Christine Marlier was angry when President Emmanuel Macron called a snap election this summer. She’s even angrier now that he appointed a right-wing prime minister, despite the fact that a leftist bloc won the most seats in Parliament.

But Ms. Marlier left that anger behind at home in the far northeast of France when she boarded a bus for a four-hour ride to a nearly 100-year-old festival on the outskirts of Paris that celebrates left-wing politics in general, and French Communism in particular.

The Fête de l’Humanité — festival of humanity — is an unlikely mixture of Burning Man, Woodstock and a political convention.

“We are never angry here,” said Ms. Marlier, 51, in between doing 1 euro shots of alcohol with her husband, both their faces decorated by sparkles.

They were standing in the middle of a dirt lane, between large white booths set up by Communist Party associations from around the country, offering the food specialties of their regions — including raw oysters and steamed lobsters, giant pans of tartiflette, and axoa, a minced veal dish from the Basque region.

A loudspeaker advertised the coming debate between the head of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, and one of the country’s top union leaders, but Ms. Marlier and her husband were already tipsy. They were planning on seeing some bands play instead.

“Here, we’re in a suspended dream, outside our daily problems and worries,” said Ms. Marlier, who works with handicapped children in elementary schools in the département of Moselle, bordering Germany and Luxembourg.

Every year, usually during the second weekend of September as the country is shaking off its vacation slumber, the festival’s organizers build a huge village out of the mud and grass of an abandoned military airport, in the distant nether regions of Paris where suburban homes give way to corn fields. Up go the stages, and up go some 350 large booths in long lines to make streets, which are often named after dead French Communist heroes.

Every year, dozens of musicians come to perform. In the past, they’ve included acts like Manu Chao, Pink Floyd, Ray Charles and Youssou N’Dour, and French stars like Aya Nakamura and Zaho de Sagazan.

And in all those booths, hundreds of political debates, lectures, and question and answer sessions are held throughout the festival’s three days. This year there were 360, running morning to evening.

That meant on Saturday afternoon, you could see a union leader square off against the head of an employers’ association; or settle into the large film tent to watch Judith Godrèche’s latest short film, “Moi Aussi,” on the prevalence of rape; or see a children’s play; or dash over to the Angela Davis stage to listen to the French musician Santa belt out lyrical songs — all more or less at the same time.

Or you could try to squeeze into the crowd pouring into the “agora” — the central red booth where the big ticket speeches happen — to see Ms. Davis herself. The retired California philosophy professor, activist and Communist presidential candidate was back at the festival for the third time since 1973.

“Hope is a discipline which you have to cultivate,” she said, her voice reverberating over loud speakers. “Because without it there is no possibility of moving forward.”

The Fête de l’Huma, as the faithful call it, began in 1930 to raise money for the official Communist Party newspaper, L’Humanité. Today, the left-wing daily is no longer the party’s official organ, but it continues to run the annual festival.

The budget has climbed to about €8 million, but the festival barely breaks even most years, said L’Humanité’s publisher, Fabien Gay, who also is an elected Communist senator.

That’s because the newspaper refuses to raise ticket prices, in keeping with the founding idea that the festival should offer culture to workers. The top price for three days of 60 music concerts is just €60 — the typical cost of a single concert in Paris, Mr. Gay pointed out.

“This is for us Communists, this is what we fight for — everything that is exceptional and grandiose must remain accessible to everyone,” said Mr. Roussel, the French Communist Party leader, who spent some of the fête in full-on campaign mode, shaking hands, slapping backs and visiting party booths from across the country, even though no election is near.

During an interview, he remembered fondly the year 1988, when the French designer Yves Saint Laurent put on a fashion show — which he called a “work of art,” comparable to the “Mona Lisa” or “Guernica” by Picasso, who also, incidentally, had exhibitions of his work here.

“Bodies must be always nourished, but so must minds,” Mr. Roussel said.

When you arrive at the fête, 22 miles south of central Paris, it feels as if you’ve entered an alternative universe, where the Communist Party is joyfully running France and not continually losing seats in the National Assembly, including Mr. Roussel’s last summer. The party currently has just nine seats in the 577-seat legislature.

Here, it’s not K.F.C. but C.F.K.: Communist Fried Kitchen, with Colonel Sanders transformed into Marx. Red flags with the hammer and sickle flap from the awnings of booths, and people wear Communist Party shirts and hats.

In 1945, with the memory of the prominent role played by French Communists in the Resistance still fresh, some one million people crammed into the festival. This year, the attendance was 450,000, according to Mr. Gay. While many come just for the music, organizers hope some will drift into a lecture or debate — particularly those camping in the 8,000 or so tents set up along the fête’s flank.

