Na próxima terça-feira, 22 de setembro, o presidente Lula, candidato à reeleição pelo Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), participa da 81ª Assembleia Geral da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU), em Nova York, Estados Unidos. Conforme protocolo, Lula abre a Assembleia, seguido pelo presidente norte-americano Donald Trump. A aposta é que Lula discorra sobre soberania em seu discurso e um encontro extra-oficial com Trump, em meio às negociações dos dois países sobre tarifas, também é possível.
O tema deste ano da assembleia é “Restaurar a confiança, gerenciar a transformação: uma Organização das Nações Unidas que atenda a todas as pessoas”. Líderes dos 193 Estados-membros da ONU estarão presentes no fórum. Também nos Estados Unidos, nesta segunda-feira, 21 de setembro, Lula deve comparecer a um encontro bilateral com o prefeito democrata de Nova York, Zohran Mamdani.
Faltando 13 dias para o primeiro turno das eleições, candidatos ao Palácio do Planalto reforçam as campanhas pelo país. Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) tem agenda nesta segunda-feira no Rio Grande do Norte, onde participa do comício no centro de Parnamirim. Em Santos, SP, no mesmo dia, Ronaldo Caiado (PSD) vai ao projeto Sabatina ACS – Eleições 2026, promovido pela Associação Comercial de Santos (ACS), às 11 horas.
Já Renan Santos (Missão) participa de sabatina apresentada pela emissora Record nesta terça-feira, 22. Augusto Cury (Avante) estará em Porto Velho, Rondônia, nesta quinta-feira, 24, para uma carreata e adesivaço na capital.
As repercussões do relatório da Polícia Federal (PF) divulgado pelo ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) André Mendonça com as mensagens de Daniel Vorcaro chegam ao Ministério Público Federal na próxima sexta-feira, 25 de setembro. O Conselho Superior do Ministério Público Federal (CSMPF) analisará a conduta do Procurador-Geral da República, Paulo Gonet considerando o caso Master e as mensagens de Vorcaro que citam o PGR. A relatoria da apuração ficou a cargo do subprocurador-geral Francisco de Assis Sanseverino.
Em manifestação de 35 páginas enviada ao CSMPF, o PGR afirmou “em termos bastante diretos e simples” não ter “relação de amizade alguma” com Daniel Vorcaro, ou “interesse pessoal nos processos em que ele conste como parte ou investigado”.
Gonet ainda afirmou não ter negligenciado as investigações sobre as fraudes do Banco Master, além de falar que as acusações feitas pelo Partido Novo alegando que não deveria atuar nas investigações do Banco Master são “descabidas e estapafúrdias”.
Segundo o documento, Paulo Gonet afirma que seus dois únicos contatos com o ex-banqueiro foram durante um evento em Londres em abril de 2024. O outro momento foi em março de 2025, quando, a pedido do advogado Ciro Soares, participou de uma ligação com Vorcaro, considerada, por ele, “uma conversa breve e sem assuntos relevantes”.
Após o ministro Edson Fachin cancelar a análise da conduta do ministro André Mendonça como relator do Caso Master e das fraudes do INSS, que ocorreria na próxima quarta-feira, 23 de setembro, o STF deve ter uma semana menos agitada. No lugar da Petição 16.704, serão realizados, na quarta, julgamentos sobre licença-maternidade a mães adotivas, custos judiciais e sistema previdenciário de servidor público federal.
Estão na agenda da semana de 21 a 26 de setembro:
Agenda da semana da Pública é um serviço apresentado aos leitores, concebido com base nas informações dos portais da Câmara, Senado e STF.
A cada R$ 10 gastos com prisões no ano passado, em 26 unidades federativas do país, R$ 6 foram dirigidos ao encarceramento de pessoas negras. Essa é uma das conclusões do estudo realizado pelo Centro de Pesquisa Justa sobre investimentos em segurança pública nos estados brasileiros. Segundo o levantamento, divulgado nesta quinta-feira, 17 de setembro, o investimento no sistema prisional dos estados chegou a R$ 22,3 bilhões, valor que não abrange apenas o Acre, que não forneceu os dados ao Justa. Desse total, R$ 13,7 bilhões foram gastos tendo como alvo pessoas pretas ou pardas.
“Cria-se uma falácia de que pessoas negras cometem mais crimes, por isso que estão presas. Mas isso é uma falácia. Na verdade, essas pessoas estão sendo selecionadas pela polícia e, depois, na frente do juiz, que poderia parar esse processo de seletividade penal, [e também frente ao] Ministério Público. [Essa] engrenagem vem sendo construída dessa forma, essas pessoas estão sendo o alvo dessa política de segurança”, explica a advogada do Justa, Sofia Fromer, doutora em saúde coletiva da Faculdade de Ciências Médicas da Santa Casa (FCMSC) de São Paulo. Para ela, o encarceramento da população negra confirma, mais uma vez, a existência de lógica punitivista e uma seletividade penal.
Para a advogada, a medida mais eficiente para transformar a lógica do sistema carcerário seria investir em políticas públicas de reinserção para egressos do sistema prisional. Essa medida, entretanto, está longe de ser priorizada pelos estados brasileiros. Segundo o Justa, para cada R$ 5.423 gastos em 2025 com as polícias estaduais (militar, civil e técnico-científica), apenas R$ 1 é dirigido às políticas para egressos.
Na comparação com o ano anterior, o investimento permaneceu praticamente o mesmo, passando de R$ 18 milhões, para políticas exclusivas aos egressos em 2024, para R$ 19 milhões no ano passado. O valor corresponde, em média, a 0,001% de seus gastos totais levantados pelo estudo.
Entre as 26 unidades federativas avaliadas, 19 delas (72%) não investiram em políticas exclusivas para egressos. Tocantins teve dotação aprovada na Lei Orçamentária Anual, mas não utilizou os recursos. Rio Grande do Sul e Santa Catarina registraram investimentos pela primeira vez em 2025, com R$ 414 mil e R$ 177 mil, respectivamente. Alagoas e Tocantins deixaram de investir. São Paulo foi o estado que utilizou o maior recurso, R$ 13,3 milhões, seguido pelo Ceará, com R$ 3,8 milhões. Mato Grosso investiu R$ 781 mil, enquanto a Bahia despendeu R$ 482 mil.
Para Fromer, políticas para egressos são multissetoriais, envolvem saúde, educação, assistência social, além do campo do direito, “para que essas pessoas possam criar novas rotas e que não seja uma possibilidade que elas precisem voltar para as prisões”, salienta.
A advogada lembra que não existe pena perpétua no Brasil, portanto, o Estado precisa pensar como as pessoas egressas “vão conseguir um trabalho, renda, ter uma casa, ter os seus documentos. Ter o contato, por exemplo, [no caso] de mulheres presas, com os filhos que deixaram sob o cuidado de uma outra pessoa”, explica.
O estudo também demonstra que se os recursos com a política para manter as pessoas fora das prisões são baixos, os gastos com a repressão são os mais altos. O total de investimentos envolvendo os 26 territórios foi de R$ 103,5 bilhões no ano passado, e a maior parte desses recursos foi para as Polícias Militares, R$ 60,7 bilhões, 58,6% do total, responsáveis pelo policiamento ostensivo da população. Já as Polícias Civis, que devem investigar os crimes, receberam R$ 22,2 bilhões (21,5%), e as Polícias Técnico-Científicas ficaram com a menor parcela, R$ 2,8 bilhões (2,7%), mesmo sendo responsáveis por atividades como perícia e produção de provas.
“Quando o investimento em policiamento ostensivo cresce sem que a investigação e produção de provas avancem na mesma proporção, o sistema amplia sua capacidade de prender sem necessariamente fortalecer sua eficiência para esclarecer os crimes. É uma lógica que ajuda a sustentar um modelo de encarceramento em massa, marcado por fragilidades na apuração da autoria e na produção de evidências”, avalia Luciana Zaffalon, diretora-executiva do Justa.
Para Sofia Fromer, as prioridades político-orçamentárias dos estados em segurança pública não se dão ao acaso. “Realmente existe uma preferência dos estados em ter um orçamento para as polícias, em detrimento do sistema prisional e das políticas para egressos.” Segundo a advogada, o investimento maior nas polícias, em específico, nas polícias militares, cujo caráter é mais ostensivo nas prisões, aumenta o encarceramento, mas não muda a realidade.
Ela explica que a pesquisa do Justa mostra que há um funil, onde a porta de entrada são os gastos com as polícias passando pelo investimento no sistema carcerário, até chegar aos gastos com as políticas para egressos. “[Temos] a ‘boca’ muito alargada do funil, ou seja, o orçamento ali é muito grande, e quando você vai afunilando, depois [estão] os gastos com o sistema prisional ainda menores, e com as políticas pregressas, quase inexistentes”.
Por outro lado, Fromer pensa em uma outra alternativa para mudar a dinâmica brasileira. Invertendo o funil, ou seja, investindo mais em políticas para egressos. Segundo ela, essa decisão criaria oportunidades para essas pessoas, diminuindo as chances de elas retornarem aos presídios.
“Quando o Estado destina bilhões à entrada e à permanência no sistema prisional, mas reserva valores residuais para a saída, limita as possibilidades de reinserção social e mantém condições que podem favorecer a reincidência”, complementa Luciana Zaffalon.
Entre os atuais candidatos à presidência da República que concorrem este ano, pelo menos três deles, Renan Santos (Missão), Flávio Bolsonaro (PL) e Romeu Zema (Novo) já citaram concordar com o modelo de segurança pública propagandeado pelo presidente de El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, baseado, principalmente, na construção de mega-presídios. Questionada se essa inspiração poderia ser eficiente no Brasil, Sofia Fromer vê restrições.
“Existe, sim, uma falta de vagas nas unidades prisionais. Se você olhar uma foto de uma prisão, você vai ver que numa cela onde caberiam 12 pessoas, tem 24, às vezes até mais. [Vai ver] pessoas em uma condição de total insalubridade. […] Criar novas vagas não resolve o problema. Se resolvesse, não teríamos mais [o problema] porque as respostas para a segurança pública, para o sistema prisional, elas têm sido pautadas, muitas vezes, na construção de novas vagas”, explica a advogada.
“E aí a gente vê de novo isso aparecendo com os candidatos, muitos inspirados no Bukele, [citando] a construção de megas prisões. Isso não funciona aqui no Brasil, e, de outro ponto de vista, a gente não tem nem orçamento para fazer essas mega prisões”, acrescenta.
Em 2025, baseado na Arguição de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental 347 (ADPF 347), determinada pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), em outubro de 2023, o Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ) junto com o Ministério da Justiça e da Segurança Pública (MJSP), elaborou o Plano Pena Justa, que consiste em enfrentar o estado de calamidade dos sistemas penitenciários brasileiros. O objetivo é melhorar a qualidade das prisões e dos serviços, além de controlar as superlotações nas penitenciárias, além de fortalecer a ressocialização dos indivíduos. O Plano Pena Justa propõe mais de 300 metas para serem cumpridas até 2027, e muitas são focadas em políticas para egressos.
O estudo do Justa mostra, entretanto, que a iniciativa, mesmo já tendo sido iniciada, ainda não apresentou resultados relevantes. Fromer entende que o Brasil começará a bater tais metas caso se debruce sobre a questão orçamentária. “Sem o orçamento, não é possível que todas essas metas do Plano se efetivem, os estados precisam ter o orçamento determinado para que, de fato, elas possam ser cumpridas”, pondera.
This summer, the FIFA World Cup turned the world’s attention to America while America turned on much of the world. As Iran was due to play Egypt in Seattle, the US launched new strikes in its four-month war with the country. On semi-final day, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social an AI-doctored image of a map showing Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Venezuela covered with an American flag. And just days after Trump handed the World Cup trophy to the Spanish national team, his administration announced sweeping 10% baseline tariffs on 80 countries. The juxtaposition of tournament host and wartime belligerent reflects the position America now occupies in European strategic thinking: too central to ignore and too disruptive to rely on.
Europeans hoping that a midterm victory for Democrats in November will bring a reversal of this foreign policy should not hold their breath. If the party wins a majority of seats in one or both chambers of Congress—which is looking likely—they may be able to attach provisions to bills, launch investigations, issue subpoenas and lambast some of Trump’s poor foreign policy choices. But the second Trump administration has shown it will route around Congress and confront it with delays, hostility and vitriol, limiting any capacity for oversight. Having spent its first 18 months in power ignoring a friendly Republican Congress, one with a Democratic majority has even slimmer chances. In other words, little will change until the occupant of the White House does.
For now, the Democrats’ real power resides not in stopping the current administration but in shaping what comes next. Democratic candidates competing across the US—for both primaries and generals—have a wide ideological range, from “democratic socialists” to “centrists”. While they all heavily criticise Trump and his administration, they have different diagnoses for where the dysfunction began, what sustains it and what needs to be done about it. Engaged in party primaries across the country, Democratic candidates are putting forward competing answers to the two central questions Americans are asking themselves: “What went wrong?” and “How do we fix it?” Based on these answers, we have identified that Democrats tend to cluster into three camps—the “revolutionaries”, the “renovators” and the “revivalists”—each with distinct proposals for the future of America.
The revolutionaries argue that the political and economic system that drives America has always been unjust and was built to concentrate wealth at the top. Therefore, the way to fix America is to enact large, structural change. The renovators argue that the democratic system of government was largely built to benefit all Americans but has been corrupted by money and captured interests. Their proposed remedy is to root out large-scale corruption, rebalancing the economic and political systems to the benefit of middle- and working-class Americans. The revivalists argue that increased partisanship, fuelled by Trump and the MAGA-aligned right, has divided the country and undermined the collaborative bipartisanship that is necessary for the functioning of the system and its institutions. They are focused on reinvigorating those institutions, reviving the post-war international order and rebuilding political bridges, all of which they see as the path back to peace and prosperity.
The revolutionaries, renovators and revivalists are ideal types, not formal factions. They emerge from our analysis of over 50 high-profile Democratic primaries and general election campaigns throughout the 2026 midterm cycle. We also researched campaign platforms, stump speeches, debates and candidate interviews with local news, and interviewed various pundits, current and former staff, officials and pollsters in Washington. In doing so, we found that sorting candidates by their messages about the underlying cause of what has gone wrong in America proved to reliably predict how a candidate discusses domestic and global problems. For example, revolutionaries support Europe’s strategic autonomy but would dislike a Europe defined by militarisation and austerity; renovators see Europe as a potential partner on anti-corruption, taxation and democracy, as long as Europeans provide for their own security; and revivalists remain attached to the NATO alliance but are still unlikely to restore the old division of labour.
The ideological battles between Democrats will matter more than the arithmetic of the Senate or the House for the next two years. One of these three camps will lead the party’s ideological charge for the next presidential race, if not the next presidency. Leaders across Europe should not wait to see which will prevail. Rather, they should engage with these camps well before the presidential race gets under way. They may then be able to shape the thinking and policy proposals that Democrats put on the table between now and 2028, and beyond.
Democrats—from New York democratic socialists to staunch Iowa moderates—have more in common than not. Practically everyone in the party believes Trump is a problem and that he and the MAGA movement have fundamentally changed American democracy for the worse. Many view widespread corruption as an issue and some say corruption is encouraged by the system itself.
