作者： admin

A growing far-right nativist British political party that has drawn high-profile backing from X owner Elon Musk is facing internal backlash and public scrutiny just weeks ahead of a critical by-election that could reshape the country’s political landscape. Led by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, Restore Britain has risen rapidly in prominence over recent months, galvanized by viral mobilization on the social media platform X, where Lowe and party-aligned accounts collectively boast hundreds of thousands of followers.

Restore Britain built its support base on a hardline anti-immigration, anti-Muslim platform, promising to roll back what it labels the “Islamisation of Britain”, ban kosher and halal animal slaughter, and achieve net-negative migration through mass deportations. The party’s explicitly nativist ideology sets it apart from even the right-wing Reform UK: in February, party spokesperson Charlie Downes made clear that while Reform UK holds that any person from any background can become British, Restore Britain defines British national identity as tied to indigenous ancestry and the Christian faith. The party has also called for the British armed forces to prioritize recruitment from the “native majority” rather than recruiting from minority communities, and Lowe has repeatedly made inflammatory public comments targeting immigrant groups from Muslim-majority nations, claiming foreign men from these backgrounds harass women and disrupt public order.

The party has shaken up the race for the upcoming Makerfield by-election, where popular Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham is running as the Labour Party candidate. A Labour win would put Burnham in position to mount a leadership challenge to Prime Minister Keir Starmer. A late Survation poll the previous week placed Labour at 43% support, Reform UK close behind at 40%, and Restore Britain at 7% in third place. Multiple campaign sources, however, have told reporters that on-the-ground canvassing data shows Restore Britain outperforming this polling number significantly. Elon Musk’s public endorsement of the party – including a recent post declaring “Only Restore Britain can save Britain” – has supercharged its growth, and the party now claims more than 123,000 registered members. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has accused Musk of deliberately splitting the right-wing vote to tip the race to Labour, saying “Quite what he’s trying to achieve, I have no idea.” With the right-wing vote split between Reform and Restore, polling and political analysts agree that the split is helping Burnham maintain his lead in the constituency, which is largely working-class and majority-white, where right-wing parties draw higher overall support than Labour.

The party’s momentum has hit a major crisis following the wedding of Lowe’s son Angus over the previous weekend, after Lowe posted a wedding photo of the couple to X that drew immediate outrage from his own far-right base. The bride, Yasmin Mezran, is the daughter of Karim Mezran, a prominent Libyan-Italian academic who currently serves as director of the North Africa Initiative and resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for Middle East Programs. Mezran, a well-known expert on political Islam and Mediterranean geopolitics, has a decades-long track record of advocating for Muslim integration and religious pluralism in Europe, and has publicly criticized anti-Muslim nationalist policies from far-right European governments. Outrage among Restore Britain supporters intensified after it was confirmed that a halal meal option was available for Muslim guests at the wedding reception – a direct contradiction of the party’s official policy to ban halal slaughter nationwide. Mezran himself reposted a social media note highlighting the contradiction between the wedding’s arrangements and Restore’s official platform.

Mezran’s long career of academic and policy work stands in stark ideological opposition to Lowe and Restore Britain’s core mission. In 2013, he published a major paper arguing that Muslim communities in Italy needed a formal agreement with the Italian state to guarantee their equal rights, noting that previous attempts at such an agreement had been blocked by widespread prejudice among the Italian public and a lack of political courage from state institutions. He has repeatedly advocated for pluralistic integration that aligns with the democratic values of constitutional tolerance, and in 2022 warned the Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni that its anti-Muslim nationalist rhetoric would damage Italy’s diplomatic relations with Middle Eastern nations. Following Pope Francis’ death in 2025, Mezran praised the late pope for his public advocacy for Palestinian rights during the war in Gaza. He has also pushed back against stereotypes of Islamist political groups, arguing in 2012 that Libya’s elected Muslim Brotherhood did not fit common negative tropes, and called for cross-ideological cooperation between liberal and religious conservative politicians in the country. In a 2023 analysis, he framed Algeria as a critical pillar of regional stability for Italy and the European Union, arguing that closer Italian-Algerian ties would strengthen Mediterranean security.

Lowe, a millionaire former businessman, farmer, and ex-chairman of Southampton FC, was suspended from Reform UK in March 2024 after he publicly criticized Nigel Farage and called Reform a “protest party led by the Messiah”, prompting his split to form Restore Britain. He is no stranger to public controversy: last year he drew widespread condemnation after revealing he had asked his gamekeeper to shoot his 17-year-old pet dog in the head after the dog lost the use of its hind legs, a decision he defended as humane. Advocacy group Hope Not Hate CEO Nick Lowles noted that Restore Britain’s aggressive on-the-ground campaign in Makerfield is being heavily amplified by far-right vloggers and Musk’s platform, and that Reform UK’s focus on attacking Restore Britain is inadvertently boosting its appeal to racist voters across the country. Middle East Eye has reached out to Karim Mezran for additional comment on the ongoing controversy.

