Can the president cancel the midterms? Is mail voting riddled with fraud? Five persistent midterm myths, checked against the law and the record. (144 characters) URL slug: midterm-election-myths

The Netherlands' most recent national election sent 15 parties to parliament. Germany's sent seven. In the United States, every one of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives went to a Democrat or a Republican in 2024. The difference is often attributed to political culture, as if Europeans were more divided or Americans held a narrower range of views. The more accurate explanation is institutional. The number of parties a country sustains depends largely on one rule: w

The Twenty-Second Amendment is commonly understood to limit American presidents to two terms. Its text is narrower: it provides that no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice. That wording has encouraged speculation about routes to a third term that avoid a third election. Examined closely, each proposed route runs into another part of the Constitution or federal law, and the one legitimate path, a constitutional amendment, faces thresholds no part

On September 16, in her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Canada become the Union's first "associate member." Prime Minister Mark Carney, present in the chamber, rose to applaud. The status does not yet exist in EU law, and its content remains to be negotiated. The proposal nonetheless marks a significant turn: the closest ally of the United States is formalizing an alternative partnership acros

Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor of New York City, describes himself as a democratic socialist. So did Michael Harrington, an American writer and activist working in the 1960s who never held elected office. Both used the same label across a sixty-year span, and the gap between what each of them meant by it is a useful way into a term that causes more confusion in American political discourse than almost any other.

A president can leave the White House six ways: voted out, term-limited, dies in office, resigns, or removed through one of two constitutional mechanisms built for entirely different failures. One of those mechanisms has been attempted four times in 237 years and has never succeeded. The other has never been attempted at all. Despite frequently being treated as interchangeable in public debate, they were designed by different generations of American lawmakers to solve differe

Iceland spent over a decade in accession limbo, an applicant frozen mid-process, and on August 29 the country chose to stay there. Voters rejected a government proposal to restart membership talks with the European Union, 52.8 percent to 47.2 percent. The vote changes little at the structural level. EU accession runs on a system built for slowness, and this result left that pace exactly where it was. Iceland applied for membership in 2009, days after its banking system collap

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same kind of politician. I know — put the pitchfork down for a second. They don't agree on taxes, immigration, healthcare, or basically anything anyone would actually vote on. But strip all of that away, and both of them are doing the same thing structurally: there's a corrupt elite screwing you over, and there's a silent majority getting ignored. They simply have different definitions of who that corrupt elite is, mainly because it's e

You have heard this line, probably from someone who sounded very sure of themselves: America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. And they say it like it's some witty response to a question no one asked, or like some kid from school who started his responses by saying "well, actually." You know the one. That kid was me. But anyway — are these people right? Have we been fed a lie our entire lives, and the United States isn't a democracy? Was Reagan wrong when he said

Twenty-seven countries. One set of laws binding on all of them. No army, no taxes, and technically, not even a country. The European Union is one of the strangest political creations in modern history, and understanding what it actually is starts with understanding why it exists at all.

The United Kingdom has never written its constitution down. What is known as the "British Constitution" is instead a patchwork of statutes, court rulings, and unwritten convention accumulated over roughly a thousand years, alterable at any time through an ordinary act of Parliament rather than a formal amendment process.

Britain is getting its seventh Prime Minister in ten years, and once again, the public has had no say in the matter. The transition arrives amid an unusually busy stretch of British news: June marked the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, and the architect of that campaign resigned his own parliamentary seat last week over an undeclared multi-million-pound donation scandal — though he is now standing to reclaim it, against a candidate running under the name Count Bin

Germany's government structure is younger than most people assume — younger, in fact, than the United States. But like the US and France, its history explains the government it has today...

France has burned through five republics, two empires, and a monarchy since 1789 — here's how the president, prime minister, and parliament actually work today.

Welcome to Politics 101, an easy guide to how governments work across the transatlantic world. Every entry takes a country apart piece by piece, so that when something goes wrong, you know exactly who to blame. Today, in honor of its 250th anniversary, we start with the United States.

Ten years ago this week, on June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom shocked the world and voted to leave the European Union, 52 to 48 percent. The cursed ratio. The people behind the Leave campaign called it the will of the British people. Most voters didn't even know what Brexit was, and a decade later the country has changed its mind. Poll after poll shows more Britons want back in.

For the past hundred years, the same two parties, the Conservatives and Labour, have swapped power between them. Today they're both falling apart, and if things continue, both could be shut out of Downing Street when the next election rolls around in 2029. The most remarkable part? Both wounds are self-inflicted.

A quick note on terms. I'm using "left," "right," and "center" by the American Overton window. Our "left" would read as moderate in Sweden, and plenty of center-right parties abroad would sit on our left. The only shared definition runs to broad ideas of more or less government, so for this piece, American frame. Every time the Democratic Party loses, the blame game starts. The left says the ticket ran too cautiously. The center says the left scared off the independent swing