Today—from our new print extra, Altered States: Why do dictators keep disrupting so many other countries? Miranda Patrucić on what China and Russia are doing in neighboring nations, developing states, and the world’s most powerful democracies.

+ Upon further consideration, cocktails will remain available in Damascus. & Martin Wolf on the globalization era’s end—and the signs of what’s coming next.

But first …

• The court found the National Rally had used fake contracts and nonexistent jobs to siphon about €4.4 million in European Parliament money for the party’s use in France.
• Nine other former members of the EP from National Rally were convicted along with Le Pen.
• Le Pen herself got a sentence of four years in prison, with two suspended. She says she’s innocent and will appeal the decision.
• Leaders on the European and American right—including Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, and the U.S. White House official Elon Musk—expressed their support for Le Pen and condemned the court decision as using legal means to undermine democracy.

Now what?

• According to French law, Le Pen now can’t run for president in 2027, when she was expected to be a leading candidate—or any office for five years—even while her case is under appeal.
• The head of her party, Jordan Bardella, 29, has called for a public mobilization against the verdict—but there’s already speculation about whether he’ll run for president himself.
• The verdict could be a potential turning point in French politics: Le Pen was leading polling for the 2027 presidential election; President Emmanuel Macron can’t run; and no one else looks like a strong candidate.
• Meanwhile, the National Rally has been getting more votes in every recent election: In snap parliamentary elections last June, candidates aligned with the party won the first round with 33.2 percent of the vote.

As the response from Orbán and others suggests, the court decision also seems likely to bring a lot more attention to the issue of democratic judicial systems being “weaponized” for political gains—sometimes called “lawfare”—as parties on the right and left across the West accuse their opponents of using investigations and prosecutions for political ends.

• Japan’s main stock index dropped by 3.6 percent, while South Korea’s index fell by 3 percent—both unusually large drops for a single trading day.
• The S&P 500, an index of leading U.S. stocks, is down 5 percent for the first quarter of the year.
• U.S. shares are on track for their worst quarter since 2022.

Meanwhile:

• The U.S. dollar has sunk by 3.5 percent in March against a basket of other currencies—the dollar’s worst performance in more than two years.
• Data released on March 28 showed consumer sentiment in the U.S. had hit its lowest point since 2022.
• The price of gold hit a new record on Monday of US$3,128 per ounce, as investors looked for safe assets that might be immune from the market slide.

Why is all this happening?

• Many traders and analysts say the main driver is U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
• Since taking office in January, Trump has imposed them on steel, aluminum, and all Chinese imports—and he’s announced plans for a new, broader round of tariffs on April 2 for most of the country’s major trading partners.
• Looking ahead, forecasters have cut their predictions for U.S. GDP growth in the first quarter, with one branch of the U.S. Federal Reserve now expecting the economy to contract over the first three months of the year.

In his first term, Trump often indicated he was highly sensitive to market fluctuations as a sign of his performance, so a key question now is how this market slide will affect his tariff plans for April 2.

• The UN officials say they spent eight days exhuming the bodies, along with the vehicles they’d apparently been traveling in, which include ambulances fire trucks, and a UN vehicle.

What happened?

• The UN says the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killed those discovered, burying them in a “mass grave” with a bulldozer.
• One, according to the Red Crescent, was found with his hands tied behind his back.The IDF confirm an incident on the night of March 23, saying they’d fired on ambulances and fire trucks that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were using for cover.
• The UN says those killed had gone out that evening to rescue ambulance-worker colleagues, who’d been shot at earlier in the day.
• The IDF says its troops opened fire on vehicles “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals.”
• The IDF also says the movement of the rescue vehicles hadn’t been coordinated with them, and the area was an “active combat zone.” The Red Crescent says it was not—and so operations there didn’t require coordination with the IDF.

If the IDF were to be found conclusively responsible for these deaths, the bodies’ alleged condition and burial circumstances would raise major questions about motive: Who if anyone in the chain of command sanctioned the killings—and why?

Organized crime

Just before the decision, Romanian intelligence services released evidence showing that Moscow had paid TikTok influencers, right-wing groups, and various actors with ties to organized crime to promote Georgescu online. Authorities later raided properties belonging to a Georgescu donor suspected of voter bribery, money laundering, and computer fraud. Intelligence files showed the donor had given Georgescu’s campaign €1 million, of which €360,000 went to TikTok.

Georgescu won the first round with 23 percent of the vote, even though polls shortly before the election had shown his support below 10 percent. He says he spent no money on his campaign, but in the two weeks before the vote, interest in it soared on TikTok, as tens of thousands of new accounts began touting Georgescu relentlessly. And since the now-annulled election, his popularity has only increased, with voting rescheduled for May. No one has made any charges of ballot tampering.

A Kremlin attempt to manipulate voting in an EU member state may be astonishing, but it belongs to a pattern. During Moldova’s presidential election and referendum on EU membership in October, Moscow sent more than US$15 million to the bank accounts of more than 130,000 Moldovan citizens to buy the favor of domestic political parties and proxy supporters, or even to buy votes outright.

In Georgia, extensive protests continue over the public accounting of general-election results, also from October. Officially, a pro-Russian party won, but Salome Zourabichvili, the country’s outgoing president says—with the support of international observers—that Moscow was behind vote tampering that denied her party the decisive victory it was headed for.

Meanwhile, authorities in Ukraine have reported that Moscow spent some $350 million on election interference in 2019 alone.

Russia’s election-interference tactics first gained global attention during the U.S. presidential election in 2016, after which the Department of Justice ultimately indicted 13 Russians, along with Paul Manafort—the former head of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—on charges including money laundering and bank fraud in attempts to swing the election to Trump. What is all of this?

Miranda Patrucić is the editor in chief of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global network of investigative journalists with operations on six continents. Patrucić says Russia, like China and other autocratic states, has been running corruption and influence operations around the world with a varied but clear set of goals. In some countries, it’s mainly economic advantage. But more often, it’s also geopolitical advantage—or even undermining democracy itself. Beijing and Moscow are invested in corroding the legitimacy and stability of democratic systems—in neighboring countries especially, but in fledgling and established democracies worldwide, too— because the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin both see the flourishing of democratic life and leadership as threats to their own autocratic systems …

• This past Thursday, Syria’s new conservative-Muslim leadership attempted to shut down 60 Damascus bars, but after a social-media outcry and appeals to local officials, the closures were reversed within a day. Despite the initial edict, at least one bartender found the Islamist authorities entirely amenable after meeting: “… we felt like we could connect with these people, if we just shake hands. They are Syrian!”

• The entertainment industry is one of the biggest economic sectors in the world—so what does pop culture look like from a quantitative point of view? Read Stat Significant, a free weekly newsletter featuring data-based essays on movies, music, TV, and more. Sign up here.

New, new world order

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