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Half want to rejoin EU and backing it could drive up Labour vote, megapoll finds

Andy Burnham’s personal preference to rejoin the European Union after the next election is supported by almost half of all voters, a new megapoll has found, although cabinet ministers concerned about reopening Brexit divides are privately urging him to proceed with caution. The poll by the Messina Group (TMG) found that renegotiating the UK’s relationship with the EU could boost Labour’s vote share by as much as seven points, if the prime minister offered a fresh referendum in which he campaigned to re-enter the bloc. Almost a third of voters said an in-out referendum would be needed first, while more than one in six felt that a general election mandate would be sufficient, and the same proportion thought parliament could make the decision. The overall findings will bolster the case of those inside Downing Street who want to promise at the next election that Labour would at least negotiate over re-entry, which the prime minister has said he wants to see “in his lifetime”. Burnham used his first Labour conference speech as leader on Tuesday to announce a review of the options for Britain’s future relationship with Europe, and subsequently added that these should include rejoining entirely. However, there are nerves among some Labour MPs, especially those with constituencies that voted for Brexit, that even testing out public support for the move would be fraught with political risk and a potential boost to Reform. Two-thirds of cabinet ministers, including Burnham himself, his first secretary, Louise Haigh, chancellor, John Healey, and foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, represent seats that backed Brexit, and previously said they would respect the 2016 vote. However, public opinion has shifted. Before Burnham’s speech, several ministers had publicly cautioned against the move. Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, said while the defence and security relationship could be better, going beyond EU reset plans inherited from Keir Starmer was “not possible nor desirable”. The trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said “constitutional questions” around Britain’s EU relationship were causing uncertainty for business. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said rejoining was “not a simple, straightforward thing” and the costs might be unacceptable. Downing Street’s strategy appears to be to put the focus on those who made big promises on Brexit but then failed to deliver, rather than accusing those who voted to leave the EU of making the wrong decision. But the government’s shift in position has caused some anxiety among Burnham’s team. One cabinet minister told the Guardian: “Brexit clearly hasn’t worked and the promises made haven’t been kept so Andy is right to open up the question of what the future relationship looks like. But he definitely needs to proceed with caution because we don’t want to restoke division”. A second said: “Andy is right to say we need some clarity around our long-term relationship. Security and trade cooperation are higher up the agenda than they were 10 years ago. But whether that adds up to a real desire for big change in the population I don’t know. My constituents will be cautious.” A third added: “There are obviously different views across cabinet about it, but the Made in Europe agenda means we do need to talk to the EU about what relationship they want with us long term, as what they are currently proposing is very challenging.” Another cabinet source said: “There’s an awareness among a number of cabinet ministers with leave voting seats that opinions are going to differ and the arguments about the future will have to be carefully made about the national interest.” A fifth said there were genuine questions about the best option on the table. “I’m sceptical if we go back in, about the terms we’d be going back in on, and whether that can really resolve the problems in people’s lives. But if you look at the global context you cannot start to solve things for people without having a closer relationship with the EU.” TMG polled 11,461 people, weighted by referendum result, from 12-24 September on seven different options for relationships with the EU. The most popular was rejoin, with 49% in favour and 28.5% against. The second was to keep the existing relationship but cut as many trade barriers as possible – as the government is attempting to do with its reset – and which was supported by 48.2%, with 20.9% against. A customs union came next, on 47.1% versus 20.7%. Joining the single market and associate membership were virtually neck and neck – 45.1% and 45.5% of respondents respectively support them – while sticking with the existing relationship was backed by 42%. The seventh option – the UK moving further away from the EU – was supported by only 27.9%, with 41.2% against. A plurality of voters – 25.9% – said they wanted the UK to rejoin the EU immediately, while a slightly lower proportion – 22.9% – said it should happen in the next three years, and 8.4% over the next decade, while 23% said they did not want a closer relationship at all. TMG also tested political messaging for each of the options to see how they could affect Labour’s vote share in an election, and found that it went up – by between 4.3 and 7.4 percentage points – for all the scenarios that resulted in closer ties, with most votes coming from the Greens and Lib Dems. The polling showed that more than two-thirds of voters thought that trading with the EU was more important than the US or China, in the event the UK had to choose; four in five people want to keep the pound; and a majority want to stay in the ECHR – 53.4% versus 24.2% against. However, it also found that Brexit arguments over immigration control and sovereignty still