“Millions of French people were Communists at one moment of their life, and they come back each year, because they feel part of the family,” explained Frédérick Genevée, a high school history teacher who has written four books on French Communist history, the most recent of which he was signing at the festival’s book fair. “It’s confirmation in what we believe in.”

Most of the labor at the festival is done by 10,000 volunteers who arrive in convoys, towing stoves, refrigerators, mattresses and kegs of beer from as far as Biarritz, 475 miles away.

Over two weeks, they work to build their regional booths, set up kitchens and sleeping quarters, and stay up late to talk. In many families, it’s a tradition going back generations.

“It gives us a taste of what the world could be,” said Catherine Lavauzelle, 64, a retired teacher who started coming with her father to volunteer at age 7. “If we all gave the best of ourselves, and weren’t always in competition with one another.”

The cheap wine and beer helps with the bonding. Add music, and you have a surefire recipe for love, which Mr. Genevée said was another festival theme. He met two of his ex-wives here.

Gregory Moser not only met his wife, Noémie, here; he married her on-site 11 years ago.

“We were married in the Cuba booth, had our wine reception in the People’s Republic of China booth,” Mr. Moser said with a laugh outside the regional booth from Charente, where the couple continue to volunteer. After the wedding ceremony, friends drove the newlyweds around the festival in a golf cart trailing cooking pans.

People often predict the festival’s demise. They are always proved wrong.

Similarly, every year, once the revelers have cleared out, and Ms. Lavauzelle is bleary eyed and packing up the sinks and stoves, peeling the tents up off the muddy ground, and beginning the long drive back home, she swears it will be her last. But it never is.

“It’s the feeling that draws us back,” she said. “It helps me feel better for the rest of the year, when I return to real life.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.

When the United Nations General Assembly convenes on Tuesday, attention will focus on the major wars raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, amid a reckoning that neither the global body nor world powers have been able to end the violence.

By all accounts, the world has descended deeper into chaos and turmoil since last year’s annual gathering, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Sudan’s civil war cast shadows. Now, those have been eclipsed by the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the war that followed in Gaza, with its catastrophic humanitarian toll on Palestinians.

The United Nations itself has had a turbulent year. A record number of its staff, 220 in total, have been killed in the war in Gaza. Its humanitarian resources, a crucial backbone of the global relief effort, are overstretched and underfunded as needs multiply rapidly because of wars, climate change and natural disasters. At the same time, its leadership struggles to play a meaningful role in conflict mediation.

“International challenges are moving faster than our ability to solve them,” said Secretary General António Guterres in a news conference this past week. “We see out-of-control geopolitical divisions and runaway conflicts — not least in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and beyond.”

The Security Council, which typically holds one session on the sidelines of the General Assembly, is scheduled to meet three times this year, on Ukraine, Gaza and the broader question of leadership challenges in resolving conflicts.

President Biden will address the General Assembly for the last time as his presidency draws to a close. With the exception of the European allies, the majority of U.N. member states have been highly critical of Mr. Biden’s staunch support of Israel and the United States’ blocking multiple calls for a cease-fire during the first eight months of the war.

Mr. Biden has in recent months led an effort, with Egypt and Qatar, to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and secure the release of all the hostages held by Hamas. But the talks have stalled, and the electronic devices attack in Lebanon this past week and an Israeli airstrike in Beirut on Friday that killed at least nine people, seem to be dimming prospects of any breakthrough.

France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will attend this year after both France and Britain sat out last year’s gathering. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will deliver three speeches in person, including at the Security Council meeting on Ukraine, where he is expected to present a new peace plan and renew his pleas to authorize Ukraine’s use of Western missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russia, diplomats said.

“It feels like we say this every year, but this year’s meeting could not come at a more critical and more challenging moment,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, at a briefing with reporters. “The list of crises and conflicts that demand attention and action only seems to grow and grow.”

Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said the United States would pursue three policy priorities during the General Assembly: international cooperation on peace and stability, improving global humanitarian aid responses, and revamping the Security Council.

Iran’s new reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, making his debut on the international stage, will be trying to present his government as moderate, pragmatic and open to diplomacy with the West, in contrast with his hard-line conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.

That might not be an easy sell. Iran’s support of a network of militias in Lebanon, in Yemen and in Gaza and the West Bank, and recent reports that it is supplying Russia with ballistic missiles for its war against Ukraine, pose obstacles to defusing tensions with the West that Mr. Pezeshkian will struggle to overcome.

Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations with the International Crisis Group, said that the prospects for breakthroughs on Gaza or Ukraine at the assembly were bleak. But Sudan, Mr. Gowan said, could be an exception.

