Early figures put incumbent leader Tsai Ing-wen ahead of her main rival Han Kuo-yu in the Taiwan presidential race, the South China Morning Post reports.

Axios: “As Taiwan’s January 11 presidential election approaches, the Chinese government is spreading disinformation and taking coercive political maneuvers aimed at convincing voters Taiwan is helpless without China.”

Nikkea Asian Review: Five things to know a day before Taiwan elections.

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel easily brushed off a challenge for the leadership of the conservative Likud party early Friday, a crucial victory for Israel’s longest-serving leader but one that may only harden the country’s yearlong political standoff,” the New York Times reports.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: “​Britain is suddenly the only big country in western Europe with a fully functional government able to take radical measures and sweep aside resistance. France, Germany, Italy and Spain are all in political turmoil or have a paralyzed executive.  The center is crumbling everywhere – but not in Britain. A one-nation Tory running on a green, social democrat economic program has pulled off the feat of uniting a blue collar north and an affluent south.”

“The world press and left-academia got that narrative badly wrong. This political asymmetry between a unified, confident, well-armed British government and a demoralised, splintered Continent matters enormously. Brussels can no longer play the divide and rule game in Westminster, or indeed with the Tory party itself.​”​

Andrew Sullivan: “Instead of sticking to getting Brexit done in Parliament, he called an early election to give himself a clear mandate for it. By fighting on the genius and simple slogan ‘Get Brexit Done,’ he exposed the deep divides on the left, unified the right, and knocked his opponents for six (if you will forgive a cricket metaphor). But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.”

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Franklin Foer: “There’s no doubt that Sanders shares some of the Corbyn view of the world. He will sometimes invoke the inglorious American history of intervening in Latin America. But Sanders is less conspiratorial and more open-minded than his British cousin. Consider how differently they have reacted to Vladimir Putin. When the Russians poisoned an ex-spy and his daughter in Salisbury last year, Corbyn expressed immediate skepticism about how quickly the British government apportioned blame for the crime. Sanders hasn’t similarly hesitated to criticize Putin. He readily condemned Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. And he has said that he would make opposition to authoritarian kleptocrats central to his foreign policy. (His speeches linking global inequality to illiberal authoritarianism contain a theory of kleptocracy that other candidates should borrow.)”

“While Sanders might have been a foreign-policy outlier in the years immediately following 9/11, his views aren’t so far from the prevailing post-Iraq consensus. He doesn’t reject humanitarian intervention on principle, even as he rails against endless wars. Sanders supported the U.S. air strikes during the Kosovo War; he was sympathetic to Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya, although he eventually came to view that policy skeptically. Where Corbyn has said that he wished NATO never existed, Sanders has merely bellyached about member states paying their dues.”

“Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist leader of the opposition Labour Party, announced Friday he will step down after election results showed the party not only failed to oust the ruling Conservatives but also lost a swath of formerly dependable seats,” NBC News reports.

Andrew Sullivan: “It tells you a lot about him that he still hasn’t resigned after the Labour Party’s worst showing since 1935. He has only promised not to lead the party into the election. He will stay on to control the succession battle and try to keep his faction in power. His goal was always controlling the Labour Party, not winning elections. He has lost two elections, but his grip on the party is going to be very hard to break. It took Labour 18 years to return to power after its drubbing at the 1983 election. It may take as long to recover from an even worse shellacking.”

London Playbook: “Any prospect of Britain remaining in the EU has gone… Johnson now has free rein to recast Britain’s entire relationship with Europe as he sees fit… Johnson will also have the power to reshape domestic policy over the coming years without restraint from his party or from Parliament.”

“The Conservatives are likely to rule Britain for the whole of the 2020s at least.

“Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party is on course for a huge majority in Parliament, according to an exit poll from the UK’s three main broadcasters,” CNN reports.

“The projections will be a big disappointment for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and suggests Johnson will be able to pass his Brexit deal comfortably.”

BBC: “Exit polls have proved to be very accurate in recent years. In 2017 it correctly predicted a hung Parliament, with no overall winner, and in 2015 it predicted the Conservatives would be the largest party.”

London Playbook: “Tonight’s result will have truly seismic repercussions for the U.K., with the two main parties offering wildly different visions of how Britain’s economy and place in the world should be transformed through the 2020s and beyond.”

“The Knesset missed its deadline to nominate a candidate for prime minister, officially launching a third election in less than a year overnight Wednesday,” the Jerusalem Post reports.

A new YouGov poll in the U.K., using the same model that accurately predicted the election outcome two years ago, suggests the Conservatives are on course to win 339 seats, Labour 231, the Lib Dems 15 and the SNP 41.

Although that would give Prime Miniater Boris Johnson a majority of 28, the poll’s range of possible outcomes stretches from 367 Tory seats to only 311.

Said pollster Anthony Wells: “Based on the model we cannot rule out a hung parliament.”

“U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson appears to be steaming toward the parliamentary majority he desperately desires to pass his Brexit deal and end the gridlock in Westminster,” Axios reports.

“Thursday’s vote is the culmination of three years of intense efforts to deliver Brexit, and to block it. The rocky road Johnson has plodded along since replacing Theresa May in July would become much smoother with a resounding electoral mandate.”

A new BMG Research poll in the United Kingdom finds that 30% of the public say they will be “voting for the best-positioned candidate/party to keep out another candidate/party that I dislike” for the December 12th election.

That is up markedly from 24% last week and around 22% near the start of the campaign.

In contrast, just 51% say they will vote for “the candidate/party I most prefer, regardless of how likely they are to win,” and 19 percent say they don’t know.