resonated. Senior Downing Street officials have been in contact with thinktanks and pollsters as they look to test public support for the UK rejoining the EU. The TMG research is expected to be shared with the current operation. Some inside No 10 are nervous, however, that promising to renegotiate entry into the bloc could revive the flagging political fortunes of Nigel Farage, who said on Thursday Burnham had given him “the biggest boost in my career” by reviving the Brexit debate. The TMG research found that 29.7% people thought the UK had been right to leave the EU, while 52.4% said it had been wrong, and 17.9% didn’t know. On whether it had been a success or failure, 12.2% said a success, 54.9% a failure, 23.2% said neither and 9.7% did not know. Ben Judah, a visiting fellow at Chatham House who was an adviser to David Lammy as foreign secretary, told the Guardian: “These polls are a massive validation of Andy Burnham’s boldness on Europe. There is close to a national consensus that Brexit was not a success. “Against this background these results show that Europe as an issue has a unique ability to unite the left and grow the Labour vote share among swing voters. The bolder the stance towards rejoin, the bigger Labour’s reward.”

‘A beacon of peace’: London’s oldest mosque celebrates centenary

Exactly 100 years ago the Guardian wrote about the opening of London’s first mosque, an impressive white building surrounded by immaculate flower gardens in the heart of south London suburbia. A report described the mosque, in its incongruous surroundings, as “a thing of beauty”. The journalists who attended the opening ceremony witnessed the mosque’s large black doors being opened with a silver key. About 600 eminent guests attended the grand opening. Ahead of centenary celebrations at the Fazl Mosque in Wandsworth, also known as London Mosque, there is lots of activity taking place. Putney Labour MP Fleur Anderson pops in and speaks about how well loved the mosque, which is home to members of the UK’s Ahmadiyya Muslim community, is in the area. “No street party is complete without the wonderful food provided by this mosque,” she says. According to Mahmood Rafiq of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK, being part of the wider community is a key part of the mosque’s ethos. They give out sweets to local children at Eid, extend Christmas greetings to neighbours, help to keep the local environment clean and show support for other faiths if they are subjected to attacks The mosque has been used for all sorts of other purposes alongside prayer, acting as an air raid shelter during the second world war, and more recently as a centre for blood donation and Covid 19 vaccinations. Its core message is “love for all, hatred for none”, a message particularly pertinent in times of hostile political and religious divisions. “Thankfully we haven’t experienced a lot of Islamophobia at this mosque,” says Rafiq. “But there has been an increase in incidents of low level harassment such as cars driving by and hooting their horns aggressively.” The building, which is in the Southfields area, was granted listed status by Historic England in 2018. It appears little changed since it first opened a century ago, with its slim vertical windows, green dome and pristine white exterior. Splashes of colour from English roses still feature prominently in the gardens surrounding the mosque. The purchase of land to build the mosque on was largely financed by a group of Ahmadi Muslims from Qadian in India, many of them women who sold their jewellery so that London’s first mosque could be established, even though they knew they would be unlikely to ever be able to visit the finished building. Mosque leaders are billing the message of this significant birthday as “a century of connection”. To mark the anniversary, 10,000 free meals will be provided for homeless people. Munir Dean, 65, a stalwart of the mosque, can trace its history through his own family, with his grandfather and father playing key roles in the mosque’s development. He said the founders of the mosque had a particular vision in the aftermath of the first world war of faith, peace and uniting humanity. In its early days the mosque entertained visitors from high society such as Viscount and Viscountess Allenby, and had some very English traditions such as serving tea out of the finest china cups. “Visitors to the mosque were much more likely to be served scones with clotted cream than samosas,” he says. In its early days when the UK’s Muslim population was much smaller than it is now there were no halal butchers around and instead people would pile into a car for the weekly treat of going to Blooms, the famous kosher salt beef restaurant in Aldgate East in London to tuck into meat sandwiches – kosher meat is accepted as halal because the methods of slaughtering animals are the same. Bilal Nuttall, who grew up in the same street as Lancashire actor, singer and comedian Gracie Fields, converted to Islam after serving in the Middle East during the first world war and became the mosque’s muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. According to the mosque’s historical records, the imam of the mosque in the 1930s, Abdur Rahim Dard, played a pivotal role in developments leading to the establishment of Pakistan as a separate country from India. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, an Indian politician and a barrister who trained at London’s Lincoln Inn Fields, was living in Hampstead at the time. According to Dean, he was “a very English gentleman” and a sharp dresser wearing the best Savile Row suits. He had been advocating for the rights of Muslims in India but had become disillusioned and was considering remaining in the UK and continuing his career in law. Dard convinced him otherwise and he made a keynote speech in the Fazl Mosque gardens, which proved to be a turning point in India’s future and partition of then British India into independent India and Pakistan. He returned to India the following year and became governor general of Pakistan when it became an independent state in August 1947. Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the current and fifth leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, says the mosque’s history reflects the principles of serving neighbours, showing loyalty to the UK and making peace with all people regardless of faith or background. “As we mark this centenary, I pray that the mosque may continue to be a beacon of peace and a means of bringing people together for generations to come.” As the community reflects on the mosque’s last hundred years, Dean is looking ahead. “Our message is quite timeless. It has no expiry date. Bring on the next hundred years,” he says.