“I actually think the General Assembly could do some good on Sudan, probably in a way that it cannot on Gaza and Ukraine,” he said. “There is an emerging feeling among a lot of the U.N. membership that the U.N. failed unnecessarily on Sudan and that it’s time to push for more diplomacy.”

Climate change and rising sea levels will join with restructuring of the Security Council and the World Bank as major topics for discussion. For years, countries in Africa, Asia and South America have complained that the Security Council’s core group of five permanent, veto-wielding members — the United States, Britain, France Russia and China — is outdated, overlooking economic powers like India, Brazil and Japan, as well as the entire continent of Africa.

This month Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said that the United States supported adding two permanent African members to the Security Council and proposed starting preliminary negotiations on the matter. Washington also supports adding seats for Germany, India and Japan, but none of the new permanent members would have veto power.

Any changes to the Security Council require altering the U.N. charter and the approval of all current five members, a tall task given the divisions among Russia, China and the United States.

In an effort to spearhead the changes, Mr. Guterres will host a conference on Sunday and Monday, ahead of the General Assembly. The goal is for countries to approve three negotiated documents that are meant to serve as blueprints for addressing current and future challenges on climate, artificial intelligence, conflict and restructuring U.N. institutions.

“So many of the challenges that we face today were not on the radar 80 years ago when our multilateral institutions were born,” Mr. Guterres said. “Our founders understood that times would change.”

The last, best chance for a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinian authorities came in 2008. Then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was prepared to give up territory in the West Bank, and allow some refugees to reclaim land. He was even willing to relinquish control of Jerusalem’s Old City to an international committee as part of recognizing Palestine as a sovereign state.

And then the potential deal fell apart, for reasons that Mr. Olmert still finds difficult to explain. “This was something that would have changed the Middle East,” he said in an interview about his failed talks with the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. “He was not ready to take any risk.”

Mr. Abbas has said he was not given a proper opportunity to examine the proposed map of the West Bank and asked for more time. Days later, Mr. Olmert resigned under a cloud of corruption accusations, and the deal died.

No one in Israel today is thinking about such peace talks, amid fears that a sovereign Palestinian state would find it easier to mount another attack like the one Hamas undertook last Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and setting off the war in Gaza.

Diplomacy has taken a back seat to military force, reflecting years of distrust and failed deals that have all but cemented the belief among the adversaries that neither side will negotiate in good faith. Officials and experts doubt those attitudes will be reversed any time soon.

Among the democratic nations it is widely agreed that Israel has a right to defend itself from the so-called ring of fire it faces from Iran and its proxy fighters in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that want to destroy Israel.

But last week’s deadly pager and walkie-talkie explosions against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon — followed by the strike on Friday in Beirut targeting a senior Hezbollah commander that killed at least 45 people — have fueled concerns that Israel is pivoting from cease-fire negotiations to free hostages in favor of military action that could escalate the regional conflict.

“The right path, the right steps, is certainly doing the hostage deal, first and foremost, and nothing else,” Efrat Rayten Marom, a left-leaning member of the Israeli Parliament, said in an interview on Wednesday. “We have to do everything in our power to bring them home now.”

Her son, a soldier, is deployed to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where more than 60,000 Israeli residents are waiting to return home after leaving last year when Hezbollah began shelling the area to protest the war in Gaza.

“We have to deal with the north because Hezbollah is there,” Ms. Rayten Marom said. But “there was a plan, a strategy, to finish the war in the Gaza Strip, first and foremost, and then to deal with the north.”

Diplomacy no longer seems to be a priority, she said, under the increasingly combative policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “I think it reflects this government’s opinion and policy, generally,” Ms. Rayten Marom said. “Netanyahu, with his extremist coalition partners, chose and still are choosing this path.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s office did not respond to a request for comment this past week. On Wednesday, responding to reports in the Israeli news media, his office said it strongly denied “the claim that he has torpedoed any deal whatsoever due to political considerations.”

Nevertheless, a few hours earlier, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, confirmed that “the center of gravity is moving north,” referring to the new focus on Hezbollah.

But, he added, “We have not forgotten the hostages and we have not forgotten our missions in the south — we are committed to our duties and we are carrying them out simultaneously.”

The sophisticated attacks in Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday killed Hezbollah operatives, but also several civilians, including children. The blasts wounded thousands, spreading panic across Lebanon, and prompted international concerns that Israel had risked further escalating tensions in the region. Reeling from those attacks and the strike on Friday, Hezbollah responded on Sunday with a missile barrage that went deeper into Israeli territory than most of its previous salvos.

