version of this story, but we do believe he believes in a kind of a wealth rapture. And when you see those AI-generated images of new Gaza and Trump sharing them, you can see how these stories have distorted his brain.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the little time we have left, I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the resistance movements, the people’s movements against this growing fascism, and also perhaps deal with some of the critiques of let’s say of Marxists like John Bellamy Foster, who basically insists that the fascist movement in the United States, the mass base of it is really the middle class, those people driven out by the Walmarts and the Targets from small businesses, and franchisees and others who have been driven down by the growth of these top-end monopoly capitalists and who have now turned to a fascist movement for their salvation.

ASTRA TAYLOR: To answer the second part first, fascism is always a movement of the injured powerful. It is a movement that creates vertical solidarity between political and corporate elites and people who are not the worst off but feel that they’ve lost status and directs their sense of insecurity downwards further towards vulnerable scapegoats — towards immigrants, towards trans kids, towards feminists — instead of upwards at the oligarchs and the politicians.

So that’s how we understand Elon Musk buying X or what was Twitter, right, is that it was a way for him to control a media ecosystem and help direct that rage downwards at the left and at the vulnerable instead of letting it be harnessed towards people like him.

So I think that that’s right, if fascism creates what we call a vertical solidarity to protect capitalism, to protect the status quo. That’s certainly true of fascism in the past and it’s certainly true today.

What we have to do to build the resistance is create that horizontal solidarity, to not scapegoat the vulnerable, to build our own coalition and find our own unusual bedfellows. I think you see that in the resistance to fascism that’s growing in the United States and around the world.

One thing — Naomi said this — the people we’re tracking — end-times fascism is not a coherent ideology necessarily. It’s not a monolith. It’s a fractious alliance of these three groups: the religious end timers, the tech accelerationists, the ethnonationalists.

But what they have in common is this sense that things are going to be increasingly unstable. We say that they’re both building their arks and they’re causing the floods. They’re accelerating collapse. They’ve decided to just bring it on and abandon this shared world in their various fantasies about bunker nation or ascending to heaven or the digital class.

So the resistance fundamentally needs to be grounded in a desire to stay here on Earth, to commit to this place. We describe them at one point in the book as traitors to creation. And we don’t use that word “traitors” lightly. We are saying they’re not traitors to the flag or the nation but actually to life on Earth, to our shared humanity, our shared planet.

And I think we see that commitment to what we call “hereness” in the book in the movement against data centers that is sweeping the nation, in the resistance to ICE where people are saying, “No, I’m going to defend my community, defend my neighbors” and people standing up and fighting for labour rights, which fascists are always attacking.

Fighting for the environment, fighting against detention centers.

And so we see the resistance growing all over the world, but I think that the data center revolt is the main one for us because it really draws new lines and shows people — is bringing people together who a year ago or a couple of years ago might have been fighting over culture war issues.

Now they’re saying, “Well, actually, we have a lot in common because there’s a class of people who actually want to replace us with robots. Maybe we should be on the side of humanity against the machines.”

NAOMI KLEIN: Including those small business people, Juan, who you were referring to. This is why it really is an opportunity to form those new alliances. Because Donald Trump has betrayed many of the people who did vote for him the first time. The trouble, of course, is that many powerful Democrats are also taking money from the large tech companies and so are not willing to harvest what has been called by a comedian in I believe it was Madison — ”the most bipartisan issue since beer” is the opposition to these tech companies.

But in order to gain political advantage from that huge bipartisan issue, you have to be willing to go against your donors or not take their money in the first place.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Naomi, the business model of these AI fascists, if they were to be able to prevail, throw millions of people out of work, how will they make their money? Because obviously Henry Ford, back in the days of the early monopoly capitalism, believed you had to give workers a living wage so they could consume the products that you produced.

NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I’m not sure it’s all that thought through. I think that they think they’re mainly going to be selling products to other businesses in the short term. But this is why, Juan, it is a bubble, and it is a process of extraction, and the bubble is rigged to explode all over working people and their pensions right now.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Yeah, I think they also think that they’ll make a lot of money hooking up with the government and the military. There is a quote from Alex Karp — who is a colleague of Peter Thiel, CEO of Palantir — and he said — we quote him in the book saying, “If these tech companies think they’re going to take everybody’s jobs and then not work with the military, they are” — I’m going to change what he said and say — ”they are foolish.”

What he’s saying is essentially if you’re planning to build a technology that causes a job apocalypse, you are also going to have to align with the state and help build the mechanisms to police and control and contain the masses of dispossessed human beings.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to end with the end of your book: “We didn’t choose to be born into a fight quite so fateful but we have reached a choice point. We can either follow end-times fascists into oblivion or we can commit to building the unruly, boundary-crossing movement they so deeply fear, one that wrests away their weapons, holds them accountable for their crimes, and defends the paradise of here.”

Those are the words of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the new book out this week, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

The original content of this programme and article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

ANALYSIS: By Ralph Nader

In his rambling and incoherent remarks for nearly two hours over two nights before a knee-jerk crowd in Dallas last week, Trump provided ample evidence that he is a dangerously unstable, delusional, egomaniacal, and megalomaniacal personality.

He pushed for this unusual midterm GOP convention to shore up his dwindling faithful followers and get out the votes in what is likely to be a losing midterm election for Republicans in the House and maybe the Senate on November 3, 2026.

That is, if Trump fails to steal the election, as a 22 single-spaced-page account published by the Washington Spectator documented in alarming detail (see Dancing in the Dark, Part 4 by Mark Medish and Joel McCleary).

• READ MORE:  US Supreme Court rejects Trump mail ballot restrictions ahead of midterms
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CNN reported that Trump brazenly urged his followers “to ‘cheat like hell’ to help Republicans keep control of Congress… and asked supporters to treat November’s elections as if he were on the ballot”.

Trump certainly lied like hell as he repeated again and again his standard lies about the Trump economy and the United States’ standing in the world.

He lied about the number of illegal aliens entering the US and the crimes they have committed during the Democratic administration.

He lied about “bringing food prices and almost every other item rapidly coming down,” … “no tax on Social Security,” “the US is producing more oil and gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined,” “sixty-five billion barrels [of oil] in Venezuela are ours,” “raking in trillions of dollars in tariffs” “making [America] richer than we ever thought,” “we now pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs,” labeled the Democrats “communists” when he extorted companies to give the federal government part ownership as he courts and praises two communist dictators — Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.

Unfunded fake promises
Then there are the legally questionable and unfunded fake promises to give every adult $5000 if the GOP wins Congress in November.

He boasts of having the greatest military in the world as he approves the firing of seasoned, experienced generals and admirals who might question the sanity of his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who calls himself “a warrior of God in the service of Jesus Christ,” while running out of ammunition in the service of Israel’s mass murdering genocide of Gaza’s civilian children, mothers, and fathers.

Trump lied about named Democratic politicians and wildly praised Ken Paxton as the greatest state attorney-general in history. Paxton is a crook, having been impeached by his own party in the state House, but was acquitted by the Senate.

Conviction on any article required a two-thirds vote — 21 of the 30 eligible senators. Paxton escaped conviction by seven votes.

Trump viciously exaggerated Joe Biden’s physical mobility and mental condition and falsely claimed the Biden administration wrecked America in all ways. This is the same polite Joe Biden who transferred power in the White House on January 20, 2025, greeting Trump with “Welcome Home”.

Because Biden backed the same genocidal Netanyahu, Trump avoids accurately accusing Biden of aiding and abetting genocide. Tyrant Trump has continued providing powerful weapons and unconditional political backing.

Trump’s practice is to mix lavish praise for loyalists by name while assailing opponents with scurrilous libels, including two Senate Democratic candidates, Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Abdul El-Sayed (typically mocking his last name) of Michigan.

Zig zag displays on Newsmax
On frantic zig zag displays at his podium, faithfully played on Newsmax — the very biased and often slanderous channel built for Trumpism — were vivid demonstrations of his megalomania and egomania.