‘We swept a lot under the carpet’: Vichy regime film hits home in France of 2026

It is the story of how a lowly state administrator unthinkingly becomes a cog in the machine of an authoritarian regime, embracing the bureaucracy and logistics of sending people to their deaths – and it is drawing in audiences to French cinemas. The French film Notre Salut (Our Salvation), with its modern lighting, improvised scenes and anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack, is far from the standard historical costume drama about the second world war. But the award-winning film about the daily lives of ordinary people participating in the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis – and ensured the deportation of a quarter of France’s Jewish population to concentration camps – is poised to become a box office hit. The film, which has been given the English-language title A Man of His Time, had a strong cinema opening in France this week, particularly among young audiences, at a time when the country is soul-searching ahead of next spring’s presidential election. Marine Le Pen of the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) continues to top the polls for the presidential race despite the political fallout from an investigation by Mediapart alleging that her party leader, Jordan Bardella, published antisemitic comments as a young party member, which he denies. Notre Salut comes amid a boom in films about France during the second world war, including more than 5m ticket sales for the two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle, as well the controversial Les Rayons et les Ombres about the press baron and Nazi collaborator Jean Luchaire, and the forthcoming Moulin, about the last days of the French resistance leader Jean Moulin. But rather than tackling well-known heroes or monsters, Notre Salut focuses instead on the role of ordinary people in the Vichy regime that, under Marshal Philippe Pétain, collaborated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi concentration camps. The film was inspired by a stash of family letters found by its writer and director, Emmanuel Marre, that gave insight into the life of his great-grandfather Henri Marre, who worked as an administrator under the authoritarian puppet regime. “There are great figures who make history, but history is also made by the second-players, the grassroots who act on the ground, and that is what is interesting about this film,” said Marc Olivier Baruch, a historian and specialist on state administrators in the Vichy regime. For Baruch, the most chilling scene in the film is the bureaucratic nitpicking about the costs incurred by providing Jews on cattle trucks with straw and chamber pots. The central character in the film, the administrator Henri Marre, “never chooses to reflect on things or look at what he’s doing, to wonder what his room for manoeuvre is”. Baruch said the film’s sense of unease was a pull for modern of audiences because today France was “in a time of great uncertainty … There’s a strong lack of confidence among French people in their elites and in their state and that has been going on for a long time.” He said the Vichy regime had resonance today as a period in history. “The Pétain dictatorship is the only moment when the far right was in power since 1820. There were these four years at the heart of the 20th century when the far right was in power and clearly for French people in 2026 and 2027 that is interesting … There has been a certain unease in modern France that it would be better to stop talking about Vichy, to draw a line under it, stop the masochism [of looking back]. That of course is stupid, and not possible.” Film critics suggested modern audiences were seeking to better understand the rise of the far right across Europe and in France. Henry Rousso, a historian who has studied the place of the Vichy regime in collective memory, wrote of the film in Le Monde: “The RN is not the fascism of the 1930s, nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime, but knowing this history allows an understanding of what [the RN] is the heir to, and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic and republican values led to disaster.” Emmanuel Marre, the film’s writer-director, who won the best Screenplay prize at the Cannes film festival, began working on the story more than a decade ago after the discovery of the letters from his great-grandfather that his family had kept in a drawer. He told France Inter radio: “There are [similar] drawers everywhere in France … there is a phantom memory of the collaboration. With this film, we wanted to prise open those drawers and allow all families to look at that – not as flagellation, [but] because after the war France pushed a lot of it under the carpet to survive.” He said it was crucial to look at the nuance of what led people to collaborate or take a stand. “In between resistance and in collaboration, there is a whole range of human emotions, even the most ambiguous.”