“I consider this situation extremely worrying,” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, said in a statement on Wednesday. He called on “all stakeholders to avert an all-out war, which would have heavy consequences for the entire region and beyond.”

Even Israel’s most reliable ally, the United States, sounded alarmed that negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage release in Gaza — efforts it is leading, with Egypt and Qatar — would now be sidelined by the pager attacks. Negotiations were already complicated by Israel’s targeted assassinations of the top leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad.

“Anything of that nature, by definition, is probably not good in terms of achieving the result that we want, which is the cease-fire,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in Egypt on Wednesday, when asked if the attack in Lebanon would make the Gaza talks more difficult.

He left the region shortly afterward without stopping in Israel. Another American envoy, Amos Hochstein, was in Israel on Monday to urge the government against escalating tensions with Hezbollah.

The pagers in Lebanon began exploding the next day.

Brett McGurk, a White House adviser on Middle East policy, said on Friday that while the United States agreed Israel should defend itself from Hezbollah, “we have disagreements with the Israelis about tactics and how you measure escalation risk.”

“We want a diplomatic settlement in the north,” Mr. McGurk told the Israeli-American Council in Washington, in remarks reported by The Jerusalem Post. “That is the objective, and that’s what we’re working towards.”

The United States has worked with Israel for years to help warm relations with skeptical or hostile neighborhood states. In 2022, for example, the United States backed an agreement to allow Western companies to explore for natural gas in disputed territory between Israel and Lebanon, where Hezbollah is part of the government. And the Trump administration was instrumental in brokering the historic Abraham Accords in 2020 that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.

But recent hopes that Saudi Arabia would finally agree to join the accords were dashed this past week when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a speech on behalf of King Salman, said anew that there would be no normal diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state.

Israel’s diplomatic contacts with adversaries are generally delivered through intermediaries, mostly Arab states in the Mideast, but also the United States and countries in Europe.

It does not negotiate directly with Hamas or Hezbollah, both of which want to eradicate Israel, and both of which Israel considers terrorist organizations, as does the United States. It also does not negotiate with Iran, which supports both groups as well as the Houthis in Yemen.

Israel and its allies say it is unrealistic and naïve to expect diplomatic efforts with groups that are trying to end its existence. “This is a different ballgame when you’re handling this situation, when you have a ring of fire — when you have Hezbollah and Houthis and Iran and Hamas, all these threats all around you,” Ms. Rayten Marom said.

Elliott Abrams, an Israel expert who was deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and is now a senior Middle East fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview that attempts at diplomacy with Iran would never amount to “more than a cease-fire, as long as Iran’s ambitions don’t change — and that ambition is to destroy Israel.”

But Walid Kazziha, a retired professor of Middle East policy at the American University in Cairo, said Israel’s hallmark since its creation in 1948 has been to use military or economic means to coerce its neighbors.

“If you live by hard power alone, you die by hard power,” Mr. Kazziha said in an interview on Wednesday. “To be able to survive in this world, you’ve got to have soft power,” he said, referring to diplomacy, “so that people feel you’re useful.”

Either way, a number of officials and experts in Israel believe Hezbollah will continue its frequent strikes until the fighting ends in Gaza and Israeli hostages are freed in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Even if Israel were serious about negotiations, a peace deal appears out of reach in no small part because of the, at best, rocky relationship between Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that is led by Mr. Abbas. (A later effort during the Obama administration also fell through, in 2014, as did a proposal from the Trump administration, which was roundly rejected by Palestinian officials.)

But Mr. Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said it was at least time to focus on negotiating an end to the war in Gaza and finding a compromise with Hezbollah that allows citizens to move back to their homes in northern Israel.

“We have exhausted all the benefits that we can get from a military operation, so we have to stop now and get back all the hostages” in Gaza, Mr. Olmert said. “It think it’s in the interest of Israel. We have to do it.”

“Look: I prefer negotiations every time, all the time, than fighting,” he said. “Fighting is inevitable and unavoidable. But it has to be the last resort.”

The embattled center-left party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany scored a hard-fought and narrow victory over the far-right ethnonationalist party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, in an election in an eastern state of the country, potentially energizing Mr. Scholz’s government in Berlin.

Although they do not affect the government in Berlin directly, state elections in Germany are often seen as a reflection of the national mood and a snapshot of the government’s popularity. Sunday’s election, in the state of Brandenburg, is the third and final election in a state that was once part of East Germany before the country votes for a new chancellor and federal government in a year.

Mr. Scholz’s party, the Social Democrats, won 31 percent of the vote, and the AfD got just above 29 percent, according to official preliminary results. Nearly 45 percent of voters chose extremist parties, and the election had the highest voter turnout in the state, 73 percent, since reunification.

