Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

A woman shops in a supermarket in Los Angeles, June 13, 2022. Rising consumer prices have become the top concern for Americans, according to some recent polls. The war in Ukraine has pushed up energy prices, but other factors are playing a role, including tight supply for labor and shortages of semiconductors.

Two days ago, Rebecca Dodson canceled her subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Weight Watchers. It’s the kind of belt-tightening that many Americans are beginning to contemplate in the wake of high inflation unseen for 40 years.

“The gas prices are really out of control,” says the Portland, Oregon, retiree and online tai chi instructor. “I’m still in sticker shock when I fill my gas tank.”

For Nancy Bisbee, the problem is housing. Crammed in a 700-square-foot one-bedroom apartment in the New York borough of Manhattan, she, her husband, and two young boys were eager to move to cheaper and larger quarters. In late 2020, they started looking in Connecticut, then New Jersey, and finally upstate New York. But offering $20,000 above asking price was getting the family nowhere, she says, because homes were getting snapped up at $50,000 above asking price.

So the homebuying plans are on hold, Ms. Bisbee says. “About three or four months ago, we just said we can’t afford this.” When she peeks at home prices these days, homes are selling at $100,000 above asking price. And the rise in mortgage rates has further dampened the family’s enthusiasm.

For Robert Johnson in Valparaiso, Indiana, the price shock is food (along with gasoline): “We noticed steaks were up to $15 a pound – New York strips. Last year about this time, you could get them on sale for $8 a pound,” he says.

Around the nation and indeed much of the world, resurgent inflation has proved more persistent than pretty much anyone had expected – most notably the Federal Reserve policymakers who a year ago labeled it a “transitory” issue.

Some recent polls show concern so high that it ranks as the top problem facing the nation, and the Fed is showing urgency of its own, with interest rate hikes designed to temper the consumer demand that has contributed to rising prices.

If all goes well, the policy shift coupled with Americans’ own economic resilience will be enough to weather the storm and see it begin to diminish in the months ahead. The challenge is that this round of inflation is unlike any other, so traditional assumptions about how inflation plays out may not apply.

“Outside of wartime history ... it’s just a very unusual circumstance” for the West, says James Stock, a Harvard economics professor and member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration. 

A garden-variety inflationary spurt might be fueled by a shortage of food or energy. But this time, these shortages have been preceded by a two-year procession of rolling shortages – everything from toilet paper and sanitizer to computer chips and lumber to baby formula and now tampons – brought on by a once-in-a-century pandemic. Economists call such huge and unanticipated shocks “black swans.”

One black swan, such as the 2009 collapse of the subprime mortgage market, can sometimes trigger a panic and a huge recession. The appearance of two black swans – the pandemic and then the unexpected Russian invasion of Ukraine – makes the current period almost impossible to predict.

For example: Will the current set of shocks last a few months, like the toilet paper shortage? Or will it last years, like semiconductors? That debate is raging right now as economists try to figure out whether the challenge is mostly a supply or a demand problem. The answer may well offer clues to how quickly inflation subsides.

“People felt much wealthier”

Inflation is the result of a mismatch between supply and demand: too many people chasing too few goods. The conventional wisdom is that the current round of price rises started because supply chains were hit hard by the pandemic. COVID-19 lockdowns temporarily closed factories and made it difficult for suppliers to catch up, especially if, say, a fire or other disaster caused further glitches. The other explanation is that the pandemic caused demand to go up. Stuck at home, workers who no longer spent money on commuting or eating out suddenly had money to spend on home offices. Unprecedented rounds of federal stimulus payments to households didn’t hurt, either. 

“People felt much wealthier,” says Diego Comin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College. “We wanted to buy ovens and fridges and stuff at Home Depot to make our houses look better.”

This unprecedented shift away from spending on services toward spending on goods was the main driver of the resulting inflation, he argues, with supply constraints exaggerating the effect. 

If limited supply is the main driver, the adjustment will depend on how quickly companies can boost production. This proved relatively quick for the makers of toilet paper and cleaning products. It’s taking much longer for computer chips because semiconductor plants require huge investments and long lead times.

If instead the main problem is demand, then the adjustment could be quicker. For some consumers, it’s already underway.

Riding an hour to lower-priced shops

“I just have to be more intentional about how I spend my money,” says Gabriel Costa in Ayer, Massachusetts, where he works part time in child care while attending community college. “Gas has been the most stark contrast. ... I live in an area where I have to drive relatively far for most of my needs. So that’s just kind of a consistent concern.”

