“Boris Johnson wants to hold an early general election ‘while Jeremy Corbyn is still around,’ senior allies have said as his team plans to overhaul the Conservative Party’s campaign machine,” the Times reports.
“The frontrunner for the Tory leadership appeared last night at a fundraising dinner with his rival, Jeremy Hunt, that was attended by 100 Conservative donors in an attempt to boost the party coffers and build an election war chest.”
BuzzFeed News “has obtained an explosive audio recording of the Metropol meeting in which a close aide of Europe’s most powerful far-right leader — Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini — and the other five men can be heard negotiating the terms of a deal to covertly channel tens of millions of dollars of Russian oil money to Salvini’s Lega party.”
“The recording reveals the elaborate lengths the two sides were willing to go to conceal the fact that the true beneficiary of the deal would be Salvini’s party — a breach of Italian electoral law, which bans political parties from accepting large foreign donations — despite the comfort with which he and Europe’s other far-right leaders publicly parade their pro-Kremlin political sympathies.”
“The opposition candidate for mayor of Istanbul celebrated a landmark win Sunday in a closely watched repeat election that ended weeks of political tension and broke the long hold President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party had on leading Turkey’s largest city,” the AP reports.
“The governing party’s candidate, former Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, conceded moments after returns showed him trailing well behind Imamoglu, 54% to 45%. Imamoglu increased his lead from a March mayoral election by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
The Guardian: “Police were called to the home of Boris Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, in the early hours of Friday morning after neighbors heard a loud altercation involving screaming, shouting and banging.”
“The argument could be heard outside the property where the potential future prime minister is living with Symonds, a former Conservative party head of press.”
The Mirror reports that Symonds was heard telling the Tory leadership candidate to “get off me” and “get out of my flat” during the disturbance.
Jeremy Hunt will face Boris Johnson in the race to be the next British Prime Minister after Michael Gove was eliminated in the latest Tory leadership ballot, the BBC reports.
Johnson, considered the favorite in the race, and Hunt will now compete in a run-off of the party’s 160,000 or so members, and the winner will be announced in the week of July 22.
The U.K. Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee announced the results of the second round of voting in the race to replace outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May as its leader, Axios reports.
“Boris Johnson’s progress towards Downing Street appeared inexorable last night as his most senior rivals began circling for jobs in his cabinet and a new poll showed that voters believe he is the only leadership candidate who can win the next election,” the Sunday Times reports.
“Two of Boris Johnson’s rivals — Michael Gove and Sajid Javid — used interviews with The Sunday Times to issue coded job applications.”
“The YouGov poll put the Brexit party in first place on 24%, three points ahead of the Conservatives and Labour, reinforcing Johnson’s case that the next prime minister will need to seize votes from Nigel Farage’s party.”
“Rivals to be Britain’s next prime minister are holding private talks over joining forces in an attempt to stop the pro-Brexit favorite, Boris Johnson, running away with the contest,” Bloomberg reports.
“Two of the candidates who are struggling for support — Home Secretary Sajid Javid and Health Secretary Matt Hancock — met to discuss their options after Johnson took a huge lead in the race for the Conservative Party leadership in the first round of voting. Hancock was weighing up whether to pull out and throw his support behind another candidate.”
Boris Johnson has secured the highest number of votes in the first ballot to select the Conservative party leader and next British prime minister, the BBC reports.
Johnson received 114 votes, Jeremy Hunt was second with 43, and Michael Gove third with 37 votes.
Washington Post: “It’s a bit painful to watch them confess via Twitter to youthful indiscretions back at England’s elite universities, while trying to turn attention to what they might do about the Value Added Tax, for example. It is also far from clear what the 120,000 or so Conservative Party members — the ‘selectorate’ that will choose between two finalists — think or care about a former government minister smoking a fatty back at Oxford.”
“The whole row began when one top contender, Environment Secretary Michael Gove, admitted to using cocaine ‘on several occasions’ in the past. Several? The British press naturally wanted to know more. There were quickly tabloid stories about a ‘double life’ and a ‘fast crowd’ in Mayfair casinos and Soho clubs, back when Gove was a young journalist.”