But while the policy views of the three Democratic camps overlap, there are a few key points of difference. To illustrate these characteristics more clearly, this paper focuses on key individuals who have gained national attention, are running in close races, or are largely representative of what other ideologically aligned candidates say. It is rare for a candidate to be a perfect “revolutionary” or “revivalist” because they must answer to constituencies with divergent interests and disparate views of American and global affairs. Some candidates will even recognise themselves across different camps. Nevertheless, these three camps represent sensitivities that are bound to clash in the primaries until one of them breaks through and is championed by the 2028 Democratic nominee for president. Understanding them helps anticipate the direction of US policy in the brouhaha of its politics.
The revolutionaries maintain that the political and economic order in the US is functioning as designed: to serve concentrated wealth rather than the American people. The enemy, in revolutionaries’ rhetoric, is not necessarily any one person or party (such as Trump or the Republicans) but the economic and political system that consistently benefits the ruling class. Only a structural transformation of the system would finally make it work for the people.
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in his primary victory speech put the thesis as such: “It turns out that the reason so many of us ain’t got is because of the system that has corrupted our politics to take it away from us. That is the thing we are taking on now”. El-Sayed, who is a former public health official in Detroit, focuses his entire campaign on big structural goals: getting corporate money out of politics, and, like Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker, passing Medicare for All, a proposal for universal healthcare. Often revolutionaries’ critiques take a moral tone, such as when Senate candidate Angie Nixon of Florida talks about cruelty out of Washington, or denounces the “liars” and “cheaters” in office.
Because the revolutionaries diagnose the political system as in need of a complete overhaul, reforms aimed at constraining the actions of individuals miss the point. Their signature domestic proposals—nationalising big American corporations, adding seats on the Supreme Court, establishing Congressional term limits, overhauling campaign funding and raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy—aim to fundamentally change the US political system rather than simply elect better leaders.
Their theory of power follows: winning office is useful, but only insofar as it can be used to structurally change power dynamics between a ruling corporate class and average working Americans. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when asked about a potential run for president in 2028, responded: “My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, house seats, elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever.”
On foreign policy, the revolutionaries argue that the current political system led America on an inevitable path of hyper-militarisation, threat inflation, an over-extension of its financial and human resources in military adventurism, and the reproduction of domestic systemic racism into foreign policy. They view the American relationship with Israel as the seminal example of everything wrong with this approach; Palestine being “one the great moral questions of our time” as New York congressional candidate Claire Valdez puts it.
Their diagnosis abroad is largely parallel to the one at home, viewing the pitfalls of US foreign policy as a metastasis caused by the American corporate class. As Valdez asserts:
“For decades, we have been sold a lie: that the US empire defends freedom, advances democracy, and protects human rights…In reality, the bipartisan war machine has delivered immense suffering around the world while doing little to improve the lives of working people here or abroad. The military-industrial complex doesn’t just enrich arms manufacturers—it has become our de facto industrial policy, sustaining enough jobs and political constituencies to make endless war challenging to stop.”
Their fixes to US foreign policy largely follow their domestic proposals: if you fix the system and its incentives for prioritising the financial gains of the wealthiest class, all else will follow.[1] This is rooted in banning corporate political action committee spending on campaigns which they believe will ultimately diminish the influence of defence contractors and foreign interest groups—namely the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)—over candidates’ races, and therefore, diminish their influence on policy. In the short term, the revolutionaries aim to cut defence spending, bolster humanitarian aid and preference diplomacy in the American foreign policy toolkit. They also believe that the Biden administration’s foreign policy officials must be held accountable for continuing to supply Israel as its war on Gaza intensified.
Unsurprisingly, many in this camp represent overwhelmingly blue districts, call themselves “progressives” and some belong to the Democratic Socialists of America or the Working Family Party.
In these midterms, some of the revolutionary firebrands include Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker, Florida senate candidate Angie Nixon, Representative Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania, House candidates Melat Kiros in Colorado, and New York congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier. Disgraced Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner also used that same rhetoric.
The renovators believe the system is imperfect, but largely worth keeping. In their view it has been co-opted and corrupted by money and corporate greed and upheld by a leadership class that is either corrupt themselves or out of answers. As James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate in Texas, explains: “I think we’re living in an era of corruption, and I don’t just mean illegal activity… I’m talking about corruption in the deeper sense, the rotting of our systems from the inside out…” In his telling, strengthened by his moral standing as a middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, the issue with the American political system is not the institutions themselves, but the way in which they are weaponised and perverted.
While the revolutionaries name the ruling class as the enemy, the renovators see the villain as a narrower collection of groups who have captured institutions that were otherwise built to work for the American people. This distinction yields a different theory of power: with the right rules in place, the existing machinery can be trusted to function again. Therefore, instead of demolition, this group aims to renovate.
Senator Jon Ossoff spoke to this message at a campaign rally in June when he mused about what the founding fathers of America would see if they came to the US today:
“They’d see a pluralist democracy, people of all colours descended from every point on earth, stitched together from out of many nations into one. But they’d also see a nation, that at its height of wealth and power, fell into the very traps they most feared. Devouring itself in bitter conflict between warring factions, captured by special interests. And they’d see a faithless president exploiting this rot to pursue the absolute power they overthrew.”
House candidate Daniel Biss has voiced a similar critique, stating that: “While our families struggle to get ahead, politicians in Washington line their own pockets and special interests and wealthy donors flood our political system with money to protect their own power and access.”
Because renovators share the same anger towards an entrenched leadership class, the remedy they prescribe overlaps somewhat with that of the revolutionaries, including stock trading bans for Congress, term limits and campaign finance reform. However, the renovators are more likely to clean out and reform an agency—namely the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—that the revolutionaries would call to abolish. The renovators also view the Democratic party as a vehicle worth trying to steer rather than run against.
On foreign policy, the renovators argue that the same corruption that is eroding domestic institutions has been exported, and that this is primarily corroding America’s credibility. Ossoff made this connection explicit when he criticised the financial gains Jared Kushner has made while carrying out US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Senator Chris Murphy, a leader in this camp, has also described Trump’s acceptance of gifts and business arrangements from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE as corruption with “no precedent in American history”. Thus, the fix renovators recommend is twofold: root out the graft of those currently running foreign policy so American leadership abroad can function as intended, and then fix the political system such that future administrations cannot replicate the corrupt schemes of the current one.
Renovators are spread across the country, from candidates in conservative states and districts such as Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas, Senator Jon Ossoff from Georgia, House candidates Sam Forstag of Montana, Manny Rutinel of Colorado, and Eric Jones of California. There is also a cluster of midwestern candidates including House candidate Daniel Biss from Illinois, Senate candidate Peggy Flannagan of Minnesota, and former Senator and current candidate Sherrod Brown from Ohio.
The revivalists are firm believers in American exceptionalism and credit American liberalism for the peace and prosperity of the past 80 years. They see Trump and the MAGA-aligned right as the primary threat to that inheritance and to American democracy and values more broadly.
Their diagnosis is that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement behind him have steeped the country in hyper-partisan vitriol and driven it into a spiral of polarisation. Revivalists argue that these divides drive dysfunction in Washington and make it impossible to worth within the political system. They often celebrate a prior era of bipartisanship and showcase their own capacity to work across the aisle.
Their theory of power follows from that diagnosis. Democrats must defeat Trump, the movement behind him and the polarisation that produced both. Then competent, experienced hands will make the system function as intended again. They believe collaborating with reasonable, non-MAGA Republicans to build bridges and pass longer-lasting legislation will show Americans how a working government can operate. In turn, they think a government that delivers will earn back trust on its own merits. Revivalist candidates centre their electoral pitches around defeating Trump, restoring institutional norms and bipartisan collaboration. Senator Chris Coons, who is running for re-election in Delaware, made an appeal to voters saying as much:
“At some point [Trump’s] chaos, corruption, and cruelty will come to an end. And a lot of work will be needed to pick up the pieces, to clean up the mess he’s made, to fix a system that’s still broken and not delivering results for the folks I serve in Delaware. I’m running for reelection because the job’s not done.”
Coons emphasises the damage that Trump has caused and his desire to restore normality to the halls of Congress. Additionally, many revivalists stand closest to the Democratic party leadership and often treat experience as a credential rather than a liability. In her unsuccessful race for Michigan’s Senate seat, Congresswoman Haley Stevens emphasised her time in the Obama administration, for example, and Roy Cooper spotlights his accomplishments as evidence of his policy chops from his time as North Carolina’s governor.
On foreign policy, the revivalists argue that American military alliances, trade relationships and institutions are integral pieces of the liberal world order. In their view, the post-war structures are worth defending, US leadership is needed and Trump’s destruction of these institutions is actively harming American global power. They mostly believe that the backlash against these institutions, whether it be NATO or the WTO, is a failure of messaging. Americans were never told what the post-war order gave them, so they have had no reason to defend it.[2]
Where revivalists identify a problem abroad, they frame it as they frame problems at home: the result of a specific bad actor’s conduct or of partisan divisions. For example, they blame Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for their countries’ strained relationships with the US. Change the leadership and you can restore the relationship, which is an argument for patience both at home and abroad. They argue too that foreign adversaries purposely widen American divisions, and that Americans should fight back by recognising those efforts and working across the aisle, a case New York representative Tom Suozzi made recently during a hearing on foreign influence:
“The biggest factor causing division in our country is our foreign adversaries…They are feeding division in our country. They cannot defeat us economically. They cannot defeat us militarily. So they want to take what they see as being our biggest weakness which is our diversity. And they fuel dissent in our country…”
Revivalists comprise the largest cross-section of the party and are represented from coast-to-coast, including Senator Chris Coons from Delaware, Senator Chuck Schumer from New York, Senator John Hickenlooper from Colorado, Representative Tom Suozzi from New York, Representative Maggie Goodlander from New Hampshire, Senate candidate Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, Senate candidate Roy Cooper from North Carolina, House candidate Rebecca Cooke from Wisconsin, former Senate candidates Janet Mills from Maine and Angie Craig from Minnesota.
Primaries have at times led to tense disputes among Democrats. When it comes to foreign policy, our analysis shows where the camps divide on five key issues that will matter to Europeans: affordability and trade; the use of military force; China and great power competition; Israel; and Europe and European security.
Since Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory in November 2025, affordability has defined this election cycle’s messaging. Candidates across the board focus on policies that would help the affordability crisis and frame other issues as perpetuating it.[3] The focus is so singular that the headline messages are often interchangeable across the party: Abdul El-Sayed is running for “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all” while Roy Cooper’s prevailing message is “Make stuff cost less.”
In terms of foreign policy, trade is affordability gone global. And as all Democratic candidates see it, Trump’s tariffs raise the price for Americans while enriching himself and his allies. But this consensus is an objection to these specific tariffs, not to all tariffs.
Revolutionaries remain sceptical of the old free-trade order itself: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez at the Munich Security Conference called for “a recognition of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] as a failed policy for many rural and working class communities,” and Abdul El-Sayed called NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership a disaster for the American worker. Moreover, this camp sees small, strategic tariffs as legitimate tools of job protection.
Renovators, on the other hand, believe current trade agreements can be improved. Senator Jon Ossoff, for example, sent a letter to the Trump administration urging them to use the US-Mexico-Canada agreement (USMCA) review to police Mexican labour and environmental practices to ensure American growers have a chance to compete fairly on the global market.
Revivalists remain closely aligned to the old free-trade consensus. In April of this year, for example, senators in this camp asked the US trade representative to “strengthen and renew” the USMCA. They believe that trade tools like tariffs or export controls should only be used for national security issues, akin to the “small-yard, high-fence” policies of the Biden administration. Amid the Trump administration’s trade wars, they suggest focusing on a narrow trade agenda that directly serves the interests of both sides, such as deals on critical minerals, new technologies or other pieces of critical supply chains.
America’s two latest military operations—Trump’s war in Iran and the operation to remove Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro—have sparked debate among Democrats over what role the US military should play in foreign policy. Nearly every Democrat criticised the Iran war and many voiced reservations about Venezuela, but the extent to which Democrats are comfortable using the military as a foreign policy tool differs.
Revolutionaries read Trump’s use of force in Iran and Venezuela as a natural continuation of an overly militarised foreign policy and advocate for that to change. El-Sayed called the Iran war “dumb and illegal”, but argued that the real issue was the cost of a war America did not need to fight. Colorado’s Melat Kiros makes this structural claim directly, “It’s time to reimagine our global role: not as a militarised empire, but as a champion of diplomacy, human rights, and peacebuilding. We need to end the blank checks for endless war and reallocate that funding towards diplomacy abroad and housing, education, and healthcare here at home.” New York candidate for congress Darializa Avila Chevalier puts it similarly.
The revolutionaries, if in office, would work to cut the military budget broadly in the name of keeping the money at home. For them, the deeper fix to a foreign policy driven mainly by military action is upstream: end the corporate and defence contractor lobbies that supports these wars in the first place.
The renovators view the most recent use of force as domestic corruption running through foreign policy. They are not necessarily opposed to using military force, but uncomfortable with the corrupt forces that push the military to be a tool of first resort. Chris Murphy’s office headlined his remarks on the money: “This president’s foreign policy, the invasion of Venezuela, the ouster of Maduro, is about making his crowd filthy rich. It has nothing to do with American national security.”
James Talarico likewise described the transaction as follows: “Trump promised the biggest oil executives in this country a ‘great deal’ if they gave him a billion dollars for his re-election campaign, and then he turned around and gave them a gift. He gave them the nation of Venezuela, home to the largest oil reserves in the world. Billionaires don’t just run our economy. They don’t just run our government. Now they run our foreign policy.” Corruption, in this telling, drives how Trump uses force. As with domestic concerns, the way to “fix” the incentives to use military force is largely the same as the revolutionaries: reign in defence contractor graft, lobbying and campaign spending.
Revivalists press hardest on legality and cost, but the argument underneath is about what these operations do to America’s standing in the world. Chris Coons admonished the administration’s decision to launch strikes on Iran in February for their method and legality: “President Trump’s military campaign against Iran and call for regime change are the beginning of a reckless new war of choice with no clear strategy and no clear endpoint. This is not how a democracy goes to war.”
Revivalists levelled similar critiques at the military operation in Venezuela. Representative Maggie Goodlander responded to the capture of Maduro by asking: “What is the legal justification for such an action? The US Constitution entrusts the US Congress with war powers for very good reasons. The Trump Administration must immediately and truthfully answer questions about the motivation and legality of this unilateral military action, the potential for any further escalation, and the plan for peace.”
For this camp, how a country goes to war is a sign of its strength. Authorisation, a stated objective, and allies consulted in advance are what gives a war public support and partners willing to help in the effort. According to revivalists, a democracy that goes to war via unilateral decision is weaker afterward, because that decision erodes the constitutional system of checks and balances. So, Trump’s lack of consultation widens a divide between Republicans and Democrats, between the branches of government and diminishes the public image of the US military.
China is generally understood by all on the left as a strategic challenge. Yet Democrats disagree on just how big the threat is, whether to commit troops to the defence of Taiwan, and just how much the US should orient its economic and security policy around the strategic competition with China.
Revolutionaries fear a full-throated strategic competition with China would subvert domestic priorities. When Ocasio-Cortez was asked at the Munich Security Conference if she would commit to sending US troops to defend Taiwan, she said: “We want to make sure we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic, research, and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation.”
