A desperate flurry of possible solutions, from the stopgap to the structural, has whirled across the German political establishment and media in the week since the AfD won a record 44 per cent of the vote in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, leaving them only three seats short of a majority. Existing efforts to deflect or contain the tide of support for the far right, primarily through a ‘firewall’ agreement between established parties to refuse to go into coalition with the it, have run out of road. Exclusion has both radicalised and strengthened it. The AfD’s winning campaign in Saxony-Anhalt put the issue of ‘remigration’, adopted directly from the fascist Identitarian movement, front and centre. It now stands to enter government not as a junior coalition partner but as a senior one.
In July 2021 my Uncle Bilal was dying of lymphoma. In the days before his death, our family gathered at his hospital bed to ‘keep him comfortable’. Comfort was a sponge dipped in icy water for his dry mouth – I think they’re called ‘oral care swabs’ – and loved ones in the room. A week or so earlier, so many of us wouldn’t have been allowed in; only people who were ‘actively dying’ could have more than three visitors at a time.
On Saturday, 15 September 2001, a friend and I went to help the members of an Anglia TV documentary team collect their belongings from a building near Battery Park that they had abandoned after the towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed four days earlier. There were masses of people in or near the park that afternoon, waiting their turn to enter the buildings where they lived to collect what they could in the short time they had to ascend and descend. The National Guard led each group to the entrance of each building. After hours of waiting, the sun setting, our turn came.
On Tuesday, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, made a statement to the House of Commons in which he announced an ‘import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories’ and a ‘new comprehensive sanctions regime’ against ‘those who finance or facilitate illegal settlements’. In retaliation, Israel said it would close the British consulate in Jerusalem, expel British representatives from the International Gaza Support Centre, shut down the British Support Team in Ramallah and ban a dozen British MPs from entering Israel.
Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average rate of more than twice a week. Donald Trump may have described it as ‘not even a country’ but objectively Somalia has been one of the US military’s higher priorities since his return to the White House.
Flood damage along the Trishuli river near Betrawati, 31 August 2026 (Imago / Ambir Tolang)
Not long after 8.30 a.m. on 26 August, a mass of rock and ice, more than six hundred metres wide, broke off the face of Langtang Lirung, a mountain in the Nepal Himalayas near the border with Tibet. It crashed into the Lhende river, more than a kilometre below, setting off a rapid chain of events that scientists around the world are still piecing together. For tens of thousands of people living along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river systems, it arrived as an unimaginable wall of mud, water and debris, rushing at the speed of an express train, mowing down everything in its way.
One of the main differences between today’s far right and the fascism of the mid-20th century is the absence of a uniformed paramilitary street wing. The anti-migrant protests in Dover and Portsmouth at the weekend mark an attempt to create one – or at least to project the image of one.