Seth Wenig/AP

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's news conference is displayed on televisions while traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange, June 15, 2022. The Federal Reserve intensified its drive to tame high inflation by raising its key interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point – its largest hike in nearly three decades.

Rather than buy food in her Boston neighborhood, Nayelly Rodríguez, a college student from the Dominican Republic, travels an hour by subway to her grandmother’s neighborhood, where the prices are cheaper. And “this is where I buy all the big [nongrocery] stuff, and then I bring it back here,” she says.

Nationally, some signs suggest that supply and demand are starting to come back into balance. Walmart and Target last month reported they now had too much inventory on hand (although key parts for manufacturers, such as car parts and computer chips, remain in short supply). Employment postings and other data suggest the labor market is hot but no longer red-hot. 

None of this suggests the transition will be easy. Nearly 7 in 10 economists expect a recession within the next 18 months and nearly that many CEOs agree, at least for their region, according to surveys in the past few days. The stock market has fallen more than 20%, a bear market that often signals a coming downturn. More than half of Americans believe the United States is already in a recession, according to a poll by The Economist and YouGov published Monday.

Harder to do business

Entrepreneurs and small-business owners are already feeling the pinch.

“I’ve noticed spending more on grocery stores or especially restaurants, and so for me, the only way to accommodate that is to bump up my own rates,” says Max Goldner, a graduate student in Brooklyn, New York, who relies on freelance tutoring for income. He’s been tutoring kids in cello and Hebrew for years and never raised his rates. “Inflation is the thing that’s making me have to be a businessperson at the end of the day.”

Wholesalers have raised their prices so much that Agyeman Manu-Dapaah, owner of a West African restaurant in Florissant, Missouri, is struggling to keep his regular customers. “A pound of goat used to go for $4. Today it’s $9, and yet customers expect the same prices,” he says.

He tried reducing portion sizes but got negative online reviews from customers. “So we had to go back to the [original] portion sizes that they were used to and increase the prices,” he says. While that’s also riling customers, it’s the only way Mr. Manu-Dapaah says his House of Jollof can stay afloat. 

An eye on expectations

Quickly tamping down the public’s inflationary expectations is key to ending the price spirals.

“The biggest risk is not from these temporary price increases, but from these temporary price increases becoming permanent, because of them being built into expectations and contracts,” says Mr. Stock of Harvard. “And that’s why the Fed’s quick aggressive reaction is so important.”

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, affecting everything from savings accounts to mortgage rates. The last time it made a hike so big was 1994. 

If Ms. Bisbee had any remaining hopes of snagging a home within driving distance of New York, the rise in mortgage rates quashed them. 

“We’re frustrated,” she says. Graduating from college just after the Great Recession, she needed years to find a full-time job. Now, she and her generation are looking to buy a home just as their parents did, but the skyrocketing costs are forbidding. “I feel I have the worst timing,” she says.

It’s a feeling Mr. Johnson in Valparaiso knows well. He graduated at the end of back-to-back recessions in the early 1980s, and it took him six years to find year-round employment. He’d grab seasonal work and rake leaves. He even delivered flowers for his brother-in-law’s funeral home in exchange for gas. For food, he’d buy hot dogs and baked beans in bulk when they were on sale, eating the beans from the can at lunchtime and the hot dogs at night. Yet time and again, money and opportunities arrived just in time, and he eventually landed a well-paid job as an engineer at Amtrak.

“I would say to any young person, ‘Don’t get bogged down in what you’re seeing,’” he says. “If we had gotten bogged down in worrying and fretting, we would never have seen the blessings we saw.”

Three years ago, he and his wife retired. Chicken and vegetables long ago replaced hot dogs and beans at mealtime.

Monitor staff writers Chris Ajuoga, Luke Cregan, Aubrey Hawke, and Rhyan du Peloux contributed to this story. 

Editors note: This story was revised to correct Mr. Johnson's first name and his relationship to the funeral director.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” the framers once wrote. On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee credited Mike Pence with demonstrating a strength of character far above what the authors of the Constitution were counting on when they designed a system of government they hoped would withstand the excesses of human ambition and a lust for power. 