Trump told the crowd on September 9, 2026, that “everybody loves me, and I love everybody.” The following evening, he asked supporters to raise their right hands and recite a pledge to “the greatest president in the history of the United States” — a reference to himself.

Perhaps these are his greatest lies, as he wrecks the lives of the poor, federal civil servants, firefighters, scientists, the sick and injured who needed insurance and benefits, and key protective and nurturing programmes for children in both Red and Blue states and overseas in Africa and Asia.

For some reason needing psychiatric explanation, he hates and undermines wind power and solar energy, while embracing oil and gas, “clean, beautiful coal” to worsen global omnicidal warming.

With his polls plunging and his postings on his misnamed “Truth Social” further bolstering the assessment of his worsening mental stability by 30 credentialed mental health professionals — both Democrats and Republicans (see April 30, 2026 of Congressional Record), Trump is running out of words like “lunatics,” “fanatics,” and “maniacs” to tarnish his critics with descriptions that apply to his own zany, lying, corrupt, violent, treacherous, law-violating, vengeful, obsessive, reality-faking daily impeachable behaviors.

His endless self-naming mania went viral with his planting American flags on a map covering Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Iceland, Cuba and Jamaica.

The man, with his finger on the nuclear trigger, who calls violent climate intensities “a hoax” and scoffs at scientists’ warning of coming pandemics, is openly and proudly out of control.

It is time to fire Duplicitous Doubling-down Donald.

Ponder why the Democratic Party is befuddled without a coherent way of responding to “crazy Donald” or a coherent, authentic pledge to the American people about what they intend to do for and with them should they regain control of Congress and the Presidency.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (2012). His new book is, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All (2020, co-authored with Mark Green). Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori has begun with an election promise from the Green Party to invest an additional $200 million in the language over four years.

Of that, $30 million annually would go towards te reo Māori education and professional development for teachers, while $20 million would be shared between Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori and Te Mātāwai.

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said sustained investment was needed for te reo Māori to flourish in homes, schools and communities.

• READ MORE: Other te reo Māori reports

“Te reo Māori is a taonga. The Green Party will proudly fund te reo Māori initiatives to thrive for generations to come,” she said.

“Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori is a time to celebrate our reo, acknowledge the generations of people who got our reo to where it is now, and advocate for the future of our reo.”

The Greens said the teacher-training funding would be used to develop programmes with schools and communities, following the end of Te Ahu o te Reo Māori.

That programme provided free te reo Māori learning to the education workforce and received $108 million between 2021 and 2024 as part of a wider $120 million package of language initiatives. Its funding was redirected by the coalition government in 2024.

16,000 participants
An independent evaluation found Te Ahu o te Reo Māori improved participants’ language capability, confidence and use of te reo in education settings. More than 16,000 people participated in the programme.

The government has since launched Te Ataarangi, a digital te reo Māori professional-development programme intended to reach 50,000 teachers. Education Minister Erica Stanford said in February that the programme would provide practical, self-paced language support from Term 2 this year.

Davidson accused the government of failing to adequately fund community language revitalisation and waging a “culture war” against the use of te reo Māori.

“Our reo must be treasured, and the Green Party will make sure that it is,” she said.

Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka dismissed the Greens’ announcement as “an election promise to spend more money”.

“Our government’s focus is on achieving results, more people speaking te reo Māori, more often and in more places,” he said.

Potaka said Te Taura Whiri, Te Mātāwai, Te Puni Kōkiri and Manatū Taonga were funded to undertake their existing roles and work programmes, but the government had no additional funding to announce.

Government ‘strategic reset’
He also confirmed the refreshed Maihi Karauna, the Crown’s Māori language revitalisation strategy, was a “strategic reset” rather than a new Budget initiative.

Potaka said the strategy retained the Crown’s long-term reo Māori goals to 2040 and would be followed by a coordinated action plan intended to make better use of existing investment.

He rejected Davidson’s allegation that the government had waged a “culture war” against te reo Māori, pointing to its investment in Māori media and kapa haka.

“We can have a legitimate debate about how public money is best invested without questioning anyone’s commitment to te reo Māori,” Potaka said.

