Today in Focus: Is a new generation taking over the Democratic party?

Kamala Harris was the big winner of the first round of Democratic party debates in the US. This week, her poll numbers surged and so did donations to her campaign. But as Lauren Gambino in Washington notes, it was bad news for the frontrunners as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders faltered. Also today: Daniel Boffey on the new cast of characters taking over the EU’s top jobs.

The race for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination is intensifying after two rounds of televised debates in which the candidates squared up to each other on major issues and their past records. The big winner was the California senator Kamala Harris, who denounced the record of the frontrunner, Joe Biden, on race.

The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino joins Anushka Asthana to look across the diverse field of potential presidential nominees and the debates that highlighted the generational and ideological divides in the party.

Will the Democrats coalesce around a centrist such as Biden, a former vice-president? Or could they opt for the more radical figure of Bernie Sanders, four years after he lost out to Hillary Clinton? Or will the torch pass to a new generation?

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Haaretz: How the anti-Erdogan Opposition Can Win Sunday's Elections in Turkey

This newfound political horizon is neutralizing the key obstacle that has plagued the opposition, especially the CHP, since the rise of Erdogan and his AKP party in 2002: The we-never-can-win syndrome. This syndrome is characterized by the belief that no matter what happens, no matter how good the CHP might perform, it is doomed to remain the opposition forever.

The flip-side of the we-never-can-win syndrome, is the co-option of the assumption that Erdogan is electorally invincible, and that no matter how bad his rule might be, or how deep the economy sinks, overall, he has been "good" for the country. This is coupled with the belief that his authoritarian ways still reflect the will of the majority which legitimizes them – and casts a shadow of supposed delegitimacy on opponents of that creeping authoritarianism. [...]

But after that rise, the CHP plateaued. Part of that was thanks to constituencies of potential voters it had consciously excluded. Even though Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, father of modern Turkey, founded the party, it had a long history of excluding Kurds and religious Muslims, among other groups. It would take the CHP a whole decade to revamp itself, and when Kemal Kilicdaroglu was elected party leader in 2010, the party expanded its base from 20% to 25%., Yet since then it has been unable to chisel away at Erdogan’s consolidated support of 42-49% - and has fallen into its normal mode of inertia. [...]

Everyone remembers the elections of June 2015, when the HDP did cross the threshold, the AKP lost its majority – but the opposition failed to unite, and that led Erdogan to declare new elections and to run them out of town. This time, it seems that even the nationalist Iyi party has been persuaded of the necessity of a tactical understanding with the HDP, to whom they are politically antagonistic, because without that understanding, the opposition’s chance of countering the AKP in parliament is nonexistent.    

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