In its third hearing this month, the committee laid out how then-Vice President Pence resisted a weeks-long pressure campaign by Donald Trump to overturn or at least delay the certification of Joe Biden as president. The committee contrasted Mr. Pence’s fidelity to the Constitution with what they portrayed as Mr. Trump’s flagrant disregard for it.

They depicted Mr. Trump as using the Constitution at best as a fig leaf for his own wounded pride, personal ambition, and desire for revenge. Though some conservative scholars took issue with states’ rapid and sweeping changes to election laws that led to unprecedented mail-in voting in 2020, the then-president based his call to “Stop the Steal” on unfounded claims of outright fraud. When that failed in the nation’s courts, he brought on a lawyer who advanced a dubious claim that the Constitution authorized the vice president to disrupt Congress’s counting of the electoral votes – but resorted to insults rather than legal reasoning when Mr. Pence refused.

“The president latched on to a dangerous theory and would not let go because he was convinced it would keep him in office,” said committee member Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat who led Thursday’s hearing. “We witnessed firsthand what happened when the president of the United States weaponized this theory.”

As in the first two hearings, the committee on Thursday relied on Trump administration officials and other Republican witnesses to make its case, using video clips of committee depositions with Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Trump legal advisers, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

Retired conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig, who testified in person, called the Trump team’s legal arguments “beguiling and frivolous,” saying they had “no basis in the Constitution or the laws of the U.S.” 

None of the testimony or featured clips provided a defense of Mr. Trump or of the legal reasoning underpinning his strategy, spearheaded by scholar John Eastman, who pleaded the Fifth Amendment in his deposition with the committee. 

Michael Reynolds/AP

Greg Jacob (left), who was counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, and J. Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, are sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 16, 2022.

The nine-member committee has been criticized on the right for excluding dissenting views. It includes just two Republicans, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to seat two GOP members who had voted against certifying some states’ electors, leading Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to pull all five of his appointees. Mr. McCarthy, along with several other Republican lawmakers, has refused to cooperate with the committee despite being served with a subpoena.

Mr. Luttig warned that while Mr. Pence had prevented the country from plunging into “revolution” in January 2021, the former president and his allies “are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public.”

In 2019, Ohio State law professor Edward Foley warned of a potential constitutional crisis if Mr. Trump, in the wake of a close election, sought to manipulate the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings to try to get himself declared the rightful winner. That idea gained currency in Mr. Trump’s circles at least two months before the November 2020 elections, and by early December Mr. Trump began actively lobbying Vice President Pence. 

Under the 12th Amendment, Mr. Pence was to preside over a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes from each state. As dozens of Mr. Trump’s suits alleging election fraud and irregularities failed to gain traction in the nation’s courts, the president argued that Mr. Pence could and should disrupt the counting. 

From the beginning, Mr. Pence’s instinct was that the Constitution did not grant him the authority to do what Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had laid out. 

“The truth is, there’s almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” said Mr. Pence in a speech last summer, admitting that while it was disappointing to lose the election, more was at stake. “If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections. We’ll lose our country.”

Much of the testimony in Thursday’s hearing centered around the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which Congress passed after it had to intervene in a disputed presidential election eight years earlier. The law was meant to avoid such chaos from happening again, but Mr. Luttig and others say the wording is ambiguous and could be exploited by someone less scrupulous than Mr. Pence. 

Greg Jacob, the vice president’s chief counsel, who also testified in person on Thursday, described to the Jan. 6 committee how he and his team had reviewed every electoral vote count in America’s history, the 1876 disputed election, the legislative history of the Electoral Count Act, and every law review article written about its constitutionality. They also fended off two lawsuits filed against the vice president to compel him to “exercise imagined extraconstitutional authority” and essentially decide the election himself. 

Jabin Botsford/Reuters

A video clip of former Vice President Mike Pence is shown during the hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 9, 2022.

Two days before the joint session, Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman met with Mr. Pence and his top aides and laid out a pair of scenarios to provide Mr. Trump a path to victory: Reject the electors of key swing states outright, or send them back to the state legislatures, buying Mr. Trump time to pressure legislators to put forward new slates of electors who would certify him as the rightful winner.

Mr. Eastman recommended the latter course of action. However, Mr. Jacob testified that Mr. Eastman, when pressed, admitted that if that scheme was brought before the Supreme Court, it likely would be thrown out 9-0. 

White House lawyers also disagreed with Mr. Eastman’s legal analysis, according to multiple Trump and Pence insiders. Mr. Kushner told the committee that he took White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s threats to resign as “whining.”

