Trade War II. China’s Commerce Ministry announced this week that the People’s Republic and the European Union have agreed to hold last-minute talks about staving off major new EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. After finding that Beijing was unfairly subsidizing its EV automakers, the European Commission had decided that, as of July 4, it would impose a 38 percent tariff—on top of an existing 10 percent duty. Which are just a couple among many trade measures Europe and the U.S. have taken—or are considering taking—to address an ongoing surge in the production of advanced Chinese technologies like EVs, solar panels, and semiconductor chips.

In May, Alice Han explored the apparent trade war emerging behind these events between China and the West. Han says China is significantly expanding its industrial capacity in part to revive its flagging economy—but also to pursue its goal of dominating high-tech manufacturing globally. Brussels and Washington are responding with tariffs and investigations into subsidies that might violate World Trade Organization rules, while the political mood in both capitals has turned in favor of more aggressiveness toward Beijing. At the same time, Han says, individual European member states still hold different positions on trade with China—which is why the EU’s whole approach remains so much a work in progress.

Everything is under control. The Chinese Communist Party is expanding its clampdown on Muslims, with Beijing now surveilling and destroying the mosques of Hui communities across China. The Mandarin-speaking Hui are the country’s largest Muslim minority and—though they trace part of their ancestry to Arab and Persian traders from the ancient Silk Road—visibly indistinguishable from the Han majority. In March, to undermine Islamic teaching in schools, local CCP officials in Yuxi—a Hui city in Yunnan Province—authorized investigating local children for fasting during Ramadan.

Throughout Hui communities, authorities have forbidden children from learning scriptures or entering religious buildings; restricted them from participating in religious retreats or activities; and prohibited religious schools—or madrasas—from organizing either. The authorities have also removed signs advertising halal food and knocked down the domes and minarets from hundreds of Hui mosques. Now they’re importing Han teachers for the madrasas and kicking out Hui ones, to secularize teaching.

In September 2023, Kalbinur Sidik examined Beijing’s repression of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslims in northwestern China, where more than a million people have been incarcerated since 2016. Uyghurs who’ve had any contact with the outside world or outwardly displayed their Muslim faith end up, Sidik says, in internment camps—where they’re shackled, unable to clean themselves, poorly fed, and tortured. It’s all as part of a campaign to “reeducate” them away from Islam and their ethnic traditions—a campaign the CCP has called the “People’s War on Terror.”

In five years, bear right. In elections across Europe this week, voters from the EU’s 27 member states moved the European Parliament rightward—though not as far as many expected they would.

The center-right European People’s Party is still the Parliament’s largest bloc, gaining four seats from the last election in 2019. The populist-right European Conservatives & Reformists gained 11 seats, but the EPP won’t have to work with them to form a governing majority. Instead, they look almost certain to rely on their current coalition partners, the centrist Renew Europe and the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats, each of which lost about 20 seats.

Still, the populist right showed its power in Germany and France: Germany’s neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland finished second nationally, and France’s National Rally nearly doubled the tally of Renaissance, the ruling party of President Emmanuel Macron—who responded to the lopsided defeat by calling for new parliamentary elections.

For more than a decade, parties of the populist right have been gaining power in Europe—and are now either taking control or poised to win elections throughout the continent. As we’ve explored here at The Signal: Italy’s populist-right Fratelli d’Italia, founded by former members of the Fascist Party, won elections in September 2022; the Dutch populist Geert Wilders won his country’s elections last November, though he has yet to form a governing coalition; and in 2023, Germany’s AfD became the second most popular political party in the country, despite its increasingly hostile rhetoric.

In power, though, the populist right has also now experienced defeat, after Poland’s Law & Justice Party—which came to power 10 years ago—was ousted from control last October by a coalition of opposition parties. There’s still no evidence that this generally surprising result might represent any counter-trend in Europe—but here, as in India, democracy can always defy predictions and storylines.

You never know. Voters in India delivered a surprising rebuke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party in national elections that spanned six weeks and concluded on June 2, with the results declared today. The BJP has won, but it’s lost dozens of seats in the National Assembly—a result that will force the party to work with others and form a governing coalition. Modi will almost certainly serve a third term as prime minister—becoming only the second politician to in India’s history—but he’ll likely have to temper his Hindu-nationalist agenda in cooperating with more secular coalition partners.

In February, Omair Ahmad explored how over nearly 10 years in office, Modi had transformed India—taking control of the country’s political institutions, turning the news media increasingly into organs of BJP propaganda, and entrenching the idea that only Hindus are true Indians. As Ahmad saw it, Indian democracy had effectively ceased to function. Now, he says, it’s showing provisional signs of life …

Omair Ahmad: The outcome was stunning, given the BJP's dominance over state institutions, including the Election Commission; its huge financial resources, including via an electoral-bonds scheme that allowed the party to mop up 65.7 billion rupees (around US$800 million) before the Supreme Court declared it illegal; and near-total media dominance. That said, there were widespread grumblings about the facts that 10 years of Modi's premiership hadn’t created jobs and that companies from his home state, Gujarat, were winning all the contracts in other states. The big surprise was the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 out of 543 MPs to Parliament—and where Modi had controversially inaugurated a temple earlier this year on the site of a mosque that’d been torn down by a right-wing mob. The opposition alliance won 43 seats, including in Faizabad, the constituency where the temple is. Even if the BJP's vote share across India has only dipped by a little over 1 percent, its manifesto for the election—running to 48 pages—was short on detail and long on Narendra Modi, mentioning him 67 times; as such, it’ll be read as a defeat for him.

