As Europe's governments lose control of Covid, revolt is in the air

Fears of civil unrest grow as people across the continent no longer trust leaders to protect them during the crisis



Julian Coman
The Observer
Europe
Sun 1 Nov 2020 

 

Hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters gather in Paris to protest against the latest measures adopted by the French government. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

As the second wave of Covid-19 filled hospital wards across Europe last week, and countries inched reluctantly towards varying degrees of partial lockdown, television schedules were cleared to allow leaders to address weary nations.

Announcing a 6pm curfew for the country’s restaurants and bars the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, called for national unity. “If we all respect these new rules during the month of November,” he said, “we will succeed in keeping the epidemiological curve under control. That way we will be able to ease the restrictions and move into the Christmas festivities with greater serenity.”

Speaking from the Elysée, a sombre Emmanuel Macron decreed a new national lockdown, lasting until at least 1 December, and warned France the new wave of infections was likely to be “deadlier than the first”. In Belgium, where Covid is spreading faster than in any other European country, the new prime minister, Alexander De Croo, hoped “a team of 11 million Belgians” would pull together to follow tighter regulations.

In tone and spirit, the messages echoed those delivered in March, when shock and fear led populations to rally round leaders and consent to restrictions unknown outside wartime. Eight months on, that kind of trust and goodwill is in short supply.

Europe, once again, is the centre of the global pandemic, accounting for almost half the world’s infections last week. But as desperately needed financial support fails to materialise, and track and trace systems fail to cope with the surge, there is public exasperation and, in some cases, open rebellion. On Friday evening, protestors threw molotov cocktails at police in Florence, in the latest outbreak of social unrest following Conte’s new rules.

Pino Esposito, a Neapolitan barber, is one of those who has lost faith in the orders coming from the top. In his home city, Esposito is leading a group of small businessmen in a campaign against the new restrictions. “We are protesting,” he says, “because all European governments, including ours, have found themselves unprepared for the second wave. Since March they were saying that, in October or November, the second wave would come and that it would be even more serious.

“But no preparation has been put in place for our schools, the health system, jobs, or the providing of incentives. And the financial support we were promised is not there to access. But businesses must have it if they are to stay closed and staff need unemployment money immediately.”

Across the continent, there is similar evidence of people facing dire economic hardship and psychological exhaustion. Earlier this month, a study from the World Health Organization reported widespread apathy and reduced motivation to follow public health guidance. The emotional toll of Covid-19 has been compounded by a growing scepticism in the capacity of governments to truly get on top of a crisis that is destroying people’s livelihoods as well as threatening their health.

According to the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, the continent’s partial economic recovery in the summer and early autumn was “unequal, uncertain and incomplete”. As the second wave hits, she said in a recent interview, “it now risks being extinguished.”

 Protesters gather at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to demand financial assistance during the second wave of the pandemic. Photograph: Maja Hitij/Getty Images

From Milan to Manchester, and Marseille to Madrid, that prospect has sparked a wave of revolts. After the spring lockdown was eased, the subsequent patchwork of regulations and restrictions hit some workers, and regions far harder than others. The Spanish government’s decision to declare a six-month state of emergency has led to angry protests across the country and a bitter row with the conservative regional government of Madrid, which has accused it of overstepping its powers.

The mayors of nine cities, including Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Milan, have by-passed their national governments to write directly to the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, demanding access to the €750bn (£676bn) EU recovery fund. In Germany, where a partial lockdown beginson Monday, thousands of workers and employers in the arts and hospitality industries marched in Berlin last week, demanding greater financial support. Freelancers across the continent have fallen through the cracks of state support for those unable to work

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Riot police fire tear gas during a protest against the latest Covid restrictions in Italy. Photograph: Claudio Furlan/AP

In Italy, a tipping point appears to be disturbingly close. Angry demonstrations erupted in Naples just over a week ago, after a local curfew was imposed. The protests were followed by civil disorder in Milan and Turin, where luxury stores were looted. “I think this is only the beginning”, says the Italian journalist and author of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano. “In the first lockdown, Italians were united in the idea that this was an wholly novel emergency; a situation that any government would find difficult to deal with. Now they feel deceived.

“They’ve been told that things were going well, that we were winning. But their savings have been used up, they can see the problems with a testing system that isn’t working, and there is confusion and disagreement between the scientists. People have started to lose faith in the capacity of institutions to save them.”

There will be unrest across Europe. It will come because the centre isn’t holding any more

Roberto Saviano

(THE CENTRE WILL NOT HOLD, MERE ANARCHY IS UNLEASHED UPON THE WORLD....WB YEATS) 

A poll following last week’s mini-riots found that over three-quarters of Italians believe there will be more violence in the streets this winter.

“There will be unrest across Europe too,” says Saviano. “It will happen in different ways and with different catalysts, but it will come because the centre isn’t holding any more. We are a world away from the mood in March when it was a case of ‘we must follow the rules and protect ourselves or we will perish.’ Now some people think, well, I’m going under anyway if I can’t survive economically.”

The geographer Christophe Guilluy, whose books have charted the growing social divisions between provincial and metropolitan France, is similarly pessimistic about sustaining a mood of unity. Over the summer, local leaders in Marseille complained bitterly that a nighttime curfew and mask regulations had been imposed from Paris without due consultation. Macron’s move to a new lockdown, believes Guilluy, is already creating new divisions, as those with sufficient means insulate themselves from the worst of what is to come. On Thursday evening, huge traffic jams built up as Parisians attempted to flee the capital and head for second homes before a 9pm curfew. “The Parisians who have fled to their second homes,” he says “are running the risk of infecting inhabitants of provincial and rural areas. They have been very badly received.

“Inequalities between classes and between regions have been exacerbated by the pandemic. The truth is, social and cultural tensions have rarely been so acute in France, but the political classes are attempting to mask them by appealing to a sense of republican unity.”