That night, Mr. Pence’s outside counsel called Mr. Luttig for help. The retired judge, a conservative heavyweight in legal circles whom George W. Bush had reportedly considered nominating for the Supreme Court, had recently opened a Twitter account. With the help of his son, he published a thread of tweets that provided Mr. Pence the legal framework to dissent from the Trump-Eastman line of reasoning.  

On the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump called Mr. Pence and made one final push to change his mind. In a video clip played by the committee, Ivanka Trump testified that the conversation became “heated,” adding that it was “a different tone” than she’d heard her father take with Mr. Pence before. 

Several hours later, in his “Save America” rally speech, Mr. Trump called on Mr. Pence to “do the right thing.” “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to re-certify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people in the world,” he said, urging his supporters to march on the Capitol to encourage lawmakers to support only the “lawfully slated” electors. “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy.” 

At the Capitol, rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” and breached the Senate side of the building as the vice president was overseeing a challenge to Arizona’s electors. Secret Service whisked him out of the chamber to his nearby office, then hurried him down a stairway just around the corner from rioters. They took him to a loading dock and urged him to evacuate. Nearly all of his entourage got in vehicles to depart the complex.

“But he looked at that and said: ‘I don’t want the world seeing the vice president leaving the Capitol in a 15-car motorcade,’ ” his then-chief of staff Marc Short told CNN this week. “ ‘This is the hallmark of democracy. And we’re going to complete our work.’ ” 

Around 8 p.m., Mr. Pence gaveled Congress back into session. Just before midnight, Mr. Eastman made one last plea to go through with their plan. Mr. Pence resisted to the last, and shortly before 4 a.m. Congress declared Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the winners of the 2020 election.

But the danger has not passed, cautioned Judge Luttig, who has urged Congress to reform the Electoral Count Act so that America’s democracy will rest squarely on the rule of law and never again be contingent on one elected official’s integrity.  

“No American ought to turn away from January 6, 2021,” he said, “until all of America comes to grips with what befell our country that day, and we decide what we want for our democracy from this day forward.” 

Christina Noriega

Marta Cecilia Garote, who was active in protests last year, hands out posters in support of the leftist presidential candidate Gustavo Petro in Cali, Colombia, before the decisive second round of polls on June 19.

Before Jhon Hernández became a voter for the first time last month, he was a front-line protester clamoring for change. He joined tens of thousands of Colombians last year in demanding stronger social programs and an end to a proposed tax reform, as COVID-19 restrictions wreaked havoc on the nation’s poor people.

This year, Mr. Hernández ditched the ski mask that had identified him as a protester and instead organized a voter registration drive, convinced that the way forward is not through bigger protests, but smarter voting.

“Change depends on our vote,” says the community leader, who cast his ballot in a presidential election for the first time this year, despite being eligible for the past 15 years.

He’s not alone. More Colombians cast their ballots in last month’s first-round election than in any other vote in the past 20 years, spurred in large part by the historic street protests. Frustration with the government’s out-of-touch policy proposals, combined with a growing desire for change, has laid the groundwork for the major political shift underway in this weekend’s presidential runoff.

For decades, Colombia has been ruled by an elite group of establishment politicians. But, this weekend, two candidates who are eschewing the status quo face off in what is expected to be a historically close runoff. Both candidates are seen as leaning left – even if one is far from a traditional leftist – to cater to protester demands.

“The vast majority of Colombians are fed up with this exclusionary political and economic class that has been governing only in their [own] favor, with the excuse that the armed conflict precluded them from addressing anyone else’s concerns,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.

“Undoubtedly, this scenario is a defeat for the traditional parties. It shows fatigue with their way of doing politics and dissatisfaction with expectations going unmet,” says Daniela Garzón, a researcher at the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, a think tank in Bogotá.

From national strike to presidential elections

Last year, protests brought Colombia to a halt, with blockades and mass demonstrations lasting more than two months. Initially sparked by a proposed tax reform, the protests quickly broadened to include frustration over income, housing, education, and healthcare inequalities.

Close to 40% of Colombians live in poverty, nearly 50% of the workforce is informally employed, and violence is surging as armed groups expand, despite the promises of a 2016 peace deal.

Christina Noriega

Many protesters who took to the streets last year are mobilizing around presidential elections on June 19. Here, in Cali, they distribute hand-printed T-shirts reading "resist with your vote."