“What matters is whether that investment produces lasting growth in the number of people learning, speaking and using the language.”

Education Minister Erica Stanford has also been asked for comment.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News

A national pro-Palestine advocacy group has criticised the “absence of signature” by the New Zealand government on a 22-member joint statement condemning the E1 Israeli settlement in the Occupied West Bank as a “moral collapse” in foreign policy.

The recent joint statement was issued by the foreign ministers of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Commission.

The statement condemned the decision by the Israeli Higher Planning Committee to approve plans for settlement construction in the E1 area, East of Jerusalem, as “unacceptable and a violation of international law”.

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The E1 settlement would divide the Occupied West Bank into two regions — northern and southern — and seriously damage the prospect of a Palestine state.

However, the status of New Zealand’s position on the joint protest was confusing with an Australian government statement not listing New Zealand while the UK version did.

RNZ National reports that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had condemned Israel’s E1 settlement plan in spite of New Zealand “not signing a joint statement”.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) spokesperson Rinad Tamimi condemned the New Zealand’s government’s “absence from the statement” in the context of the specific citing of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, describing the settlements as a “flagrant breach of international law.”

“The Key/English National Party government co-sponsored this resolution at the UN Security Council in 2016,” she said in a statement.

Israel’s E1 Settlement Plan Sparks International Condemnation   Video: Al Jazeera

“But the Luxon National Party, even after the genocide in Gaza in the past three years, can’t even bother to put its name to this recent condemnation,” Tamimi said.

Israel’s ‘favourable note’ on NZ
“In the nuanced world of international diplomacy, Israel will be taking favourable note of New Zealand’s slide into not caring what atrocities Israel is committing.

“Without taking any other action, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has always made of point of saying he often ‘made his concerns known’ to Israel. Now he’s even given up on that.”

Tamimi also criticised the lack of specific policies by New Zealand’s political parties to support Palestine in their election manifestos.

However, Te Pāti Māori publicly presented a strong 10-point pro-Palestine policy platform by co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer at a PSNA “make genocide an election issue” rally in Auckland on Saturday. Labour Party and Green Party spokespeople also made key statements over Palestine at the rally.

Tamimi said Israel’s genocide in Gaza was the worst atrocity of the 21st century.

“While there is meant to be a functioning ceasefire, the latest news from Gaza is that Israel has reoccupied more than 70 percent of Gaza, Israeli forces have resumed their assault because children in Gaza were flying kites,” she said in the statement.

“And on the Occupied West Bank Israeli settlers are openly beating up foreign network journalists with impunity.”

Practical, significant leverage
She said New Zealand had practical and significant symbolic leverage against Israel which it had “deliberately decided not to use”.

“As you would expect, all three coalition parties, pretend there is no such thing as foreign policy.”

“Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori have expressed support for Palestine, including imposing sanctions.

“But they need to clearly state what type and level of sanctions. Even the present government can say its immigration bans on West Bank terrorist settlers constitutes a sanction.

Tamimi said it was just “election rhetoric”, without announcing specific and meaningful sanctions in all areas — trade, investment, diplomatic, military and immigration.

“Without sanctions, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the Greater Israel project, are all still licensed for Israel to action,” she said.

Four opposition party spokespeople today condemned the New Zealand coalition government’s Palestine policies and called on voters to oust it and elect parties pledging “humanitarian” policies.

The spokespeople accused the Christopher Luxon-led government of turning a “blind eye to a full-blown genocide” and being complicit in crimes against humanity.

Speaking at the 152nd consecutive week of pro-Palestine protests in Te Komititanga Square in downtown Auckland, speakers for the fledgling Free Palestine Party, Green Party, Labour Party, Te Pāti Māori and an independent candidate for Mangere, Dr Timoti Te Moke, delivered stinging criticisms of the government to loud cheers and cries of “shame”.

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Organisers invited nine political parties and independent candidates to take part in today’s rally and forum. Only five agreed. But FPP and TPM were unable to attend and sent statements.