Political rivalries and ambitions that pre-date the pandemic are also complicating the response to the second wave. In Belgium – where overwhelmed hospitals in Liège have asked Covid-positive medical staff to keep working – concerted action was stymied by high-profile disputes between politicians from the Flemish-speaking north and the Francophone south. The country has now locked down until mid-December. But the minister-president of Flanders, Jan Jambon, had previously claimed tough action was necessary only in Wallonia. By the time of his U-turn last week, 600,000 Belgians were believed to be spreading the virus.

“From May through June and right up until recently, you have seen a growing polarisation of opinion in public debate,” says Dave Sinardet, a political scientist from Saint-Louis University in Brussels. “The virologists would push for tougher measures, but there was a growing lobby for keeping the economy more open. So in September, when the infection rate was rising sharply, there was still a reduced level of restrictions. There’s a lot of criticism of the people who were giving that advice.”

The obvious failure of the country’s track and trace system is contributing to a sense of disillusionment with the management of the crisis. “There is frustration and a feeling that businesses such as cafes and restaurants did a lot, and the government didn’t do enough,” says Sinardet.

'It's the final blow': businesses angry at Italy's new Covid rules

Boris Johnson will on Thursday add England to the list of European nations shutting down for a second time. According to Germany’s finance minister, Olaf Scholz: “November will be the month of truth”, in the battle against the second wave of Covid. But the indicators are that the struggle could go either way. The pace and intensity of the surge in infections has taken governments by surprise and left them looking unprepared. Public buy-in to a renewed lockdown, may need a step-change in the level of support and solidarity governments are prepared to offer. The financial cost will be enormous, but the price of inaction could be much higher.

In a column for La Stampa last week, the philosopher and former mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari, wrote: “A social crisis has been added to the public health one… [the crisis] is creating differences in income and living conditions which are completely incompatible with what we mean by a ‘democracy’. Are we aware of this? Up to now, I don’t think so. But there isn’t a moment to lose.”

The stakes were dramatically high before the first lockdown in March. They may be even higher now.

Additional reporting by Angela Giuffrida

A win for Joe Biden would only scratch the surface of America’s afflictions
John Mulholland

Donald Trump has inflicted misery on his country, but its problems do not stem from the past four years alone; they run centuries deep

Sun 1 Nov 2020 

Illustration: Dom McKenzie.

On 18 September, the first day of early voting in the US, Jason Miller, a house painter from Minneapolis, became, according to the Washington Post, one of the first people in the country to vote. He cast his vote for Joe Biden, saying: “I’ve always said that I wanted to be the first person to vote against Donald Trump. For four years, I have waited to do this.” Close to 90 million people have already voted in the US and it is on track to record the highest turnout since 1908.

We can thank Donald Trump for that, a man who attracts fierce loyalty from his supporters but who energises his opponents in equal measure. The country has been fixated by the White House occupant for the past four years. But there is a danger that progressives and liberals invest too much faith in Trump’s departure and too little in what will be needed to fix America. 

Getting rid of Trump might be one thing, fixing America is another.

If the president loses, there will be much talk of a new normality and the need for a democratic reset. Hopes will be voiced for a return to constitutional norms. There will be calls for a return of civility in public discourse and a healing of the partisan divide that scars America. All of that is as it should be. But it ought to come with a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump and his departure would be no guarantee that the country will be mended. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.

His ugly and dysfunctional presidency has distracted from many of the fundamentals that have beset America for decades, even centuries. But they remain stubbornly in place. If he does lose, America will no longer have Trump to blame. Two two-term Democratic presidents over the past 30 years have not significantly affected the structural issues that corrode US democracy and society, and race is always at their heart. The past few months have drawn further attention to the systemic racism and brutality that characterise much policing. But racism in the States is not confined to the police. In fact, it is not confined at all.

 Michelle Obama, Melania and Donald Trump and Barack Obama at Trump’s inauguration on 20 January 2017. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/EPA

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was talk about a post-racial America. But in 2016, at the end of Obama’s eight-year term, the non-partisan thinktank the Pew Research Center estimated that the median wealth of white households in the US was $171,000 (£132,000). This was 10 times the median wealth of black households ($17,100). This was a larger gap than in 2007, the year before Obama was elected.

Trump can be blamed for exacerbating racial tensions and giving succour to white supremacists but the racial wealth gap runs deeper than his term of office. As the non-aligned Brookings Institution said this year: “Gaps in wealth between black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.” The country, post-Trump, could choose to turn its attention to school segregation, but that seems unlikely. As Elise Boddie, a law professor at Rutgers University, and Dennis D Parker, from the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in the New York Times in 2018: “No one is really talking about school segregation anymore. At the height of school desegregation, from 1964 through the 1980s, high-school graduation rates for black students improved significantly.” Boddie and Parker estimated that school segregation in Michigan, New York, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey is now “worse than in the former Confederacy”. Other research confirms that school segregation is higher than it has been in decades.

Then there’s income inequality, which has surged in the past 40 years (including during 16 years of Bill Clinton and Obama) from technological change, globalisation and the decline of unions and collective bargaining. Pew estimates that income inequality in the US increased by 20% between 1980 and 2016. The non-profit, non-partisan thinktank the Economic Policy Institute estimates that CEO compensation in America has grown 940% since 1978. Typical worker compensation rose 12% during that time. 

Racism in the States is not confined to the police. In fact, it is not confined at all.

But at the heart of a broken America is its system of democracy. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die, wrote: “Our constitution was designed to favour small (or low-population) states. Small states were given representation equal to that of big states in the Senate and an advantage in the Electoral College. What began as a minor small-state advantage evolved, over time, into a vast over-representation of rural states.”

All states are represented by two senators. So a citizen of California with a population 40 million (which is 39% white) is represented by two senators – as are the 570,000 people who live in the state of Wyoming (which is 92% white). This means that voters in older, rural and majority-white states are significantly over-represented in both the Senate and presidential elections. This may explain the fact that out of nearly 2,000 people who have served in the Senate since 1789 only 10 have been black.

