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SANFORD, Maine — Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ended her Senate campaign on Sunday, further clearing the path for rival Troy Jackson as he consolidates support in a fast-moving Democratic nomination contest.

“This has been an unprecedented nominating process, compressed into days instead of months, and I’m grateful to every volunteer who worked around the clock for this movement,” Bellows said in a statement. “That energy is exactly what we need to beat Susan Collins in November — and Democrats don’t have a day to waste in unifying around that shared goal.”

Bellows was the most prominent woman to enter the breakneck contest, which has unfolded over the last week after Graham Platner ended his campaign following POLITICO’s report that a woman who used to date him accused him of sexual assault. He has denied the allegations.

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MADRID — The last time Spain reached the final of the World Cup it had a team heavy with players from the region of Catalonia, where the all-conquering FC Barcelona had refined a possession-based attacking style that laid the template for the entire country’s soccer identity.

Barcelona stars Xavi Hernández, Carles Puyol, Gerard Piqué and Sergio Busquets — Catalans, all — were key players in the side that defeated the Netherlands in the 2010 final in Johannesburg.

That historic summer for Spanish soccer was also a seismic moment for the country’s relationship with Catalonia. The day before the final, hundreds of thousands of Catalans took to the streets of Barcelona to voice their anger at a judicial decision which reversed some of the powers devolved to their northeastern region. It was the beginning of several years of territorial tensions which would culminate in a full-blown constitutional crisis, after Catalan political leaders staged a disputed independence referendum.

Sixteen years later, the challenge to Spain’s territorial unity from Catalonia and its other restive region, the Basque Country, has faded — now no more than a subplot to more urgent political battles over corruption and immigration.

Yet the Catalan and Basque presence in the World Cup squad is stronger than ever, with players from those two regions outnumbering representation from Spain’s other 15 in the squad that will face Argentina in today’s final. With no players from Real Madrid, the historic club from Spain’s capital, in the squad — although one did sign for the team in the off-season — this Spanish side relies particularly heavily on the country’s so-called periphery, those regions far from the capital’s power base.

Soccer has eclipsed politics as the vehicle for Spain’s most prominent separatist strongholds to project their identities.

“It’s not that pro-independence feeling has disappeared, but nobody sees it as a priority right now,” Lola García, a columnist at Catalonia’s centrist La Vanguardia newspaper, told POLITICO. “This government inherited one of the worst crises Spanish democracy has seen,” added Justice Minister Félix Bolaños, saying that “normalcy and co-existence have returned.”

‘The Premier League speaks Basque’

The Catalan influence on Spain’s soccer psyche began in earnest with the tenure of Dutch coach Johan Cruyff at Barcelona, between the late 80s and the mid-90s. He introduced a model of play that emphasized cool, triangular passing rather than the more physical, passionate style previously been in vogue.

A decade later, Pep Guardiola would use Cruyff’s blueprint for his own revolution, which prioritized passing and pressing — and saw his Barcelona side of 2008 between 2012 dominate all it faced. Guardiola went on to win further honors and spread his philosophy during coaching stints in Germany and England. Catalan soccer’s stock has remained high since and his former club, Barcelona, has continued to produce world-class players, many graduating from its La Masia academy, with a style that ESPN describes as “the most pressing- and possession-intensive […] on the continent.” The style is now emulated around the world.

While Catalan soccer prowess has become something of a given, expanded Basque influence in the game has been more striking in recent years. Two Basque players — Mikel Oyarzabal and Nico Williams — scored the Spanish goals that defeated England in the 2024 European Championship final.

A generation of coaches from the region have made their name both domestically and abroad. Four Basques will lead English teams at the start of this coming season, including Mikel Arteta at reigning champions Arsenal and Andoni Iraola at Liverpool.

“The Premier League speaks Basque,” the Crónica Vasca news site wrote of the richest and most powerful soccer league in the world.

Catalan separatists split

The last two decades may have witnessed the Spanish soccer team’s greatest achievements — four men’s European and world titles and a women’s world title since 2008 — but they have also seen Spain’s national unity pushed to the brink.