This camp’s scepticism of the use of force and relentless focus on domestic framing is clearly seen when hot-button issues in the strategic competition discussion arise. For example, this camp would rather support limits on AI development to protect jobs, workers and the environment, than to push forward on AI research in order to compete with China. Likewise, they are more likely to focus the conversation of US-China strategic competition on manufacturing gaps, lags in research and education and trade deficits, thus bringing the focus back to the working class and economic issues.
At the other end, revivalists treat China as the defining national security issue and, therefore, AI, space and weapon development are part of an arms race that the US must win. All tools are on the table, whether it be an export-control regime, import controls on Chinese electric vehicles, sanctions on Chinese Communist Party officials or even bans on TikTok.
Renovators sit in the middle. Hawkish enough to want to compete but unwilling to let strategic competition swallow the agenda. They are focused on economic fairness with China and competing beyond military means alone, but also willing to place domestic guardrails on AI and the tech race. They believe competition is important, but that it should not overtake all domestic needs. For example, they would advocate for the need for data centres to be energy and water self-sufficient, or even call for moratoriums on data centres, even if that threatens frontier model development.
Israel is where the three camps separate most cleanly along a single question: what, if anything, should America sell or give to Israel?
This is a central issue for the revolutionaries, who maintain that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. This camp has concluded that conditioning aid to Israel, the previous progressive position, is no longer a viable measure to ensure any meaningful end to the conflict or long-term peace. Their preferred policy is a full arms embargo on Israel, including defensive systems.
This distinction has already defined a few primary elections. New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the congressional primary against Representative Adriano Espaillat, ran on “babies not bombs”, promising to vote to halt arms sales to Israel. Melat Kiros, who unseated nearly-30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Colorado, called for a full arms embargo to Israel and closed her victory speech leading a “Free Palestine” chant. El-Sayed takes this same position: “I support an immediate arms embargo on Israel and reject the false differentiation between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons.”
The renovators often make that distinction and are primarily focused on the need for change in the US-Israel relationship. Their belief that the system must be reformed is clearly reflected in their positions towards Israel. James Talarico, for example, has said he would work to ban the sale of offensive military weapons to Israel while still supporting Israel’s defensive systems. Talarico has declined to call it a genocide but has called the destruction in Gaza a “moral disaster”. Senator Jon Ossoff similarly told constituents that he voted against sending rifles to Israel because of the “extreme mass deprivation of civilians in Gaza”, and defended his vote for air-to-ground missiles because of Israel’s need to be able “to strike those who would launch missiles and rockets at Israeli civilians.” Senator Murphy, likewise, voted with Bernie Sanders’s resolution disapproving of the sale of offensive weapons in 2024, but has since moved even further, calling for a halt of US military aid altogether. But most in this camp have stopped short of demanding a total embargo. Instead, they try to thread the needle between respecting America’s long-standing special relationship with Israel and combatting the structure that has allowed Israel’s abuse of military force.
Revivalists support the US-Israel relationship but blame the two leaders, Trump and Netanyahu, for souring the once-mutually beneficial of defence relationship. In their view, Netanyahu and Trump’s actions have exacerbated US public opinion of the relationship, rather than the structure of the relationship itself. Chris Coons has reiterated that his “commitment to Israel remains ironclad” while directly placing the blame on Netanyahu for the declining American sentiment towards the country. Similarly, Representative Chris Pappas, running for Senate in New Hampshire, articulates support for Israel and criticism of Netanyahu’s government. Roy Cooper, meanwhile, has flatly rejected efforts to block aid to Israel.
The revivalists’ view on America’s relationship with Israel is perhaps best expressed in Chuck Schumer’s March 2024 Senate floor speech, where he called Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” who has “lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” In other words, just as Trump and the rise of the MAGA right have degraded the American political system, Netanyahu and the far-right in Israel have degraded the US-Israel relationship. The solution, then, is to try to change the behaviour of Netanyahu since they cannot change that he and Trump are in power. Therefore, this camp tends to treat US-Israel arms sales on a case-by-case basis, usually agreeing to send weapons, but reserving the right to condition those arm sales based on how Israel uses them. As Governor Janet Mills, who failed to win the Democratic primary for Maine’s Senate, said while criticising Netanyahu’s conduct she would evaluate any bill to halt arms shipments “on the specifics.”
Nearly all Democrats see the value of the transatlantic relationship beyond the Trump administration’s idea of a “shared cultural heritage”. For the president, this is often a thinly veiled way to value the continent for its whiteness and colonial past and lambast it when he sees this as changing. Democrats, on the other hand, value the relationship for its shared rules and norms—whether these are liberal internationalism or workers’ rights.
A Democratic congressional majority will certainly not have the same disdain for Europe as many in the Trump administration do, but the Democratic party is certain to present its challenges. Some in the Democratic coalition would like to see a renewed American role in NATO, for example, while others want a European partner that can stand on its own. One challenge is for certain: the US-European relationship will be on the back burner. In the midterm campaigns you would be hard pressed to find a single Democratic candidate talking about the transatlantic relationship with voters.
On the war in Ukraine, all camps are firmly behind Kyiv but divide over the specifics of what America should do in support. Revolutionaries are wary of a militarised US foreign policy and an economic statecraft whose costs fall to the American taxpayers. Leaders in this camp voted against seizing Russian oligarch’s assets in 2022, and signed, then retracted, a 2022 letter urging Biden to use negotiation and diplomacy. Much of the motivation to write that letter four years ago still exists within this camp today.[4]
The revolutionaries are most eager to push for peace and they remain somewhat doubtful that additional weapons for Ukraine benefit Americans, viewing an open-ended war as another entry in the long book of American over-extension. However, they are not outright against supporting Ukraine. Even Abdul El-Sayed, who was extremely vocal against sending weapons to Israel, said: “When it comes to Ukraine, I think we are involved in a righteous struggle from being invaded by their neighbour.”
Those in the renovator and revivalist camps both support Ukraine’s independence and the use of American military aid to secure it with varying intensity. Their divergence is on the use of sanctions on Russia. Renovators Chris Murphy and Jon Ossoff expressed some scepticism of the efficacy and knock-on effects of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026, which would authorise an increase of tariffs up to 100% for the top-five foreign purchasers of Russian energy supplies. Murphy ultimately voted for the bill, and Ossoff against. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, both revivalists, on the other hand, vocally supported the bill from the beginning. These are arguments about how much to spend and how hard to squeeze, not about whether Ukraine should survive. The sharper disparities appear when the question turns from the war to the US-European relationship itself.
Revolutionaries are interested in a transatlantic relationship that is not centred around NATO or any military alliance. As revolutionaries believe in creating an American foreign policy that is not solely centred on military force, they also see that as a goal in the European context. Hence, they accept European strategic autonomy and might even welcome it. They are the camp most open to structural boldness and the least likely to campaign for returning any troops Trump withdraws from the continent. This camp has shown a proclivity for supporting a move towards burden-shifting, but are sceptical of a European relationship achieved only through rearmament.[5] Rather, they will seek an affirmative agenda as sketched by Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Jason Crow at the 2026 Munich Security Conference: a new transatlantic relationship re-centred on combatting authoritarianism on both continents and advancing labour standards, rather than one singularly obsessed with NATO and continued US security commitments.
Renovators would likely treat Europeans first and foremost as partners on the agenda they care about—corruption, taxation and democratic resilience.[6] They would also push for Europe to continue to take an increased responsibility for its own security. Murphy explained as much during a Senate foreign relations subcommittee hearing in September 2025: “I believe in that NATO treaty, I believe in Article 5, but I also think it is absolutely time for the members of NATO on the other side of the Atlantic to take more responsibility for their collective defence.” The renovators are therefore keen on the idea of increased burden-sharing within NATO since they often view foreign policy issues through the lens of “where is the money going?” Correspondingly they view European governments as natural allies in the pursuit of tax enforcements, financial transparency, AI and digital platform regulation.
Revivalists remain the most attached to the alliance and the most likely to defend NATO. Coons released a joint statement with Senator Mitch McConnell in April of 2026 reaffirming their support for the alliance: “Americans are safer when NATO is strong and united. It is in our interest for all allies to tend this unity with care…The Senate will continue to support the alliance for the peace and protection it provides America, Europe, and the world.” The revivalists also credit European allies with responding to American pressure by committing 5% of GDP to military spending, and with this they treat burden sharing as a question already answered.
Any structural change, in their eyes, is unnecessary and potentially counterproductive to continued US leadership. Rather, they see European rearmament as vindication of the alliance and reason for the US to stay committed. Even if the old division of labour and spending is not coming back, they would restore the old processes within the alliance: consultation before decisions, allies told in advance and an obligation to commitments.[7]
It is too early to know which of the three camps will be the most successful with voters. Democratic primaries in the spring and summer 2026 have offered mixed lessons. Quite a few revolutionary firebrands, such as Abdul El-Sayed and Angie Nixon, have won their primaries in widely covered upset victories. Meanwhile, some renovators like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico are running particularly strong campaigns while revivalists continue to fare strongly across the board. In other words, Europeans could be facing any of the foreign policy positions described above, and should engage with all three camps long before the American public decides which should come out in front.
Trump’s frenzy of disruptions too often clouds European judgement on long-term evolutions. If Democrats return to power, they will not revert to “back to normal”. Instead, Europeans need to engage with them on a new agenda; whether they be a far cry from the previous Democratic administration, like the revolutionaries, or a fair bit closer, like the revivalists. To anticipate what they may be dealing with in less than three years, Europeans should engage with all Democrats—from the familiar to the uncomfortable—even when disagreements abound, and start thinking of a common agenda to help shape Democratic policy while it is still being formed.
European governments took a long time to accept that MAGA is durable and not a deviation from the norm. To be better prepared this time around, the debates on the American left deserve early attention, especially as they too could cause surprises. The populist energy emanating from the revolutionaries may prove to be a winning electoral strategy for Democrats in the midterms, and could well be mobilised by the next presidential candidate.
One thing is for certain: the Democratic party has entered a post-Obama, post-Biden era where questions over leadership mark more than a change of personnel. They signal the passing of the generation shaped by the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the rise of ISIS and the return of great-power rivalry with Russia and China. Strategic competition with China is no longer the modus operandi as it was under Biden. International trade is no longer taken as an unqualified good. The American left is not returning to the internationalism of the 2010s. A new cohort of Democratic leaders is emerging with different political instincts and foreign-policy priorities.
Many Democrats no longer see the transatlantic relationship as an inheritance that they have a duty to preserve. If and when they return to power, their expectations of burden-sharing will have hardened, historical attachment to the Atlantic alliance will have faded and Europe will no longer occupy the central place it once did in Democratic foreign policy debates. Younger Democrats in particular approach alliances through the lens of effectiveness and narrow shared interests and values, rather than a long-standing historical solidarity. Europeans need to pay attention to the debates taking place inside the Democratic party in order to engage the party of tomorrow.
As Europeans navigate the new American left, the biggest hurdle they will face is that they are increasingly viewed as at best as irrelevant and at worst as complicit. Europeans are not the focus of any of the three camps’ foreign policies. In fact, throughout our analysis, Europe was hardly mentioned in any television interviews, stump speeches or posts on X. Even the war in Ukraine and Russia’s hybrid challenges have lost prevalence in foreign policy debates consumed with China, Iran, Israel and Venezuela, to name a few.
When they do pay attention to Europe, Democrats across the board are beginning to regard European leaders who have spent nearly two years currying Trump’s favour as part of the problem—whether that is because Democrats view them through the lens of upholding an oligarchy, enabling gross corruption or being pathetic in the face of a global bully. Even if European leaders are pragmatically flattering the president with paternal references or golf rounds, they should remember that there are still a lot of democrats (not the party, the philosophy) on the other side of the Atlantic who would like to see in Europeans a standard-bearer and not an enabler.
Likewise, behind closed doors European leaders espouse a disappointment in Democratic politicians for losing to Trump twice and failing to put up decent opposition so far.[8] Democrats, too, are acting pragmatically. The options they currently have to mount a significant opposition are few and ineffective.
Which is all to say, engagement and re-building bridges across the left now will be essential for building a transatlantic relationship fit for the post-Trump world. European leaders and all three camps want America to play a constructive, trusted and peaceful role in the world—they just differ on what exactly that looks like.
In particular, Europeans have to start meeting and engaging with revolutionaries, even if their positions appear furthest outside the norm. This camp, for its provocations and innovation, is feeding most of the political conversation and fires up the base. Engagement would make Europe’s concerns and assets more prevalent to their thinking, while ignoring them only guarantees tension if they come to power.
As Democrats are not paying any attention to Europe, the burden of revitalising the transatlantic relationship lies with Europeans. There are significant areas—like tech regulation, corruption reform, taxation, trade and security—where European leaders will find partners in the American left if they so choose. They should not be surprised, however, if they must make the first move. Indeed, if Democrats win the midterms, the next two years will see Trump weak and the Democrats not yet strong. In that time, no policy idea will come from Washington that imagines the future of collaborations with Europe. It is up to Europeans to propose them.
Europeans’ experience of the Biden administration illustrates why relying on American leadership is insufficient. Although Biden championed alliances rhetorically, several defining decisions were taken with limited European consultation. The Inflation Reduction Act prioritised domestic reindustrialisation through measures many Europeans regarded as discriminatory. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was poorly coordinated with allies. The AUKUS agreement advanced Indo-Pacific strategy but came at the expense of French interests. These episodes reflected a broader shift towards a US that increasingly pursues its strategic objectives unilaterally, even under an avowedly pro-NATO administration. Europeans’ continued acquiescence towards the Trump administration has only made unilateral foreign policy more appealing.
To avoid facing a Democratic majority which operates alone, Europeans must think through what they would like to propose to Democrats. That agenda should be capable of appealing across the Democratic coalition, from revolutionaries to renovators to revivalists.
In setting an agenda, Europeans should connect with Democrats from all three camps, but there are specific opportunities to build stronger coalitions with the camps that are naturally aligned with European interests. For example, on Israel policy and a new US role in the Middle East, the revolutionaries and the renovators could find alignment with many European governments. On a framework for competing with China and derisking, Europeans should collaborate with renovators and revivalists. All three camps will be in favour of a rebalanced NATO, but should Europeans seek more structural changes, they would find allies in the renovator and revolutionary camps. On all issues, Europeans should make the case that they can be a practical partner in solving some of the international problems around which the next Democratic coalition will organise itself. In so doing, Europeans and the US Democrats can build a new, more balanced and stable alliance.
A renewed transatlantic programme should therefore include:
These proposals would resonate differently across the Democratic coalition. Revivalists would view them as a means of modernising American leadership rather than abandoning it. Renovators could see them as evidence that Europe is assuming greater responsibility for its own security while contributing to domestic American priorities on labour, industrial policy and technological governance. Revolutionaries may find opportunities to advance an ambitious climate and social agenda beyond their shores. In all cases, the objective should be the same: demonstrate that Europe can be an asset rather than a burden for the next generation of Democratic policymakers.
The revolutionaries, renovators, and revivalists are ideal types that emerged from our analysis of 42 high-profile Democratic primaries and general election campaigns throughout the 2026 midterm cycle and of 63 individual Democratic candidates. We exhaustively researched campaign platforms, stump speeches, debates and candidate interviews with local news, and interviewed various pundits, current and former staff, officials and pollsters in Washington DC from April to August 2026.
The Democratic primary races and candidates studied include: Senate races in Alaksa, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas; Governor races in Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia and Wisconsin; and Congressional races in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.
