| | | | "Nothing will be changed," if British Prime Minister Theresa May resigns, writes The Guardian's Polly Toynbee, after May told Conservative MPs that she'll step down once Parliament passes her Brexit deal; "Parliament will be as gridlocked as ever"—but with an "avowed Brextremist" at the helm to negotiate Britain's relationship with the EU.
Playing her "last card" may have breathed some life into her deal, as BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg notes it's brought some big names, including Boris Johnson, in line to support it. In a series of nonbinding votes Wednesday, no plan garnered a majority; the Evening Standard had called these votes a "distraction" and sees some Brexit supporters as having "blinked," tilting toward May's deal. | | Life Imitates Art in Ukraine's Election | | Ukrainians will vote Sunday in the first round of their presidential election, and it appears likely comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy will advance to a second round.
It's a three-way race between an unpopular incumbent (President Petro Poroshenko), a populist (former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko), and Zelenskiy, and it's a moment in which life is imitating art: Zelenskiy's political career began with a TV show—he plays a high school teacher who accidentally becomes president, after a rant goes viral—that was engineered by a media-controlling oligarch as a criticism of Poroshenko, writes Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Adrian Karatnycky.
As far as implications go, Karatnycky worries Zelenskiy as president would only benefit Russia; among the three leading candidates, Zelenskiy's policies on Russia and the West are the least defined, writes Melanie G. Mierzejewski-Voznyak of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. | | The Ardern Governance Model | | | New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has drawn widespread praise for her response to the Christchurch shootings, but Peter Apps writes at the New Statesman that she offers lessons in governance, too.
New Zealand's government has been the first to focus on "national well-being" instead of economic growth, he writes. Ardern's budget reflects it: Spending has been "ruthlessly prioritised to reduce child poverty, prioritise mental health, build digital access and skills, transition to a low carbon economy and uplift historically marginalised groups," Apps writes, posing New Zealand as an experiment worth watching. | | The world order hasn't changed that much under President Trump, Columbia University Prof. Adam Tooze argues in a London Review of Books essay. American military supremacy remains intact, as does US financial hegemony, with the dollar remaining the world's favorite currency and the Fed its favorite lender.
What has changed, he concludes, is America's provision of a political model: "Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity," Tooze writes. "What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation." | | Answers for an Aging Economy: Immigration and Robots | | "For the first time in history, the Earth has more people over the age of 65 than under the age of five," and that ratio is only growing, The Economist writes. With it comes obstacles to economic growth—two solutions for which might be immigration and robots.
An "influx of young foreign workers" can address "nearly all the ways" aging slows growth, the magazine writes, while automation can also fill the void, as MIT's Daron Acemoglu and Boston University's Pascual Restrepo recently found that "aging can trigger a sizable adoption of robots" and spur productivity in automation-prone industries. | | | | | | |