In recent weeks, consecutive back-to-back state visits to Beijing by Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.S. President Donald Trump have thrust China’s role in global diplomacy into the center of international discussion. Many international analysts have framed this flurry of high-level summits as proof of China’s emerging status as a stabilizing global actor: a capable broker capable of hosting two competing major powers within days, and a core pillar of global order. Other observers go further, arguing that the wave of visits cements China’s position as an indispensable global power, and its leader as a central global figure that must be engaged and courted by the international community.

Chinese analysts add broader context to this trend, noting that Putin and Trump’s visits are not isolated events. Over the past six months, Beijing has welcomed heads of state from across the globe, including France, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea and Germany. Notably, many of these trips marked long-awaited returns to Beijing for top leaders: it was the first UK prime ministerial visit in eight years, and the first such trip in nine years for leaders from Canada, South Korea and the United States. Chinese state media has embraced this narrative, describing Beijing as a global “living room” that offers much-needed stability amid global turbulence, with one headline declaring the world has entered “Beijing time.”

But while the string of summits has undeniably elevated China’s global profile, these celebratory interpretations overlook three critical, underreported factors that change the picture of Beijing’s growing diplomatic centrality.

First, the true motivation behind many leaders’ trips to Beijing remains unclear. While many frame the visits as a victory for proactive Chinese diplomacy, a large share of these trips are instead driven by foreign leaders’ desire to gain greater leverage in their own tense dealings with the second Trump administration. For example, when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney traveled to Beijing in January, widespread analysis framed the trip as a direct response to Canada’s deep structural economic dependence on the United States, paired with growing policy volatility under the second Trump administration. Many international outlets noted Carney was effectively playing the “China card” to strengthen his hand in upcoming trade negotiations with Washington.

Second, access to Beijing’s diplomatic “living room” comes with a high tangible price, and many visits have been tied to significant policy concessions from visiting leaders. During his 2025 Beijing trip, for instance, Trump reversed earlier campaign and policy proposals that would have blocked Chinese nationals from purchasing U.S. farmland and imposed strict caps on Chinese university students studying in the United States. Chinese state media itself was quick to highlight the fierce backlash these concessions drew from Trump’s own MAGA base and rival Republican lawmakers in Washington.

Similarly, Carney’s trip yielded a major trade concession for Beijing: a new bilateral deal that cut Canadian tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles to 6.1% for the first 49,000 imported vehicles annually. This marked a sharp reversal from late 2024, when Canada imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EV imports, and even clashed with Carney’s own 2025 election campaign rhetoric, where he called China the “biggest geopolitical threat” to the West. The tariff reversal drew sharp criticism from Canadian opposition politicians, who warned it would open the door to a flood of low-cost Chinese EV imports without securing any binding guarantees for reciprocal Chinese investment in Canada’s domestic economy.

Third, the string of high-profile visits has not produced any measurable shift in China’s long-held core foreign policy positions, despite repeated appeals from visiting leaders. European leaders’ diplomatic outreach, for example, has not altered Beijing’s ongoing material support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nor has it reduced China’s persistent large bilateral trade surplus with the European Union. Similarly, Beijing refused to commit to supporting the Trump administration’s policy goals around Iran, even after Trump publicly praised Xi Jinping’s leadership and paused a controversial planned arms sale to Taiwan that Beijing had strongly opposed. Even Vladimir Putin, a close strategic partner of Beijing, left his Beijing visit without resolving longstanding disagreements over the Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline, a project Putin has prioritized for years. If completed, the pipeline would carry 50 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to China annually — equal to roughly 12% of China’s total domestic gas consumption in 2025.

So what does this wave of visits actually signal, if not a rise in China’s effective global leadership? The surge in top-level trips to Beijing is more a reflection of growing systemic uncertainty across the existing global order, argues author Czeslaw Tubilewicz, a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Adelaide University. The sharp, unpredictable shifts in U.S. foreign policy under the second Trump administration have sparked deep anxiety among Washington’s long-standing traditional allies, creating a vacuum that China has been quick to fill by positioning itself as a reliable, stable alternative partner after years of more confrontational “wolf-warrior diplomacy.”

Yet this growing diplomatic visibility does not equate to more effective Chinese diplomacy. Domestic economic pressures and competing conflicting international priorities still severely limit the tangible concessions and outcomes Beijing can deliver to global partners. To prevent widespread factory closures and hit official annual economic growth targets, for example, Beijing provides massive state subsidies to key domestic manufacturing sectors, generating massive surplus output that is exported to global markets (including the EU) at artificially low prices. Beijing cannot afford to rein in these exports, even as it fuels trade tensions with Western economies that are critical to China’s own long-term economic growth.

At the same time, China has continued to provide diplomatic and material support to Russia and Iran as they challenge U.S. and European security order, even as this ongoing support creates lasting rifts with Western economies that are central to China’s economic development. The end result is that high-profile summits in Beijing deliver heavy ceremony and global visibility, but very few tangible, lasting policy outcomes.

In sum, the recent visits by Putin, Trump and a stream of other world leaders have certainly made China appear far more central to global diplomatic affairs. But this newfound visibility does not automatically translate into effective, influential global leadership.

