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Metropolitan Police Department officers secure 16th Street near the White House, ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy meeting to discuss the war in Ukraine, in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 17, 2025.
What We’re Watching: Zelensky’s turn to meet with Trump, Israelis protest against Bibi again, Hong Kong media mogul faces trial
Zelensky heads (back) to the White House
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is back in Washington today, meeting with US President Donald Trump to discuss a potential end to the Russia-Ukraine war and hoping for a better outcome than his last visit to the Oval Office earlier this year. This time he’s bringing friends, European leaders including France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and the UK’s Keir Starmer, who are offering their support as he attempts to keep his country intact.
The confab follows Trump’s Alaska meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, which produced very little by way of a ceasefire in Ukraine. While Zelensky will hope that this visit is more cordial than his last, he is likely still feeling the pressure: Trump reportedly told European leaders yesterday that he supports Putin’s offer to pause fighting if Ukraine relinquishes the Donbas region, even though Russian forces don’t currently hold this land. Zelensky has ruled out such a land swap. The US president also said on social media last night that his Ukrainian counterpart should forget about regaining Crimea or joining NATO.
Is there any timeline for peace here? With the White House now pushing for a peace deal rather than just a ceasefire, don’t expect an imminent pause in fighting, says US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Washington is nonetheless trying to strike a positive tone, with US special envoy Steve Witkoff declaring on Sunday that Russia had agreed to “robust” security guarantees, including a collective defense of Ukraine by American and European forces should Russia try to invade again.
Anti-Netanyahu protests growing in Israel
Is Israel’s anti-Bibi wing back to pre-October 7 levels? Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv – and other parts of Israel – on Sunday to implore Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a deal to return the remaining hostages. The crowds were roughly the same size as the rallies against Netanyahu’s judicial changes in early 2023. The protests came after the Security Cabinet approved a plan to conquer Gaza City two weeks ago, a possible signal that the Knesset is prioritizing rooting out Hamas over returning the hostages.
In latest setback for Hong Kong’s democracy, a media mogul faces trial
Closing arguments are underway in a landmark trial against Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai, one of the city’s most prominent pro-democracy figures. Lai ran the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper, which China has criticized for spreading “fake news” and instigating “Hong Kong Independence”. After being held in solitary confinement for around 1,700 days, he is being charged under the controversial National Security Law for conspiring to collude with foreign forces and publishing so-called “seditious” articles. If convicted, the 77-year-old could face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.Supporters of coalition parties PDCI (Democratic Party of Cote d'Ivoire) and PPA-CI (African People's Party of Cote d'Ivoire) march to protest the removal of their leaders names, Tidjane Thiam and Laurent Gbagbo, from the electoral list calling for an inclusive and peaceful election in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, August 9, 2025.
Africa’s age gap: Young nations, old rulers, big problems
Africa is one of the youngest regions on earth, with a median age of just 19.7 in 2020 – more than ten years less than any other continent. Yet several of its most powerful leaders are in their 70s and 80s – and they’re refusing to cede power, despite growing opposition to their rule.
In recent days, thousands have protested in Ivory Coast, after the country’s electoral commission barred opposition leaders from October’s election, in which President Alassane Ouattara, 83, is seeking a fourth term. Challengers were also recently excluded in upcoming elections in Cameroon, paving the way for 92-year-old President Paul Biya to win an eighth seven-year term, and possibly rule until age 100.
The gerontocracy generation. A study of elections during the period 2018-2021 found that, out of 28 African countries that went to the polls, only one – Ethiopia – chose a president or prime minister who was under the age of 50. Nineteen of the 28 winners were over 60, and as of late 2024, eleven were over 70.
They include 82-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, in power for 45 years, and Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo, 79, who has led for 40 years. The second oldest, 83-year-old Nangolo Mbumba of Namibia, did relinquish power in late 2024, only to hand it to a 72-year old successor, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah.
In May 2025, the West African nation of Togo made headlines after President Faure Gnassingbé, 59, rewrote the constitution to give himself a term-limit-free role as president of the country’s council of ministers, leaving the country’s actual president, Jean-Lucien Savi de Tove, as little more than a figurehead. Critics, and protesters in the streets, viewed this as a “constitutional coup” meant to indefinitely extend the Gnassingbé family’s 60-year grip on power.
And looking ahead, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, 73, is already backed by his party for elections slated for 2027, while Liberian President Joseph Boakai, 80, is attempting to complete his reform agenda in a country still recovering from civil war.