The surprise win for the Social Democrats was as much the result of the popular governor’s intense campaigning as it was because of strategic voting against the AfD, according to exit polls.

“Our goal from the outset was to prevent our state from being stamped with a big brown stamp,” said Dietmar Woidke, the governor, on Sunday night, referring to the far right.

Earlier this month, two other eastern states, Saxony and Thuringia, held their elections, and extremist parties dominated. The AfD, some chapters of which have been labeled extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, won around 30 percent in all three states; in Brandenburg, the Social Democrats still edged out the AfD. In Thuringia, the AfD got 32.8 percent, taking the plurality of the vote, the first time a far-right party won the plurality in a German state since World War II.

Even though his party won, Mr. Woidke said that if an openly far-right extreme party can “win around 30 percent of the vote in our state, then it is a shrill wake-up alarm for all of us democrats, for all those who stand for freedom, openness and tolerance.”

A new far-left party, built up around a former communist, comfortably won double digits in all three states, beating the Social Democrats in both Thuringia and Saxony.

Both the AfD and the new far-left party, Bewegung Sahra Wagenknecht, campaigned on controlling immigration, which many Germans perceive as a problem, according to polls, and against military support for Ukraine.

Sylvia Knake, 70, a longtime Social Democrat voter, switched to the conservative Christian Democratic Union this year because she disagrees with Mr. Scholz’s support for Ukraine. “We are now building weapons and exporting them?” she said. “Haven’t we learned anything from our history?”

Mr. Scholz did not immediately respond to the win for his party. But Kevin Kühnert, a party leader, called the narrow victory “an encouragement for our entire party.”

Still, it’s not clear that Sunday’s success will help Mr. Scholz’s chance next year. Mr. Scholz’s government is unpopular and his party is polling at 14 percent support. According to polls sponsored by German public television, many voters in Sunday’s state election said they voted for the Social Democrats to ensure the AfD would not gain power.

This strategic voting is one reason the mainstream opposition, the Christian Democrats, did so poorly, coming in at just over 12 percent of the vote, the lowest it has ever scored in Brandenburg.

Die Linke, the far-left successor party of the socialist party that ran East Germany under communism, won 3 percent of the vote, missing, for the first time since unification, entry into the state house.

The Marxist candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, was elected president of Sri Lanka on Sunday, riding a wave of popular anger at the established political order that ran the South Asian nation’s economy into the ground.

The remarkable turnaround for Mr. Dissanayake, after he had won only 3 percent of the vote in 2019, lifts his half-century-old leftist party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, to the center of a political landscape shattered by widespread protests two years ago. The popular outpouring of anger culminated in the toppling of the strongman president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the capital city, Colombo, on a navy ship as protesters jumped into his pool and fried snacks in his kitchen.

Mr. Dissanayake, 55, had in recent years led a rebranding effort of an organization once known for deadly insurrections: building a large coalition, softening its radical positions and pitching it as the alternative to the deeply rooted politics of patronage that has brought only hardship to many of the island nation’s roughly 23 million people.

“The people have placed their trust in me and my political movement,” Mr. Dissanayake said on Sunday evening after the election commission officially declared him the winner. “Everyone — those who voted and didn’t vote for me — we have a responsibility to take this country forward.”

Mr. Dissanayake secured 42 percent of Saturday’s high-turnout vote, about 80 percent. His closest competitor, the opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, received about 33 percent of the votes cast.

In a sign of how enormous a swing it is in the island nation’s political landscape, Mr. Dissanayake’s immediate challenge will be forming his cabinet. In Sri Lanka’s system, cabinet ministers must come from the Parliament, where his party has only three seats.

His officials said the new president has constitutional options to oversee the work of the ministries while he calls for new parliamentary elections in the coming months, in which his party will have the momentum.

“Parliament will be dissolved because this Parliament already lost the mandate,” said Bimal Rathnayake, a member the political bureau of the new ruling party.

While congratulations and concessions trickled in early Sunday morning as the overnight vote count continued, Mr. Dissanayake’s official victory had to wait until late in the day as the results required another round of counting that included voters’ second and third choices.

In Sri Lanka’s ranked-choice election system, voters can mark one candidate on their ballot or list three candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets 50 percent or more of the vote, a second round of counting factors in the preferences of voters whose first choice did not make it to the top two.

At the end of a peaceful and orderly vote on Saturday, the government had made a surprise announcement of an overnight curfew as the counting continued. But a statement of support from Mr. Dissanayake’s camp suggested it was a coordinated effort to prevent violence, rather than anything sinister.

