Partisan | News
Jul 28, 2026
Politics Comes of Age
Andy Burnham’s return is a reminder that politics has changed. The bigger story is how political work itself is becoming a profession.
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Power
Meet the Campaign AI Engineer
Every major technological shift has changed not only how political campaigns operate, but also who they hire. Television campaigns created a need for media consultants. The rise of the internet produced digital directors. As campaigns became increasingly data-driven, specialists in voter files, CRM systems and digital advertising moved from the periphery of campaign headquarters to its centre. New technology rarely replaces existing roles overnight. Instead, it creates entirely new ones that would have seemed unnecessary only a few years earlier. Artificial intelligence is likely to produce a similar organisational shift.
Know When to Go: How to Leave High Office Gracefully, and What Happens When You Don't
Keir Starmer walked out of Downing Street on 22 June 2026 and said he was leaving "with good grace." He had heard the answer of his parliamentary party to the question of whether he was best placed to lead them into the next election, and he accepted it. It was a dignified exit in a dignified format. The words were right. The tone was measured. He listed his achievements, acknowledged the moment, and stood down without drama. The problem was everything that came before it. By June, he had been governing with a net approval rating that had collapsed to minus 46. His chief of staff had resigned in February after the Mandelson-Epstein fiasco. His health secretary had quit in May. Local elections in May had stripped Labour of more than a thousand council seats. Andy Burnham had entered parliament with an explicit mandate to replace him, and the direction of travel had been obvious for months. The question political strategists were asking by the time he finally resigned was not whether he would go, but why it had taken this long.
Memes, Myths, and the Ballot Box: Lessons from the Gen Z Movement Against Authoritarian Populism
Can memes dismantle a political strongman? Beyond the headlines of shifting electoral battlegrounds lies the story of how Generation Z used digital subversion, humour, and decentralised networks to challenge authoritarian populism—offering a blueprint for modern democratic resistance.
Youth
Jul 20, 2026
Trust, Data and Political Campaigns: Where the Ethical Line Should Be Drawn
Monecuccoli, an Italian general, is famously quoted many times that he said that “for war you need three things: money, money and money”. Well, to paraphrase that to today’s politics, you also only need three things: data, data and data. Data is the foundation for any successful campaign. Good data and empirical decisions based on that can successfully overcome even a significant disadvantage in financial means. It also gives you the insight you need to know where to use the most scarce resource that any campaign has: time. The precise decision from what to talk about in which cities and towns, how to engage with certain social classes and target groups, to even the location of a stage within said towns - every good decision must come down to data.
Don't Feed the Martyr: How to Campaign Against a Convicted Candidate
On Tuesday 7 July 2026, a Paris appeals court upheld Marine Le Pen's conviction for misappropriating European Parliament funds and sentenced her to one year under electronic monitoring, a fine of €100,000, and a 45-month ban on holding office, of which 30 months were suspended. The effective ban had, dating from March 2025, already been served. By Tuesday evening, Le Pen was on TF1 declaring herself a presidential candidate for 2027. The conviction was upheld. The sentence was reduced. The candidate, far from being removed from the race, emerged from the courthouse as the frontrunner. Opponents of the Rassemblement National who spent the past sixteen months treating the legal process as their electoral strategy are now staring at polling numbers that show RN at 31 to 36% in first-round projections, with Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella both polling further ahead of their nearest rivals than at any previous point in French electoral history. This is not a unique situation. It is a pattern. And it has a playbook, which the opposition keeps ignoring.
Protection
Jul 12, 2026
Five Shifts Every Public Affairs Professional Should Be Watching in 2026
From AI procurement to stakeholder intelligence, explore the five shifts reshaping public affairs in 2026 and what they mean for professionals across Europe.
Lights, Camera, Vote - To Film or not to Film
Something interesting has been happening at the cinema lately. Between the superhero sequels and the animated sequels to the animated sequels, a new genre has been quietly making its way onto screens, into living rooms, and, most importantly, into the political conversation: the campaign documentary.
Game On for Democracy: How Virtual Worlds Became Political Arenas
Democracy is losing ground in the very spaces where the next generation now spends most of its waking, feeling, and experimenting hours: games and game‑adjacent platforms. The people who will shape Europe’s democratic future are not gathering in party youth wings or town halls; they are leading guilds, moderating Discord servers, and arguing in Twitch chats. In those arenas, they learn how power works, whom to trust, and which stories about the world feel emotionally true. Politics, by contrast, still behaves as if the central stages of democratic life are parliamentary chambers and Sunday talk shows. The gap between where political meaning is made and where political systems actually operate is widening, and authoritarian actors are already exploiting that distance.
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