Bangkok at breaking point as floods turn streets into stagnant lakes

Bangkok is used to absorbing the sudden afternoon downpours that inundate the city during the rainy season. Even streets in many central high-rise districts can briefly turn into rivers, with rats and cockroaches racing out of sewers and taking temporary refuge on trees and buildings as the subterranean world is flushed out. But every city has a breaking point, and this year rain fell so fast and so hard that whole neighbourhoods of the Thai capital have been transformed, not into rivers, but stagnant lakes. In parts of the city, roughly 300mm of rain – the equivalent of half a year of average rainfall in London – fell in about two days. About 40 people died in flood-related incidents, according to the government. A number of the deaths were from drowning and several from accidental electrocution. Thousands of people stayed in more than 230 shelters across the city, authorities said. Suleemas Kurangkul, a 73-year-old resident of a block of flats whose ground floor stairs are still under water, said last weekend’s rain was not the usual evening storm but was constant, “like all day, all night”. “The water just kept rising,” said Suleemas, whose flat is above the waterline on the second floor. By the time she and her neighbours received a mobile phone warning, it was too late, and the street-level water was waist-high. The 1970s Khlong Chan flat compound in north-east Bangkok where Suleemas lives has become a symbol of the disaster. Photos have been shared across Thailand of the flats rising out of the brownish water, with the rooftops of parked cars barely peeking above the surface, although the authorities had managed to drain away the worst of it by Thursday. Later in the week, during a brief respite in the rain, Suleemas said the water had receded somewhat. “People are so happy to see the sunshine,” she said. “Yet, the smell is getting stronger. So much debris and rubbish floating all over the place.” Built on a vast floodplain of the Chao Phraya River, Bangkok, a megacity of millions, relies on a network of muddy canals to drain water, as well as pumps and dikes. But concrete construction has destroyed much of the canal network, and the city is unable to cope. The government has declared a flood disaster across all 50 of the city’s districts. Some neighbourhoods have turned into dystopian scenes, with people using blow-up paddling pools or, in one case, a floating fridge, as boats to reach their homes. One man was arrested for riding a jetski along a main road. “It’s a lesson,” said Chaleerat Chamrasporn, 55, a resident. “The kids are into doomsday-themed content, so now they can see what the ‘end of the world’ is actually like, or rather, that this is just the beginning.” Flooding has also disrupted Bangkok’s main Suvarnabhumi airport, with about half ⁠of Thai Airways’ workforce unable to report for work at one point this week, causing thousands of items of luggage to pile up and forcing flight cancellations. Many schools have closed, and with much of the capital in gridlock even people in less affected areas have been stuck at home. Thailand’s prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, told reporters that Bangkok’s metropolitan area was still at risk from flood waters flowing in from the north, and said a war room had ‌been set up to monitor ‌the situation. Thailand’s weather ⁠agency has forecast more heavy rain for next week. It is part of a pattern that seems to be setting in this part of the world. South-east Asia has already seen a worsening of extreme floods, scientists say, a trend that is set to worsen as fossil fuel pollutants bake the planet further. Hot seas evaporate more water and warm air can hold more moisture, allowing downpours to crash down with far more force. “In central Thailand, I can see from my maps, we have already seen a small but significant trend towards extreme rainfall,” said Nikolaos Skliris, an ocean scientist at the University of Southampton who has studied heavy rain in the region. “In the long-term, all models show this will be amplified – more rainfall, and more extreme rainfall.” It is too early for scientists to attribute these particular rains to climate breakdown without doing a study. They were caused by a low-pressure system that moved from an unusually warm South China Sea