There was also praise from leaders of the country’s minority groups, as well as from activists for an election campaign that, unlike divisive past campaigns, had happened largely “without recourse to racial or religious chauvinism.”

It is the first time a presidential election in Sri Lanka has appeared genuinely multipronged, in contrast to a history of direct competition between coalitions formed by the two parties that have dominated ever since the nation became a republic in 1972.

While officially more than 30 candidates were contesting, the majority of the votes were split among three front-runners.

The popular protest movement that forced the powerful Rajapaksa clan out of power in 2022 threw the political landscape wide open, the anger reshaping the dynamics down to the local level. While Gotabaya Rajapaksa had put accusations of war crimes during the country’s bloody civil war behind him to win a handsome mandate in 2019, his management of the economy led to his downfall: The country ran out of foreign exchange for imports, as people lined up for fuel and food.

Before its fall, the Rajapaksa government had become a family affair, with various relatives serving as president and prime minister, as well as helming several ministries and key positions. But its fall has been so thorough that Namal Rajapaksa, the family’s 38-year-old political heir and presidential candidate in the current election, was a distant fourth, with a single-digit share of the votes.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, the 75-year-old political survivor who stepped in as interim president after Mr. Rajapaksa fled the country when protesters surrounded his home, has helped stabilize the country and negotiated a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund.

But Mr. Wickremesinghe was also trailing far behind in Saturday’s vote, with his roughly 17 percent of the votes putting him in third place — a sign of anger over his austerity measures that have pinched the poor hard, and of his lasting public image as part of the discredited old guard.

Mr. Premadasa, the opposition leader, had also tried to fashion himself as offering an alternative with more capable hands in his team to handle the economy. But he was formerly in Mr. Wickremesinghe’s party before a messy public parting also split the party support base.

Mr. Dissanayake positioned his National People’s Power coalition, built around his old J.V.P. party as its largest partner, as the best positioned to deliver the public demands of the protest movement for cleaning up Sri Lanka’s deeply entrenched political patronage and corruption. He brought in new faces at the top, and focused on reaching out to and mobilizing women, who were particularly hard hit by the economic collapse. He also softened his own party’s old radical Marxist messaging.

His efforts appeared to have resonated with a tired public ready for change.

“I’m voting for the Compass this time,” said Saman Ratnasiri, 49, an auto-rickshaw driver in Colombo, referring to the election symbol of Mr. Dissanayake’s coalition. He said he had never voted for Mr. Dissanayake before, but he wanted to give his outfit a shot after other leaders had failed him.

“If we don’t get it right this time also, then I might as well forget about this country,” he added.

The economy was a central issue of the campaign, with poorer people continuing to feel the pinch of the austerity measures as the interim government increased taxes and reduced subsidies. The economic collapse saw poverty rates double, with a quarter of the population living below the poverty line.

All of the main candidates were largely in favor of the economic stabilization efforts around the I.M.F. bailout package and the macrovision of increasing taxes and increasing exports to correct a lopsided economy, said Umesh Moramudali, a Colombo-based economist.

Mr. Dissanayake has said that he would like to revisit the debt sustainability with the I.M.F. in the hopes of getting more relief for the poor and middle class. Mr. Moramudali said the new president might find some face-saving ways in which he manages certain small concessions for his political base without throwing the program into uncertainty that derails the recovery.

“All three of them categorically mentioned that they will not derail from the I.M.F. program,” Mr. Moramudali said. “I think that stems from the fact that they understand the potential downsides of leaving an I.M.F. program in a situation like this.”

The simple pleasure of a hot pub meal and a cold pint can be found just down the street for most people in Britain. Then, there is The Old Forge: perhaps the most remote pub on the mainland, lying at the end of a multiday wilderness hike through craggy mountains and glistening lochs.

Isolation is part of the charm that draws adventurers to the untamed landscapes and quieter lifestyle of Knoydart, a rugged peninsula on the west coast of Scotland. To get to its main settlement, Inverie — home to half of the peninsula’s 120 or so residents — travelers must churn over the waters of Loch Nevis from Mallaig or walk some 20 miles from the nearest road.

In Knoydart, there are no roads connected to other towns, no major supermarket, and in some places, even no cellphone signal. But there is, of course, a pub.

“You definitely need a pub at the end of that big trip,” said Stephanie Harris, business development manager at The Old Forge. “We try our best to make sure that folks have a good welcome when they get here.”

The trek is rewarding, but not without danger. One hiker, Paul Conway, spent nearly a week outdoors this month, according to Police Scotland, after he got lost and went missing on the 24-mile walk from Glenfinnan to Inverie, one of two main hikes into the village. Mr. Conway, 67, was eventually found in “good health and good spirits” after a challenging search that pulled in mountain rescuers, the police said.

