Al Jazeera: Halimah Yacob named Singapore's first female president

Halimah Yacob, a former speaker of parliament from the Muslim Malay minority, did not have to face an election for the largely ceremonial post originally due this month after authorities decided her rivals did not meet strict eligibility criteria. [...]

Authorities had decided to allow only candidates from the Malay community to put themselves forward for the presidency, a bid to foster harmony in the city-state of 5.5 million people which is dominated by ethnic Chinese.

The other two contenders, Salleh Marican and Farid Khan, were both denied eligibility, having fallen short of a constitutional rule that required any candidate from the private sector to have led a company with shareholder equity of at least 500 million Singapore dollars ($372m). [...]

It was not the first time in the affluent city-state - which is tightly controlled and has been ruled by the same political party for decades - that the government has disqualified candidates for the presidency, making an election unnecessary.

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The New York Review of Books: Brexit’s Irish Question

The simplest way to understand how radically Irish identity has changed is to consider the country’s new prime minister, Leo Varadkar. He is thirty-eight and in many ways a typical politician of the European center-right. He is also part Indian—his father Ashok is originally from Mumbai. And he is gay. When Varadkar was born in 1979, over 93 percent of the population of the Republic of Ireland was born there and most of the rest were born in Northern Ireland or in Britain (often as children of Irish emigrants). Ethnic minorities were scarcely visible—just one percent of the population was born in what the official figures charmingly described as “Elsewhere.” Now Varadkar leads an Ireland in which over 17 percent of the population was born Elsewhere. The ultraglobalized Irish economy sucks in migrants from all over the world, notably Poland, Romania, the Baltic states, and Nigeria. [...]

But the Irish radically revised their nationalism. Three big things changed. The power of the Catholic Church collapsed in the 1990s, partly because of its dreadful response to revelations of its facilitation of sexual abuse of children by clergy. The Irish economy, home to the European headquarters of many of the major multinational IT and pharmaceutical corporations, became a poster child for globalization. And the search for peace in Northern Ireland forced a dramatic rethinking of ideas about identity, sovereignty, and nationality. [...]

This reciprocal withdrawal of territorial claims has recreated Northern Ireland as a new kind of political space—one that is claimed by nobody. It is not, in effect, a territory at all. Its sovereignty is a matter not of the land but of the mind: it will be whatever its people can agree to make it. And within this space, national identity is to be understood in a radically new way. In its most startling paragraph the Belfast Agreement recognizes “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose.” It accepts, in other words, that national identity (and the citizenship that flows from it) is a matter of choice. Even more profoundly, it accepts that this choice is not binary. If you’re born in Northern Ireland, you have an unqualified right to hold an Irish passport, a British passport, or each of the two. Those lovely little words “or both” stand as a rebuke to all absolutist ideas of nationalism. Identities are fluid, contingent, and multiple. [...]

English nationalism is also naive. Wrapped up for so long in the protective blankets of Britishness and empire, it has not had to test itself in the real conditions of twenty-first-century life for a middle-sized global economy. Unlike Irish nationalism, it has not been forced to rethink itself and imagine how it might work in a world where collective identities have to be complex, ambiguous, fluid, and contingent. It does not know how to articulate itself without falling back on nostalgic notions of Britishness that no longer function. And since it is not sure what it is, it is not good at adding those crucial words “or both” and becoming comfortable with an identity that is European as well as English. It gives the most simplistic nationalist definition of “us”—we’re not them.

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The Atlantic: What Happens if Brexit Negotiations Don't Work?

“We could be headed for a ‘chaotic Brexit,’ which is no deal at all—no deal on the terms of our withdrawal, let alone the future relationship,” he said, noting that such a scenario would have damaging consequences, such as undermining the economic and political stability of Northern Ireland, as well as leaving EU citizens in the U.K. and British citizens in the EU in legal limbo. Though such an outcome is in neither party’s interest, Portes said the U.K. would have more to lose than the EU if it occurred. “The issues are pretty much the same, it’s just the magnitude that’s different because we’re a much smaller market for them in size terms than they are for us.”

This hasn’t been the negotiating posture of British Prime Minister Theresa May, who declared in January that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” But the threat appears to have fallen on deaf ears in Brussels, in part because EU negotiators know exactly what would happen if no deal is reached, particularly on trade. As noted by John Springford and Simon Tilford of the Center for European Reform, a cliff edge scenario—in which the U.K. would leave the EU (including its single market and customs union) without a trade deal or transition period—would make the 40 percent of overall U.K. exports that go to the EU subject to automatic tariffs and customs barriers. This, in turn, could cause the attractiveness of the U.K. as a place for investment to rapidly decline and prompt a further drop in the pound, which has lost more than 13 percent of its value against the dollar since the U.K.’s referendum to leave the EU took place. [...]

But fruitful discussions are a far cry from actual agreement. With only two rounds of talks remaining before October’s EU summit (during which it will be decided if talks can proceed to trade), the likelihood of reaching agreement on all three major divorce issues before next month’s projected deadline is slim. “I still think the most likely thing is that there will be … [a] deal, but it’s not going to happen by October,” Portes said. “The longer this drags on, the less time you have to talk about anything else.”

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The Atlantic: What Right-Wing Populists Look Like in Norway

Yesterday was a good day for Norway’s populist Progress Party. Results in the country’s parliamentary elections on Monday show it nearly maintained its support from four years ago and, along with the Conservative Party, its coalition partner, appears headed for another four years of governing in this traditionally left-wing country, as support for the center-left Labor Party drops to historic lows. Buoyed by its anti-immigration, anti-Islam rhetoric, the Progress Party received 15.3 percent of the vote here, barely a percentage point lower than in 2013. [...]

By any objective standard, the Progress Party is among the most successful right-wing populist parties in Europe: it’s the third-largest party in Norway and, unlike many of its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, is actively serving in a governing coalition in Oslo’s parliament. This is a not-insignificant feat for a populist party—and its expected four more years in government are a seeming endorsement of the coalition’s right-wing tack on immigration. It would be easy to look at Progress and arrive at a broad conclusion that, after a string of less-than-successful elections for similar parties across Europe, this anti-immigration, anti-Islam party is a bright spot for the movement heading into another round of key European elections this fall. [...]

“It has to do, essentially, with priorities,” Cas Mudde, an expert on European right-wing populist parties at the University of Georgia, told me. “Nativism isn’t really the core of their agenda, and they’re also still very neoliberal, which parties like the Front National of course are not.” Right-wing populism in Scandinavia is “very diverse,” Mudde added, referring not just to Norway’s Progress Party but to the Finns Party in Finland, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, and the Danish People’s Party in Denmark. “Almost none of the parties is a really good, perfect fit for what we see as the prototype, such as Front National.” [...]

It’s true that the Progress Party’s anti-Islam rhetoric is restrained compared with the election-season rhetoric in nearby Germany. For example: There, AfD posters designed solely to stoke anti-Islam sentiment abound. (“Burqas? We prefer bikinis,” one poster says, featuring the posteriors of two bikini-clad women.) Still, an electronic billboard in Oslo’s Central train station in the lead-up to Election Day displayed a Progress Party ad calling for a burqa ban in public spaces, a key tenet of the party’s platform on immigration. And in its active social media presence, similar messages often appear.

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Vox: What Hillary Clinton really thinks