It will only get worse. According to author Ezra Klein: “By 2040, 70% of Americans will live in the 15 largest states. That means 70% of America will be represented by only 30 senators, while the other 30% of America will be represented by 70 senators.”

The electoral college allows, indeed facilitates, such distortions as the Republicans being able to win the White House in 2000 and 2016 despite losing the popular vote. They control the Senate despite polling fewer votes. Then there is widespread gerrymandering and voter suppression aimed mostly at poorer communities and people of colour, which the Guardian has highlighted in a year-long series. Klein has neatly summarised the problem thus: “One of the biggest problems with American democracy is that it’s not democratic.”

None of these systemic issues – or myriad others – which disfigure the US is on the ballot on Tuesday. But will they remain in place long after the election? Removing Trump would be a start, but some of the scourges that afflict America have lasted 400 – the first enslaved people arrived in 1619 – not four years.

•John Mulholland is Editor of Guardian America and former Editor of the Observer

North Carolina’s Police Attack on Election Marchers Had a Long History Behind It

A racist sheriff and a system of voter suppression meet in a cloud of pepper spray.

By JULIA CRAVEN OCT 31, 2020
THE SLATEST

Early voting in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Thursday. Alex Wong/Getty Images

On Saturday, Alamance County sheriff’s deputies and city police pepper-sprayed a crowd of about 200 people who were peacefully marching to the polls in Graham, North Carolina, without warning and on slim reasoning. Graham police claimed that protesters didn’t have the adequate permits to close off the road, while the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office said that the march was shut down out of “concerns for the safety of all.”

If it is at all difficult to understand how a police department could act so heinously—particularly when children and elderly community members are present within the crowd—then it’s important for one to grasp the context that the law enforcement operates within.

This is the second time since 2016 that Alamance County has made national news for its treatment of voters. In 2017, 12 residents, most of whom were Black and on parole or probation for felony charges, were charged for illegally voting in the 2016 election. If someone is convicted of a felony in North Carolina, they lose their right to vote for the entirety of their incarceration and until any parole or probation has concluded—another key method of voter suppression in the state.

“There is no doubt that in North Carolina’s history, felony disenfranchisement legislation was enacted by legislators as a way to keep African Americans from voting and participating in democracy,” Orville Vernon Burton, the Judge Matthew J. Perry distinguished professor of history at Clemson University, told WRAL in July.

While it’s up to the local district attorney to bring charges in these cases, police—particularly sheriffs, who wield an astounding amount of power within their jurisdictions—have a critical role in setting the tone for the prosecutions.

Voter intimidation is an omnipresent concern in North Carolina, a state that has tried to prevent Black and brown voters from casting ballots with “surgical precision” since Reconstruction. During the late 1800s, a high-level white supremacist campaign in North Carolina went to extreme acts of violence—including massacring Black residents in Wilmington—in order to regain political power within the state. Less outwardly violent voter suppression tactics have cropped up in the state following the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, such as North Carolina’s infamous voter ID law and gerrymandering so precise that every district in the state had to be redrawn.

Prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Black people across the South were at risk of being arrested by police on Election Day for minor crimes by officers hoping to deter voters from casting ballots. In recent years, there have been complaints about suspiciously timed arrests and traffic stops involving Black residents on Election Day.

In North Carolina, “the sheriff’s office is a creation of the state constitution. The sheriff’s office is on the same hierarchical tier as the governor’s office,” explained Dawn Blagrove, executive director of the Carolina Justice Policy Center, to WUNC in May. “So you need to know what they think, where they stand policy-wise, and what type of culture they’re going to create in your county.”

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson, who has held the position for almost 18 years, has a record defined by racism and intimidation. As the 2004 general election approached, Johnson announced that he would send deputies to the homes of all new registrants with a Hispanic-sounding name to investigate whether they were citizens. He claimed that undocumented people were registering to vote at local Division of Motor Vehicles offices with falsified documents. (The Justice Department sent election monitors to Alamance in 2004, 2008, and 2012.)

Johnson has a history of making incredibly racist statements about immigrants—including egregious, nonsensical claims that it’s socially acceptable to sexually assault underage girls in Mexico. The sheriff has been vehement about incarcerating “criminal immigrants,” or “taco eaters,” who are coming into the country to “victimize our children, our citizens, with drugs, murders, rapes, robberies, you name it.” In early 2019, he told the Alamance County Board of Commissioners that undocumented “criminals” were “raping our citizens in many, many ways.”

Beyond his rhetoric, Johnson has used his office to wreak havoc on immigrant communities in Alamance. The sheriff’s office was sued by the Justice Department for an alleged pattern of abusive enforcement against Latinos, including charging Latino drivers with traffic violations at least six times as often as non-Latino drivers. (A district court dismissed the suit, and it was then settled in lieu of an appeal, with the sheriff’s office agreeing to implement a “bias-free policing plan” and other reforms.) Johnson has also advocated for higher policing budgets in order to crack down on immigration, and used money from the $3.6 million the county received from housing Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees in 2019 to give out bonuses to his staff.

This summer, as citizens were demanding the removal of a Confederate statue in Graham, the sheriff’s office announced that the city’s police department would not be granting permits to protesters. When an activist asked Johnson why he and his deputies were “breaking the law” by forgoing North Carolina’s mask mandate, he replied: “Ma’am, you’re breaking the law. We know you’re a member of antifa.”

Trump adviser falsely claims Democrats could "steal" electoral votes

Orion Rummler


WATCH https://tinyurl.com/y29skxyc

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller falsely claimed on Sunday that Democrats would try to "steal" electoral votes after election night if President Trump appears to be ahead, signaling a coming legal fight over mail-in ballots that are counted after Nov. 3.