In a Facebook post, the pub said it was relieved to hear Mr. Conway had been reunited with his family. “We hope to see you in the Forge afore long,” it said.

The Old Forge, once an 18th-century cottage on the peninsula, has long served as a meeting place for Knoydart’s residents and thirsty hikers. In 2022, a group of residents raised more than one million British pounds (about $1.3 million in 2022) to buy the pub and refurbish it.

“Being the only pub in the area, it’s a real focal point,” Ms. Harris said of The Old Forge, describing it as an economic and social center for Knoydart. The previous owner had closed the pub during winters, and that had dampened morale in the village, she said.

These days, the pub is open year round, and most days a crew of hikers stop by for food or a pint of locally brewed beer.

“So far, it is looking like a really successful year,” Ms. Harris said. (For a time, they offered beer for free to hikers as part of a collaboration with an online sports retailer. That offer is no longer valid, she clarified.)

To reach The Old Forge, hikers trek between two deep-sea lochs, Loch Nevis and Loch Hourn — popularly translated from Gaelic as “Heaven” and “Hell” — into a lush limbo of steep hills, mountain passes, woodland and valleys. Ravens and eagles circle above, while deer and highland cows roam through the grassland.

“It is the mystery of what is on the other side,” said Ben Thorburn, a spokesman for Wilderness Scotland, which leads guided hikes through Knoydart, of the walk’s appeal. “It’s almost like you’re entering a wonderland.”

But there is very little cellphone signal along the route, which includes some challenging sections, said Finlay Greig, a ranger in Knoydart.

“People have it in their heads that it is a pleasant stroll to the pub, but seriously, it is rough country,” he said, adding that hikers should carry a personal locator device on the journey. Those not up for the long route to the pub can visit via ferries and boats, which also bring supplies from the mainland, he said.

Mr. Greig, 31, moved to the peninsula after a hiking trip three years ago turned into a longer stay, and eventually a permanent relocation from Glasgow. “It was the landscape that attracted me, but it was the people and the hardworking community that made me stay,” he said.

He sometimes misses the conveniences of city life, he said, like easily getting a haircut. “You need to be more practical and a little more organized — a little more self-sufficient,” he said.

“You definitely have to have a certain hardiness to live here,” Ms. Harris said. But those who choose to make Knoydart their home share a desire to be close to the land, she said. There is a common saying on the peninsula, she said, “If you make it through two winters, you probably will never leave.”

In April, Ruth Aisling, who makes travel videos, made the trek to Inverie. She left her vehicle in Kinloch Hourn, a settlement from which the hike to Inverie takes two days, and stayed overnight at a bothy, or a shelter for hikers maintained by a national charity.

“It really does feel like a wilderness because there are no roads,” she said. “You can go long stretches without meeting anyone.”

She, like many others before her, was excited when the village, and then The Old Forge, came into view at the end of the long walk. She went in and ordered a drink.

“It was the best beer I’ve ever had,” she said.

Voters are going to the polls on Sunday for state elections in Brandenburg, the eastern German state that surrounds Berlin like a doughnut, in a regional contest that could affect the stability of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government.

Mr. Scholz’s government has been struggling in recent months as Germans worry about the poor economy and uncontrolled migration and blame his coalition for not solving these problems.

Both the far right and the far left are expected to make significant gains on Sunday, as was the case with elections in two other eastern German states this month, further weakening the grip of the country’s center-left and center-right parties.

Here is what to know about the vote and its possible ramifications.

Why is this election important?

The election in this relatively small state — involving only about 3 percent of Germany’s voters — is being widely watched, even though it does not directly affect Mr. Scholz’s government.

Brandenburg is one of the last two eastern bastions for the chancellor’s center-left Social Democratic Party. And the state’s incumbent governor, Dietmar Woidke, is one of the most popular Social Democrats in the country.

But the far right Alternative for Germany party (widely known as AfD, its initials in German) and the far-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or B.S.W., are both poised to make significant gains. Polls suggest that the AfD is set to win a plurality of the seats in the statehouse.

If voters oust Mr. Woidke in favor of the AfD, it would be a symbolic and a practical loss for Mr. Scholz, his party and the government he leads.

Germany’s state leaders meet regularly in Berlin at the Federal Council of the States, where they approve — or block — laws passed by Parliament. If Mr. Woidke were ousted, the Council of the States could become less willing to rubber-stamp laws drafted by the government that includes his party.

Such a loss would sting on a personal level for Mr. Scholz, given that he lives in Brandenburg and maintains his election district there.