What’s the political impact?
Critics say the age gap between voters and leaders is a recipe for unrest, repression, and revolution. They point to examples such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, elected again in 2013 at the age of 89, who was deposed in a coup four years later. What’s more, when long-entrenched leaders approach the end of their reign, intense and sometimes violent succession battles often break out, frequently within presidential families. Simply put, governance can become brittle when leaders never leave.
All of this could complicate the region’s ability to grapple with a range of pressing issues, including militancy, jihadist violence, a wave of coups, and intensifying external competition and meddling.
And there is a further concern: the erosion or abuse of nominally democratic institutions is fueling disillusionment with the idea of democracy itself. Although polling across African countries still show a strong majority in favor of democracy and against one-man rule, that support has flagged in recent years, while acceptance of military rule has crept up. When citizens increasingly equate democracy with gerontocracy, those trends make sense.
People celebrate the one year anniversary since student-led protests ousted Bangladesh's former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, August 5, 2025.
Bangladesh a year later: democracy is easier said than done
Earlier this week, thousands of people flooded the streets in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka to mark the one-year anniversary of a student-led protest movement that brought an end to 15 years of rule under former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her political party, the Awami League. Hasina, who fled to India last August, had been accused of increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian rule.
The anniversary celebrations culminated with a nationally televised address by Bangladesh’s current caretaker leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pledged to honor the spirit of the protests by working towards an orderly and inclusive democracy in the densely-populated country of 175 million.
But one year on, that path remains rocky.
“There are many that are disappointed, particularly students,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, “The pledges for reform have taken much longer than we had earlier thought.”
While the climate of fear under Hasina has lifted, Bangladesh still faces challenges from security forces with a controversial human rights record, the rising influence of Islamist hardliners, and deeply entrenched political and communal divisions.
So why has reform stalled in Bangladesh? From the outset, Yunus faced an uphill battle. Under Hasina’s rule, Bangladesh’s key institutions – from the judiciary and civil service to the military and economy – were politicized and abused.
“[He’s] basically facing the challenges of putting a country back together after 15 years and increasingly autocratic rule,” says Jon F. Danilowicz, the former deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Dhaka. “The system is overwhelmed.”
And although Yunus set up no fewer than 11 commissions to propose legal and constitutional reforms, political infighting has stalled progress at nearly every turn.
“Whatever change they’re hoping for hasn’t really happened that much,” says Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for South Asia and Southeast Asia at the Council of Foreign Relations. “Yunus tried to get all these reforms, but the political parties wouldn’t agree.”
Yunus, after all, is the unelected head of an interim government that lacks a popular mandate to push through difficult reforms or unify the country’s fractured political class.
While conditions have improved overall since the Awami League’s exit, the failure to bring needed reforms to the military and police has enabled Hasina-era abuses to resurface.
Mob violence, political unrest, and Islamist attacks targeting women, LGBT communities, and religious minorities have escalated sharply, while rights groups have accused the interim government of using arbitrary detentions to target its political opponents.
But experts stress that the current government still marks a significant departure from its predecessor.
“When there’s a charge that this government is acting just like its predecessor, I’d say that in this government, you have good people who sometimes do bad things,” says Danilowicz. “In the past government, you’ve had a lot of bad people who consistently did bad things.”
What’s next for Bangladesh’s fragile democracy? With national elections slated for February, Bangladesh stands at a crossroads. The incoming government will inherit the same hopes for change and challenges of reform as the interim one.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the traditional rival of Hasina’s Awami League, is positioning itself for a comeback, but it faces challenges from the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, as well as the student-led National Citizen Party (NCP), which was born out of last year’s protests.
Still, Danilowicz maintains a positive outlook.
“I’m still hopefully optimistic that the Bangladeshi people may take advantage of this opportunity and not squander it as they have in the past,” he says. “The spirit [of the protests] still exists… there is a group of empowered young people who don’t want to see the country move backwards.”
US government rescinds West Point role for former cyber director
In this Quick Take, Ian Bremmer reacts to the US government's decision to rescind former CISA Director Jen Easterly’s appointment to West Point, raising serious concerns about the state of American democracy and national values.
Ian argues that the United States is falling short of the ideals it claims to uphold. “I believe that it is still patriotic to criticize your country when it makes a mistake,” he says. “What we now see are increasingly values that the US has said historically that it stands for not living up to that.”