Police repressed the protesters violently, and conservative President Iván Duque addressed few of their grievances. These issues became top voter concerns.

In Cali, the epicenter of unrest, Mr. Hernández joined from day one, angry over the poor medical attention he received after injuring himself as a construction worker.

With a rock-slinging cohort of protesters, Mr. Hernández and his neighbors ousted police from their neighborhood, and held a six-block area for two months. They transformed a police station into a library, held art events and concerts, and hosted community assemblies to discuss solutions to the unrest.

The levels of participation seen in these protests were unprecedented, says Victoria González, a professor at the Universidad Externado in Bogotá. People supported protesters in any way they could: organizing soup kitchens, leading vigils and silent marches, teaching art classes, and hosting outdoor seminars on politics. Some Colombians, especially in working-class neighborhoods, were learning for the first time how Congress works.

This “contributed to creating a wider political conscience,” she says.

Mr. Hernández says he’d never voted in an election before because “nothing was going to change.” But participating in the protests and the decision-making that positively impacted his community was empowering. When protests ended with no real solutions, he decided the only option left was to vote.

“What do we win by protesting if we’re not going to vote?” he says.

Demonstrations aren’t new in Colombia, but in the past, protesters typically “didn’t directly participate in elections,” says Dr. González.

“Now they believe their only hope for transformation is participating [at] the ballot box.”

Bye-bye status quo?

This weekend’s runoff pits Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla who, if victorious, would become Colombia’s first leftist president, against Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman pledging to end corruption.

Mr. Petro previously served as mayor of Bogotá, and has promised free higher education, welfare for poor people, a transition away from oil exports, and investment in the rural economy. He’s raised fears among some conservatives and the business community that as a leftist he would move Colombia in the direction of neighboring Venezuela.

Santiago Arcos/Reuters

Colombian left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro of the Historic Pact coalition and vice presidential candidate Francia Marquez react onstage after Mr. Petro came out on top in the first round of the presidential election in Colombia, May 29, 2022.

Mr. Hernández, also a former mayor in the city of Bucaramanga, has inspired fed-up voters with his anti-corruption platform and straightforward manner of speaking. His populist rhetoric, asserting that “the thieves need to be kicked out of politics,” has connected with Colombians and earned him a surprise spot in the runoff.

Despite comparisons to Donald Trump and a wave of support from establishment candidates who didn’t make it into the second round, Mr. Hernández has released policy proposals that skew surprisingly to the left. They call for a full implementation of the peace deal, talks with the largest remaining rebel group, marijuana legalization, and restrictions on riot police. But he has also mentioned an intention to rule by emergency decree if he wins office, raising concern about his commitment to democratic institutions.

It’s not just Colombia rejecting the status quo. Across Latin America, lack of opportunity, and more recently the consequences of the pandemic, have fueled anti-incumbent fervor, catapulting outsiders into office. From Gabriel Boric in Chile to Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, successful candidates are increasingly speaking to and depending on votes of discontent.

But two anti-establishment outsiders reaching the final round makes Colombia unique, says Patricio Navia, a political scientist and professor at New York University. Both candidates are promising a clean break from the right-wing brand of politics that has won the presidency in the past four election cycles.

New generation of social leaders

On a recent afternoon in Cali, former protesters rode motorcycles to a rough neighborhood in the city’s south where they served food, offered free haircuts – and encouraged locals to vote.

Mayra Mueses, a protester-turned-organizer, says initially she had little interest in electoral politics. She’d never voted in her life. But, after five people were killed at the protest blockade she oversaw for two months last year, she felt driven to seek out new ways to pressure the government for change.

By talking to other protesters and educating herself, she “understood that the repression that came from the police had been ordered,” from people in power, says Ms. Mueses. “We began to ask ourselves, ‘In whose hands are we if [politicians] are giving orders to kill their own people?’”

At least 80 people died during the protests last year, according to the rights group Indepaz, and Ms. Mueses’ political awakening isn’t unique in areas where protesters took to the streets..

A recent poll shows nearly 70% of people between the ages of 18 and 24, the protagonists of last year’s demonstrations, will vote for Mr. Petro on June 19. They’re concerned with poverty and lack of opportunities, having witnessed friends join violent gangs and parents work until old age without pensions.

Older generations are wary of the stigmas associated with the left, in a nation that suffered decades of civil war between extreme leftist guerrilla groups and the government. Many are falling in line behind Mr. Hernández.

