The Covid wave that spread rapidly and disastrously across India last month took many outside observers by surprise. But not the Booker prize-winning author and political activist Arundhati Roy, whose excoriating essay for us this week lays the blame squarely at Narendra Modi’s door. As Roy points out, the prime minister’s gloating about how his government had supposedly defeated the virus has come back to haunt him. Judging by his party’s poor showing in West Bengal’s regional elections, it’s a view that may be increasingly shared by India’s voters too.
Two hundred years ago this week, a four-page weekly edition of the Guardian newspaper was published in Manchester for the first time. More than 54,000 editions – and several million articles – later, we are still going strong, having morphed into a UK daily newspaper, an international weekly magazine and a 24-hour breaking news website with offices in London, New York, San Francisco and Sydney. Our features pages this week are filled with reflections on the anniversary. Larry Elliott recalls the Guardian’s long history, Charlotte Higgins looks back at a selection of its most esteemed contributors, and we revisit some of the paper’s biggest stories over the years and the effect they had on the world.
Germany has been the bedrock of European centre-right politics for 16 years. But as Angela Merkel’s long chancellorship draws to a close, could a political revolution be about to hit the Bundestag? Polls suggest that, after September’s federal elections, the largest party may not be Merkel’s CDU but the Greens, whose candidate Annalena Baerbock may be in a position to choose from a range of coalition partners. Our Berlin bureau chief, Philip Oltermann, weighs up the chances of an outcome that could spell a seismic shift for green politics worldwide.
Another notable anniversary passed this week in Northern Ireland, where the centenary of Irish partition was marked mutedly by Protestant and Catholic communities set on edge by recent disturbances. Our Ireland correspondent Rory Carroll visited Enniskillen, the site of one of the worst IRA bombing atrocities of the Troubles, and found unionists in particular struggling to come to terms with demographic and societal shifts that seem likely to shape the province’s future. On our Opinion pages, meanwhile, Martin Kettle reflects on the abrupt political demise last week of Arlene Foster, the divisive Democratic Unionist Party leader.