Ian also points to the role of far-right political activist Laura Loomer in influencing the decision, calling it a troubling sign of democratic backsliding. “Those cadets will no longer have that opportunity,” he states, “because it has been taken away by someone who has no idea what Jen stands for.”
Supporters of the recall movement gather in Taipei, Taiwan July 19, 2025.
Total Recall: Taiwan attempts a do-over of last year’s elections
This Saturday, Taiwan will try to do something that no democracy has ever done: a mass recall of lawmakers who serve in the national legislature.
Around one-third of the island’s voters will head to the polls in what local media outlets are dubbing “The Great Recall” – an effort to remove 31 of the country’s 113-seat legislature.
“It is unprecedented in Taiwan’s history,” says David Sacks, Asia Studies Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We haven't seen a similar recall effort in any democracy in the world.”
What’s more, the outcome will determine which party controls Taiwan’s legislature. The fate of 24 lawmakers – all from the country’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT) – will be decided on Saturday, with another 7 recall votes scheduled to take place later in August.
So, what are the recall elections about? Last year, William Lai won the presidency, but his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its parliamentary majority to a coalition led by the KMT, a long-time rival. Since then, frictions between the legislature and the presidency have been high, with the opposition blocking Lai’s legislative agenda – including key spending on defense and foreign affairs – while also seeking to expand the power of the legislature itself.
The DPP is betting that the recalls, initially launched by a group of civil society activists, will help break the political gridlock and allow them to retake their majority in the legislature.
“The DPP hopes that they can shift the balance of power in the legislature in their direction,” says Bonnie Glaser, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program. “If a president has control of the legislature or the parliament, then they have a much stronger ability to get their own agendas funded.”
What’s China’s role in all of this? A key question in the recall votes is where lawmakers stand toward Beijing, which views self-governing Taiwan as part of China. The KMT is open to eventual reunification with the mainland, while the DPP is fiercely opposed.
So while the DPP frames the mass recalls as a move to protect Taiwan’s national security from “pro-CCP” KMT lawmakers, the KMT says the DPP is undermining democratic institutions by trying to relitigate an election it already lost.
How likely are the recalls to succeed? The DPP needs to flip just 6 of the KMT’s seats to regain its legislative majority. But it’s not a slam dunk: to successfully unseat a lawmaker, turnout in their district must exceed 50%, with a majority voting in favor of a recall.
And even if Saturday’s recall elections do succeed, the affected districts will then head to by-elections, where DPP candidates must face off against new KMT challengers.
“Many of these people who are being recalled come from districts that are very heavily pro-[KMT],” says Glaser. “So it is more likely, in most of these districts where the KMT is recalled, that simply another KMT legislator will be voted in a by-election in the fall.”
What effect will the recalls have on Taiwan’s domestic politics? If they succeed, it will make it easier for Lai to push ahead with his agenda, although at the cost of potentially inflaming already deep partisan divides.
“Taiwan has very fractious political dynamics,” Sacks warns. “We've seen brawls in the legislature. We've seen pig and cow parts thrown at legislators.” (Yes, you can watch that here.)
If the recalls fail, however, it could at least in the short term force the DPP to change tactics.
“If this gambit doesn’t work, [the DPP] may come to terms with the fact that it’s just going to have to face a divided legislature in order to get things done,” says Glaser. “[And] they’re going to have to engage more with the opposition.”
But other experts warn that the recalls could open a pandora’s box.
“This episode shows that recalls are now part of Taiwanese political culture,” says Ava Shen, Eurasia Group’s regional expert, “and they will emerge again when the conditions align.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves (right) crying as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer speaks during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, London, United Kingdom, on July 2, 2025.
UK PM’s freefall is a warning to centrists
A week is a long time in politics, so the expression goes. A year? Well that must feel like a lifetime – especially for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
It was just over one year ago that Starmer took up residence at 10 Downing Street. With a 174-seat majority in parliament, and the opposition Conservatives in shambles after their worst election ever, the new Labour PM seemed ready to hit the ground running with a center-left agenda of better healthcare, lower immigration, and economic growth that benefits everyone.
He’s stumbled out of the starting blocks.
Just last week Starmer suffered a ringing defeat on a key agenda item, failing to pass welfare reforms that would have saved a mere £5.5 billion ($7.5 billion) by 2030 – just a small fraction of the overall government deficit. Members of the prime minister’s own party had objected to the cuts to disability benefits. To make matters worse, Starmer’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves was seen crying in the House of Commons after the government had to gut key provisions of the legislation.
