International News and Politics

But then Mr. Wilders won national elections convincingly in November. Nearly a quarter of Dutch voters chose his party, which won 37 of 150 seats in the House of Representatives, a huge margin by the standards of a fractious party system that rests on consensus and coalition building. Since then, Mr. Wilders has become an unavoidable political...

Earlier today, Russia announced the death of anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. He died in one of the most remote prison camps in Russia, inherited from the Soviet network of Gulags. Navalny resembled the old-style Soviet dissidents. He was stubborn. He adamantly refused to compromise. And he was determined not to be driven into exile. After...

The riots grew bigger. Schools and theaters were destroyed.... churches were burned to the ground; graffiti in red paint on a church in Marseilles declared: "Mohammed was the last prophet". Bank branches were ransacked and ATMs opened with chainsaws. Slogans were shouted: "death to the police", "death to France", "death to the Jews!"

The Dutch government collapsed on July 7 after failing to reach a deal on restricting immigration, which will trigger new elections in the fall. The crisis was triggered by a push by Prime Minister Mark Rutte's conservative VVD party to limit the flow of illegal immigrants to the Netherlands, which two of his four-party government coalition refused...

Leave it to a man-in-the-street Frenchman of Algerian origin, one of millions of people in France descended from Muslims who immigrated from the former colony that violently achieved independence, to lay out the stark reality of where this is headed, with no theological complications.

The tensions of major modern issues — the environment, immigration, trust in traditional institutions — have ripped up the political playbook. Right-wing parties such as Geert Wilders's PVV and new far-right party JA21, plus a potential new left-wing coalition of the Dutch Green Left and Labor are flexing their muscles for a general election. The...

All over Europe the right is surging ahead. Everywhere you look, the left is losing — in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary and now, following an election victory for the New Democracy party on Sunday, Greece. Cue the usual agonized and simplistic commentary about the march of the far right. But one common, if not quite ubiquitous,...

This is very bad news for anyone who believes in democracy and respects the most basic human rights. The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside of, "under its roof." Last week I lived under the roof of hope as the campaigns for the first round of the...