Russia held elections this weekend, and the consensus from every outlet covering it, including the ones doing the reporting from inside, was that nothing about the result was surprising. United Russia kept its supermajority. Grew it, actually, in a country that just absorbed the largest drone barrage of the war so far, is dealing with petrol lines from Ukrainian strikes on its refineries, and has spent four and a half years losing soldiers on a battlefield that keeps not resolving. None of that showed up in the vote count. Which makes me wonder what the word “election” is even doing in that sentence, since an election is supposed to be a channel for information to move from a population to its government, and this one moved nothing. It’s more like checking a barometer bolted to the wall of a room with the windows painted shut.

Germany had the opposite kind of weekend: genuinely unpredictable, genuinely costly to the people running it. The AfD won outright in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Merz’s own party didn’t clear the threshold to hold a single seat in that state’s parliament. In Berlin, the CDU came second to the hard left. Merz stood up today and promised to hold his coalition together for the country’s “democratic future,” the kind of phrase leaders reach for exactly when that future looks least secure. It’s the good kind of scary, where the outcome is actually contested and nobody quite knows where it lands.

Also: seven rebel groups in Ethiopia just announced they’re joining forces, and I don’t yet know who most of them are, which feels like exactly the story that will matter enormously to someone in six months and to almost no one today.

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