just another thursday in a modern dictatorship. a private university with over 20K students gets shut down overnight by presidential decree, leaving students, faculty, and staff in massive uncertainty. take whatever lesson you will about bringing dictators to power

I chuckled. I shouldn’t have. But I chuckled.

South London

Ousting the main opposition party's leadership is obviously a huge escalation. I am not sure though whether this constitutes THE turning point for autocratization in Turkey. IMO, this move was possible because democratic institutions and rule of law are already dismantled.

72% of Germans say the AfD is a danger for democracy. That is almost all current non-AfD voters (AfD polls at exactly 26%). (ZDF Politbarometer)

Turkey is a dictatorship now

🚨🚨Breaking: @bsky.app Says #Kremlin Is Hacking Its Platform to Spread Propaganda. The company said it was fighting Russian efforts to hijack real users’ accounts to post fake content, an apparently novel tactic. 🧵 www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/b...

I wrote an article how China managed to slip a key phrase into a White House readout — and why that was a big win for China but may well decrease stability in US-China relations www.gmfus.org/news/beijing...

Sign of the times

2% of LE26 Labour voters consider voting for Reform at the next election. Less than 1% of Reform voters consider Labour. Yet, Labour continues to target exactly those voters. Literally, politics for the 1%. Meanwhile, 42% of Lab voters consider the Greens. After already having lost tons to them.

In case it wasn’t clear what the Trump administration’s agenda in Venezuela is

Share widely:

LibDems will do best as the "we're not the batshit insane ones" party

The FCDO cuts, at the time of greatest global instability since the end of WW2, are a staggeringly bad idea. People will look back at this and not believe it happened. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Today, we are looking for 4,000 new members to join us — 4,000 people who stand for the truth. If you are not a member yet, we hope you seize this chance to become one: kyivindependent.com/membership/?...

Lots of good May 26 events in #Georgia & diaspora. Here's one in #Berlin by Gza. www.linkedin.com/posts/gza-eu...

I don’t think people understand how terrifying I find the things people say here. The need for purity in voting. The “I won’t vote for….if they don’t….”. What I hear is “yes, you will certainly be killed under fascism but I will always know I did not impugn my own integrity”.

The difference between the collapse of the Clyde shipyards in the 20th century and the risks that British higher education might collapse in the 21st is at least UK governments had a strategy for the former.

I wish I didn’t know as much about the end of Reconstruction as I do. If you understood what is being unleashed now, how it will touch every aspect of our civic life, and how difficult it will be to undo it, you wouldn’t be able to think about anything else.

Sounds like a great time to switch your browser’s default search to DuckDuckGo, gang.

Neither is this one, really, it's just that I remember reading that the Board of Peace was meant to supplant the UNSC.

"Lower taxes, but enough to fix the roads, a bit of flag-waving but still pro-EU, some family values but we won't ask any questions...and otherwise we'll make sure you can ignore politics for most of the week" used to be the USP of the European Centre Right generally

It really is time for democrats to start withdrawing from arenas that give a platform to people like Yarvin.

Almost certainly a terrible idea and at the same entirely believable, which tells us, if that was needed, about the state of US foreign policy.

An elder relative of mine, no mental problems but some hearing issues, thought she talked to her brother about their past and a trip to their hometown. She found him unusually warm and friendly. Next day she understood she had accidentally called Meta AI on WhatsApp. I don't think that's ok.

@palewi.re has created an index of all the FiveThirtyEight articles that are preserved on the Internet Archive. Very useful: fivethirtyeightindex.com

Starmer and Burnham's stance towards the EU is in that classic place on the British politics Venn Diagram that is tactically sensible while at the same time looking strategically and tonally weak

🥳 Grab your copy today! Two weeks of free downloads. Aizada Arystanbek and I have gathered everything we've learned about decolonial themes and initiatives in Central Asia today. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Burnham “I am trying to become a Labour MP in order to depose a Labour PM - so no-one is allowed to talk about Brexit or immigration in case it helps Reform which also wants to get rid of the PM “

@jodemocracy.bsky.social is a vital journal and platform for knowledge about all things democracy/autocracy globally. Long may it live.

The Journal of Democracy has been spun off from the National Endowment for Democracy to become an independent nonprofit now housed at Stanford www.journalofdemocracy.org/about/

Interesting to see *even now* Labour ministers working hard to alienate on the EU issue the Labour voters the government has not already alienated on the immigration issue. And, to be entirely fair to the government, vice versa.

Next to quantitative ratings, there is chance to provide nuance in comments & list evidence, so that this makes a solid case. (In my view, not everything maxes, it's bad enough as is.) We'd really welcome your input. A few minutes is enough & anonymous. tinyurl.com/GEO-Autocrac...

Not a lot of positives for me to take away from the Trump-Xi Summit (beyond the fact that there weren't any big disasters as far as I can tell; only small and mid-sized ones), but now I have hopes that the China discussion on Bluesky will improve the more Trump cozies up to China.

Top: Trump with leader of democratic Ukraine. Bottom: Trump with leader of authoritarian China.

A. lived in Germany since he was two months and last year gained German citizenship. Now he’s been stripped of it because of pro-Palestinian Instagram posts, in a disturbing legal case that points to the rise of citizenship-on-probation. My latest @jacobinmag.bsky.social jacobin.com/2026/05/germ...

Sure are a ton of Cuba-related leaks/scoops/stories this week. Washington is telling Havana to get serious.

If the Cuban regime collapses there'll be an exodus to the U.S. and/or other Caribbean and Central American nations. If there's a controlled regime change, chances are still nonzero. One way to avoid this is to keep the regime, but change its foreign and domestic policies save those on immigration.

Does that include the £5mn?

Always the weak spot in the Burnham scenario : in the current climate, is anywhere a shoo-in for this kind of move?

Judging by the media coverage, the biggest scandal in English football history is that a "spy" was spotted at a training ground, not that so many of its clubs are owned by brutal regimes, private equity grifters and gangsters, and take the money of quasi-criminal crypto companies and bookies.

With Orbán in power in Hungary, Russians refrained from targeting Ukraine’s Transcarpathia that hosts a sizeable Hungarian ethnic community. But after the regime change in Hungary, Russians are no longer restrained, hence the most dramatic Russian strike on Transcarpathia today since February 2022.

NEW: On a ‘emergency’ episode of Balkanomnicon I discuss with @odgovor.bsky.social’s Kenan Efendić the implications of Christian Schmidt’s resignation as @OHR_BiH. The episode is now streaming on the Odgovor YouTube channel, and/or wherever you stream your media. rss.com/podcasts/bal...

Much of politics is Mean Girls

Good proposal by Sweden, Austria, Estonia & co to strengthen rule of law conditionality in the next MFF. www.ft.com/content/80f3...

How long are we going to keep having to have this conversation. Exit in disgust is a perfectly legitimate response to the irretrievably objectionable. No decent person should have to remain on X.

I honestly don’t understand just what it is with people who tell me I am responsible for X being as toxic as it is, as if it were my refusing to subscribe to Stormfront that made the letters page more fascist than it would otherwise have been. And nobody was “corralled”. We left.

This is a really cool view to see how global trade routes have been changed since the Strait of Hormuz went offline. Blue means traffic flows declined while orange indicates trade routes with increased traffic.

Not often I get to write about Georgia these days, but… www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-sign-...