“As a party we have marched beside and for our Palestinian whānau, we have pleaded with our government to do more, do better — speeches, written questions, letters,” Te Pāti Māori coleader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said in a statement presented by Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa’s Leeann Wahanui-Peters.

“We called for ceasefires, to sanction Israel, expel the Israeli ambassador, recognise the State of Palestine, pushed for humanitarian pathways, called to end to NZ participation in military occupation.

“But this is no big feat. This should’ve been the norm in the face of such atrocity.”
Ngarewa-Packer’s statement said: “We have watched as the people of Palestine have lost their homes, their land, their whānau — grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, children — whole generations.

‘Experiencing loss after loss’
“Injuries unseen, unprecedented. No food, food blocked. They pick up, rebuild, and are moved again. Experiencing loss after loss.

“We have heard the misleading narratives, we have heard the ceasefires where the fires have not ceased, the ‘war’ references as a blind eye gets turned to a full-blown genocide and not only have we had to witness this overseas, but our own government . . . has refused to take any meaningful action and will always sit complicit in this genocide.

“We as Māori understand too well the effects of colonisation, the shared experience of indigenous across the world and stand in solidarity with our Palestinian whanau.

“We understand the historical context that creates environments where greed becomes more important than lives.”

The statement said the party’s 2026 foreign affairs policy committed Aotearoa to an “independent, militarily neutral foreign policy grounded in peace, mana motuhake, indigenous solidarity and international human rights”.

It also “explicitly commits us to sanctioning states involved in illegal wars and cutting diplomatic relations with governments actively committing war crimes”.

Wahanui-Peters read out a list of 10 commitments, including recognising Palestine and expelling the Israeli ambassador.

‘Free Palestine’ an election issue
PSNA’s Anna Lee read a statement on behalf of the FFP, pointing out that the party “isn’t for voting” but to raise “genocide as an election issue”.

It will provide information over what is going on in Palestine.

The party is committed to contesting parliamentary elections as an independent party and building a mass democratic movement for justice in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.

“We aim to change public opinion and put sustained parliamentary pressure on the New Zealand government to uphold its obligations under international law with respect to Palestine.”

“When [voters] go to the ballot box look for the parties that have made an ethical stand and support for the Palestinians and against the genocide that is happening,” Lee said. “So remember, this is a party, that we do not vote for.”

The Green Party’s Ricardo Menéndez March reminded the Palestine supporters of his party’s long solidarity with the free Palestinian movement.

“From years ago when [co-leader] Marama Davidson joined the Freedom Flotilla towards Gaza, we have taken action in Parliament against the genocide.

Time to sanction Israel
“This is why as we are heading to the election it is very clear. It is time to sanction Israel and it is time to expel the Israeli ambassador.” Loud cheers greeted this statement.

“Anyone who comes from a Muslim majority country will know that when you are applying for a visa, you are more likely to face delays, discrimination and scrutiny on national security grounds.

“Yet people who come from Israel and from the IDF are more likely to have been involved in war crimes, and this has not been rightfully applied

“I myself have called within the Green Party throughout this term to make sure that we have humanitarian visas for Palestinians to be reunited with their families. And this needs to be part of a broader package of humanitarian response to genocide of free passage.”

Phil Twyford, Labour Party MP for Te Atātu, also gave a strong statement on his party’s stance supporting Palestine, saying that foreign affairs spokesperson Vanushi Walters would present “official” policy at Parliament this week.

He said the activist movement supporting Palestine liberation had done an “amazing job” over the last few years, “keeping the issue alive – not just here, but all over New Zealand.

Twyford also acknowledged Menéndez March and the Green Party for “leading on this issue” in Parliament.

‘We acted with courage’
“Our country has done best over the years when we have acted with courage and on principle – and we have done it on multiple occasions. The New Zealand government responded to activists on the anti-apartheid struggle.

“It was a Labour government that responded to the peace movement, which demanded that we go nuclear free. And we did. We led the world.

“It was Helen Clark government that refused to go along with the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. It was the right thing to do.”