over Cambodia and Vietnam before getting stuck above Bangkok, which was fairly cool, data from Copernicus Climate Pulse showed. The picture is complicated by the emergence of an abnormally strong El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern that brings record heat and more violent extremes around the world. Its presence typically leads to drier summer conditions in south-east Asia but recent research suggests it still exacerbates days with extreme rainfall. Naim Laeni, a consultant and part-time university lecturer who co-authored a study on Bangkok’s flood resilience, said authorities had underestimated the strength of the rains, which persisted for days. The city’s drainage canals can handle about 60mm of rain an hour, rising to 80mm in upgraded sections, but localised bursts exceeded this while leaving too little time between periods of stress. “The government did not communicate the seriousness,” said Laeni. “Usually in Bangkok we receive heavy rain for a few hours, not for days.” Neighbouring Myanmar has suffered from the same weather system, with flash floods and blocked roads complicating rescue efforts in the country. Rescuers were pulling bodies from a landslide that devastated the village of Ka Det Nge Htein in Myanmar’s south at the weekend. That disaster had already claimed nine lives, and eight more people are missing under the mud in another village, local officials said. Civil war across the country, and a junta that restricts the media, have made it hard to get information, and hampered aid organisations. Back in Bangkok, pumping stations have been operating at full capacity, but it could be days before the waters fully drain. At her apartment complex, Suleemas said she would stay where she was with her neighbours. “It’s hard, yes, very hard,” she said. “But together we are fighting and biting through it. When we get together to help one another like this, our spirit can keep us on our feet; we can get through it all together.” Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Ukraine war briefing: Russian attacks on Kyiv bridges cause traffic chaos

Russia struck a bridge linking two sides of Kyiv for the second successive day, officials said on Friday, part of an intensifying campaign of air attacks ⁠on infrastructure in the Ukrainian capital. An ⁠evening drone strike on the closed Southern Bridge was the latest in a series of strikes since Thursday that forced the full or partial suspension of traffic across it and two other bridges spanning the Dnipro River. Long traffic jams snaked through the city in the morning and evening. Before ⁠the latest attack on the bridge, Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, held a city security council meeting, describing the situation in Kyiv as “very dramatic”. The strikes on the bridges and other sensitive infrastructure appeared to be linked to an order Vladimir Putin made in September to scrap constraints on Russia’s air campaign, a senior Ukrainian official said. About 500,000 people commuted from the Dnipro’s left bank to the right bank daily, an economic analyst said. Earlier on Friday, one person was killed and two injured in a Russian drone strike that caused a fire on the ‌upper floors of an apartment building, officials said. In the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-biggest, two people were killed and 32 wounded in a guided bomb strike, the regional governor said. Kyiv is entering its most difficult period since the early days of the invasion, as intensifying Russian attacks reshape everyday life in a capital that Moscow is seeking to plunge into darkness. For weeks, the main worry in the Ukrainian capital had been the coming winter, Pjotr Sauer reports from Kyiv. But a sharp escalation in Russian attacks has left many residents feeling that some of the hardship they were bracing for is already here. The joint US-Ukrainian reconstruction investment fund has sealed its first ⁠critical minerals deal alongside ⁠four other new projects, one of its top US officials told Reuters. The fund, established as part of the minerals pact the two countries signed in ⁠April 2025 after a push by Donald Trump, is focused on five sectors, from minerals and defence to energy and infrastructure. The fund’s projects now totalled about $70m, said the head of investments at the US International Development Finance