Reality check: Electoral College votes are not awarded until December, and no state ever reports its final count on election night — despite Trump's insistence that the election should end on Nov. 3 and that the courts should not allow ballots to be counted in the days following.

The big picture: Amid massive early turnout, Americans are expected to vote by mail in record numbers this election — and polling has found that more Democrats than Republicans said they would mail ballots.

Many of those votes won't be counted by election night, as states process more mailed ballots than they ever have before.

That delay could mean that Trump will appear to lead on election night, which would shift as more Democratic votes are tallied.

Trump has baselessly accused Democrats of trying to "steal" the election by pointing to efforts that expand voting access, such as extending mail-in ballot deadlines in Pennsylvania and building an in-person voting center in the California suburbs.

Between the lines: Trump has repeatedly declined to say whether he would accept the results of the 2020 election if he loses to Joe Biden.

He told reporters in September that he believes the Supreme Court may have to decide the result, after claiming that the only way he can lose the election is if it is "rigged."

The Trump campaign is reportedly raising money to continue ballot fights into mid-December, per the New York Times.

What they're saying: "If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral, somewhere in that range," Miller said on ABC's "This Week."

"And then they're going to try to steal it back after the election. We believe that we will be over 290 electoral votes on election night.

"So no matter what they try to do, what kind of hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we're still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected."

Scoop: Trump's plan to declare premature victory

Jonathan Swan AXIOS

Photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

President Trump has told confidants he'll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's "ahead," according to three sources familiar with his private comments. That's even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.

The latest: Speaking to reporters on Sunday evening, Trump denied that he would declare victory prematurely, before adding, "I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it's a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over."

He continued: "I think it's terrible that we can't know the results of an election the night of the election. ... We're going to go in the night of, as soon as that election's over, we're going in with our lawyers."

"We don't want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy. ... We don't want to be in a position where he's allowed, every day, to watch ballots come in. See if we can only find 10,000 more ballots."

Behind the scenes: Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.

For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.

Why it matters: Trump's team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud.

Details: 

Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state's final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.

Trump's team is preparing to claim baselessly that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have "stolen" the election.

Trump's advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions.

What they're saying: Asked for comment, the Trump campaign's communications director Tim Murtaugh said, "This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he's going to say so."

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller predicted that Trump "will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results."

Reality check: Mail-in ballots counted after Election Day as set forth in state-by-state rules are as legitimate as in-person votes recorded on Nov. 3.

Many states won't be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night.

In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.

Night-of counts may be deceptive. It could be days, if not weeks, before we know who won Pennsylvania. If it's a close race, this could also be true for other states, given the record numbers of Americans who voted by mail this year.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC's "Meet the Press" today that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, "so, yes, it will take longer" to count.

"I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that's mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days," Boockvar said.

What we're watching: Miller, on ABC's "This Week," predicted 290+ electoral votes for Trump on election night, and he claimed Democrats are "just going to try to steal it back after the election."

He described any prospective challenges by Democrats as "hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense."

Between the lines: Trump advisers are more optimistic about winning than they were three weeks ago, based on my conversations with multiple senior campaign officials over the past week, including two officials with direct knowledge of sensitive internal data.

They said analyses of early-vote totals in battleground states indicate he's doing substantially worse in Iowa and Georgia compared with this point in 2016, but better than expected in Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin.

Just a few weeks ago, senior Trump advisers were bearish about Wisconsin and had reduced TV advertising there to an insignificant figure. A senior campaign official told me, then, that the state didn't figure in his paths to 270 electoral votes.

But that appears to have changed. In recent days, senior Trump advisers have privately expressed growing optimism about Wisconsin, based on their analysis of early vote data.

The other side: “It comes as no surprise that Donald Trump and his campaign plan to declare victory before all the votes are counted. That has been his strategy for months, and nobody should fall for it,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a statement to Axios.

“It's why he is demonizing mail-in ballots and sabotaging the postal service. ... We will not allow that to happen. Every vote must and will be counted."

Biden Warns Trump Against Declaring Victory Early on Tuesday Night

By DANIEL POLITINOV 01, 2020

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden speaks at a get out the vote event at Sharon Baptist Church on November 1, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

 Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Former vice president Joe Biden was asked Sunday night about a report that President Donald Trump is planning to declare victory early on Tuesday. “My response is the president is not going to steal this election,” Biden told reporters in Philadelphia. Earlier in the day, Sen. Kamala Harris said the goal of the Democratic campaign is to make sure the victory is so resounding that it won’t even be an issue. “First of all, we plan to decisively win this election so I don’t think we’re going to need to get to that point,” she told reporters in North Carolina.

Biden reacted after Axios reported that Trump is planning to get ahead of things and will declare victory Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead.” Even if there are still lots of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania, Trump has apparently told those around him that he will prematurely declare himself the winner, Axios reported, citing three anonymous sources.

People close to the president believe that Trump will be ready to declare himself the winner of the election if he has significant leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona, and Georgia. Simply declaring himself the winner wouldn’t actually change much, but it would allow him to challenge ballots from a position of perceived victory as there are more and more signs that the president’s allies will be arguing that mail-in ballots counted after Tuesday should not be valid.

Later Sunday, Trump denied he would prematurely declare victory but he also raised questions about the validity of ballots counted after Election Day. “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over,” Trump said. The president added it was “terrible” to not know the results on the night of an election and previewed a long legal battle ahead. “We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Trump denies he will declare victory before results are in

Julian Borger in Washington and Martin Pengelly in New York
THE GUARDIAN
Sun 1 Nov 2020 
 

Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Michigan sports stars park, in Washington, Michigan, on Sunday. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Donald Trump embarked on a blistering final campaign sprint on Sunday, lining up 10 rallies in seven swing states over two days in an effort to defy the polls and replicate his shock election win in 2016. As he did so, it was reported that he is planning to declare victory on Tuesday, before the result is called.