Dr Timoci Te Moke, an independent candidate for Māngere, said: “The reason why I have such passion for the people of Palestine is because what’s happening to them happened to my people.

“The destruction of their people happened to my people. The colonisation of the Palestinians happened to my people.”

About the future with the “needed” change of government, Dr Te Moke said: “We need to recognise Palestine and we need to have a Palestinian embassy here. And internationally, we need to kick out [Foreign Minister] Winston Peters and put someone in who will recognise Palestine.”

Twice arrested
During question time with “open mic”, a man spoke who said he had just come from the United Kingdom and he had been twice arrested for his support for the Palestine Action group that had been unjustly proscribed by the British government, and has also just been banned by the US government as well.

The man, Jeremy Watson, said his case was due to come up in court in October “along with 500 other people — they can’t just put us all in jail”.

He urged the New Zealand activists today to carry on their protests. He warned against state efforts, such as in the UK and United States, to “silence speaking out for Palestine” and protect Israel’s genocide.

He said it was pensioners, retired people, invalids and other vulnerable people who were being unjustly arrested for supporting Palestine Action.

Several speakers said how vital it was to hold an incoming new government to their Palestine promises.

The New Zealand general election is on November 7.

What Te Pati Maori Party pledges:

1. Recognise Palestine: Aotearoa should formally recognise the State of Palestine and support Palestinian self-determination and full international recognition.

2. Sanction Israel: Impose meaningful sanctions against the Israeli state and those responsible for war crimes, occupation, illegal settlements and the destruction of Gaza.

3. End military complicity: No New Zealand participation in, procurement from, intelligence support for, or military cooperation that contributes to Israel’s war against Palestinians. We oppose purchasing Israeli weapons and military technology while Palestinians are being killed with the same military-industrial system.

4. Use diplomatic consequences: Where a government is actively committing war crimes, our policy allows for diplomatic relations to be severed. We have called for the Israeli Ambassador to be expelled or recalled and for New Zealand to withdraw diplomatic legitimacy from Israel’s conduct.

5. Demand an end to the siege of Gaza: Open the crossings. Allow unrestricted humanitarian assistance, food, water, medicine, fuel and reconstruction materials into Gaza. Starvation cannot be used as a weapon of war.

6. Demand a real and permanent ceasefire: Not temporary pauses while bombardment, blockade, displacement and occupation continue. There must be an enduring cessation of violence accompanied by accountability and Palestinian freedom.

7. Uphold international law and accountability: Support international investigations and accountability through institutions, including the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. War crimes must have consequences regardless of which country commits them.

8. End economic support for occupation and apartheid: Support divestment and economic measures against institutions, companies and products directly sustaining illegal settlements, occupation or military violence against Palestinians.

9. Protect humanitarian workers and peaceful solidarity: Aotearoa must defend humanitarian workers, including New Zealanders attempting to deliver aid to Gaza, and unequivocally protect peaceful Palestinian solidarity and protest.

10. Confront antisemitism and Islamophobia without silencing Palestine: We condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism. Opposition to the actions of the Israeli Government, Zionism, occupation or genocide must not be falsely characterised as hatred of Jewish people.

The 2026 general election was a vote for stability, says political analyst William Numanga, as preliminary results placed the governing Cook Islands Party (CIP) on track to secure a fifth consecutive term.

The Mark Brown-led CIP has secured 12 seats following the preliminary count, while independent candidates hold eight seats — including two from Atiu (Independent-Enuamanu) and one from Mauke (Independent Party).

The Cook Islands United Party has secured four seats. At least six independent candidates have confirmed their allegiance to the CIP.

• READ MORE: Democratic Party pledges ‘honest review’ after preliminary election wipeout in Cook Islands
• Other Cook Islands elections reports

Numanga said the preliminary results broadly reflect what he expected — “a very competitive election, particularly in Rarotonga, but with CIP remaining the strongest national political organisation”.

However, he said the final composition of Parliament was still not settled. Given the very close results in Manihiki, Rakahanga, Pukapuka, and Ngatangiia, “petitions or challenges could still affect the overall picture”.