In a bombshell new interview with Al Jazeera published Sunday, former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has lifted the veil on coordinated political pressure, intimidation tactics and punitive sanctions designed to force her to abandon a landmark investigation into alleged war crimes committed in occupied Palestine. Bensouda, who led the ICC’s prosecution division from 2012 until 2021, laid out a years-long campaign of harassment that began just months after she opened a preliminary examination into the Palestinian situation in 2015.

The first incident came when two unidentified men showed up unannounced at Bensouda’s private residence in The Hague, where the ICC is headquartered. The men left her an envelope holding $500, claiming the cash was a thank-you gift from a party she had previously assisted. But Bensouda told the outlet she quickly recognized the encounter for what it was: a deliberate threat designed to prove that her opponents could track her down to her home. She immediately reported the break-in visit to ICC security and Dutch law enforcement, which later traced phone numbers linked to the two men back to Israel. No further action was ever taken in the case, according to Bensouda, leaving her feeling abandoned and unprotected by the institutions she served.

Beyond the surprise home visit, Bensouda detailed repeated, high-level pressure meetings with Yossi Cohen, who led Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency during her tenure. One of the most notable encounters took place in a New York City hotel during the annual United Nations General Assembly, where Cohen made his organization’s position explicitly clear. According to Bensouda, the meetings opened with superficial friendly overtures and attempts to coerce her through persuasion, before quickly shifting to direct, uncompromising demands that she end the Palestine investigation. When asked to confirm a prior Guardian report that Cohen explicitly warned her proceeding with the probe would put her personal safety and her family’s security at risk, and that Israel could “take care” of her if she complied, Bensouda answered plainly: “He did. He did.” The former prosecutor said she had no doubt that the messages amounted to direct threats against her and her loved ones, all aimed at killing the investigation.

Bensouda went on to link these Israeli intimidation efforts to the sweeping sanctions imposed against her by the first Donald Trump administration in September 2020. The punitive measures were implemented after the ICC moved forward with investigations into alleged war crimes by both U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Israeli troops in occupied Palestine. The sanctions froze her global assets and imposed broad travel restrictions, upending both her professional and personal life in ways the public rarely sees, she explained.

Beyond barring her from entering the United States, the sanctions triggered cascading financial disruptions that affected nearly every part of her daily life. Her long-held account with the UN Federal Credit Union, opened decades earlier during her work at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, was shut down immediately. Basic routine transactions from booking hotel rooms to sending money to ICC member states became impossible. Even Dutch banks, which fall under the scope of U.S. financial regulations, were forced to cut ties: the bank that held her mortgage closed her account entirely. It took coordinated intervention from the ICC registrar and Dutch authorities to arrange for her salary to be deposited at a bank that already worked with the court, and eventually for a second Dutch bank to take over her basic transactions, even with strict limits on her activity. Even after that workaround, transfers to family members regularly failed when intermediary correspondent banks refused to process the payments out of fear of U.S. penalties. Her own son, a resident of The Gambia, had his personal bank account blocked as a result of the sanctions.

Bensouda also confirmed that her husband was targeted for surveillance in the lead-up to the 2020 sanctions designation, with efforts to collect intelligence through photographs and audio recordings. The U.S. only lifted the punitive sanctions against Bensouda in early 2021, shortly after Joe Biden took office. Since that time, the politicization of the ICC has only escalated. After returning to the U.S. presidency, Donald Trump reimposed broad sanctions targeting ICC personnel in an executive order signed in February 2024. The order authorizes economic and travel restrictions for any individual working on ICC investigations into U.S. citizens or U.S. allies including Israel. To date, current ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan, who succeeded Bensouda in 2021, both of his deputy prosecutors, and eight sitting ICC judges have been added to the sanctions list. Khan has since narrowed the scope of the Afghanistan investigation to focus exclusively on atrocities committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State, effectively dropping the probe into alleged U.S. war crimes.

In addition to detailing the pressure campaign, Bensouda pushed back against longstanding criticisms that the ICC disproportionately targets African nations for investigation. She noted that the vast majority of the court’s African investigations were launched at the formal request of African governments themselves, rather than being imposed by the court unilaterally. “People always forget that ICC did not go to Africa to start investigating. It was Africa that came to the ICC,” she said.

Despite the growing bipartisan and international political attacks on the court’s authority, Bensouda reaffirmed her unwavering support for the ICC’s core mandate of advancing international justice. “There will be attempts to make the court disintegrate and fade away. But I know that there are still people, institutions and countries that want justice,” she said.

Bensouda spoke out publicly ahead of her keynote address at last week’s Hague Rights Forum, where she urged the European Union to take concrete action to shield the ICC and its personnel from extraterritorial sanctions imposed by outside powers. She called on the EU to activate its blocking statute, a regulation designed to protect European companies and individuals from the extrajurisdictional impact of third-country sanctions, and to share technological resources from the bloc’s autonomy initiatives with the court to strengthen its resilience.