Ms. Mueses has no plans to return to protesting, deterred by the violence that injured and killed so many last year. But even if Mr. Petro loses, she says, that would not dampen her commitment to social change. “We understand that it is the responsibility of the youth, like us, to vote.”

Since the social uprisings last year, she adds, “many social leaders have been born.”

As a local politician in the French city of Rouen, Laura Slimani has been privy to degrading comments on the job on several occasions. Once after delivering a speech as a young Socialist, she was congratulated by a male politician who pinched her on the cheek. 

Another time, when she came to work in a fitted skirt, a male colleague asked her why she was dressed like the boss’s secretary, conjuring up images of an oversexualized assistant. 

“It’s pretty frequent to have these kinds of comments,” says Ms. Slimani, now the deputy mayor of Rouen and also in charge of fighting gender equality and discrimination. “Sometimes the men in question don’t even realize they’re being offensive.” 

That was the case two weeks ago, when Ms. Slimani had a run-in with a right-wing politician during a city council meeting. After arguing over naming more schools after notable French women, the male politician told the mayor – also a man – to “put [Ms. Slimani] in her place.” 

“‘Where is my place,’ I asked him. ‘Outside?’” says Ms. Slimani. “Later, I told the mayor why it was so offensive to have one man tell another man where my place was, as a woman, in a political setting.” 

In the run-up to the second round of the French legislative elections on Sunday, issues related to gender have become important factors in the race. Though President Emmanuel Macron has been lauded for choosing a woman as interim prime minister, political parties have been scrutinized about whether they satisfy the country’s laws requiring gender parity in the candidate lists they put forward. As female politicians and activists shine the light on gender equality, sexism, and sexual misconduct in politics, it has left parties with no choice but to react – and act.

“Since the beginning, there has been opposition and incomprehension within the political class about a woman’s place, but this is completely at odds with how women are viewed in the rest of society,” says Janine Mossuz-Lavau, a political scientist at Sciences Po Paris and a specialist in gender and politics. “No one has a problem with a woman doctor or a woman dentist. It really is specific to politics, which continues to have a very traditional view of society. 

“And when it comes to misconduct, there’s no place to hide now with social media and 24-hour news. Those who have made errors in judgment will pay the price.” 

Thibault Camus/AP

La France Insoumise candidate Rachel Keke (center) speaks with campaign members in Fresnes, south of Paris, ahead of the legislative elections, June 16, 2022. Ms. Keke's party falls just short of France's gender parity requirement, and will lose some public funding as a result.

Sexism at the National Assembly

French women were given the right to vote in 1944, and one year later 33 women were elected to the National Assembly’s then-522 seats. Ever since, gender equality in parliament has ebbed and flowed.

Since June 2000, political parties are required by French law to respect gender parity within a margin of 2% at the legislative elections. Those who don’t risk losing precious public funding. Among the list of 6,293 candidates this year, 44.2% are women and 55.8% are men. It is an improvement on 2012, which saw 40% women versus 60% men.

While Mr. Macron’s En Marche and the far-right National Rally party both meet the parity requirements this year, some political parties are still willing to be sanctioned instead of respecting the parity law. The far-left La France Insoumise, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, will forfeit more than €250,000 ($261,000) while the right-wing Les Républicains gave up €1.8 million.

From 2012 to 2017, the parity law failed to make significant changes – to the disdain of Danielle Bousquet, the president of France’s High Council on gender equality. During that period, the Socialist and Républicain parties were fined €6.4 million and €18 million, respectively. 

“Once again, the Républicains said they will be paying the fine this year,” says Julia Mouzan, founder of the multiparty, Bordeaux-based Elues Locales, France’s first network of female politicians. “Public funding is so important to smaller parties that they have to follow the parity law to survive. But unfortunately, it’s often the larger parties who are willing to pay the fine versus respecting the law.” 

There have been glimmers of progress. Elisabeth Borne recently became the second woman in France to be named prime minister. Following Ms. Borne’s appointment in May, Edith Cresson – France’s first female prime minister from 1991 to 1992 – wished the new leader “lots of luck,” while heavily criticizing the French political class for its “machismo.”  

Jean-Francois Badias/AP

Volunteers empty a ballot box after the first round of the parliamentary election in Strasbourg, France, June 12, 2022. French President Emmanuel Macron's centrist alliance is expected to keep its parliamentary majority after the first round of voting, according to projections.

