In Seattle, left-wing Democrat Katie Wilson won the mayoral election. The 43-year-old prevailed in a close race against the previous incumbent, Bruce Harrell, also a Democrat. During the election campaign, Wilson campaigned primarily for higher taxes on top earners and more affordable housing. Harrell, who is considered a moderate Democrat, congratulated her on her election victory on Thursday.
Wilson, a self-described socialist, entered the race only after Harrell publicly opposed a new tax on high incomes. Her candidacy primarily mobilized young, progressive voters – a trend that only became apparent late in the counting of postal votes. With this success, Wilson joins a series of left-wing electoral successes at the local level: at the beginning of November, the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York City.
Several progressive candidates also prevailed in the city council. Wilson, who lives with her family in a small rented apartment and does not own a car, presented herself in the election campaign as the voice of the generation that, despite working, can hardly keep up with previous generations financially.
The USA wants to classify the German Antifa group “Antifa Ost” as a “foreign terrorist organization”. The US State Department said on Thursday in Washington that the so-called “Hammer Gang” had “committed numerous attacks on people it perceived as ‘fascists’ or part of the ‘right-wing extremist scene'” in Germany and Hungary between 2018 and 2023. Hungary had already put the group on its national terror list at the end of September. Read more about this here.
An end to the partial shutdown of US government business is a done deal. After the Senate, the House of Representatives was the second chamber of parliament to approve a transition budget. All that was missing for the legislative package to come into force and an end to the longest shutdown in US history was President Donald Trump’s signature. He gave it that night.
In the House of Representatives, where Republicans have the majority, 222 members voted for the interim budget and 209 voted against it. In the end, there were also some supporters among the opposition Democrats.
Since October 1st, the United States no longer has a federal budget and government operations are only functioning to a limited extent. Government employees no longer receive salaries, food aid for many Americans is stopped and thousands of flights are canceled.