Scream to a whisper. Today, Hong Kong’s High Court found 14 pro-democracy activists guilty of “subversion.” Their case marks the broadest use yet of the National Security Law imposed by the Chinese Communist Party after mass protests in the enclave in 2020. The 14 belong to a group of 47 activists charged with trying to “overthrow” the government for organizing an unofficial primary election four years ago. By now, almost 300 people have been arrested under the law, with Hong Kong officials citing a nearly 100 percent conviction rate for those charged.

In October 2021, Glacier Kwong explained the ways Beijing was intensifying its repression of Hong Kong’s democracy movement—closing the city’s last independent newspaper, almost completely stifling dissent, and creating a climate of fear.

A series of violent events. On May 23, an armed gang attacked a U.S. Christian missionary group in Haiti, where the state has mostly stopped functioning, killing the group’s Haitian director and a married American missionary couple. Gangs now mostly run the country, having gradually taken control since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. That was in July 2021. A month later, Laurent Dubois explored the political dynamics that led up to the assassination. As Dubois sees it, the government has often lacked legitimacy in Haiti, mainly for having often represented outside interests—notably American interests. In the next few days, about 2,500 Kenyan police officers are expected to arrive in Haiti to try to restore order. Dubois explains the historical background to that challenge.

Quiet streets. Flying in foggy blizzard conditions through the mountains of northwest Iran, a helicopter carrying the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, crashed on May 19, killing him along with Iran’s foreign minister and six other people. The country’s constitution requires a special election to replace Raisi within 50 days, leaving its clerical leadership with a tough choice: Either allow moderates to run—which it’s avoided in recent elections—or allow only conservative candidates, which would likely lead to dismal turnout among an increasingly disaffected population. A week before Raisi's death, only 8 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in Tehran’s electoral districts during the second round of parliamentary elections.

Discontent with the Iranian regime has been rising for several years now—and came into view around the world during weeks of demonstrations across Iran after the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody in September 2022. Amini had been arrested and beaten for not wearing her hijab in accordance with the country’s “morality” laws. In the month following her death, Vali Nasr examined the threat growing popular opposition posed to the regime. Their scale, Nasr says, revealed the depth of dissatisfaction not only with the country’s rulers—but with some of the cultural foundations of the Islamic Republic itself.

The end of Law & Justice. The European Commission announced on May 6 that it would drop sanctions proceedings against the European Union member state Poland. The sanctions were to target what the Commission saw as ongoing violations of democratic principles—including repeated efforts to control Poland’s independent judiciary.

Until the national elections of October, Poland was governed for eight years by the populist-right Law & Justice party. The new government, however, has enacted rules to eliminate political meddling in the appointment of judges to the country’s highest courts—or leveling disciplinary action against sitting judges for following EU laws.

Last November, shortly after Law & Justice was defeated, Ivan Krastev explored the causes of the party’s downfall—and the Polish opposition’s surprising victory. A key factor, Krastev says, is that Law & Justice, in power with the support of the country’s conservative majority, had begun to take their party’s views to extremes a broader majority of Polish voters rejected—creating a liberalizing political backlash and unprecedented support for the opposition’s relatively progressive policy agenda. It’s a curious case in Europe, cutting against the continent’s political trend to the right.

Life on a warming planet. Canada is now battling multiple wildfires across the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba—with one fire covering some 13,000 acres and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people near Fort Nelson, B.C. Smoke from the fires has meanwhile triggered air-quality alerts in five U.S. states—Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana—as officials there asked residents to limit their time outdoors. Wildfires like these have been fueled by an ongoing, extreme drought over the past few years. And just this week, the journal Nature published a study that finds the summer of 2023 to have been the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest in about 2,000 years.

Last September, Rachel Cleetus explored the heat waves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events of the passing summer—parsing out their relationship to human-caused climate change and assessing the state of play in efforts to mitigate it. “Some sectors are harder to decarbonize than others,” Cleetus says. “In transportation, global demand for electric vehicles has been accelerating for individual people and families, and for mass transit, but air travel and maritime transportation are much harder to move. The production of iron, steel, and cement is also hard to decarbonize.” As she explains, despite the growing adoption of renewable-energy technologies, humanity has already locked in significant climate impacts, such as rising sea levels and disappearing ice sheets—and could yet cause irreversible changes to other natural systems.