Spain: Former ETA Guerrilla Trades Bullets for Ballots in Basque Election | Wall Street Journal

Modern Europe’s longest violent conflict still weighs on the former guerrilla who five years ago helped bring it to a quiet end. Arnaldo Otegi, then in prison, was credited with persuading his comrades in the Basque separatist group ETA to declare a permanent cease-fire after 52 years of fighting the Spanish state. Released this year, Mr. Otegi hit the campaign trail and is leading ETA’s political wing in the Basque Country regional election Sunday. His path is familiar. In other Western countries emerging from civil conflict, insurgent leaders have put away their bullets to compete for ballots. Their passage is a measure of how well those societies heal.

United Kingdom: Voting turnout gap between old and young widening – report | The Guardian

A combination of demographics and greater turnout gave the baby boomer generation an advantage of 4 million votes over millennials at the last general election, according to a report that warns of a growing inter-generational political divide. With likelihood to vote closely tied to being a homeowner, the turnout gap between younger and old people could increase further, the Resolution Foundation said. The thinktank has analysed turnout figures for every general election since 1964, as part of the work of its Intergenerational Commission, which is trying to understand inequalities between age groups. It found that in 2015, the vote gap between baby boomers (those born between the end of the second world war and the mid-1960s) and millennials (defined here as people born from 1981 to 2000) was a combination of sheer numbers and the fact that the latter were a third less likely to cast a vote. The statistics showed that a total of 10.6 million baby boomers voted in 2015, 67% of the demographic’s population. In contrast, 6.4 million millennials voted, which was 46% of those of voting age.