There are over 1000 votes by declaration yet to be counted, while additional postal ballots are still arriving. The final count is expected either late this week or early next week.

“My initial assessment was that several Rarotonga constituencies would be highly competitive between CIP and United,” Numanga said. “That was certainly evident in Ngatangiia, while Matavera’s shift to United demonstrates that voters were prepared to change representation.”

“I expected RAPPA, Nikao and Ruaau to be particularly competitive, although ultimately Ruaau was the closest of those contests.”

Voters backed ‘stability’
According to Numanga, CIP’s performance suggests that, despite public concerns over some government decisions, “many voters ultimately placed considerable value on stability, continuity and confidence in government”.

“Cost of living remained important, but voters may also recognise that inflationary pressures are not unique to the Cook Islands,” he said.

“Geopolitical issues also appear not to have been decisive, while the easing of recent concerns in the New Zealand relationship may have reduced some political uncertainty.”

Numanga said for the opposition, fragmentation was probably its greatest weakness.

“United and the Democratic Party had four years to find common ground. By contesting separately, they divided the alternative vote in constituencies where cooperation may have produced different outcomes.”

He said the biggest story is the eight independents.

“They can no longer be viewed as peripheral to the political system,” said Numanga. “Their support could be important not only for forming a comfortable governing majority, but also for major legislation and constitutional reform.”

Final results, petitions
“The coming days will therefore be about final results, possible petitions and, importantly, discussions between the major parties and Independents about the shape and priorities of the next government.”

According to the preliminary count, about 8000 of the 11,000 registered voters cast their votes either in advance or on election day.

Chief Electoral Officer Taggy Tangimetua earlier stated that they had set tentative dates for the final count, which would depend on the Electoral Office receiving all the remaining postal votes and completing the verification process for special votes.

The count to finalise the August 12 election results is expected to take place over two afternoons, scheduled for either Thursday and Friday, Friday and Monday, or Monday and Tuesday (local time).

Republished from the Cook Islands News with permission.

Cook Islands’ Democratic Party leader Tina Pupuke-Browne has pledged an “honest campaign review” after preliminary results showed the party losing all its seats.

Pupuke-Browne said the party will learn from its dismal 2026 general election performance, but added that it is “premature” to declare their final standing while official counts remain pending.

According to preliminary results released last week, the Democratic Party — which governed the country before the Cook Islands Party was voted into power in 2010 — failed to win a single seat.

• READ MORE: Mangaia trio backs CIP, bringing ‘supermajority’ within reach
• Other Cook Islands elections reports

However, two of its candidates remain locked in close contests, with a significant number of declaration votes yet to be counted.

In Rakahanga, incumbent and party leader Pupuke-Browne trails the Cook Islands Party’s Levi Teinaki by just three votes, with 14 declaration votes remaining.

In Matavera, incumbent MP and party deputy leader Vaitoti Tupa trails the Cook Islands United Party’s Taneao Ngamata by 18 votes, with 60 declaration votes left to verify.

“The preliminary results are deeply disappointing for the Democratic Party, and we must accept that the voters have spoken,” Pupuke-Browne told Cook Islands News.

“We will take responsibility, listen carefully, and conduct an honest review of our campaign and the party’s direction.”

Two disappointing campaigns
Asked whether she would reconsider her position as party leader after two disappointing election campaigns, Pupuke-Browne emphasised that the electoral process was not yet complete.

“Pukapuka is showing a closely fought seat,” she said.

“In Rakahanga, declaration votes remain to be finalised, as they do in several other constituencies. Any election petitions must also be heard and determined by the Court.”

“Until then, it would be premature to declare the party’s final position or any individual candidate’s position.”

She said once the process is complete, the party would meet and make “considered decisions about its leadership and future”.

“Those decisions should be made collectively and calmly, not in reaction to preliminary results.”

Pupuke-Browne thanked the party candidates, supporters and volunteers for their support.

“This is not the outcome we hoped for, but democracy requires us to respect the will of the people.

“We will learn from this result, rebuild and continue serving the Cook Islands.”

Republished from the Cook Islands News with permission.