Citing three anonymous sources “familiar with his private comments”, the news site Axios said Trump “has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s ‘ahead’.

“That’s even if the electoral college outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania,” the site said, adding: “Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.

“For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.”

Trump denied the Axios story, describing it at false, but then confirmed he would try to shut down vote counting as soon as the polls close on Tuesday.

“I don’t think it’s fair that we have to wait for a long period of time after the election,” the president told journalists in North Carolina “As soon as the election is over - we’re going in with our lawyers.”

Asked about the Axios report, Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, said: “My response is the president’s not gonna steal this election.”

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads in Ohio, Texas and Iowa while Biden is up in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. The races are all exceptionally tight: the biggest lead in the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average is Biden by three points in Arizona, the smallest Trump by 0.2 in Ohio.

Under the coronavirus pandemic, early and mail-in voting has reached unprecedented levels, fuelling expectations of record turnout but also fears many states will take longer than usual to count their ballots.

Trump’s tactics, Axios said, will depend on continuing to claim without evidence ballots counted after election day are illegitimate and evidence of voter fraud. Vote counting after election day is a regular feature of US elections.

CHILD ABUSE

A child holds a flag as supporters wait for the rally of Donald Trump at Hickory regional airport in Hickory, North Carolina, on Sunday. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

Many of Trump’s claims have focused on Pennsylvania, where the race is close but where votes counted after 3 November are expected to favour Biden who leads most national and battleground polls. Both candidates campaigned heavily in the state this weekend.

“Pennsylvania is critical to this election,” Biden told a drive-in rally in Philadelphia on Sunday evening, describing the president as an obstacle to defeating the pandemic.

“To beat the virus we’ve first got to beat Donald Trump,” he said “He’s the virus.”

Democrats have long worried that Trump will declare victory early, aiming to sow uncertainty and legal battles over ballots and results. Some observers have called the tactic the “red mirage”, which former housing secretary Julián Castro said this week “sounds like a super villain, and it’s just as insidious”.

“On election night, there’s a real possibility that the data will show Republicans leading early, before all the votes are counted,” Castro said. “Then they can pretend something sinister’s going on when the counts change in Democrats’ favour.”
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On Sunday, on CNN’s State of the Union, Biden adviser Anita Dunn said she thought the victor would be known some time on 4 November, the day after election day.

“A lot of the early states that are battleground states, especially in the Sunbelt, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, are states that tend to get their votes counted on election night,” Dunn said. “I think we will get some sort of indicator what kind of night it’s going to be from those three states. We will see. Obviously, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin may be slower.”

The Pennsylvania official in charge of elections, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, told NBC’s Meet the Press there could be 10 times as many mail-in ballots than in 2016 and added: “I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that’s mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days.”

Axios said the Trump campaign was bullish about key states including Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin. On ABC’s This Week, Trump adviser Jason Miller claimed: “If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral [votes], somewhere in that range. And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.

“We believe that we’ll be over 290 electoral votes on election night. So no matter what they try to do, what kind of hijinks or law suits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we’re still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected.”

Miller’s claim rested on the idea that all ballots must be counted on election day, a legal and political nonsense. Nonetheless, the Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told Axios: “When he wins, he’s going to say so.”

Trump’s final 2020 tour, which began on Sunday in Michigan, is aimed at holding states he won four years ago and shoring up support in traditional Republican strongholds, like North Carolina and Georgia. Biden was due to hold two drive-in meetings in Pennsylvania, one of a string of former Democratic bastions in the north-east which Trump won from Hillary Clinton by less than a point.

New polls showed Biden holding on to a lead in Pennsylvania. The New York Times and Siena College gave the Democrat a six-point edge, while the Washington Post and ABC showed a seven-point margin

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 Supporters attend Trump’s campaign rally in Washington, Michigan, Sunday.

 Photograph: Carlos Barría/Reuters

In Michigan, Trump repeated some of the messages that worked in 2016, highlighting the impact of globalisation on the car industry.

“I gave you a lot of auto plants, so I think we’re even,” he told a crowd at a wind- and rain-swept rally in the town of Washington.

One new car plant has been announced since Trump took office, while Michigan automotive jobs had fallen by 2,400 even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Employment in the sector is down more than 18,000 in the state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump’s other principal line of attack was to warn voters Biden would implement a drastic lockdown that would kill jobs. The president has insisted the nation has “turned the corner” despite record numbers of new cases across the country, and warnings of a spike in deaths over the winter.

Trump has insisted on holding mass rallies with no social distancing, at which few wear masks. A study by Stanford University economists estimated at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths caused by 18 Trump rallies between June and September.

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious disease, told the Washington Post. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

A NBC and Wall Street Journal poll on Sunday put Biden up 10 points, a majority of voters saying they were unhappy with the president’s handling of the pandemic and the direction of the country. The same poll four years ago had Clinton up but by only four. In 2016 there were many more undecided and third-party voters.

The Trump camp has stepped up signals that they will look to Republican-leaning courts to cast doubt on the integrity of the enormous volume of postal ballots. In Texas, a federal court will hear a lawsuit on Monday aimed at having 117,000 votes in Houston thrown out because they were cast at curbside ballot boxes set up to make voting easier during the pandemic, which the Republican plaintiffs argue was illegal.

The Texas supreme court has twice rejected a similar argument but a federal court in Houston has agreed to hear the case, presided over by an ultra-conservative judge.

Trump finds unlikely backers in prominent 

pro-democracy Asian figures

Hong Kong tycoon and dissidents praise US president’s hardline approach towards China but others dispute its authenticity

Emma Graham-Harrison
Sun 1 Nov 2020 THE GUARDIAN 
 

Media mogul Jimmy Lai praised Donald Trump in an editorial of his Apple Daily newspaper. Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong media tycoon and one of the most prominent pro-democracy figures in the city, waded into the US election in its final days, with an enthusiastic endorsement of the incumbent in his Apple Daily newspaper.