The debacle reflected larger problems for the prosecutor-turned-politician. Starmer has failed to revive the UK’s long-sputtering economy, struggled to make good on a promise to stop illegal migrant crossings by boat from mainland Europe (they are actually rising), and had little-to-no effect on long waits for National Health Service appointments and treatments. These issues have overshadowed the prime minister’s successes elsewhere, notably the trade deals with the US and India.
The result: the Labour Party is now polling at just 24%, and Starmer’s net approval rating is a crushing -40.
“I think of him more as a barrister than a politician,” Lord Gavin Barwell, who was former Prime Minister Theresa May’s chief of staff, told GZERO. “You deal with issues sequentially, like a barrister deals with one case at a time, [but then] you don’t have any kind of overall narrative about what the government is for.”
To be fair to Starmer, he inherited some of his troubles from his predecessors. The UK’s challenging fiscal situation and the turbulent international environment would be hard for any prime minister to address within a year. What’s more, while the Conservatives are in the wilderness, there is a resurgent opposition group in the form of Nigel Farage’s nativist Reform UK. It is now polling ahead of both Labour and the Tories, the two parties that have held a duopoly on power in the UK for nearly a century.
Even so, the prime minister has often been his own worst enemy. Polling data from the opinion-research firm Early Studies suggests the government’s priorities haven’t aligned with those of the voters, especially when it comes to cost of living – 15% of voters said it’s their top concern, making it the biggest singular issue of all, yet it attracts just 1% of parliamentary attention. What’s more, Starmer’s communication with Labour backbenchers has been lacking, so rebellions – like the one on the welfare bill – occur more frequently than they should.
“I've heard from a few Labour MPs that they've never spoken to him,” says Jon Nash, a fellow at the London-based think tank Demos. “It does feel like there’s a bad level of organization within the party.”
Ominous signs for centrists. Starmer’s struggles highlight a broader issue that centrist parties across the world face: they tend to work too methodically and timidly within a system that a growing number of voters think is broken, all-the-while focusing on short-term issues while glossing over longer-term ones. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change conducts focus groups in most major Western democracies, and has found that the public’s frustrations are broad-based.
“There are these deep systemic trends where basically, voters and non-voters alike, just feel that around them is this pervasive sense of decline,” Ryan Wain, an executive director at TBI, told GZERO. “It’s mainstream politics’s job – I include the center-right in that, as well as the center left – to arrest and reverse that decline.”
And if centrist parties don’t reverse that decline, others are waiting in the wings to take their place, says Jon Nash of Demos.
“That inability to get anything done is what opens up the door to others coming along and saying, ‘Look, we’re going to do things differently. Vote for me, I’m a businessman,’ or, ‘vote for me, I’ll do something radical.’”
Graphic Truth: Last democracy domino falls in Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s League of Social Democrats, the last active pro-democracy party in the Chinese-controlled territory, announced on Sunday that it was disbanding, putting another nail in the coffin of the city’s democracy. China’s draconian national security law of 2020 has led to hundreds of arrests in recent years, all but silencing Hong Kong’s broader opposition movement. With the folding of the League of Social Democrats, Hong Kong’s Beijing-installed Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu will now rule without even the slightest hint of dissent.
A Canadian border services superintendent, stands at the Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) border crossing with the United States in Stanstead, Quebec, Canada
Hard Numbers: Canada tracks illegal Iranians, US slashes pro-democracy programs, small town sees last graduate, bear goes to the dentist
115: Canada’s border agency has opened at least 115 investigations into how suspected agents of Iran were able to enter Canada despite being banned from the country since 2022. Three individuals have been given deportation orders, and another has already been removed from the country.
1.3 billion: The US State Department has been advised by the Office of Budget and Management to end nearly all pro-democracy programs, effectively halting $1.3 billion in grants supporting pro-democracy activists or minority populations in authoritarian countries like China and Yemen.
20: The remote town of McCallum, Newfoundland, is home to just 20 people, and the youngest of them just graduated as the high school’s only student. The celebratory event has reopened conversations about the future of the town, where residents remain fiercely connected to a place and a community at risk of dying out within a generation.
800: A visit to the dentist is always a bit of a bear, but this time … quite literally. Tundra, an 800-pound Alaskan brown bear, was sedated in a northeastern Minnesota zoo and fitted with the world’s largest dental crown ever created — marking the first time the procedure has been performed on a bear.