To evolve from libertarian icon to statesman, the Argentinian candidate needs to think beyond the material. — Ever since the Brexit-cum-Trump dual shock of 2016, most of the international press has resorted to labeling candidates and causes to the right of establishment liberal-conservatism as “far-right,” “fringe,” or even “extreme.” To the extent these national-populist leaders have challenged entrenched orthodoxies on free trade and relatively free migration, this media hysteria is partly warranted. But what happens when the shock comes not from a conservative populist like Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro but from a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian? Someone who, taken at his word, wants not to bury but to revive a more radical version of the same neoliberal dogmas of yore about a limited state and the rejection of protectionism?

To defeat the ruling far-Left, PP and VOX should have run as a bloc instead of against one another. — On Sunday around midnight, with the last few locales vote-counting Spain’s way to a hung parliament that virtually no poll had predicted, I sat dejected on the backseat of a jam-packed Uber van rolling through downtown Madrid. A two-month inebriating spell of gung-ho eagerness, giddy stumping, and the complacency bred…

Their alliance once deemed the obvious and favored alternative to Pedro Sánchez’s far-left ruling coalition, PP and Vox are now falling apart — and endangering that alternative. — As politics goes, the Kingdom of Spain could just as well be called “Kingdom of Spin” — denoting the ability of events to whirl around at dizzying speed. In the two months since May’s local-cum-regional races and leading up to Sunday’s general showdown, the country’s political epicenter — the voting…

What if there’s nothing the country could do… —

How long can the South American nation withstand the onslaught from Washington and Brussels? — A fierce, nail-biting contest is being waged between Brazil and Argentina, and this time it’s not what FIFA calls “the essence of football rivalry.” Nestled betwixt the two South American giants is landlocked Paraguay, straddling the tropic of Capricorn, flanked by mighty rivers and lush forests on all sides, and…

A new book traces the words and deeds of eight leaders who devoted their lives to their fellow Jews. — And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel. By Rick Richman. Encounter Books; 368 pages; $29.99. Following the Torah’s account of Jewish bondage before Moses led the Israelites into the Holy Land, the Hebrew Bible devotes no less than 19 books to as many…

A new book surveying Spain’s political and economic turmoil calls for a national reawakening. — Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country. By Michael Reid. Yale University Press; 345 pages; $29.99. Can psychoanalysis illuminate the fate of nations? In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud theorized that the more a collective possesses common traits, the likelier its members will be hypersensitive…

Are the Hungarian Prime Minister and his allies poised to take over the institutions of the EU? — In the age of liberal near-hegemony in Washington and Brussels, international right-wing gatherings can easily turn into loser’s group therapy. Attendees LARP their way into alternate realities where climate change is wished away, the Ukraine war is nothing but an intra-Slavic dispute lacking a clear aggressor, and a pro-life, pro-family…

A new book makes the case against multiculturalism based on the world’s record of ethnic violence. — Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future. By Jens Heycke. Encounter Books; 345 pages; $29.99. As right-wing books go, immigration is a doomsday topic. But for a niche of libertarian broadsides signing its praises on narrowly economic terms, pessimism about the…