“I find a stronger sense of security in [Donald] Trump,” he wrote in an editorial that praised the US president for his “hardline” approach to Beijing.

His position is echoed by many in Hong Kong’s increasingly battered pro-democracy movement, across Taiwan and among many exiled Chinese dissidents living in America, including blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who endorsed Trump at the Republican national convention.

The US president might not seem like a natural ally for pro-democracy campaigners after years of public support for strongmen and dictators, undermining the press at home, and even attacking domestic protesters as “rioters”.

At a time of increased hate attacks on Asian Americans he has also used racist rhetoric about Covid-19, describing it as “kung flu” and the “China virus”. Advocacy groups have warned Trump’s language could have dangerous consequences.

But Lai and others who want democracy for China see in Trump’s unpredictable approach to foreign policy, and his escalating confrontations with Beijing, their greatest hope of challenging Chinese Communist party rule.

“The Trump administration might be the hand that eventually pushes China to democracy,” dissident Wang Juntao, who fled into exile after the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989, told local New York paper The City.

In Taiwan a recent poll found that independence-leaning Taiwanese back Trump strongly. 80% of Democratic Progressive party supporters wanted US voters to return him to office, the Taiwan Times reported.

These enthusiastic Trump supporters are motivated by the president’s turn away from decades of US engagement with Beijing, rather than his personal politics, said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.

“They are focusing much more on confronting the challenges posed by the Communist party of China than they are focusing on the principles of democracy and human rights,” Tsang said.

Since Nixon, US presidents had all “to slightly different extents, belonged to the school of engagement with China”, Tsang added. Trump began his presidency with a similar approach, so keen to strike a trade deal that he held off taking action over human rights abuses in Xinjiang to smooth negotiations.

But amid escalating tensions over everything from the coronavirus to the economy and allegations of industrial espionage, he has broken definitively with that tradition, deploying the strongest rhetoric on China since the early days of the cold war.

Trump has also brought in a series of sanctions over alleged abuses in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, boosted diplomatic and military support for self-ruled Taiwan, and challenged Chinese-owned tech firms operating in the US.

For prominent figures like Lai, that has meant support for both his cause, and him personally. When the tycoon was arrested by Hong Kong authorities in August, Trump denounced the detention as “a terrible thing”.

Lai’s media empire has even been accused of trying to actively meddle in the US election. He recently apologised for the role the Apple Daily played in a report on Hunter Biden’s alleged Chinese business links.

He admitted funds from his private firm had been used to pay for it, but said he personally had “nothing to do” with its commissioning or dissemination.

Support for Trump is far from universal among critics of China, however. Kevin Yam, a Hong Kong-based lawyer, is among those who argue that the lure of a hardline stance against Beijing is superficial, and the president’s position on other issues will ultimately undermine everything they are fighting for.

“I dispute the very idea that Trump is ‘tough on China’ given his record, and his words and deeds make it hard for him to have credibility when pushing a human rights agenda around the world,” said Yam who laid out his concerns in an editorial for Ming Pao and said he was showered with abuse when it came out.

“If an anti-universal values power ‘beats’ another, that’s not a triumph for freedom, it’s just Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four-style endless mutual destruction as between hegemons,” he wrote in an English language summary of his argument on Twitter.

In the US, another Tiananmen Square dissident, Wan Yanhai is campaigning hard against the incumbent, and says he too has faced verbal abuse and even a death threat, but is determined to continue.

“Trump has inflicted major damage on democracy,” he told The City. “You want to fight against the CCP [Chinese Communist party], but you shouldn’t expect one monster to eat another monster.”

Interview
What can we learn about 2020 from the Black Death? Dorsey Armstrong has all the answers

The US professor became an unlikely TV star this year, with a series about the plague. She explains what the 1348 pandemic can tell us today about conspiracy theories, recklessness, deurbanisation and social unrest

Sam Wollaston
@samwollaston
Sun 1 Nov 2020 

Dorsey Armstrong: ‘It’s not, once we make it through, all sunshine and rainbows, but there is hope for improvement in society.’ 

Photograph: Jeff Mauritzen/Jeff Mauritzen - inPhotograph/Courtesy of The Teaching Company

A pandemic rages across the globe, leaving a trail of death, confusion and economic ruin, and changing everything. This is a new disease, about which little is understood. People and communities don’t know what to do, and they react in different ways – sensibly, understandably, honourably, idiotically, criminally. Cities go into lockdown, quarantine rules are introduced, new hospitals are built to try to cope with the numbers of sick. There are heroes and acts of kindness and selflessness. There are also deniers, conspiracy theorists, finger pointers. And there are people – including those in positions of leadership and power – who don’t just fail to step up to the plate, but abandon the field of play.

The year is 1348, of course. Not 2020, but you knew that. Different deals: Covid is a virus; the Black Death – the Great Mortality, pestilence, plague – a flea-driven bacterial infection. Now (it still exists) plague is mostly treatable with antibiotics; then, of course, it lived up to its names. “The thing I like to stress to people feeling anxious about Covid is that the mortality rate for the Black Death in the 14th century was about 80%,” says Dorsey Armstrong. With Covid it is far, far lower, “although I understand absolutely it’s not encouraging to people with family members who have gotten ill and who have died”.

Armstrong, 49, is a professor of English and medieval literature at Purdue University in Indiana. She did a series of TV lectures – The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague – that became an unlikely hit. Made in 2016, way before Covid, it went out on Amazon Prime this year, just as the new pandemic struck and locked-down 21st-century humans looked to the distant past to try to understand what was happening and what may happen next

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Scene of the plague in Florence in 1348, described by Boccaccio, by Baldassarre Calamai. Photograph: Dea Picture Library/De Agostini/Getty Images

We meet the modern way, on Zoom. She is sitting at her desk at home in West Lafayette, Indiana, in front of busy bookshelves. No plague kitsch on display, sadly. In the series she charts the spread of the Black Death across Eurasia from a panelled room decorated with skulls and rats. Standing on an oriental rug and wearing a series of brightly coloured jackets (chosen by her mum), she alternates her angle of delivery as if addressing students on different flanks of a lecture hall. The lessons are scholarly but lively, compelling and human; as likely to reference The Walking Dead as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. And she serves them up with relish and a wry wit. So the mass graves of medieval Florence were dug deep, then filled with a layer of bodies, followed by a thin layer of earth, then more bodies, “like how one layers lasagne with cheese”.