Ms. Cresson was subjected to catcalls during a meeting of the National Assembly in 1992. Twenty years later, then-Housing Minister Cécile Duflot was whistled at during an Assembly meeting after arriving in a blue-flowered dress. According to a November 2021 study of 1,000 female politicians by Elues Locales, 74% said they had been victims of sexism in the workplace. 

“Women will tell us that when they show up to a political meeting, a male politician will ask them to get them a coffee or make photocopies,” says Ms. Mouzan. “There is a wide range of incidents that go from comments to physical actions, even threats. But what we hear about is only a fraction of what really goes on behind closed doors.” 

Pushing back on bad actors

Just as political parties and politicians have been called out for bad behavior on gender parity and sexism, there is a growing intolerance of acts of sexual misconduct by public officials.

Last November, 285 women – including politicians, businesswomen, and activists – signed an open letter published in Le Monde newspaper, calling for a stronger response against legislators facing such allegations. The #MeTooPolitique movement was born, and quickly gained traction thanks to similar social movements in France’s literary, cinema, and sports sectors.

In February, the five women – four politicians and one journalist – at the heart of #MeTooPolitique founded the Observatory for Sexist and Sexual Violence in Politics, a watchdog that publishes the names of male politicians accused of misconduct via their Twitter account.

“There is something very bourgeois about French politics, where talking about these things means talking about sex, which is still a taboo,” says Mathilde Viot, co-founder of the observatory. “But we’re trying to highlight the impunity mechanisms that take place in each affair, and the sense of solidarity between male politicians in which they protect one another, even across party lines.”

The observatory has been partly responsible for several public officials putting an end to their electoral bids due to mounting public pressure. Far-left assembly candidate Taha Bouhafs withdrew in mid-May after several women accused him of sexual assault.

And even after saying that his criminal record “shouldn’t stop [him] from political life,” Jérôme Peyrat, an En Marche candidate from the Dordogne, finally stepped out of the legislative race following controversy over his 2020 conviction of violence against his former partner. 

Still, several public officials accused of misconduct remain in their political functions, including Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who has been accused of rape and sexual harassment. Damien Abad, the recently appointed minister of solidarity, has been accused of rape by two women. Recent polls show him comfortably ahead in his local Ain department.

Elues Locales has encouraged its network to speak out about their experiences to make sexism and sexual violence more visible. Even if progress sometimes feels like one step forward and one step back, experts say the spotlight is finally being put on gender issues in politics in a meaningful way, which has forced change.  

“There are still archaic things about how female politicians are expected to be, but there is a huge difference between what was said and done even 10 years ago compared to today,” says Dr. Mossuz-Lavau of Sciences Po. “Obviously we need to reflect on what we can do to improve things, but we also need to be conscious of the past and see the evolution.”

Reuters

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gestures during the 33rd anniversary of the death of the leader of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Tehran, June 4.

Since early May, ongoing protests in Iran have reached unprecedented levels, not only in number of places but types of demonstrators. Teachers, retirees, civil servants, rural poor people, even cell-phone sellers in the bazaars have either gone on strike or taken to the streets – despite brutal repression by the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

The protests were sparked by sudden cuts in food subsidies. Yet they are driven by an acute downturn in the economy. Corruption, drought, and Western sanctions have all taken a toll. As the protests have gone on, they have turned political, marked by two common chants: “Clerics! Get lost.” and “We don’t want an Islamic republic.” 

That message reflects a growing desire among more Iranians for equality as citizens and for secular rule. Increasingly, Iranians reject life under a theocracy trying to create an Islamic civilization across the Middle East. Another protest chant calls for an end to government spending on militant groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Gaza. 

More than half of Iranians now live below the poverty line. According to a 2020 poll, 68% believe that religious prescriptions should be excluded from legislation. Only a third identify as Shiite Muslim while nearly half say they have transitioned from being religious to nonreligious. An estimated 150,000-180,000 educated Iranians leave the country every year. 

The gap between the ruling mullahs and the people has never been wider. The same can be said about Iran’s influence over nearby Iraq and Lebanon. Recent elections in both countries reflect popular demands to end the use of religion in politics. 

That same 2020 poll found more than half of parents want their children to learn about different religions. For a regime trying to impose its theology both at home and abroad, that sort of interest in equality is difficult to suppress. The protests may be quelled. A popular revolution in free thinking will go on.