Célia Belin is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office. Her research focuses on transatlantic relations.
Chris Herrmann is the US programme coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in Washington, DC. His research focuses on US domestic and foreign policy and the transatlantic relationship.
Nevada Joan Lee is a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in the Washington office. Her research focuses on European security and defence, US foreign policy, the transatlantic relationship and NATO.
We would like to thank the many people who helped with this paper. First and foremost, thank you to all the Democratic politicians, staffers, pollsters and pundits who met with us for our research. A big thanks to Portia Kentish, whose thoughtful and thorough editing greatly sharpened the piece. Jeremy Shapiro and Jim O’Brien provided sage wisdom and multiple rounds of considered feedback. Majda Ruge offered generous comments and advice on earlier drafts. Chris Eichberger gave this piece its visual life through his extraordinary visuals. Martin Tenev worked tirelessly to bring the paper to its final form—life on the web.
[1] ECFR conversations with current and former progressive congressional staffers, Washington DC, July and August 2026
[2] Author’s conversations with congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[3] ECFR conversation with Democratic pollsters, Online, May 2026
[4] Conversations with progressive and moderate Democratic congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[5] ECFR Conversation with former and current progressive congressional staff, Washington DC, July and August 2026
[6] Authors’ conversations with politicians, March 2026, Washington DC and conversation with Tim Walz, ECFR annual council meeting, Vienna, June 2026
[7] Author’s conversations with congressional staffers, Washington DC, July 2026
[8] ECFR private workshop with European officials, Berlin, February 2026
Investigamos o que importa para os brasileiros além do que passa na campanha eleitoral. Leia mais reportagens como essa clicando aqui.
Os órgãos que deveriam amparar as candidatas vítimas de violência política de gênero como a Justiça Eleitoral e a Polícia Federal não estão preparados para enfrentar o problema, denuncia a deputada estadual Bella Gonçalves (PT-MG), que disputa uma vaga a deputada federal nestas eleições. Ela é uma das mulheres candidatas que alertou ter recebido ameaças de morte e estupro nos primeiros dias de setembro.
Minas Gerais é o segundo Estado que mais mata mulheres do Brasil [em números absolutos]. A violência política acompanha a violência de gênero, por isso que eu acho que, em Minas Gerais, é tão comum a violência política contra as mulheres”, diz Bella Gonçalves.
Ela não foi a única. Na noite do último sábado, 12 de setembro, a suplente ao Senado e advogada, Fernanda Klitzke (PT) foi agredida, chutada e alvejada por balas de borracha por policiais militares em Jaraguá do Sul, Santa Catarina. As agressões ocorreram após uma denúncia de som alto.
Também no sábado, em Minas Gerais, a deputada estadual pelo PT, Andréia de Jesus, candidata à reeleição, também divulgou em suas redes sociais o recebimento de ameaças. Segundo uma matéria do site Alma Preta, Jesus foi ameaçada de morte, com conteúdo racista e de violência física, via uma mensagem eletrônica.
A candidata pelo PT, a deputada federal por Minas Gerais, Ana Elisa Santos Silva, também fez um Boletim de Ocorrência após receber mensagens com conteúdo de ódio racista e ameaças de morte e violência sexual em setembro. “A violência no Brasil [contra as mulheres] nunca parou; na verdade, ela está em crescimento”, afirma.
No dia 4 de setembro, a deputada federal Duda Salabert (PSOL-MG), candidata à reeleição, usou suas redes sociais para denunciar agressões sofridas quando fiscalizava uma mineração ilegal na divisa de Belo Horizonte com o município de Nova Lima, que foram seguidas por uma tentativa de homicídio.
Para Silva, que está concorrendo pela primeira vez em uma eleição, a sensação de insegurança continua. “Eu fui ameaçada de morte, não tenho segurança, não tenho medida protetiva, não tenho absolutamente nada e não tenho dinheiro”, relata. Mesmo denunciando aos órgãos competentes e levando ao Tribunal Regional Eleitoral de Minas (TRE-MG), Ana Elisa ainda se sente insegura.
Gonçalves também chama a atenção para o fato que as candidatas que estão entrando na política “seguem muito desprotegidas para enfrentar a violência política de gênero”. Mesmo contando com a presença de uma policial militar por ser deputada estadual, Bella Gonçalves critica a falta de regulamentação das leis que protegem as mulheres que atuam na política institucional, tanto no âmbito dos tribunais eleitorais, já que se trata de crime eleitoral, como na legislação de enfrentamento à violência política de gênero, aprovada em Minas Gerais.
Ironizando uma fala do ex-governador de Minas e candidato à Presidência pelo Novo, Romeu Zema, em entrevista à TV Globo, Bella Gonçalves diz que Minas tem, de fato, políticas contra mulheres. “A não-regulamentação e o não-funcionamento do Conselho de Proteção à Mulher do Estado, o não-investimento na rede de proteção, entre tantas outras ações que vão resultar na ponta em morte de mulheres”, exemplifica.
Entre as medidas tomadas após o recebimento das ameaças, a deputada estadual formalizou um pedido de providências na Gerência-Geral de Polícia Legislativa (GPOL) na Assembleia Legislativa de Minas Gerais (ALMG) e na Justiça Eleitoral. Além disso, afirma estar cobrando investigação das forças de inteligência da polícia e a segurança dela e de seus familiares. Gonçalves ainda pretende entregar uma carta ao Partido dos Trabalhadores solicitando a utilização do fundo partidário para combate à violência política de gênero e garantia da segurança das candidatas.
A percepção de que a violência política de gênero está aumentando no Brasil ocorre, segundo a gestora de mobilização da plataforma Bonde (antiga Nossas), Maíra Baracho, porque a presença de mulheres em espaços de poder incomoda. “A violência, infelizmente, nos acompanha por onde a gente circula”, diz Baracho ao explicar que a violência política é uma das facetas das diversas violências sofridas pelas mulheres no âmbito doméstico, íntimo ou profissional.
“Quando a gente olha para a política institucional, esse instrumento que é a violência se intensifica. E a função que ele ocupa nesse lugar é a de expulsão. É expulsar as mulheres que ousaram ocupar esse lugar, que não foi desenhado para elas”, analisa.
Baracho cita a deputada federal Benedita da Silva (PT-RJ) ao lembrar que na Assembleia Constituinte que produziria a Constituição de 1988, a Câmara Federal não contava com banheiro feminino. No Senado, a situação foi pior. O primeiro banheiro feminino foi construído apenas dez anos atrás, em 2016. “Isso ilustra muito bem, e a violência vem com esse lembrete, de que esse lugar não é [pensado] para a gente”, complementa.
A deputada Bella Gonçalves concorda. “Acho que [a violência] é uma tentativa de clara intimidação das mulheres, em um contexto eleitoral muito acirrado, em que o debate de enfrentamento à violência contra a mulher está muito acendido, e com a tentativa de nos desestabilizar”, avalia.
Ana Elisa Silva segue no mesmo pensamento ao considerar as ameaças, tanto a ela como às outras candidatas mineiras, fazem parte de um ataque coordenado para enfraquecer as candidaturas progressistas no estado, tanto em cargos proporcionais como nos cargos majoritários. “A gente sabe que nunca um [candidato a] presidente da República ganhou [a eleição] sem ganhar em Minas”, argumenta.
As intimidações mostram, segundo Baracho, como é importante que as mulheres continuem ocupando espaços de poder. “Se esse espaço não fosse relevante para a gente, os homens, o patriarcado, essa estrutura de poder, não estaria exatamente se preocupando com a nossa participação, com a nossa presença nele. Isso faz a gente refletir o quanto é importante ter mulheres na sua diversidade, negras, indígenas, trans, e muitas outras possibilidades do que é ser mulher, dentro desse espaço da política institucional”.
Além da responsabilização dos agressores, Maíra Baracho aponta o suporte às mulheres candidatas vítimas de violência política como uma importante ferramenta para mantê-las atuando na política. E, nesse caso especificamente, o suporte [se dá] pela continuidade, para que [a violência] de fato não signifique o desencorajamento de outras mulheres a estarem nesse lugar [de poder].
Bella Gonçalves, por exemplo, já havia sofrido outros ataques e ameaças antes dos ocorridos neste mês. Ela conta que em 2024, várias parlamentares estaduais e municipais, na maioria mulheres lésbicas, receberam ameaças de estupro corretivo e violência de gênero. Na época, elas se juntaram para aprovar a Lei nº 24.466/2023, que cria a política de enfrentamento à violência política contra a mulher.
Também foi realizada a Operação Di@na, uma parceria entre o Ministério Público de Minas Gerais e as polícias Civil e Militar do estado. Foram descobertos fóruns e grupos na internet, conhecidos como chans, onde participantes incitavam a violência, pedofilia e necrofilia. Um dos autores das ameaças às parlamentares chegou a ser preso em 2025.
Entretanto, na visão da deputada, a prisão não foi suficiente considerando que as mensagens recebidas agora traziam características muito parecidas àquelas que recebeu em 2024, com descrições de brutalidade contra ela e contendo informações de caráter privado. “É uma violência sem rosto”, diz Gonçalves. Ela ainda ressalta que “não só as candidatas são ameaçadas, mas também toda sua família”.
Ela defende, entre as ações de combate à violência política, a criação de espaços, tanto da Justiça Eleitoral quanto das polícias Civil e Militar, de recebimento de denúncias e de rápido encaminhamento para apuração. A responsabilização pelo Estado brasileiro das empresas de tecnologia pelas violências que ocorrem no âmbito da internet, também é defendida por Gonçalves.
A gestora da plataforma Bonde também defende que o Estado deve regularizar as redes sociais e pressionar as empresas para participarem da solução do problema. “Se a gente tem um universo de redes sociais, de big techs, alinhadas ao mesmo pensamento, à mesma lógica de sociedade, que está compondo boa parte do Estado brasileiro, é claro que essas pessoas não vão fazer esse enfrentamento [da violência], não é do interesse delas fazer esse enfrentamento”, argumenta.
Para que todas essas transformações ocorram, Baracho acredita que o caminho é a mobilização social. Tanto para defender as mulheres que irão “topar esse desafio e assumir essa tarefa coletiva”, como na elaboração das pautas desses mandatos.
Segundo ela, “quando a gente fala de violência no lugar da política institucional, não é só o corpo [que está em risco]. É o corpo também, mas é o que aquele corpo representa, o que aquele corpo está pautando. Então, avançar com determinadas agendas também é uma resposta, também é uma forma de proteger esses corpos, e avançar com a ideia de justiça social, que para a gente é fundamental”, conclui.
Dania Thafer of the Gulf International Forum weighs in on previously scheduled talks between Iran and Gulf states. Shortly before this interview aired, Oman announced that the talks were postponed.
Nesta segunda-feira, 7 de setembro, candidatos à Presidência da República cumprem agendas voltadas para as comemorações pelo Dia da Independência do Brasil. Na avenida Paulista, em São Paulo, um ato foi convocado pelo candidato e senador, Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ).
O presidente Lula, candidato à reeleição, estará presente ao tradicional Desfile Cívico-militar na Esplanada dos Ministérios, em Brasília. Os temas deste ano abrangem a luta contra a violência à mulher, a soberania nacional e a Copa do Mundo Feminina, que o Brasil sediará entre os dias 24 de junho e 27 de julho de 2027.
No Rio de Janeiro, o candidato do partido Avante, Augusto Cury, participa da “Caminhada da Independência Cury Brasil”. Com o trajeto entre o Posto 6 em Copacabana, zona sul do Rio de Janeiro, até o Posto 5, a concentração irá começar às 9 horas.
Em Brasília, o Partido Novo convoca seus aliados para participar de uma manifestação no feriado contra o ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) Alexandre de Moraes. O ato está marcado para às 9h, em frente ao Banco Central, local próximo de onde estará ocorrendo o desfile oficial. O candidato do Novo à presidência, Romeu Zema, não confirmou presença e é esperado no mesmo evento de Flávio Bolsonaro em São Paulo.
As denúncias trocadas entre os ministros do STF André Mendonça e Alexandre de Moraes, que devem ser tema nos eventos eleitorais desta segunda-feira, também mobilizam a Corte nesta semana. O presidente Edson Fachin deve ouvir manifestações do ministro André Mendonça e da Procuradoria-Geral da República (PGR) a respeito do pedido de investigação sobre abuso de poder e improbidade administrativa supostamente praticados por Mendonça feito pelo ministro Alexandre de Moraes na última quinta-feira, 3 de setembro.
Por sua vez, Mendonça tirou o sigilo do relatório da Polícia Federal (PF) das conversas entre o ministro Alexandre de Moraes e o ex-banqueiro Daniel Vorcaro, do Master. Ele solicitou que o plenário do STF avaliasse o material para decidir se Moraes deveria ser investigado.
Com menos de um mês para o primeiro turno das eleições, o Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) julga nesta semana as requisições dos Tribunais Regionais Eleitorais do Piauí e do Maranhão, de uso da Força Federal, composta por militares do Exército, da Marinha e da Aeronáutica. O objetivo é assegurar o livre exercício do voto nas eleições de 2026. As capitais, Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Fortaleza (CE), municípios distantes e aldeias indígenas de Rio Branco, capital do Acre, fizeram a mesma solicitação e já tiveram os pedidos aceitos pelo TSE.
Estão na agenda da semana de 7 a 11 de setembro:
(Image credit: Vahid Salemi)
Há crises políticas que resultam de uma única decisão errada. Outras resultam de um conjunto de acontecimentos que, isoladamente, poderiam eventualmente ser explicados, mas que, acumulados, criam uma realidade politicamente insustentável. O caso Luís Neves pertence claramente à segunda categoria.
O que verdadeiramente distingue esta crise não é apenas a gravidade de cada episódio. É a sucessão de factos, contradições, relações pessoais, decisões administrativas e explicações posteriores que foram surgindo ao longo das últimas semanas. E é precisamente essa acumulação que levanta uma pergunta inevitável: até quando pode Luís Montenegro manter no Governo um ministro cuja permanência se tornou, ela própria, um problema político para o Executivo?
Tudo começou com as obras numa propriedade em São Teotónio, no concelho de Odemira. O empreiteiro responsável, João dos Santos Carvalho, da Construbarcelos, não era um desconhecido de Luís Neves. A empresa tinha realizado trabalhos para a Polícia Judiciária durante o período em que Luís Neves dirigiu aquela instituição. Posteriormente, foi o mesmo empreiteiro a realizar obras na propriedade privada do atual ministro da Administração Interna.
A questão não é afirmar que uma relação pessoal ou profissional constitui, por si só, um crime. Não constitui. Mas a proximidade entre quem dirigia a Polícia Judiciária e um empresário cuja empresa recebeu contratos daquela instituição exige um escrutínio particularmente rigoroso. Quando essa mesma empresa passa depois a realizar obras na propriedade pessoal do antigo diretor nacional da PJ, a exigência de transparência torna-se ainda maior.
As obras no Alentejo levantaram outras dúvidas. Foram divulgadas informações relativas a 108 faturas, emitidas por 13 empresas, num valor superior a 23 mil euros. Durante algum tempo, uma das principais questões foi precisamente a ausência pública dos comprovativos de pagamento. Luís Neves afirmou ter pago cinco mil euros ao empreiteiro, mas a forma como determinados pagamentos foram realizados e a documentação disponível tornou-se objeto de escrutínio público.