“Michael Gove, a senior official in Britain and one of the top contenders to replace Theresa May as Conservative leader and prime minister, has admitted to taking illegal drugs in his youth, calling it ‘a mistake,'” the New York Times reports.
“The revelation is contained in a biography, Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry, by Owen Bennett, a political journalist, that is scheduled to be published in July. The British newspaper The Daily Mail published excerpts from the book on Saturday.”
Said Gove: “I took drugs on several occasions at social events more than 20 years ago. It was a mistake. But I don’t believe that past mistakes disqualify you.”
A new The Times/YouGov poll in the U.K. finds the Liberal Democrats leading with 24%, marginally ahead of the second-placed Brexit Party on 22% (whose ranking at any other time would have been a story in itself). Meanwhile the Conservatives and Labour are in joint third on 19% with the Greens at 8%.
Haaretz: “The Knesset voted Wednesday night to dissolve itself after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition, sending Israel to a new election mere seven weeks after the last one.”
“At the heart of the impasse was the issue of drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students: Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, without whom Netanyahu can’t form a coalition, refused to back down on the bill’s terms, while ultra-Orthodox parties claimed they have already yielded enough ground.”
“Populists and nationalists who want to chip away at the European Union’s powers increased their share in Europe’s Parliament after four days of continent-wide elections, but it was not the deluge that many traditionalists had feared,” the New York Times reports.
“When the vote counting is done, the populists are expected to get around 25 percent of the 751 seats, up from 20 percent five years ago, figures released by the European Union showed on Sunday.”
“But a higher than usual turnout suggested that pro-European voters were also more motivated than before.”
“Taken together, the results indicated that the struggle over the future direction of the bloc — more integration among European countries, or less — would only intensify.”
Axios: 6 takeaways from the European elections.
“For weeks, Europe’s far-right populists have been dashing across the Continent, joining arms and presenting themselves as a united front that will batter the political establishment and score a big breakthrough in this week’s elections for the European Parliament,” the New York Times reports.
“Their latest group hug came in Milan on Saturday evening, where Italy’s firebrand, Matteo Salvini, preened with France’s far right icon, Marine Le Pen, and nearly a dozen other populist leaders. They bashed the European Union, migrants and Islam and promised the dawn of a new, nationalist era.”
“But it was telling what they did not talk about: the scandal that erupted this weekend in Austria, which led to the collapse of the nation’s coalition government after the far-right vice chancellor was caught on a video promising favors to a woman claiming to be a Russian investor.”
“Austria’s chancellor called Saturday for snap elections after the country’s far-right vice chancellor resigned over a secretly filmed video from 2017 that renewed questions about whether Russia had a direct line into a government at the heart of Europe,” the New York Times reports.
“The video showed Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the far-right Freedom Party promising government contracts to a woman claiming to be the niece of a Russian oligarch.”
A new Observer/Opinium poll in the U.K. finds more voters now say they would back the Brexit party at the next general election than the Conservatives.
“Nigel Farage’s party increased its support by three points to 24% of the vote, leapfrogging the Tories and trailing Labour by just five points. The Conservatives claimed 22% of the vote, the same figure they recorded in last week’s poll.”
“Scott Morrison, Australia’s conservative prime minister, scored a surprise victory in federal elections on Saturday, propelled by a populist wave — the ‘quiet Australians,’ he termed it — resembling the force that has upended politics in the United States, Britain and beyond,” the New York Times reports.
“The win stunned Australian election analysts — polls had pointed to a loss for Mr. Morrison’s coalition for months. But in the end, the prime minister confounded expectations suggesting that the country was ready for a change in course after six years of tumultuous leadership under the conservative political coalition.”
Washington Post: “The apparent upset victory was the latest election to trample predictions by polling firms, which all showed Morrison’s political bloc trailing the opposition Labor Party. It also carried other uncanny parallels with Trump’s rise.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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