The brewing Catalan unrest of 2010 eventually exploded in 2017, with the separatist regional government staging a referendum on independence deemed unlawful by the conservative central administration in Madrid. The ballot went ahead amid chaotic scenes, as police baton-charged voters and the country plunged into its deepest constitutional crisis since the post-fascist return to democracy in the late 1970s.

Pro-independence politicians were jailed, direct rule was temporarily introduced from Madrid and the president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, fled to Belgium.

Nine years on, Catalonia is a different place. Those jailed are now free, while other legal action taken against Catalan nationalists has been lifted thanks to an amnesty introduced by the Socialist-led central government of Pedro Sánchez, who has been in power since 2018. On Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in favor of Puigdemont after a Spanish court had sought to prevent him from benefiting from the amnesty. The decision could, finally, pave the way for him to return to Spain without facing jail time.

“The previous independence attempt failed and so there’s not going to be another one in the short or medium term,” said García, author of two books about the Catalan crisis. “Insisting on it doesn’t make political sense” for nationalist politicians, she added.

She said Catalans are more concerned about housing, where a rental crisis is pricing out many in the region — and more widely across Spain — from the market. Immigration is also a growing worry, providing fertile ground for a relatively new far-right party, Aliança Catalana. It preaches a unique blend of anti-immigration policies and Catalan nationalism. But while advocating independence for the region, it is not promising to lead another secessionist bid.

Meanwhile, the disparate pro-independence parties that buried their economic and social differences in order to defy the government in Madrid a decade ago are once again divided.

“Since the independence drive what we have seen is a deepening of the left-right ideological differences” between separatist forces, Francesc-Marc Álvaro, a member of the Spanish Congress for the separatist Catalan Republican Left, told POLITICO.

That party now takes a more moderate approach to the independence issue than Puigdemont’s conservative Together for Catalonia and the far-left Popular Unity Candidacy.

“Not enough time has passed to embark on another [independence bid],” Álvaro said. “We’re in a phase of what you might call reconstruction and building up of strength.”

Terror and violence

Basques have their own long-standing independence movement, with some mainstream parties supporting that aim. But, as in Catalonia, the issue has been pushed into the background.

In 2011, the armed Basque separatist group ETA announced a permanent ceasefire. In 2018, it disbanded. Compared to Catalonia, the sovereignty issue in the Basque Country had literally been a matter of life and death: ETA killed 853 people over a four-decade campaign of violence, during which government-sponsored death squads also operated.

“Basque society is still in a phase of wanting to move on from what happened,” said García. “It was a lot of years of terrorism and people prefer to forget about it altogether.”

The moderate Basque Nationalist Party leads a coalition government in the region, while the more stridently separatist EH Bildu is the main opposition. With polls showing support for Basque independence at just 23 percent, and memories of the failure of the Catalan secession bid still fresh, neither party is focusing on the territorial issue.

However, nationalists in both the Basque and Catalan regions continue to demand their own national soccer teams. In the former case, they want to see players from the French-Basque region eligible.

“I’m not supporting either side,” nationalist party leader Aitor Esteban said when asked in a radio interview ahead of the Spain vs. France semifinal earlier this week. “My team is the Basque national team, and neither of these sides [France or Spain] has my support because the governments of both countries knowingly prevent us from having an official national team.”

Santiago Segurola, a sports journalist and editor of a book of essays exploring soccer’s relationship to politics, describes an “Asterix village” mentality in Spain’s Basque Country, which has a population of just over two million and a passion for soccer that verges on the religious.

“The Basque Country is small, so they look for space for pitches wherever they can find it because soccer’s so important there,” he told POLITICO.

Second-division club SD Eibar’s Ipurua stadium, for example, is on the side of a mountain, built on top of the rubble left by the bombing of the city by German and Italian aircraft during the Spanish civil war.

The region’s most successful club, Athletic Bilbao, has arguably been a proxy for nationalist dreams of a Basque national team. It only signs players who have either come through its junior ranks or represented other teams in the Spanish and French Basque Country, or Navarre. (The French-born Aymeric Laporte, who plays in defense for Spain, qualified to play for the club through Basque family links.)