It has been an intense few months for Armstrong. Four family members – her parents, her brother and her sister – got Covid-19. All have recovered, though her mother was hospitalised for several weeks and still suffers from exhaustion. Armstrong’s 14-year-old twin daughters have been at home all day, off school. One, who has autism and for whom school was stressful, “likes to tell us that she is having a great coronavirus … For the other, the lack of social contact is really difficult.” At the same time there has been this explosion of interest in her Black Death course, though she stresses she would “prefer that the course languished in oblivion rather than there be Covid-19 sparking an interest in it”.

Different diseases, different times, but a lot of human nature spans the centuries and Armstrong immediately saw parallels. “The thing that is most horrifying about studying the Black Death is that, in the terror, people were looking for anyone to blame,” she says. “These conspiracy theories start to circulate about Jewish populations, that this was a Jewish conspiracy and that Jews were poisoning wells and planned to wipe out medieval Christian society, which of course was absolutely not true. When Covid first erupted we saw, to my distress, scapegoating of people of Asian ancestry because it looked as if the virus had originated in China.” It didn’t help that the US president called it the “China virus” and “kung flu”. She’s not a fan.

When it was clear the Black Death was wiping out whole communities, some turned to God, prayer, even self-flagellation. Others thought, if we are going to go, let’s have a good time. Armstrong hasn’t noticed any whippings today, but the partying is going on. “We see that quite a bit with college campuses where students – 18 to 22 years old, prefrontal cortex not fully developed – have decided they are going to have a good time.”
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A loss of confidence in leaders – political, religious – is another parallel. Also deurbanisation. Armstrong witnessed well-to-do New Yorkers heading to their second homes out of town when the city was hit hard in the summer. In Florence – which kind of was the New York of the 14th century – “rich Florentines fled to the countryside to try to avoid the Black Death while the city was suffering”. Then, once everyone had left, the city fathers started dishing out fines, telling people they had to come back to do their jobs. Not unlike essential workers being called back to work today.

 Ambulance men of plague-stricken Florence. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

I wonder what connection she sees between Covid and the recent protest and unrest in her country, with people calling for a radical change to deeply entrenched inequalities? “It’s not that the pandemic contributes to social unrest, it is that the pandemic allows other systemic problems in society to become more visible. They cannot be controlled or contained or dismissed or covered up because the systems that were in place to maintain a status quo are too busy coping with this other emergency.”

She brings up the serfs in medieval England who were suddenly enabled to tell the lord of the manor they didn’t need to stay with him, instead they could head off down the road where people were desperately needed to work the land, and actually charge wages. “In some places, people who had been at the bottom of the social order were able to carve out a better situation for themselves – if they survived the plague.”

This sounds like good news. And though the same feudal agrarian system no longer exists, even in the US midwest where Armstrong lives, perhaps opportunity for social mobility may emerge from this? “This situation has made plain that the system, especially in the US, is fatally flawed and that there are no safety nets. For the first time I hope that we will begin a conversation about universal basic income. And it’s made clear that if you connect health insurance to employment you are going to have a disaster if people lose their jobs because businesses have shut down. I hope we are going to have another conversation about universal health care in this country.”
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Scholars have often said that medieval European society would have continued being medieval for longer had it not been for the Black Death. Also that it sowed the seeds that led to the Reformation and the Renaissance. And while Armstrong doesn’t dispute these positive changes, she points out that it took time for them to register. “It’s not, once we make it through, all sunshine and rainbows, but there is hope for improvement in society.”
Armstrong presenting her show The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague. Photograph: Courtesy of The Teaching Company

More than a post-Covid new Renaissance, she would like to see a fundamental step backwards to shore up the foundations of society. “It would be great if we get some great literature out of this,” she says. But what she really wants to see is “communal and systemic structures in place that support people that we don’t currently have”. She looks back to Florence – I think Armstrong likes Florence – which set up the first board of health after the first wave of plague.

It’s going to be easier for the historians of the future; there is so much more documentation. “In the case of the Black Death, sometimes you don’t have information,” she says. “What we have that shows the devastation is a lack of information – bureaucratic documents that suddenly cease being continued, or a sudden silence some place because there is no one left to document what happened. Or an increase in people writing wills.”

She is in no doubt that our times will be studied, in detail; not just the 21st century, they will be zooming in much closer. “Someone will say: ‘So, what’s your field of study?’ and they’ll say: ‘Well, I do the mid-portion of 2020, I focus on March through July.’ Another will say: ‘I focus on the second half of the year.’ Because this year has been so unusual in the way it has affected all levels of society and everyone around the world.”

If more people knew about the Black Death, she thinks, things could have been different. “If people had understood the devastation plague had wrought on the medieval world, going into the current pandemic, I think more people would have taken steps to curb the spread of Covid a little earlier.”

She’s not suggesting that Donald Trump wasn’t up on his medieval history, is she? “Or with what is happening right now. Or reality.” And she rattles off the list of failures – delayed lockdown, not enough adequate PPE or accurate test and tracing, no coordinated national plan – that could so easily also be applied to this country. Oh, go on, give him a score, it’s part of your job. Student Trump, out of 10? “Minus 20.”