It would also not bode well for the national coalition government parties — the Social Democrats, the climate-conscious Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats — with a general election looming.

In a recent poll of German voters, more than half of respondents said they wanted the general election scheduled for September of next year to be held earlier. That sort of angst prompted the Christian Democrats, the mainstream opposition to Mr. Scholz’s party, to meet this past week to agree on their candidate for chancellor — meaning that they will be ready if the government falls and an early election is called.

Why are people moving away from the center?

The AfD in particular has been gaining support for its positions on curbing migration and ending German military support for Ukraine, a cause that is unpopular in eastern Germany.

And because the party has held seats in the state legislature for a decade but has never had a chance to govern, that has given its politicians a wide berth to claim that they could help solve the state’s many problems if only they were let into government.

The B.S.W., led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a former communist, has also been outspoken on the issues of immigration and support for and an end to military support for Ukraine. Although neither of those planks is directly related to state politics, recent polls suggest that the party is to likely garner significantly more than a tenth of the votes.

Yet even if the AfD meets the expectations of the highest projections, it will receive less than a third of the vote, which is not enough to run the government on its own. And every other major party on the ballot has vowed not to work with them.

Why is Brandenburg a special case?

Because it surrounds Berlin, the country’s capital, parts of the state tend to be wealthier and younger than other regions of eastern Germany. By attracting Tesla to build its only European car factory there, Brandenburg has created thousands of well-paying jobs.

But other parts of the state are still reeling from a decline in coal mining, which was a major economic driver in the days before the reunification of East and West Germany in the early 1990s.

Politically, Brandenburg differs from Thuringia and Saxony, the two other eastern states that just voted. Although the far right also does well in Brandenburg, the country’s two largest mainstream parties still command significant support there. Combined, those parties — the Social Democrats and the Christian Conservatives — are posed to get more than 40 percent of the vote.

If they do, and if the Greens eke out the 5 percent needed to return to the legislature as polls suggest they will, the state’s current governing coalition of those three parties could continue.

How close is the race?

Mr. Woidke, the popular incumbent governor, recently announced that he would retire if the AfD received the most votes, even if his party can still lead a government coalition. And Mr. Scholz, fully aware that he and the Berlin government are unpopular, has refrained from campaigning for Mr. Woidke in the state.

The party’s tactics appear to have had some effect. Recent polling shows that although the Social Democrats are still trailing the AfD, the gap has been slowly closing.

More than 700 inmates were released from the largest prison in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the country’s authorities said on Saturday, as officials sought to ease overcrowding in a facility where at least 129 people died in an attempted jailbreak this month.

Congo’s justice minister, Constant Mutamba, announced their release during a visit to the Makala Central Prison, where the deadly episode highlighted the alarming conditions faced by inmates in the only prison in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital and one of Africa’s most populous cities.

Mr. Mutamba promised that Kinshasa would get a new prison, though he did not give details.

Of the 729 inmates released, most — 648 — were released on bail.

On the evening of Sept. 2, inmates, whose cells had been without water and electricity for more than a day and a half, tried to break out to escape the stifling heat, several inmates told The New York Times.

The details remain unclear, but most of the deaths occurred in a stampede that followed, while at least 24 people were fatally shot while trying to escape, the country’s authorities have said. Several female prisoners were raped, according to Human Rights Watch and Congo’s interior minister.

The Makala Prison, which was built in 1957 during the era of Belgian colonial rule and little renovated since, has a capacity of 1,500, but has at times held 10 times more than that.

The prison’s director, Joseph Yusufu Maliki, has been suspended, and dozens of inmates accused of raping female inmates during the jailbreak soon faced trial.

Some of the women told the television channel TV5 Monde that 10 men, some of whom were armed with scissors and knives, had raped them and threatened to kill or mutilate them if they resisted.

Human rights organizations and journalists have long described conditions in Makala and other prisons in the Central African country as inhumane: overcrowded, violent and filthy.

Last year, more than 500 inmates died from suffocation and various diseases at the prison, according to Emmanuel Adu Cole, a human-rights activist based in Kinshasa. Mr. Cole said that out of about 15,000 inmates, only 2,500 had been convicted; the rest were awaiting trial.

“Most of the inmates have no reason to be held in such inhumane conditions,” Mr. Cole said in a telephone interview. “This cannot continue.”

More than 500 inmates had been released from the Makala Prison in August, before the attempted jailbreak shed a new light on the conditions there.

“There is a program, across the country, that aims at building new prisons,” Patrick Muyaya, a government spokesman, said this month on the television channel France 24. “The incident that happened is going to accelerate the process that had already started.”

Mr. Muyaya did not provide details on how many facilities would be built, nor when they would be operational.