Também a própria legalidade urbanística das obras foi questionada. A Câmara Municipal de Odemira confirmou que estava a averiguar a situação e que não existia processo de licenciamento ou comunicação prévia para as obras referidas. Luís Neves acabaria por admitir a necessidade de regularizar a situação.
Mas foi o episódio do atrelado que transformou uma polémica numa verdadeira crise política.
Um atrelado apreendido no âmbito da Operação Pacoba, relacionada com tráfico de droga, foi encontrado nas instalações da empresa Construbarcelos, pertencente precisamente ao empreiteiro amigo do ministro. A Polícia Judiciária abriu um inquérito para apurar as circunstâncias da situação.
Importa ser rigoroso: a PJ esclareceu que os produtos encontrados no interior do atrelado não eram estupefacientes. Contudo, o atrelado tinha sido apreendido numa investigação de combate ao tráfico de droga e continha materiais e produtos químicos associados à operação que levou à sua apreensão. A questão central não é, portanto, insinuar que o empreiteiro ou o ministro traficavam droga. Não há qualquer fundamento para essa afirmação. A questão é outra e é suficientemente grave: como chegou um bem apreendido pela Polícia Judiciária às instalações privadas de um empresário próximo do então diretor nacional da PJ?
Há ainda uma questão adicional, relacionada com a segurança do próprio atrelado e do seu conteúdo. Segundo foi noticiado, a Marinha não queria que o atrelado permanecesse nas suas instalações por razões de segurança. Perante essa preocupação, o atrelado acabou por ser transportado ao longo de vários quilómetros e armazenado nas instalações do empreiteiro, aparentemente sem condições adequadas de segurança ou de custódia.
Esta circunstância torna a decisão ainda mais difícil de compreender. Se existiam preocupações de segurança suficientemente sérias para levar a Marinha a recusar a permanência do atrelado nas suas instalações, como se considerou aceitável transportá-lo para um espaço privado, sem condições comparáveis e pertencente a um empresário com uma relação de proximidade com o então diretor nacional da PJ?
Luís Neves assumiu posteriormente ter autorizado a deslocação do atrelado, defendendo que a decisão permitiu poupar dinheiro ao Estado e afirmando que não existia qualquer problema com o atrelado enquanto este esteve na posse do empreiteiro. Mas essa explicação levanta uma pergunta inevitável: se estava tudo bem com o atrelado e com o seu conteúdo, por que razão a Polícia Judiciária foi imediatamente apreendê-lo quando soube que se encontrava nas instalações do empreiteiro?
A apreensão posterior não prova, por si só, que tenha existido qualquer irregularidade criminal. Mas demonstra que a situação era suficientemente sensível para justificar uma intervenção imediata das autoridades. E essa intervenção contradiz, pelo menos politicamente, a ideia de que se tratava de uma solução normal, segura e sem qualquer risco.
A explicação, contudo, não encerrou a polémica. Pelo contrário, colocou no centro do debate a relação entre a decisão administrativa, a entidade que beneficiou da guarda do bem, as condições de segurança do armazenamento e a amizade existente entre o então diretor nacional da PJ e o proprietário da empresa.
Quando um cidadão comum olha para este caso, é legítimo que pergunte se o mesmo tratamento teria sido dado a qualquer empresário sem qualquer ligação pessoal ao responsável máximo da Polícia Judiciária.
E as dúvidas não terminaram aí.
Surgiu depois a questão de uma viatura apreendida pela PJ e utilizada por Luís Neves. O ministro tinha afirmado, numa conferência de imprensa, possuir apenas um automóvel familiar com cerca de quinze anos. Posteriormente, tornou-se público que tinha outra viatura pessoal e utilizava ainda um automóvel que tinha sido apreendido pela Polícia Judiciária e posteriormente cedido ao Ministério da Administração Interna.
A questão deixou, assim, de ser apenas a utilização de uma viatura. Passou também a ser uma questão de credibilidade. Quando um governante presta esclarecimentos públicos e a informação posteriormente conhecida demonstra que a realidade é mais complexa do que aquela inicialmente apresentada, é inevitável que a confiança nas suas explicações seja afetada.
Também foram levantadas questões públicas sobre outros bens apreendidos e sobre a gestão e utilização de património proveniente de processos sob tutela da PJ. Todas estas matérias devem ser investigadas com rigor, sem julgamentos antecipados e sem condenações mediáticas. Mas há uma diferença fundamental entre respeitar a presunção de inocência e exigir responsabilidade política.
Um ministro não precisa de ser condenado por um tribunal para deixar de reunir condições políticas para permanecer no Governo.
É precisamente aqui que a responsabilidade passa diretamente para Luís Montenegro.
Porque mantém o primeiro-ministro Luís Neves no Governo?
Essa é hoje uma das perguntas mais importantes desta crise. Montenegro continua a manifestar confiança no ministro, apesar da sucessão de episódios, das investigações e do desgaste evidente da imagem do Governo.
A explicação poderá ser política: afastar Luís Neves poderia ser entendido como admitir que a escolha foi errada. Mas mantê-lo tem igualmente um preço. Cada nova revelação prolonga a crise. Cada nova contradição transforma o problema de um ministro num problema do próprio primeiro-ministro.
E é também impossível ignorar o comportamento da restante oposição.
O silêncio ou a contenção de alguns partidos perante uma crise desta dimensão merece reflexão. O Partido Socialista, em particular, não demonstrou a mesma intensidade política que tantas vezes manifesta perante casos de menor dimensão quando os protagonistas pertencem a outros quadrantes políticos.
É legítimo perguntar porquê.
Não significa afirmar que existe qualquer acordo oculto, comprometimento ou cumplicidade. Não existem elementos públicos que permitam fazer essa acusação. Mas politicamente é legítimo questionar se determinados silêncios resultam de uma estratégia de prudência ou do receio de que uma escalada do escrutínio sobre relações entre poder político, empresas e instituições possa trazer novamente à superfície outros casos do passado.
É neste contexto que o CHEGA decidiu assumir uma posição clara.
André Ventura exigiu a demissão de Luís Neves e alertou para o risco de perda de confiança dos portugueses nas instituições. O partido apresentou uma moção de censura e procurou colocar o caso no centro do debate parlamentar.
A comissão de inquérito proposta pelo CHEGA tem igualmente uma importância política fundamental. O Parlamento não pode limitar-se a assistir às revelações e esperar que o tempo resolva aquilo que a política tem obrigação de esclarecer. Uma comissão parlamentar de inquérito permitiria chamar responsáveis, analisar decisões, conhecer documentos e perceber como foi possível que um bem apreendido pela PJ fosse parar às instalações de um empresário próximo do seu então diretor nacional, em condições de segurança aparentemente inadequadas.
Mais do que uma iniciativa contra uma pessoa, trata-se de defender uma regra essencial: ninguém pode estar acima do escrutínio democrático.
O Presidente da República também deixou claro, através das intervenções e alertas dirigidos ao funcionamento das instituições e à necessidade de responsabilidade política, que Portugal não pode normalizar crises permanentes no Governo. A estabilidade não pode significar silêncio. A estabilidade não pode significar tolerar indefinidamente situações que fragilizam a confiança dos cidadãos.
A moção de censura apresentada pelo CHEGA deve, por isso, ser analisada para além do seu resultado aritmético.
Mesmo que não tenha condições para derrubar o Governo, tem um significado político inequívoco: o CHEGA recusou ser cúmplice, recusou fechar os olhos e posicionou-se claramente contra um Governo que prometeu rigor, transparência e exigência, mas que hoje mantém no seu interior um ministro envolvido numa sucessão de casos que continuam por esclarecer.
O CHEGA fez uma escolha política clara, não proteger o Governo apenas porque algumas das suas posições podem coincidir pontualmente com propostas defendidas pelo partido.
O Governo de Luís Montenegro deve ser avaliado pelos seus atos. E, neste caso, o ato mais relevante do primeiro-ministro é precisamente aquilo que ainda não fez.
Ainda não retirou Luís Neves do Governo.
E enquanto isso não acontecer, a crise continuará a ter dois protagonistas, Luís Neves, por tudo aquilo que ainda precisa de explicar, e Luís Montenegro, por continuar a decidir que essas explicações são suficientes.
Talvez sejam suficientes para o primeiro-ministro.
Mas a pergunta verdadeiramente importante é outra: serão suficientes para os portugueses?
Acho que não.
The post LUÍS NEVES: QUANDO AS EXPLICAÇÕES JÁ NÃO CHEGAM appeared first on Jornal O DIABO.
O Estado de São Paulo já teve mais resgates de trabalhadores sujeitos a trabalho análogo à escravidão no campo nos seis primeiros meses do ano do que em todo o ano de 2025. É o que revelam dados do relatório de Conflitos no Campo, com dados parciais de 2026, divulgado nesta quarta-feira (2), pela Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT). O número nacional total de resgatados de condições degradantes de trabalho, por outro lado, diminuiu.
Ao todo, 148 trabalhadores foram resgatados no primeiro semestre deste ano em São Paulo. A marca já é superior aos 142 de 2025. A maior parte desses profissionais trabalhava no plantio e corte de cana-de-açúcar.
Para a coordenadora do CPT, Cecília Gomes, o aumento de casos pode ser visto pela característica do tipo de trabalho nos campos, incluindo lavoureiros e operários de construções. Entretanto, Gomes também avalia que o aumento da tecnologia pode influenciar nessa conta.
“Aquela história de que levar a tecnologia para o campo vai diminuir a mão de obra e o trabalho escravo, essa hipótese cai por terra. Porque, quando a gente olha, quanto mais tecnológico é o ambiente, maior a probabilidade ou a possibilidade de ter trabalho escravo. Essa é uma característica que tanto está no Sul, no Sudeste, no Centro-Oeste, está em todas as regiões brasileiras”, afirma a coordenadora.
No país, 355 trabalhadores foram resgatados em 30 casos registrados entre janeiro e junho. Em 2025, essa marca foi de 842 pessoas. Mesmo com as subnotificações das denúncias, Gomes afirma que o trabalho da CPT em conjunto com o Ministério do Trabalho mostra que existe uma necessidade de um olhar mais atento nas áreas mais tecnológicas.
A CPT também identificou que os casos mais graves de violência são praticados, em sua maioria, por fazendeiros (305 casos) e empresários (102 casos), que respondem por dois terços dos assassinatos e 61,4% dos episódios de violência contra ocupação e posse no primeiro semestre de 2026.
Para Gomes, a crescente violência no campo é possibilitada pela impunidade dos agentes causadores. “Pouco desses casos são apurados e os poucos que são apurados são pouco punidos”, explica a coordenadora da CPT.
Violência mais praticada no campo em 2026, a contaminação por minérios atingiu 195 ocorrências. Para a CPT, o cenário é possível devido à priorização do “lucro em detrimento à vida” e da falta de fiscalizações mais rígidas de mineradoras.
Também houve 169 casos de contaminação por agrotóxicos, o que passa longe de ser por acaso, já que a organização vem identificando o uso intencional dessas substâncias como um tipo prático de arma química. “Não é só a contaminação das águas, esse agrotóxico é colocado para atingir os povos, para atingir as comunidades, como uma forma de expulsão”, denuncia Gomes.
Em 2025, o Brasil bateu recorde de agrotóxicos liberados. Foram 750 registros concedidos pelo Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento (Mapa).
Investigamos o que importa para os brasileiros além do que passa na campanha eleitoral. Leia mais reportagens como essa clicando aqui.
A violência policial matou 18 pessoas por dia e mais de 40 mil foram vítimas de mortes violentas intencionais em 2025 no país, segundo o Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública. São dados que justificam a preocupação dos fóruns populares de segurança pública em apresentar, em um ano eleitoral, 27 pontos “inegociáves por uma Segurança Pública que Proteja a Vida”.
“A segurança no nosso país tem sido discutida e tem sido organizada só com a agenda da repressão qualificada. […] O que o Fórum Popular propõe é dar dois passos para trás e pensar numa segurança que seja sustentável a partir de uma política forte de prevenção à violência”, afirma Edna Jatobá, coordenadora executiva do Gabinete de Assessoria Jurídica às Organizações Populares (Gajob) e articuladora do Fórum Popular de Segurança Pública do Nordeste.
Nas reivindicações reunidas durante a 1ª Conferência Popular de Segurança Pública do Brasil (ConsepBR), realizada em Fortaleza (CE), saem pautas muito discutidas atualmente como aumento de penalidades, diminuição da maioridade penal, mudanças nos códigos penal e processual para entrar garantia de direitos, prevenção, educação, saúde, trabalho e renda, estratégias comunitárias de policiamento, mediação de conflitos e até segurança alimentar. No encontro, ocorrido entre 19 e 21 de agosto, estiveram presentes 300 representantes de fóruns populares e entidades que discutem o tema de 16 estados do Brasil.
Para Gerlane Simões, integrante do Fórum Popular de Segurança Pública do Nordeste e de Pernambuco, fazer a conferência antes das eleições foi importante para “a gente levar para o debate [sobre segurança pública] e colocar o dedo na ferida [dos candidatos e políticos]”. O objetivo agora é apresentar as ideias aos candidatos à Presidência da República e também ao máximo de candidatos aos governos dos estados.
A gente fez uma discussão enorme, várias reuniões, por conta desse timing [das eleições]. A segurança pública é a pauta que está na agenda do dia da extrema direita e a gente faz a disputa dessa narrativa. A ideia é encaminhar para todos os candidatos que a gente conseguir alcançar”, explica Simões.
Jatobá afirma que os pontos formulados mudam a forma como a segurança pública vem sendo discutida. Em vez de tratar sobre a punição aos crimes, abrangem a prevenção da criminalidade. Para ela, a primeira medida necessária é mudar a forma de investir na segurança pública.
“Primeiro é o investimento, a reorientação do investimento para programas de prevenção. Segundo, é entender a segurança como uma política que se vê realizada também em outros direitos, como acesso à moradia, acesso à cidade, acesso à cultura, esporte, lazer, entretenimento, educação, saúde”, afirma.
Para Simões, há uma diferença entre investimento na segurança pública e investimento em armamentos, que recebe investimentos bilionários com a crença de amenizar a violência nos estados. “Segurança pública para a gente não é um investimento bilionário. Por exemplo, aqui em Pernambuco, que se investiu mais de 4,5 bilhões em 2025, investiu-se em mais armamento e mais policiamento, e a violência só aumentou”, afirma.
A coordenadora do Gajob pondera que não se trata de dizer com isso “que não vai ter mais polícia, que não vai ter repressão, que não vai ter prisão. A gente está dizendo que esse caminho já foi percorrido e poucos resultados foram alcançados. O caminho da prevenção foi pouco percorrido e tem condições de dar base a uma mudança social”.
“Segurança pública é garantia de direitos. É um conjunto de políticas públicas que estejam funcionando”, explica Gerlane Simões. Ela conta que em Pernambuco ocorreu uma pré-conferência com crianças e adolescentes. Nela, as crianças diziam que só queriam brincar. “Se isso não está na pauta do que é segurança pública então deveria ser outra coisa, né?” indaga Simões. Para ela, direito ao lazer, à saúde, ao trabalho e à renda, são pautas que devem ser abordadas sempre que o tema for a segurança pública.
