In a historic development, Republican Michelle O’Neill has become the new First Minister of Northern Ireland, marking the first time that Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, has taken control of Ulster in a “power-sharing” government. O’Neill assumes the position after a two-year political vacuum that was marked by Brexit tensions and a unionist boycott.

Michelle O’Neill, 47, whose father was an IRA political prisoner, expressed her commitment to leading positive change and working with other political forces for the progress of society. She emphasized the importance of respect, cooperation, and equality in her new role. This is seen as a significant opportunity to create hope and foster growth, ensuring that Northern Ireland never regresses to its troubled past.

The recent agreement between the British Government and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) has allowed for the return to political normalcy in Ulster. The DUP, the second most voted force in May 2022, decided that Jeffrey Donaldson would retain his MP seat in Westminster, and Emma Little-Pengelly would become the deputy chief minister. Edwin Poots, the former leader of the DUP, assumed the role of president of the Stormont Assembly.

For over two decades, Sinn Féin has played a supporting role in Northern Ireland’s governance. Notably, the partnership between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness brought about a decade of stability. However, tensions arose during the formation of the new government and distribution of portfolios, highlighting the ongoing divisions among unionists. Rishi Sunak, the UK Prime Minister, welcomed the Stormont Assembly’s reestablishment as a positive step toward restoring institutions in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald has indicated that her party’s rise to power in Northern Ireland brings the island’s unification closer. However, a recent poll by The Irish Times revealed that support for unification remains at 30%, while 51% favor remaining in the United Kingdom. The poll also highlighted the ongoing division in Ulster, with 40% identifying as nationalist, 40% as unionist, and 20% as non-aligned. Sinn Féin’s increased support has largely come at the expense of the Social Democratic and Labour Party.

Jon Tonge, a professor at the University of Liverpool, predicts that there will never be a unionist chief minister in Northern Ireland again. He suggests that while the unionist state may be over, it does not signify the end of the union. Tonge also notes the significant popular support Sinn Féin has gained, despite the party’s reluctance to recognize Northern Ireland as a political entity.

It was already early this Saturday morning and a large group of police officers continued controlling streets in the vicinity of Congress, in the center of Buenos Aires.. It was the end of three days of extreme tensions in Argentine politics, the closing of a week that brought success to President Javier Milei with the approval of the omnibus law, although the opposition had partially scrapped it.. A week that demonstrated, once again, that politics in Argentina is resolved in the offices, but also in the streets.

“The country is not for sale!” chanted a thin group of protesters.. 10 meters away, a passerby was talking to himself, almost shouting: “What do you blame Milei for, if he hasn't done anything yet? Don't you remember Alberto Fernández?”

Everything happened in the midst of devastating temperatures, 30 degrees and high humidity at night after a day in which the thermal sensation was well above 40. And it will continue to be like this for the next two weeks.. After approving the Law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines by 144 votes in favor and 109 against – from Kirchnerism and the hard left -, the Chamber of Deputies will debate the articles of the law on Tuesday. Once this step is passed, the text will go to the Senate. If it is approved, and the signs are favorable in that sense, the rookie Milei, with only 38 deputies out of 257 and seven senators in a Chamber of 72, will have scored an indisputable success.

“No government in the 40 years of Argentine democracy has carried out a reform of this depth,” highlighted Rodrigo de Loredo, parliamentary spokesman for the Radical Civic Union (UCR), a social democratic party that governed with Raúl Alfonsín and Fernando de la Rúa and was part of Mauricio Macri's coalition. Criticism of the UCR for having supported the law has been strong, but De Loredo knows that the voters of the UCR gave a very large majority of their vote to Milei in the second electoral round in November to block the way for the Peronist Sergio Massa.. Blocking the Milei government was not an option. “We approve what is necessary for governability, we reject what is harmful to the republic!”, summarizes De Loredo.

This rejection of “what is harmful” extended to other parliamentary groups, such as Macri's PRO, and a diverse alliance of moderate Peronists and social democrats.. The sum of these three groups allowed Milei to approve a law that lost a lot in the parliamentary process, but remains a powerful instrument of reform.

“We support the law because it is a step towards transformation and change, which is what the people voted for,” Daiana Fernández Molero, PRO deputy, told EL MUNDO.. “We believe that we had to guarantee the government a toolbox so that it could govern after the social and economic crisis left by Kirchnerism.. And in the negotiation we improved the law a lot.”

The original 664 articles of the law were less than half complete. The tax reform and the moratorium, as well as the electoral reform, were erased from the law; The list of companies to be privatized was reduced – Aerolíneas Argentinas remains, but YPF was removed; the closure of cultural institutions was stopped; the open bar for foreigners to buy land; the weakening of environmental controls and the forest fire law; as well as the reforms to the fishing law that left Argentine fisheries at the mercy of competition from China, Taiwan and Spain, among other countries.. The superpowers Milei requested were also severely curtailed.

Even so, the combination of the law with the vast decree of necessity and urgency (DNU) that was approved in December gives Milei a series of tools of notable scope.

Another thing is that the president knows how to use them, warns analyst Martín Rodríguez Yebra in La Nación: “In that sea of opponents that Milei describes as 'the caste' perplexity reigns. Dealing with a foreign body. “Those who extend their hand to help often bite it back.”

The president “insistent on overacting audacity as a way to make up for his lack of deputies and senators. “He believes in a direct link with society, without intermediaries.”

That direct link is on social networks. Milei does not hold public events, never in democratic history has a president's voice been heard as little as the libertarian. To find out what he thinks you have to go to social network X: “History will remember with honor all those who understood the historical context and chose to end the privileges of caste and the corporate republic. “We hope to have the same greatness on voting day in particular, moving forward to the Senate.”