Belarus protesters use Telegram to keep up pressure on Lukashenko

Secure messaging app pivotal to organisation of protests and spreading of news about repressions

Shaun Walker in Minsk
Sun 1 Nov 2020 

 

Participants in women’s peaceful solidarity march in Minsk on Sunday. Photograph: EPA

In a small Minsk apartment one evening last week, a group of people gathered to discuss plans for a Halloween party with a twist. There would be costumes, drinks and games, but the main event was a ceremonial funeral. The plan: to bury Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship.

“Maybe we should bury a pumpkin with a moustache,” suggested one young woman.

“What about a giant rat?”

“Yes! Brilliant idea! Write it down in the chat. We’ll need to work out where to get the rat model from.”

“And we’ll need spades to dig the grave. It would be cool if we have a proper grave. There’s a funeral parlour near me, maybe we can actually order a proper gravestone.”

The discussion went on in a similar vein for several hours. Those gathered were the most active members of a local group coordinating protest events in one small district of Minsk, using Telegram. The app has been a driving force of the protests against Lukashenko, since they began in August after he declared victory in a rigged election. The biggest channel has nearly 2 million followers, helping to direct the weekly Sunday protests and spreading news about new repressions.

Since August, the protest has also become localised, and hundreds of smaller groups have appeared. Now there are Telegram channels for each city, each district, and in some cases even individual apartment blocks. They provide support for people who get detailed by police, a forum to swap ideas, and in many parts of Minsk, local protest events, lectures or concerts.

The most famous of these courtyard protest venues is just north of the centre, where a mural has been painted of two DJs who achieved cult status before the election, when they were hired for a pro-Lukashenko gathering and played the perestroika-era track Changes, which has become the unofficial anthem of the Belarusian uprising. The square has been unofficially renamed Changes Square and attracts musicians who give concerts most weekends.Quick guide

Symbols of Belarus protest

White bracelets/ballot initiatives

Supporters of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya wore white bracelets to polling stations on Sunday in the hope that a show of popular support for the opposition candidate would prevent election workers from spoiling their ballots. Similar initiatives called for voters to upload photographs of their ballots or to fold them in specific ways, so they would be visible in the ballot box. Supporters later wore white ribbons to protests or tied them to their cars and motorcycles.
Protest anthems

Two songs have been popular at pro-Tikhonovskaya rallies. One is the Kino classic Peremen, or Changes, a perestroika-era song that became a protest anthem in eastern Europe. Two Belarusian DJs were each sentenced to ten days in jail last week for playing the song at a pro-government concert. The other was a Russian translation of the Polish song Walls, which was popular among the workers of 1980s Solidarity movement. The chorus ends: “Then the walls will fall, fall, fall. And bury the old world.”
The Trio and hand symbols

Three women spearheaded the campaign to unseat Alexander Lukashenko, a novelty in Belarus’ male-dominated politics. When Svetlana Tikhanovskaya announced that her campaign would ally with those represented by Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo, the three women held up hand symbols: a peace sign, a raised fist, and a heart. They quickly became a campaign symbol.

Andrew Roth
Photograph: Sergei Gapon/AFP


“I saw the atmosphere at Changes Square and thought it would be good to set something up for my own district,” said one of those present at the gathering last week. Others joined in, and now they form a small underground protest cell, one of thousands across Belarus.

Three months ago, hardly any of the people gathered took any interest in politics. They felt Lukashenko’s neo-Soviet authoritarianism did not affect their lives much. But things have changed quickly in Belarus, with a broad swath of the population developing political consciousness in a remarkably short time.

“At the first big protests there was a feeling of: ‘Wow, are we really allowed to do this?’ Then there was a feeling of total helplessness seeing that it was not working, and now we are doing all this organisation as a form of therapy,” said one man in his 30s, who is responsible for distributing opposition leaflets and newsletters to people’s apartments in the neighbourhood.

He has recruited a network of volunteers in each apartment block, as an intercom code is required to reach the letterboxes. “None of the carrier pigeons know who the others are, and why should they? I also don’t know the identities of the people who are printing the materials. It’s better that way, if they pick me up and start breaking my fingers, then I won’t be able to give anyone else up,” said one young man.

With thousands of people arrested in recent months, everyone here now takes precautions. When going to protest, they take rucksacks full of essentials in case they are arrested. Several say they wear two pairs of pants just in case – nobody wants to spend 15 days without a change of underwear.

As the protest mood refuses to be quashed, Lukashenko’s regime ploughs on with its grim crackdown. This week, some restaurants that joined a strike called by the opposition on Monday have been closed down, ostensibly on health and safety grounds, while Lukashenko has ordered universities to expel striking students. The dean of one university resigned, apparently unwilling to do so.

On Friday, Lukashenko said the regime would no longer “take prisoners” and would hunt down opponents even if they were hiding in private apartments. “If someone touches a serviceman, he should be left at minimum with no hands,” said Lukashenko, who has on occasion made suggestions he is ready for reform though his actions have suggested the opposite.

The district protest planners said for security reasons, they only communicated through encrypted Telegram chats, using accounts that were not linked to their phone numbers and registered under pseudonyms. Most of those gathered do not know each other’s full names, and only one of them knows who the Telegram channel administrators are.

Sometimes, the conspiratorial chatter last week could seem a little bit overdone. It was only a local Halloween party they were discussing, after all. But the caution turned out to be far from misplaced. In the days after the meeting, strange men arrived at the apartment of one of the channel’s administrators and rang the doorbell for 15 minutes.

She did not open the door, and waited for them to leave. Later, after other group members had done a sweep of the area and given the all clear, a friend picked her up and brought her away. Shortly afterwards, her landlord received a call from the authorities that they had a warrant to search the apartment. The rest of the group are now worried for their safety. Some of the details in this article have been left vague to protect their identities.

“I don’t know what charges I face or whether I can go back, I don’t know what to do at all,” the channel administrator whose flat was searched said, on a Telegram audio call from a safe location outside Belarus. “But I know one thing: I’m not giving up the fight.”