“Se a gente tem investimento em prevenção, uma política de segurança articulada com outros direitos sociais, refletida num padrão de formação das forças de segurança, observando a diversidade da nossa população, orientando as forças de segurança para protocolos antimachistas, antirracistas, com respeito a todo credo e religião e à diversidade, a gente pode aí trilhar um caminho diferente”, completa Jatobá.
A carta política dos fóruns populares também traz alternativas à chamada guerra às drogas, que segundo Jatobá “não é uma guerra contra a substância, ela é uma guerra contra as pessoas pobres que consomem drogas”.
Entre as soluções apresentadas está observar a questão das drogas “como um problema estruturalmente de saúde, um problema social”. A dirigente do Gajob ainda afirma que “não se faz guerra às drogas a quem está traficando no alto escalão, [de] colarinho branco”.
“Se tiver que fazer algum enfrentamento com relação ao tráfico de drogas, que comece com o sufocamento das grandes facções, dos grupos criminosos armados, por agir com inteligência e desmantelar esses grupos, tirar essas armas de circulação, sufocar financeiramente como algumas operações realizadas pela Polícia Federal, articulada com polícias estaduais”, aponta Jatobá.
Ela ainda lembra que mesmo nos bairros nobres, a “guerra às drogas” vai vitimar “o menino pobre, preto, morador de periferia, que faz uso de pequena quantidade de droga. Ou [que a droga] serve como trabalho, que é um dos piores trabalhos infantis e dos mais perigosos que existem”.
“A gente entende que uma política de segurança pública deve acabar com esse termo da guerra às drogas, que tem sido um pretexto para praticar o genocídio, o genocídio contra a juventude de pobre, negra e periférica”, finaliza.
Gerlane Simões acredita que a população brasileira não só está mal informada sobre o que devidamente é a segurança pública, como existe uma intenção em deixá-la desinformada. “A sociedade [brasileira] foi construída a partir de uma colonização, que ainda está em curso, e vai se reformulando. Então, a sociedade está bem formada nesse sentido do que é a segurança pública”.
Já a coordenadora do Gajob entende que há uma grande onda de notícias falsas no campo da segurança pública, “Há uma tentativa de tratar o tema da segurança como palanque eleitoral, prometendo que vai se resolver tudo com polícia, com morte e com prisão, mas sem apresentar alternativas estruturais para resolver o problema”, completa. O resultado da desinformação, para Edna Jatobá, é uma população “que está refém do medo e o medo tem sido um impulsionador para esses projetos fundamentalistas de tratar a segurança como morte”.
“A gente tem uma população que está buscando se informar, mas que ainda precisamos agir sobre esse grande mercado de notícias falsas, de propostas sem futuro e sem fundamento, sem nenhum respaldo de estudo ou de dados, para que as políticas deem certo”, conclui Jatobá.
Veja aqui todos os 27 Pontos Inegáveis para a Segurança Pública que Proteja a Vida.
Investigamos o que importa para os brasileiros além do que passa na campanha eleitoral. Leia mais reportagens como essa clicando aqui.
Já autorizados para fazer propagandas eleitorais nas ruas e na internet, os candidatos à Presidência terão disponível a partir desta sexta-feira, 28 de agosto, o horário eleitoral gratuito de rádio e de televisão. As veiculações seguirão até o dia 1.º de outubro, três dias antes do primeiro turno das eleições. O Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) divulgou na última quinta-feira, 20 de agosto, o tempo concedido à propaganda para cada partido.
O horário eleitoral gratuito será dividido em dois blocos de 12 minutos e 30 segundos para os candidatos à Presidência. A coligação de Lula, o Brasil Pronto para Mais, composta pelos partidos PT, PC do B, PV, PDT, PSB, PSOL e REDE, vai receber o maior tempo de propaganda, com 5 minutos e 31 segundos. Flávio Bolsonaro terá 4 minutos e 20 segundos; Ronaldo Caiado, 2 minutos e 2 segundos; e Augusto Cury terá 35 segundos de tela. Os demais candidatos à presidência não atingiram as exigências de cláusula de desempenho.
Seguindo com as sabatinas dos programas de televisão, a TV Globo inicia uma série de entrevistas com os candidatos à Presidência da República nesta segunda-feira, 24 de agosto. O primeiro entrevistado será Romeu Zema (Novo), que estará no programa nesta segunda-feira. Seguindo o cronograma, Ronaldo Caiado (PSD) é entrevistado nesta terça (25); Renan Santos (Missão), na quarta-feira (26); Lula (PT), na quinta-feira (27); Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), na sexta-feira (28) e Augusto Cury (Avante), no sábado (29).
As entrevistas serão transmitidas pelo canal a partir de 21h05, após o “Jornal Nacional”. Também será possível acompanhá-las pela TV a Cabo na “Globonews” ou pela internet no portal G1.
No Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), a “uberização” e o vínculo trabalhista entre motoristas de aplicativo e as plataformas de transporte voltam a ser discutidos pelo Plenário da Corte nesta quinta-feira, 28 de agosto. Os julgamentos do Recurso Extraordinário (RE) 1446336, que tem como relator o ministro Edson Fachin, e da Reclamação (RCL) 64018, com relatoria do ministro Alexandre de Moraes, poderão considerar a Convenção Internacional sobre o Trabalho Decente na Economia de Plataformas. O recurso relatado por Fachin aborda a relação de trabalho entre motoristas e plataformas digitais. Já a reclamação analisada por Moraes foi apresentada pela empresa Rappi, que contesta a decisão da Justiça do Trabalho em reconhecer vínculo empregatício entre a plataforma e o motorista.
A nova convenção sobre as plataformas digitais foi aprovada pelos estados-membros da Organização Internacional do Trabalho (OIT) em junho deste ano. Ela promove normas e garantias aos trabalhadores por aplicativo, como o pagamento dos valores a receber dentro dos prazos legais e, para aqueles que têm reconhecido o vínculo empregatício, um salário mínimo, além de uma compensação dos custos gerados pelo exercício da profissão.
Agenda da Semana de 24 a 28 de agosto:
Agenda da semana da Pública é um serviço apresentado aos leitores aos domingos e segundas, concebido com base nas informações dos portais da Câmara, Senado, TSE e STF.
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One of the most vivid memories of my childhood involves an ice cream. My mother and father kept a relatively treat-free house, with desserts reserved for special occasions, but their standards loosened during summer vacations. During a visit with relatives we didn’t see very often, my parents decided to make the day even more special; they gave my sister, my two cousins, and me money to buy something from the ice cream truck that made a regular circuit around the neighborhood. Thrilled by this rare indulgence, I rushed down the sidewalk, delighted to finally take part in this classic summertime ritual, eating dessert in the middle of the afternoon!
I can still remember the thrill of holding that much-anticipated cone, taking my first lick . . . then watching the scoop roll off its biscuity throne to the sidewalk.
Perhaps that is why, as an adult, my freezer is always stocked with at least two flavors of ice cream, which I eat year-round. It’s my go-to way to reward myself after a productive day, or to make a bad one better. While I tend to keep things simple (and have been known to eat directly out of the carton), I love ice cream for its versatility. It can support a piece of apple pie or be the main event in a fudge-slathered sundae. Its near-infinite variety of flavors offers something for everyone, from no-frills vanilla to chef-inspired gastronomic experiments.
That ability to shape-shift has made this humble dessert a mirror of sorts, reflecting cultural changes. It even goes back to the founding of the country: Thomas Jefferson was the first known American to write down an ice cream recipe (though it’s only fairly recently that historians have begun to acknowledge his problematic relationship with the enslaved workers who produced such delicacies for his guests). A century later, advances in refrigeration transformed ice cream from a luxury good to a mass-market phenomenon. As immigration surged in the US, peddling ice cream on the street became a way for new arrivals to grasp the American dream. During World War II, the dessert symbolized the country’s can-do attitude: Despite the many logistical obstacles, the US government shipped it to troops as far away as the Pacific.
In our current Age of Ozempic, while celebrities get ever slimmer and our screens fill with physical-optimization hacks, desserts may seem like an endangered species. But I believe it’s more important than ever to take guilt-free pleasure in food that brings you joy. And if you still feel a twinge of hesitation before digging into a bowl of your favorite flavor, multiple studies over the past 20 years have shown that ice cream actually has real, measurable health benefits (see David Merritt Johns’s piece from The Atlantic below). No less an authority than Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist and oncologist, titled his most recent book on healthy living Eat Your Ice Cream.
So go ahead and have a scoop. Think of it as doctor’s orders.
This entertaining account traces ice cream’s transformation from an expensive luxury to an all-American dish in the early 20th century, when advances in refrigeration made it more widely available. Prohibition played a part, too: When alcohol was banned nationwide in the 1920s and early ’30s, some breweries switched to making ice cream instead, “a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.”
But what really stands out in this story is the role ice cream played in World War II, when it became a symbol of American patriotism. Siegel weaves together historical anecdotes that show the enormous effort the US military put into embedding ice cream throughout its supply lines. Why go through all that trouble? Siegel makes a compelling case that getting ice cream halfway around the world, under such difficult circumstances, was a way of putting American exceptionalism into action. If we can do this for our soldiers, we can do anything.
By the time World War II came around, ice cream . . . had become inseparable from the American way of life, an emblem of American comfort, freedom, and democracy. The rest of the world went back to banning ice cream as part of its rationing efforts (with Great Britain adding salt to the wound by endorsing carrots on sticks as the official wartime substitute for ice cream bars), but the United States doubled down, building pop-up ice cream factories on the front lines; delivering individual ice cream cartons to foxholes; spending more than a million dollars on a floating ice cream barge that roamed the Pacific delivering ice cream to Allied ships incapable of making their own; and distributing 135 million pounds of dehydrated ice cream base in 1943 alone.
And you’re goddamn right we won the war.
This engaging survey of popular ice cream flavors is filled with trivia-night-worthy fun facts: that vanilla is consistently the best-selling flavor worldwide; that chocolate ice cream may actually have been created first (cocoa being more readily available than vanilla); and that mint chocolate chip got an international popularity boost when a British culinary student created the dessert “Mint Royale” to celebrate the marriage of England’s Princess Anne in 1973.
But such is the nature of culinary history that not all lineages are straightforward. I appreciate the way Barron analyzes all the possible origin stories, even when they contradict. While some flavors have a single known inventor—such as the Grateful Dead fan who suggested “Cherry Garcia” to the hippie entrepreneurs Ben & Jerry’s—others resulted from experimentation over time. Some even have shameful associations: Butter pecan, for example, became popular in the American South, where the nuts were plentiful and used to dilute vanilla ice cream when serving it to Black customers.
Rocky Road could be considered the ice cream world’s first mix-in flavor, blending creamy ice cream with crunchy and chewy additions. According to legend, its creation dates back to 1929, when ice cream maker William Dreyer and candy maker Joseph Edy teamed up in Oakland, California. During the Great Depression—a “rocky” time for America—Dreyer supposedly invented the flavor by using his wife’s sewing scissors to cut marshmallows into a chocolate ice cream base studded with walnuts. The duo mass-produced the new flavor, giving the country a bit of sweetness and humor during a bleak decade.
But the name “Rocky Road” may have existed long before. In the mid-1800s in Australia, settlers used the term for a confection of sweets, nuts, and dried fruit; essentially, a proto-trail mix. And just down the road from Dreyer’s and Edy’s, Fentons Creamery also claims to have invented the flavor, swapping walnuts for almonds in their signature version.
Brianna Wellen had one overarching question when she visited the Chicago outpost of The Museum of Ice Cream: What is this place? I had the same thought as Wellen when it started showing up on Google Maps as a must-see attraction in my hometown—is this “an influencer’s paradise? A children’s playground?”
The answer, it turns out, in her snarky-but-fair review, is both. A privately owned chain with five locations in the US and one in Singapore, it started as a pop-up “experience” in New York, with an aggressively pink aesthetic that bridged the line between kids’ party and Instagrammable photo op. If you’re looking for “an anthropological look at the history and cultural impact of ice cream,” she writes, this isn’t it. (Though I’d happily visit that museum.)
It’s more fun to write a scathing review than a positive one, but Wellen doesn’t take the easy route and go full hater. She acknowledges that the people around her are having fun taking pictures in the giant pool of faux sprinkles, and that the unlimited ice cream samples may be worth the price of admission for some, even if the Chicago hot-dog-style signature treat looks better than it tastes.
What she points out so effectively is the chasm between the museum’s ethos of lighthearted escapism and its grim reality: It is housed in a building that used to be the headquarters of the prestigious Chicago Tribune newspaper, now given over to an ephemeral, commercial experience dependent on overworked, demoralized employees.
There’s something extremely dystopian about these bright, colorful, somewhat functionless installations popping up inside closed businesses, which is how the project started. And seeing Chicago’s iteration in the storefront of the now empty Tribune Tower, which once housed some of the most influential journalists the city had to offer, was disappointing, signaling that while the media industry is on its deathbed, people will form a line down the block to snap a photo with a plastic sprinkle.
There was something about the staff’s demeanor that led me to believe they weren’t as excited to be there as their oft-repeated scripted banter made it seem. The logistics of certain experiences seemed like a mess; the large, unending crowds needed to be endlessly wrangled; and the loud music meant that their faux cheerful taglines needed to be screamed right into the ears of visitors to be heard. Smiles were pasted on as impatient guests asked why they couldn’t just go into the Ice Cream Lab already. When Angela and I kindly told one worker that there was no rush in letting us into a particular room and then complimented her ice-cream-themed hair clips, she reacted with such graciousness at our attitudes that I thought she was about to start sobbing.
I still remember my visceral reaction on reading this Atlantic story a few years ago: Is ice cream actually good for me?
In this exhaustively researched and reported piece, Merritt Johns explains how a statistically significant finding can be pushed aside when it doesn’t fit an accepted narrative. For more than 20 years, nutritional studies have shown that diabetics who eat half a cup of ice cream a day have a lower risk of heart problems, and people who eat two or more servings of ice cream a week had a significantly lower risk of developing diabetes in the first place. Yet those findings seemed so contrary to public health advice that alternate explanations kept being pushed instead—it’s just dairy that’s good for you, especially if you choose low-fat milk or yogurt. “As academia’s public-relations machinery came to life,” he writes, “nuance went out the window.”
Poor ice cream never got its due—until now.
Every day brings another health story about a so-called “superfood,” but Merritt Johns’s relentless focus on the facts sets this one apart. Rather than relying on an academic study or two, he tracks down all the key researchers involved in what I like to call the Great Ice Cream Cover-up: “I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before.” Some refuse to be interviewed (more proof of a conspiracy?), but most seem relieved to finally admit that seemingly set-in-stone advice about what’s good for us is more malleable than we think.
In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.
The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.
Who thought foie gras ice cream was a good idea? And more importantly—what does it taste like? Amy Ettinger took on these pressing questions with a visit to Humphry Slocombe, a “kid-unfriendly” ice cream shop in San Francisco. Chef and co-owner Jake Godby admits the controversial flavor is only rarely on the menu (it’s too expensive and takes too long to make), but the debate surrounding it has been good for business. Hardcore foodies rush to buy it when they can, while the protests of animal-rights activists only raise the shop’s profile.
More than a food review, Ettinger explores why people make and eat extreme flavors. She argues that American palates have expanded over the decades; we’ve gotten used to ordering Korean barbecue tacos and sushi burritos, mash-ups unknown (and unthinkable) to our great-grandparents. To grab attention—and prove your chops as an out-of-the-box culinary thinker—you have to raise the stakes: “One person’s gross-out experience seems to be another person’s gleeful experimentation.”