The next steps of the omnibus law will find Milei between Israel and the Vatican, where he will visit Pope Francis. Until recently they hated each other, today they meet and prepare a photo of harmony. And Milei is accused of not knowing how to do politics. The truth is that he sent to Congress a law that was a mixed bag, something never seen before, and he is close to taking a law that, combined with the DNU, gives him a margin of action far above what professional politicians would have expected a couple of months ago. With an extra addition: seven years ago, the Argentine Congress was attacked with 14 tons of stones by hard-left organizations. Mauricio Macri governed, who did not know how to handle the matter and never recovered from that impact.. Milei, aware of this, exacerbated the cultural battle and, led by his former rival and now Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, deployed a shocking security operation so that the axis of politics was in Congress, and not in the streets.

When Joe Biden entered the South Carolina primary four years ago, his campaign was on the brink of collapse. The current president had been fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and second in Nevada. If he didn't win that state, Biden could pack his bags and return to Delaware.

Biden won in 2020, and he will win again in the primaries being held today, Saturday, in South Carolina. His victory is so discounted that since January 5, no one has conducted a survey on Democratic voting intentions.. More than winning, he should sweep, to clear up any doubt about his ability to mobilize voters, which, today, is the greatest danger to his re-election.

Biden's two rivals have no chance. One of them, Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, may go down in history as the perpetrator of one of the biggest political suicides in memory.. The other is Marianne Williamson, who could be defined as a self-help and parapsychology guru.. Although it is almost axiomatic to say that American political life has deteriorated, it has not done so to the extent that someone like her can win a primary.

That's not a problem for Williamson either, since many of his books have been best-sellers, and are available in Spanish, such as The Law of Divine Compensation and How It Works, Money, and Miracles; The Soul Diet: 21 Spiritual Lessons That Will End Your Weight Problems Forever; The Age of Miracles: A New Perspective on Midlife; o Light for the path: Thoughts, prayers, rituals. These works will not put her with Faulkner, Poe or Twain in the American literary canon, but they have guaranteed her a considerable fortune that already allowed her to run in the primaries in 2020 and, now, do so again.

Who is in danger of entering another pantheon – that of authors of political idiocies – is Phillips, who abandoned in October a promising career that might have led him one day to lead his party in the House of Representatives to challenge Biden in the elections. primaries. The result of his bet is evident in the fact that in the New Hampshire primaries this 55-year-old millionaire (by inheritance) found himself not once, but twice, in the uncomfortable situation of holding an electoral event and no one appeared, with the sole exception, of course, of the journalists to draw up a record of the ridicule. In those primaries, which were not recognized by the party, Phillips was crushed by Biden even though the president was not running and, therefore, was not on the electoral ballots.. That was possible because voters wrote Biden's name in pen.

Phillips has been caught in the same dilemma as the Republicans who have challenged Trump: his political ideology is the same as that of his rival. So why vote for him? Their argument is that Biden is too old. That's something the electorate agrees with.. But what Democrats don't want is to replace the old Biden with Phillips. Saying his voters fit on a bus is literally an exaggeration: in New Hampshire he hosted an event where people could go on his campaign bus and ask him anything they wanted. It was nobody.

Aside from the weakness of his rivals, for Biden, a primary in South Carolina is like playing at home. Already in 2020, he knew how to use the asset of his five decades in politics, which had allowed him to establish relationships with the political and social leaders of the state. And that counts a lot in South Carolina, where, to mobilize, you must have the support of the Protestant churches, which are the main civil society organization in the state, and with local leaders. And that's what Biden did. In reality, that's what every candidate does.. The Republicans, with the whites, who are about two-thirds of the population; the Democrats, with the blacks, who make up a quarter.

There are few exceptions to that rule.. One of the most famous was that of Barack Obama in 2008. To avoid the support of churches for Hillary Clinton, the future president's team focused its efforts on all types of organizations and, especially, on some very specific establishments: nail salons, which are especially successful among African-American women, whose nail fixation is out of this world. With such an outrageous strategy, Obama struck down Clinton in the primaries.

So Biden won in 2020, saving his campaign. To thank the state, he has pressured the Democratic National Committee to make North Carolina the first primary state for that party for the first time in 52 years.. The territory thus gains political relevance and, incidentally, the Democratic Party begins its race towards the White House with a message aimed at the black voter, to whom all the presidents of that formation except one – Lyndon B. Johnson, who won in 1964 – they owe him the position. In a time of political tribalism that is very important. Not in vain, the second state in which the party's primaries are held this year is Nevada, a state in which the population of Hispanic origin and unions – two other bastions of Democratic power – have enormous weight.. Identity vote plus well-oiled political apparatus is the president's key. That, and having rivals like Williamson and Phillips.

The irony is that Biden won in 2020 and will win again in 2024 in a state where it is metaphysically impossible for the Democratic Party, due to its dependence on the black vote, to win an election, to the point that it is expected that In the Democratic primaries, less than half of the citizens vote than in the Republican primaries, which take place in three weeks.. The state is one of the most racially divided in the US, and its history proves it. South Carolina was the first territory to declare independence from the United States and even attacked the Armed Forces of that country in 1861 to preserve slavery.. Still in 2016, a 21-year-old white man, Dylan Roof, murdered nine black people in cold blood in a prayer group in a church shouting “you are raping our women, you are stealing our country.”. But that does not matter. The primary votes are what they are, and the president has them in the pot.