Corporation, Conor ⁠Coleman. The long-anticipated first minerals deal would inject roughly $30m into a “joint investment platform” with BGV Group, a firm founded by Hennadii Butkevych, the billionaire co-owner of Ukraine’s largest supermarket chain, ATB. Russia must ⁠provide humanitarian assistance to civilians in ⁠the Russian-occupied Ukrainian ⁠town of Oleshky ⁠as the situation there is “appalling”, a European commissioner ⁠said. “Civilians are trapped under siege by Russian forces ‌without access to food, medicine, clean water and basic care. This is unacceptable,” said Hadja Lahbib, whose portfolio includes humanitarian ‌aid. A former resident quoted by AFP said there was no flour left to make bread and in the early days people ate pigeons but now even those were difficult to find. Latvians vote in a parliamentary election on Saturday that is likely to keep power in the hands of its pro-Ukrainian incumbent prime minister, Andris Kulbergs, although deep political fragmentation may complicate the formation ⁠of a government. Opinion polls put Kulbergs’s centrist ⁠United List ahead, with about 14% of votes, but followed closely by the overtly pro-Russian Sovereign Power.

Magnitude 4.8 earthquake hits Victoria with tremors felt across Melbourne

A magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck Victoria in the early hours of Saturday morning, shaking Melbourne and waking people across the whole region. Geoscience Australia said it detected an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8 at 2.01am near Leongatha, 130km south-east of Melbourne, with the tremors felt across the city’s eastern suburbs. Geoscience Australia said it had received thousands of reports from people who said they had felt the earthquake. Posting on Facebook, Brian Morley in Narre Warren said “felt it and woke me up”, while Theresa Stevens said: “Shook our house in Garfield.” Other posts indicated the quake had been felt in Preston, Heidelberg Heights, Venus Bay and many other parts of Melbourne. The quake was estimated to have struck at about 10km below the Earth’s surface. Victoria’s State Emergency Service said the earthquake was a “timely reminder” to remember the drill to follow during an earthquake and that was drop to the ground, take cover under a sturdy piece of furniture and protect your head and neck, and hold on until the shaking stops. The Bureau of Meteorology said there was no tsunami threat from the quake. The quake occurred in a region of South Gippsland considered to be amongst the most active seismic zones in Australia. Victoria’s two most recent quakes with magnitudes of 5 or above, however, were recorded elsewhere: a 5.9 magnitude in 2021 near Mansfield, in the state’s north-east, and a 5.0 on the Great Ocean Road in 2023. The quake on Saturday morning was the largest recorded in the state since that shock in 2023. An aftershock of 3.1 magnitude was recorded 55 minutes after the 4.8 magnitude earthquake early Saturday, with a magnitude 3.3 earthquake also recorded on Thursday morning at Yarram, about 80km east of Leongatha. Mark Quigley, associate professor of earthquake science at the University of Melbourne, said aftershocks could be felt for weeks in the region. “South Gippsland is one of our more seismically active parts of the country,” Quigley told the ABC. “We know it’s an area where seismicity is common, [and] we know we would expect aftershocks from an earthquake of that magnitude.” He said the earthquake was the result of a two by three kilometre area of rock about 10km below the surface slipping five to 10 cm rapidly, releasing seismic energy. Quigley said that earthquakes were not being recorded more often, despite a seeming increase in frequency in recent years. While the earthquake was “not an opportunity for people to panic or anything”, Quigley said it could be useful for people who lived in the region to consider whether they had items in their houses that could be damaged or create a safety risk in the event of a larger quake. “We know from the geological record we’ve had much larger in Gippsland in the past, larger than six and possibly as large as magnitude seven which I can assure you would cause widespread damage should they occur.” The last earthquake to cause property damage in Victoria was the 2021 quake, which resulted in tremors about 700km from the epicentre.