As I took another bite, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill. There was something decadent in eating a treat that so many people would be upset about. The wrath I could incur by simply opening my mouth, chewing, and swallowing made me feel powerful. And maybe that perceived transgression is itself a flavor enhancer, much like artificial coloring can ramp up our experience of “lime” or “banana” in some mass-produced, neon-colored taffy or gum.
Is that why Godby put it on the menu—so he could wield that kind of power? Why continue making food that would anger people? Was it to get attention?
Who knew the simple ice cream truck had such a dramatic backstory? As an avid collector of historical trivia, I devoured this account of ice cream’s mobile history, starting with 19th-century immigrant street peddlers through controversies over the trucks’ music, cleanliness, and supposed ties to organized crime (the notorious Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars ended with six people killed in a fire).
What gives this piece a lovely personal touch is the way Potts weaves this past with her own memories of growing up in an English seaside town, where she and her father would pick up ice cream treats in the summer: “An unspoken secret between us, given that Mum had dinner waiting on the table when we arrived, and would have been appalled to know that a mere seven minutes earlier, we were driving along the seafront, car top down, the salty air whipping my long hair into the ice cream and sticky sauce.”
As she interviews ice cream van owners whose vocation goes back generations—along with the entrepreneurs adapting their vehicles to new technologies—she is struck by how many people in the business are following a family tradition. “It’s an industry that remains strong, with an uncanny ability to adapt to changing times,” she writes. “I am fascinated by its survival.”
While it may be more common now to see an ice cream truck at an event or on TikTok, we still crave those summer days when jaunty chimes call us out to the street. The odds can feel stacked against the old-school icey men, with legislation that limits their movement, environmental and nutritional campaigners who demand more and more restrictions, rising pitch rents, the price of vans, the difference, even, in the way children play outside. But they’re still there, still clinging on. Why?
This portrait of master gelatiere Andrea Soban oozes with admiration for its subject—and had me craving his signature mandarin orange flavor. From his base in Valenza, Italy, halfway between Milan and Torino, he continues a family tradition that goes back at least five generations: creating the most flavorful, creamy gelato free of artificial ingredients or colors.
The word gelato—Italy’s lower-fat, lower-sugar version of ice cream—literally means “frozen,” but making it at Soban’s level involves science-whiz levels of knowledge. Zwingle shows the intricate steps he takes to get the right balance of ice crystals, fat droplets, and air bubbles. While he sources ingredients from around the world, most of his favorites come from specific parts of Italy; the best pistachios, for example, are grown in one small Sicilian town.
This story gave me a new appreciation for the effort that goes into making a seemingly simple dessert—when the person making it wants to be the very best, that is. Anyone want to join me on a field trip to Valenza?
“Try this,” Andrea said, as he handed me a tiny spoonful of a just-made mandarin sorbetto. Sensations of cold, and a smooth wave of extraordinary citrus flavor, blended into a faultless harmony as the whole combination swept up to my brain. It tasted juicier than the juice of the fruit itself. And then it simply disappeared. No loading my tongue with a mass of flavors jostling together, struggling for dominance, leaving assorted clinging aftertastes as my stomach braced itself. It left only the desire for more.
Suddenly I understood the hidden power of fine gelato. It doesn’t aim only for my mouth, and my stomach is really of no interest. It aims for the dopamine reward system lurking in my brain, the part that says, “You don’t need this, but you’ve got to have it.” We did these little teaching-tastings intermittently all morning. I paid close attention to everything he said, but the voice in my head kept crooning incoherently about what was happening in my mouth.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
E se experimentar a cidade de Lisboa fosse menos condicionado por mapas coloniais e mais capaz de questionar territórios de poder, subalternidade e resistência? Por via da arte e de debates, agosto convida a deslocamentos entre Arroios, a Quinta do Mocho e a Cova da Moura. No livro O Espaço do Cidadão, Milton Santos sustenta que «o modelo cívico forma-se, entre outros, de dois componentes essenciais: a cultura e o território». Tal enunciado desloca a compreensão da cidadania para além da (…)
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Note: This policy brief is a second edition of an earlier paper published on June 9th 2026. It updates the prior analysis in light of Marine Le Pen’s confirmation that she will run for the French presidency.
In the early hours of November 2nd 1976, a bomb exploded outside the Paris home of the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and his family. The perpetrators were never found. His youngest daughter, Marine, 8 years old at the time of the attack, later seethed that the family was not shown “the slightest sign of solidarity or compassion” by the French authorities. Today, as Marine Le Pen launches into her fourth—and most competitive—bid for France’s presidency, that quote reveals something of the woman who might soon occupy the Elysée Palace. If she wins, European policymakers will need to understand this self-defined outsider and how her family’s and party’s long years in the political wilderness shape her domestic and international agenda.
That insurgent self-perception may seem odd now. After all, the National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) is far ahead in polling for the first round of the election, is accepted by an increasing share of French polite society, and is close to some of the country’s most powerful economic elites. But it still explains why the rest of Europe should brace for the possibility of a French president who sees herself as a rebel against the country’s and the EU’s established norms and institutions. As this paper will argue, a Le Pen presidency of France would be a significantly more formidable challenge to European orthodoxies than Giorgia Meloni is in Italy or Viktor Orban was in Hungary.
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Only one thing is certain about the result of France’s presidential election next year: President Emmanuel Macron’s decade in power will come to an end. Who replaces him is an open question, with any number of conceivable outcomes. The exact field of candidates is not yet clear, not even in Macron’s centrist camp, where two former prime ministers—Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal—are vying for primacy. French presidential election campaigns are often volatile; both those in 2017 and 2022 saw major shifts over the half-year before polling day. But current polling suggests that the RN party candidate is on track to win the first round, on April 18th 2027, and to enjoy good prospects in the second, due on May 2nd.
The RN went through months of speculation over who would represent it at the presidential election. In March 2025, Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzling European parliamentary funds and received a five-year ban on standing for election. Over recent months, Jordan Bardella, the RN’s untested young leader and Le Pen’s protégé, was talked about as the party’s best hope.
On July 7th 2026, however, the Court of Appeal reduced Le Pen’s ineligibility penalty, which enabled her to run. It also required her to serve a year of house arrest with an electronic ankle tag. That evening, Le Pen announced that she would seek the presidency and would appeal to the Court of Cassation. The penalty is suspended until France’s highest court rules on the case, which could take place as late as April 2027.
Her candidacy has significant implications for the rest of Europe. Le Pen is an experienced campaigner and an established (though also divisive) figure in France. Her bid for the presidency is perhaps more likely to survive the heat of the campaign than a Bardella run would have. The fact that she is the candidate probably increases the chances of the French far-right coming to power for the first time since Marshal Pétain, the puppet leader of Vichy France.
Le Pen is marked by the RN’s long years in the wilderness. She believes in radical solutions. As president, she would likely be a confrontational and abrasive force in Europe.
To reiterate, the outcome of the election remains wide open. But the scale of the potential rupture of a Le Pen win means policymakers elsewhere in Europe must both understand the RN and prepare for that eventuality. To that end, the authors of this paper have extensively researched the party’s Europe and foreign policies. The following study is based on in-depth interviews with an array of senior RN figures and external experts as well as analysis of the party’s speeches, legislative proposals, voting records and electoral programmes. The result is a series of five theses about what a Le Pen win next year would mean for Europe.
Marine Le Pen’s decision to run for president despite her upheld conviction—and in contradiction of her own prior statements—is a reminder of her centrality to the RN. She is still the party’s dominant leader. The decision also dispelled the illusion that Bardella constitutes a real alternative to her leadership. It showed that today’s RN is still Marine Le Pen’s inheritance and achievement.
The party was founded as the National Front (FN) in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, along with French former members of the Waffen-SS and other nostalgists for colonial French Algeria. It drew together different threads of the far-right. For decades most French citizens considered it beyond the pale. When Jean-Marie Le Pen narrowly made it into the second round of the 2002 presidential election, it shocked both France and Europe. He was roundly defeated by 82% to 18% by then-president Jacques Chirac.
Taking the reins of the party from her father in 2011, however, Marine Le Pen pursued a strategy of “dédiabolisation” (“detoxification”). This saw her expel Jean-Marie from the party in 2015 over his racist and anti-Semitic comments. After her resounding defeat to Macron in 2017 she intensified the process, renaming the party and dropping its commitment to “Frexit” (leaving the EU).
In 2019, she appointed a fresh-faced young activist from a deprived Paris suburb to lead the RN’s campaign for the European Parliament election. Jordan Bardella delivered the party’s first ever first-placed result in a national election and was rewarded with the RN presidency in 2021. He would play a central role in the party’s 2022 presidential campaign—a much closer contest—and in its triumphant win in the 2024 European vote. Le Pen further empowered Bardella when she announced he would be her choice for prime minister. When it looked like she might be banned from running, Bardella became her natural replacement as a presidential hopeful.
Nevertheless, despite Bardella’s rapid rise and growing public profile, the RN remains firmly in Le Pen’s hands. For nearly half a century, the promotion of family members, such as Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal, and significant turnover among the lower levels of the party has kept power within the Le Pen clan. Many of the party’s cadres remain more loyal to her than to Bardella, and were determined that she should run rather than him.
Now that the party is back behind its leader, Le Pen will continue to highlight the duo she forms with Bardella—as she did on prime-time television when she launched her campaign. She once again promised to make him prime minister if she becomes president. Running a “ticket” for the French presidency is unprecedented and anathema to the function. But it has a distinct advantage: broadening her voter coalition while keeping the party together.
Le Pen’s own political base has two main parts. First, an anti-elite and disaffected working- and middle-class electorate in the northern post-industrial Pas-de-Calais region that she has represented since 1998 (as a councillor, MEP and in the National Assembly), And, second, a chain of strongholds along the Mediterranean coast, which adhere to long-term RN positions hostile to immigration and taxes.
By contrast, Bardella appears more economically liberal and temperamentally closer to other parts of the French right, including the conservative flank of the Republicans (LR, the rump centre-right force) and culturally reactionary forces like Éric Zemmour’s far-right Reconquest. He is also more engaged with the wider European right, especially Meloni in Italy. Within the RN itself this aligns him more with a more bourgeois and younger new electorate.
Over the last year, Bardella had even started to sand down some of the party’s most abrasive ideas. Where Le Pen cleaves to some of the party’s old Putin-friendly instincts on Russia, he has spoken in defence of Ukraine’s sovereignty. He also broke from Le Pen on pensions reform, suggesting dropping the fixed retirement age and moving to a more contributory system. Where Le Pen went to Budapest to help out an embattled Orban, he struck a friendly tone towards Germany and even met with the country’s ambassador in Paris. All this created expectations in Brussels and other EU capitals that a President Bardella might be closer to the bloc’s economic orthodoxies and more open, at least, to compromises.
Le Pen’s candidacy firmly relegates him to a subordinate position within the party. Gone, too, is the spectre of a somewhat more conciliatory RN presence in the Elysée Palace if the party wins power next year. “Bardellism cannot exist, as it is ultimately Marinism”, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a senior RN figure, has said. The reassertion of Le Pen’s primacy within the RN thus makes the party both more likely to take power and more likely to disrupt the rest of the EU and its foreign policies if it does.
France is a highly centralised state, and its president wields executive power more akin to an American president than to counterparts in its European neighbours. The country also remains a pivotal power in Europe as one of its two nuclear-armed countries and half of the Franco-German motor that long drove the European project.
News of an RN win would therefore send shockwaves around the continent, stunning the mainstream. It would also lift the spirits of much of Europe’s radical right after a difficult 2026 in which its pre-eminent governing leader, Orban, lost power and its links with Trump turned out to be liabilities. After all, the RN has been unapologetic in its support for fellow “patriots” across Europe. Le Pen campaigned for Orban, and Bardella has engaged closely with Meloni and her government in Italy and Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK.
Farther afield, the RN has been increasingly welcomed by fellow nationalists like Israel’s Likud government, which hosted Bardella and other far-right leaders in 2025. The Trump administration has professed its own commitment to supporting “patriotic parties” and would react favourably to an RN win. This is despite Bardella’s and Le Pen’s efforts to cool their party’s earlier enthusiasm for the US president.
The RN would revel in the sense of rupture. In private, party leaders compare their potential accession to power to left-winger François Mitterrand’s historic victory in 1981—which they see as the only true political change France has undergone in the last 50 years.
*
Thus empowered, the RN would want to enact its programme. Although foreign and defence policy may not be its top policy priority, “fixing” France’s relationship with the EU is bound to be one.
In its 2019 and 2024 European election campaign manifesto, the RN suggested transforming the European Commission into a mere secretariat of the EU, leaving legislative initiative only to the European Council. The party decries attempts to expand qualified majority voting, refuses any new transfers of competencies on foreign and defence policy to the commission—and seeks European allies in that endeavour.
The RN is vehemently against EU common taxation and borrowing. Both Le Pen and Bardella have proposed slashing the French contribution to the EU budget (by “between €2bn and 3bn”, as Bardella suggested, equivalent to 9-14% of the French payment in 2024). RN MPs have already put forward several amendments to the budgetary laws to that effect. In July, Bardella has even advocated reducing the contribution by half. In place of European joint spending, the party wants the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to back “sovereign industries” in defence, technology and energy.
The party’s antipathy towards NATO means it plans to prioritise national-level defence instead. The RN has committed to maintaining current defence spending, but argues this should support France’s own military-industrial infrastructure first and foremost. Even if it has paused an earlier plan to leave NATO’s integrated command, at least for “as long as the war [in Ukraine] goes on”, Le Pen revived the idea as recently as May 2026.
The strictly national principle applies to energy too. The RN has promised to lower French energy costs, notably by breaking from EU-wide electricity pricing (which often depends on gas prices less relevant to France’s nuclear-heavy energy system) and thus allegedly reducing the French retail price. And, despite claiming to be concerned about the consequences of climate change, the RN is relentless in its opposition to the European Green Deal and its insistence that French nuclear energy should exempt the country from EU climate strictures.
Overall, if Le Pen were to become president, the RN’s highly disruptive European agenda would inevitably put France on a path to confrontation with European partners and institutions. As the fight against the EU is both a symbolic and a policy priority for the RN, other European leaders may have to find a way to negotiate on some of the demands—that for a budget rebate, for example—in order to prevent French vetoes.
Europe’s best hope, in the event of a Le Pen presidency, may reside in the fact that foreign policy would not be the top priority for the RN in power.
First, the RN’s foreign policies often remain vague or only partially formed. Despite its long-standing presence in the French political landscape, the party has no national governing experience and only in 2022 won a significant share of seats in the National Assembly. With little network among the French diplomatic establishment, RN leaders have rarely engaged closely with foreign policy debates. The party prefers to hide behind references to General de Gaulle’s pro-independence foreign policy to justify criticisms of the EU or NATO without being too specific.
According to RN insiders, the party’s foreign policy decisions emanate from private discussions between Le Pen and Bardella, with the occasional counsel of the advisory group Les Horaces. If she attains power in 2027, Le Pen may seek to attract more experienced figures from the traditional right (from LR or UDR) or from the military to lead on top foreign policy positions.
Second, the RN is clearly prepared to change its tone on international topics when political expediency dictates. RN figures privately insist that foreign policy cannot win it elections, but can lose it ones. They blame Le Pen’s defeat in April 2022 on her failure convincingly to pivot away from Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two months earlier.
The party abandoned Frexit after the UK’s Brexit turned out to be a disaster. It curbed its old openness to strongmen such as Putin (repaying a contentious loan to a Russian bank in 2023) and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. In recent years, it attempted to erase its anti-Semitic past by adopting a strongly pro-Israel line. Since February 2022, the party has walked a tightrope: paying lip service to Ukraine’s right to self-defence while criticising sanctions against Russia as costly to French consumers and opposing some military aid to Kyiv as escalatory. Having greeted Trump’s re-election in 2024, the party has become a nimble critic as his erratic foreign policies have made alignment with him a political liability.
It is safe to assume, then, that, even with Le Pen as candidate, the party will tend towards orthodox language on most foreign policy ahead of the election. It has a vested interest in a campaign that focuses on topics such as immigration, crime and purchasing power (where the party is most confident), rather than one that debates France’s role in Europe or global geopolitics (where it is more uncertain and, in some cases, divided).
And even if the party wins power, the domestic agenda will likely come first. This can be summarised as: countering cultural and industrial decline by pursuing “national preference”. In policy terms it would include harsher law-and-order measures (especially on migration and crime), trade protectionism and efforts to reverse green policies in the hope of revitalising industry, and prioritising French nationals over foreigners in accessing welfare or public services. European partners should reckon on an RN presidency being most intransigent on EU matters related to those domestic priorities—and possibly being more open to negotiation in other areas.
In sum, however, they should expect a Le Pen foreign policy that is unclear, evolving or even contradictory. Under her leadership, France would take few initiatives and rather behave as a blocker. For example, it is hard to imagine an RN president responding decisively to a security crisis on Europe’s eastern flank. If under pressure from EU member states to be tougher on Russia, she would likely seek concessions and negotiations rather than further action.
If it does anything proactively, such a presidency would concentrate on disentangling France from EU policies that contradict its domestic goals. At best, the RN’s lack of interest and inexperience may be an opportunity for other European governments to shape some of the outcomes, as long as they keep their expectations low.
Today’s RN is infused by two strategic debates that would shape Le Pen’s tenure as president.
The first has to do with the RN’s political identity: the party is struggling to determine whether it seeks to forge an union des droites (union of the right) or whether its outsider populist status remains its core identity.
In the long years the FN and the RN spent on the political margins, the Le Pens’ “neither left, nor right” approach appealed to disillusioned voters who rejected all forms of politics. It acknowledged the cordon sanitaire between the mainstream right and their parties. Even back in the FN days, Jean-Marie Le Pen crushed several internal attempts to unite the right. Marine Le Pen remains firmly opposed to any such efforts today.
But the RN’s proximity to power is challenging its outsider identity. Proponents of a union of the right are multiplying. One is Eric Ciotti, the mayor of Nice and former president of LR, who decided to join forces with the RN ahead of the 2024 snap legislative election. This created a major clash with his party and ended with the foundation of a new outfit (the Union of the Right for the Republic, UDR). The union of the right has also been promoted by Maréchal. She quit the RN in 2021 for Zemmour’s Reconquest, though has since drawn back towards her aunt’s party.
If she is elected, it is unclear how Le Pen will position herself towards other right-of-centre French parties. Her instinct seems to be that working with them would dilute the RN and prevent it from conducting truly disruptive policies. Given her aversion to compromise and her long years of ostracism by the mainstream political class, Le Pen would struggle to extend a hand to others to form a majority in the National Assembly.
She may, however, continue using Bardella as a useful bridge to other parties of the right, at both national and European levels. In an interview with Le Figaro after Le Pen’s official launch of her presidential bid, he insisted that, as prime minister, he would seek to gather the right-wing electorate back to his party in order to build a “solid majority”.
It is reasonable to expect that, if Le Pen allows Bardella to forge these links at home, she will let him do so abroad too. If so, Bardella would continue building alliances with the European right spanning conservatives and various families of the radical right, likely with immigration as a focal point. The RN has already demonstrated its ability to build coalitions with other far-right parties and the European People’s Party to advance tougher migration legislation in the European Parliament. It would likely continue to do so if elected. Bardella has indicated that he would share this agenda with leaders such as Meloni and German chancellor Friedrich Merz and seek to work with them.
The second faultline within the RN today is between rival conceptions of national sovereignty, a point that came across especially strongly in the authors’ interviews with senior party figures. Le Pen and the “old guard” around her have long held the view that France must resist Anglo-American hegemony and EU technocracy alike. They treat Washington and Brussels as equal threats to French autonomy.
Yet a new generation around Bardella—having come of age against the backdrop of the 2015 terror attacks in Paris and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine—has adopted an identity-based sense of Europeanness. It acknowledges the need for European cooperation against common threats, as long as this cooperation is “chosen”. It is inclined to invoke a shared Western and European cultural affinity.
For example, on Russia and Ukraine, Le Pen and the old guard have continued to blame NATO’s enlargement for “provoking” Russia. This fits their antipathy to Washington and Brussels. Their old ideological affinities with Moscow as a counterweight to American hegemony allow them to imagine a future in which Russia might even be a partner in a multipolar order once the war ends. But Bardella has admitted the “naivety” of Europeans in the face of the Russian challenge. Despite a less-than-keenly pro-Ukrainian voting record in the European Parliament, he has also spoken in favour of Ukrainian national sovereignty and against Russian imperialism.
These debates will continue within the RN—especially because Le Pen has been unwilling to sweep aside Bardella’s “union of the right” and rhetorically “pro-Ukraine” positions. For as long as she wants the electoral breadth he brings, the tension will persist.
The disruptive nature of RN policies towards Europe means France’s relationship with European partners would deteriorate over time.
At first, the RN would likely seek to reassure the financial markets and its international partners. Victory for the party may be accompanied by protests and strikes, and the new government would face economic limitations like France’s high levels of debt. In this context, Le Pen may want to project stability. Nevertheless, the RN has promised to engage on a number of priorities that will put it at odds with other European governments—including those led by the right—as well as EU institutions.
Opting out of the EU-wide electricity pricing could push up prices for other member states; quitting the migration pact would put greater pressure on others; curbing the French contribution to the EU budget would force others to pay more and possibly trigger an infringement procedure. More generally, Paris governing in a spirit of French exceptionalism would roil Europe’s collective efforts on common challenges.
Enlargement could prove an especially inflammatory topic. Plenty of European governments have concerns about bringing Western Balkans countries, Moldova and especially Ukraine into the EU. But if the RN wins the French presidency, it will be the most outspokenly opposed government among major European states. It has warned that enlargement would ruin French agriculture and suppress French wages; intensify the EU budgetary demands on France; and further centralise power within the EU at the cost of individual states. The accession of Ukraine, with its vast agricultural industry, particularly alarms the RN.
The long-term result of these trends would likely be some degree of French isolation. The party’s policies and instincts would set Le Pen up for conflict with the European Commission—but also with other national governments, including right-wing counterparts. Although others in the EU might conceivably come around to RN doubts about enlargement, the insistence on French national priority will alienate even ideologically sympathetic forces elsewhere.
Tensions could emerge with other far-right leaders, such as Meloni, over issues like migration. Despite broad ideological alignment on reducing migration, the RN prioritises national sovereignty over the management of borders and migration flows. By contrast, Brothers of Italy has advocated greater EU coordination and burden-sharing. As a result, a cohesive far-right alliance at the EU level should not be taken for granted. If these conflicts escalate, an “empty chair” moment, where France simply withdraws from EU meetings as it did under de Gaulle in 1965, is not unthinkable.
At a time when nationalist parties are rising in other major EU states, including Germany, an RN presidency could encourage unilateralism there too. The result could be doubly paradoxical: a lonelier right-wing France in a more right-wing Europe, and a more nationalist France more exposed to the interference of external powers like China, Russia and the US.
As the rest of Europe faces up to the possibility of President Le Pen, the risk is that leaders and other policymakers bunch around one of two poles: complacency (the over-confident belief that she could simply be “handled” like any other challenging leader); and panic (the fatalistic assumption that an RN-led France would automatically mean the beginning of the end of the European project). Of the two courses, the first—the assumption of business as usual—currently looks like the greater risk. But neither is advisable.
This paper has shown that an RN win is a real possibility and would herald great disruption for the EU and its place in the world. It has argued that a Le Pen presidency would see itself ultimately as a radical insurgency against the French and European establishment. But it has also explored some of the complexities and shed some light on how the rest of Europe should think about them. In particular, leaders elsewhere on the continent should:
As president, Le Pen would be as fundamentally rooted in French traditions and peculiarities as equivalent leaders are in those of their countries. Trump’s America is simply too different to be closely relevant to France, despite the executive power both presidents wield. Orban’s Hungary does not fit either, with its distinctive tale of state capture and subordination to kleptocratic interests. Meloni’s Italy, meanwhile, is a complex story of creeping authoritarianism at home but emollience internationally. A Le Pen presidency would bear passing resemblances to each, but be sui generis.
Le Pen is a familiar figure, but her party has never held national power before and has evolved over time. Knowing how it ticks will be essential. This should lead decision-makers to engage with the party now, including by pursuing carefully calibrated efforts to meet with its senior figures to assess their true intentions. The decision of the German government to make contact with Bardella, for example, was the right one—though Europeans should be wary about reading Le Pen’s positions and instincts via Bardella and his circle.
An RN win would be significant for Europe’s far-right. But ECFR’s research points firmly away from the idea of a coherent and durable European “union of the far-right” of any sort. The radical right has an emphatic sense of momentum, but that is not the same thing as a common project. Indeed, dismantling European integration is likely to generate conflicts over budgets and policies on issues like borders, energy, industry and defence—even between governments of similarly nationalist ideological hues.
Even in today’s more plural Europe, France is too big and too important to be circumvented entirely in a world of predators. Perhaps there would even be some limited common ground (most likely to be around defence, geoeconomics and building strategic autonomy). There could even be the possibility to mould a party that is still uncertain about its exact foreign policy agenda. But, especially under Le Pen rather than Bardella, this would still be a significantly less predictable, less collegiate and less European France than the one partners have known under Macron.
An RN-led presidency would be complicated and disruptive. It would call for real diplomatic skill and political leadership in the EU and the rest of Europe, especially in powerful states like Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and, outside the bloc, Britain. In some cases, the task at hand might be to moderate France and bind it into groups of other states on matters of common and agreed interest. In others, it would be to build coalitions of the willing where France was reluctant to join. This would be a good time to deepen relationships between Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Warsaw, Madrid and London, as well as other capitals.
Europeans prepare for the possibility of Le Pen as president of France, they should keep in mind that an array of outcomes is still possible. There is also a significant chance of a moderate candidate making it to the second round and rallying the republican front once again against the RN. And in today’s volatile and fragmented French politics, there is even the possibility of a far-right against far-left runoff. But polls are polls, and probabilities are probabilities. This paper is a response to one major possibility among several—and an urgent call to France’s European partners to be ready.
Célia Belin is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and head of its Paris office.
Jeremy Cliffe is editorial director and senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He co-heads the New Politics Project within the European Power programme.
Camille Lons is a policy fellow and deputy head of the Paris office at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Constance Victor is the Paris office coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
We would like to start by thanking ECFR colleagues, including Piotr Buras, Teresa Coratella, Agathe Demarais, Janka Oertel, Nicu Popescu, Jana Puglierin, Marta Prochwicz Jazowska, Herman Quarles, Jeremy Shapiro, Vessela Tcherneva and Pawel Zerka who gave thoughtful comments on various drafts. We would also like to thank Zineb Bouziane for her thorough research support in the earlier stages of this project.
We are grateful to experts such as Catherine Fieschi, Jacob Ross and Victor Mallet for engaging with us and offering constructive feedback. We also would like to acknowledge the politicians, journalists and thinkers we interviewed over the course of this research; while we respect their anonymity, we thank each of them for their time and insights.
The task of editing the two editions of this paper fell to Kim Butson and Adam Harrison and we are grateful for their time and dedication in bringing it to completion. Thanks also go to Chris Eichberger for offering beautiful visuals to complement our work.
This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on July 21, 2026. It is shared here with permission.
In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.
Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)
While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.
On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation. A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men. Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”
Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.
Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction. Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.
Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety. Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life.
From being used as a method to expel Palestinians from their land in 1948 to the use of gendered sexualized violence to torture Palestinian detainees and prisoners in the wake of the 1967 War, and beyond, the report shows that while sexualized violence has changed frequency and form, it has remained a feature of settler-colonial displacement and oppression.
The United States cannot treat this as someone else’s crime. US officials have been told about these abuses. US weapons and diplomatic support continue to shield the system in which they occur. Accountability must go beyond a handful of soldiers to reach and tear down the legal, military and political structures that command and then protect these crimes.
July 7th saw one period of uncertainty in French politics end and another begin. Despite an appeals court upholding Marine Le Pen’s fraud conviction, the leader of the far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National, RN) will run for president next year. The election result remains wide open, but she is polling strongly and the possibility of a Le Pen-ist France is once again plausible. Should she win, the rest of Europe would have to contend with a highly abrasive and confrontational leadership in Paris, determined to unwind significant parts of the country’s integration with the rest of the EU.
European policymakers must prepare for that turbulent eventuality. In particular, they should:
France’s appeals court on July 7th confirmed Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European public funds. It reduced her “ineligibility” sentence, opening the possibility of her running as a candidate in the presidential election, but required her to serve a year of house arrest wearing an electronic tag. Le Pen has always said she would not run in those circumstances, but has announced that she will appeal to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court, suspending the penalty until it delivers its verdict at some point in the new year. Until then, she is tag-free and able to take back the reins from her young protégé, Jordan Bardella. The possibility that his more cautious approach might temper the party’s populist radicalism now seems remote.
Now entering her fourth presidential campaign, Le Pen is an experienced candidate well-known to the French electorate. Having taken over the party (then called the National Front) from her father in 2011, she has sought to detoxify its image. Le Pen presents herself as both an empathetic leader and an unapologetic nationalist who champions “national priority” for French citizens over foreigners. She is polling far ahead of challengers in the first round and appears highly competitive in the second. Current polls put her slightly ahead of her strongest (centrist) challengers in the second round of voting, though French presidential elections can see significant volatility.
This week, Mark Leonard welcomes Célia Belin, head of ECFR’s Paris office and senior policy fellow, and Jeremy Cliffe, ECFR’s editorial director and senior policy fellow, to discuss Marine Le Pen’s decision to run in France’s 2027 presidential election.
After a Paris appeal court ruling rescinded her ban from holding public office, Le Pen has reasserted leadership of the far-right National Rally (RN) and sidelined Jordan Bardella, who was widely expected to lead the party into the 2027 election. Her announcement has led to rivals across the centre and the left recalibrating their strategies in an already volatile political landscape.
Together, Mark, Célia and Jeremy explore how Le Pen’s candidacy changes France’s electoral outlook. They discuss whether she is a stronger candidate than Bardella, how French political parties are preparing for an election that RN enters as the favourite, and they draw on ECFR research to examine what an RN presidency could mean in practice.
Would a Le Pen government seek confrontation with Brussels? How might it reshape France’s approach to migration, the EU budget and European integration? Could nationalist governments across Europe really cooperate? And how would a Le Pen presidency impact relations with Ukraine, the US and France’s European allies?
This podcast episode was recorded on July 8th 2026.
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