‘We want action’: Fijian climate activist sends message ahead of UN talks in Pacific

From her wooden veranda in Fiji’s remote Yasawa islands, climate activist Lavenia Naivalu remembers when the reefs were once so healthy, her grandfather would walk to the shoreline and return with fish. But life there has changed. “The reefs that the older generation of men spearfished in, no longer provide what they once did,” the 44-year-old says. “Young people … now must travel further out to sea to find fish for their families.” As she looks out at a white sandy beach, eaten away by rising sea levels, Naivalu recounts watching painfully as her three children “feel the brunt of changes in the climate. “I ask myself ‘what did they do wrong?’” The question is personal, but it’s also part of what drives her pursuit of climate justice for Pacific people, whose way of life is being threatened as the planet warms. At this year’s UN climate talks, known as Cop31, the region will be in the spotlight like never before. Next week, Fiji will host leaders ahead of the climate summit, where Naivalu hopes to draw attention to Indigenous and Pacific perspectives which she says are often relegated in global negotiations. The Pacific Islands are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, despite accounting for just 0.02% of global emissions, according to the United Nations. “One thing that triggers me is when somebody else is speaking on my behalf,” she tells the Guardian. “I want to amplify the voices of my community and the people that I represent directly to all leaders.” Naivalu, an Indigenous representative participating in the Fiji meeting and the Cop31 summit in Turkey, has been a trailblazing advocate for her people. She was Fiji’s first female mata ni tikina, or district representative, overseeing seven village chiefs under the traditionally male-dominated governance system. Naivalu was also the first Indigenous representative selected to Fiji’s tourism board. A veteran of past Cop summits, Naivalu – who lives on the island of Nacula in the Yasawa islands – says bringing the climate talks home matters, but she wants discussions to move beyond language that people do not see reflected in their daily lives. “We talk about climate change, climate finance, about adaptation and mitigation,” she said. “But my people in Nacula don’t know what climate finance is; what we want to know is action.” On the frontline of the crisis Turkey and Australia agreed last year that the Pacific would host preparatory meetings before Cop31 under a compromise deal to resolve a standoff about where the 2026 summit would be held. The summit will be hosted in Turkey’s Mediterranean resort city of Antalya in November, while Australia will chair negotiations. Sivendra Michael, Fiji’s permanent secretary for environment and climate change, said Naivalu “closes the distance between negotiating room and the reef. “Fiji will go into Cop31 arguing for direct access to finance, for adaptation that is actually delivered at community level, and for Indigenous knowledge to be treated as evidence rather than decoration,” he said. “We are asking the world to trust Pacific leadership. That argument is far stronger when Pacific leadership is not confined to officials like me.” Having grown up in Nacula village, Naivalu has seen the impact of the climate crisis first-hand. “Water sources that used to sustain our village are now drying up, while seawater increasingly threatens the hand-dug wells,” she said. Nacula is doing its best to adapt to climate change – families now store drinking water for dry periods and women preserve food. Village chief, Ratu Manasa Naikasowalo, said he sees the value of Naivalu’s advocacy. “Her work has helped bring important connections and practical initiatives back to the community, including food security, salt making, coral planting and food-preservation programmes,” Ratu said. Naivalu knows adaptation cannot be left solely to frontline communities, and has witnessed the gap between Cop discussions and what happens at home. In Fiji next week, she will be bring the lived experiences of Indigenous communities into the Cop31 process, pushing for their voices to be heard as leaders negotiate climate finance, adaptation, loss and damage, and keeping global warming within 1.5C. “I don’t attend Cop to worry about texts and brackets; I attend Cop to forge partnerships with organisations that I believe can help the people of Nacula.”

Brazil’s Lula says only he can stop rise of fascism under Bolsonaro’s son

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has claimed he is the only thing standing in the way of far-right “fascists” reclaiming power, as he led a huge rally through the streets of Rio ahead of Sunday’s crunch election. Speaking on the eve of the demonstration, the 80-year-old leftwinger said he had decided to seek a historic fourth term because he believed only he could prevent the family of his rightwing rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, returning to government. “If it weren’t for me standing up to these fascists they’d easily win another election. I’m the one standing in their way,” Lula told a popular podcast called Flow, before adding: “It’s either me, or it’s barbarism.” Hours later, Lula flew to Rio, staging what his team called a “victory march” between two highly symbolic downtown locations that played an important role in Brazil’s fight for democracy during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship. “What’s at stake is not the victory of one man, it is the victory of an idea, it’s the victory of democracy,” Brazil’s president said after the parade set off from the Candelária church. The church is the location where more than a million people, including Lula, famously gathered in 1984 to demand direct presidential elections. Lula, who was among those who spoke at that historic demo when he was an up-and-coming politician in his 30s, added: “Either we consolidate democracy, or we will lose it.” From Candelária, a sea of red-clad Lula supporters marched a mile south towards Cinelândia, the scene of an equally well-known pro-democracy protest in 1968 called the March of the Hundred Thousand. “No gringo is going to lay a finger on Brazil’s things,” vowed Lula, in an indirect reference to claims Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to sway the vote in Bolsonaro’s favour with a campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure. The decision to hold Friday’s rally between two such politically charged places spoke to how this year’s election has stirred up renewed fears over the future of Latin America’s biggest democracy. Election-eve polls suggest Lula holds only a slender lead over his adversary, whose father, the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a failed coup after Lula beat him in the 2022 election. Many Brazilian democrats fear that if 45-year-old Bolsonaro wins this year’s election, he will move quickly to free his father and his fellow coup-plotters from jail – and then set about dismantling and co-opting the country’s democratic institutions, such as the supreme court. “This is the most important election of our lives – and we have to do everything we can to win,” said Marcelo Freixo, a politician from Lula’s Worker’s party (PT) who is running for a seat in congress. Freixo warned: “We spent 21 years living under a really harsh dictatorship. We fought so hard to attain our democratic institutions. And a victory for the Bolsonaro family – a family that always … openly defended the dictatorship and tried to stage a coup … would spell the end for our democratic process and institutions.” Valmir Aleixo, a 55-year-old history teacher who was one of thousands of people who joined Friday’s pro-Lula demo, said: “This is [a choice] between democracy and the savagery of far-right fascism. This is perhaps the most important election since the return of democracy in the 80s.” Noni Ostrower, 74, came to what was Rio’s largest leftwing protest in years carrying a homemade banner that read: “Democracy Is Valuable”. “I’m the daughter of two refugees from nazism. They came to Brazil from Germany because of this,” Ostrower said. “I was born here in Brazil … and today I have grandchildren and I absolutely do not want to see fascism return to Brazil – it would be a tragedy for the country. That’s why I’m here today.” During the campaign, Flávio Bolsonaro has vowed to pardon his 71-year-old father if elected, with some speculating Jair Bolsonaro could even become a minister. His brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a radical former congressman with ties to Trump’s Maga movement, reputedly hopes to become foreign minister. Flávio Bolsonaro has announced plans to appoint five firmly conservative supreme court judges. Luiz Eduardo Soares, a prominent anthropologist and writer, said he feared what might happen if the Bolsonaro clan managed to reclaim power. “I think these elections could be the last ones in my life, for my generation … What was done over the course of 10 years in Hungary, [Bolsonaro] will do in two,” Soares predicted in reference to the European country’s transformation into an “electoral autocracy” under its former prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Diogo Nogueira, a famous samba singer who came to the rally wearing his trademark panama hat, said: “We need to win in the first round so we don’t allow this type of people to get back into government. If they do get back in, it won’t just be a problem for four years, but for 10 or 20.” Polls suggest the election is likely to go to a second round runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro on 25 October, with Lula expected to secure about 45% of votes on Sunday and Bolsonaro 40%, according to the Datafolha pollster. But at Friday’s rally Lula claimed he could pull off a shock first-round win by claiming more than 50% of the vote. In an online broadcast, Bolsonaro insisted his campaign would prevail. “Brazil is a few hours from deciding its future … for the next 30, 40, 50 years. It’s the end of an era. It’s the end of the Worker’s party era,” he claimed, asking undecided voters to back him to achieve that aim, even if they didn’t like him.