Despite its strict signings policy, Athletic is one of only three clubs — along with Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — never to be been relegated from the top division.

“In a globalized world where borders don’t exist, Athletic has maintained its borders,” said Segurola. “Athletic has made a virtue of this policy. This shows that soccer is more than a business.”

‘A propaganda strategy’

With its heavy reliance on Catalan and Basque players, the Spanish team poses a conundrum for nationalists from those regions: Should they support it in the World Cup?

Those who remember the febrile atmosphere in Catalonia during the height of the independence drive say support for Spain was muted. That has changed.

“Now there’s more willingness to celebrate the success of the national team and do so more freely,” said García, the columnist from La Vanguardia. “It’s not that you weren’t allowed to before, but it was frowned upon.”

Álvaro, the lawmaker from the pro-separatist Catalan party, says he has pro-independence friends who support the Spanish team despite their political opinions, because they enjoy watching Dani Olmo, Marc Cucurella, Pau Cubarsí and Lamine Yamal and other Catalan players on the biggest stage. However, he takes a different view.

“The Spanish team wants to convey a positive idea of Spain — it’s saying to Catalan and Basque nationalists: ‘This team can be your team too,’” Álvaro says. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a propaganda strategy. And there’s a problem with that, because those who are telling you that won’t let you have a Catalan team that competes on an international level, like Scotland does.”

Sixteen years ago, as the Spanish team disembarked in Madrid from the aircraft that had brought it home from its World Cup victory in South Africa, the bags of Xavi Hernández and Carles Puyol were each wrapped in the Catalan Senyera flag, in a subtle assertion of regional pride that stirred debate. Three years earlier, many claimed the duo had made a more provocative gesture by wearing their socks in such a way that the red-and-gold Spanish colors were hidden throughout an international game against Latvia.

But, with Catalan and Basque influence on the national team greater than ever and separatist tensions slackening off, such controversies are much less frequent.

Soccer, rather than independence, is now the talking point in Spain.

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The head of FIFA’s anti-discrimination partner is calling on the international soccer body to not adopt a ban on transgender athletes at the Women’s World Cup, after the Trump administration publicly announced its intention to pressure the organization to do so last week.

Andrew Giuliani, the head of the White House World Cup Task Force, told POLITICO Thursday that getting FIFA to guarantee that “women play in the Women’s World Cup and not biological men” could represent a lynchpin issue during planning negotiations for the 2031 tournament.

If successful, the endeavor would represent a major victory for the Trump administration’s efforts to bar transgender women from competing in women’s and girls’ sports domestically and abroad. Earlier this year, the International Olympic Committee adopted a blanket ban for its female categoriesthat paralleled an earlier White House executive order.

But Piara Powar, the executive director of anti-discrimination group Fare network, warned that such a restriction would only further stigmatize transgender athletes and marginalize women with intersex characteristics.

“We think it’s important that even if a ban comes into force for the World Cup in 2031 it should not be embedded in FIFA regulations permanently,” Powar wrote in a text message to POLITICO. “FIFA should not go the way of the IOC and exclude human beings from participation in football.”

FIFA did not respond to requests for comment.

The organization currently has no centralized sex-verification regime, instead requiring each national federation to verify the eligibility of its players before submitting rosters, including investigating “any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristics” and maintaining documentation of its findings.

The IOC’s policy, meanwhile, dictates that athletes competing in female categories undergo a one-time genetic screening.

Powar said such a ban at FIFA would impact women with medical conditions known as differences in sex development, or DSDs, which can manifest as testosterone levels outside the typical female range and having male chromosomes.

Jon Holmes, spokesperson for the advocacy group Football v Homophobia similarly warned that women with DSDs would “bear the brunt of this.”

He suggested that the administration’s efforts are largely performative — noting that “there’s no suggestion anyone is near international level,” referring to transgender female soccer players.

Payoshni Mitra, an advocate for abolishing sex testing in women’s sports, however, said in an interview Friday that it was too early to speculate about a policy that doesn’t exist, but noted that she “will be very, very surprised if suddenly they come up with a very exclusionary policy.”

Mitra said she’d hope that FIFA acts “in a way that is based on science,” adding: “If they come up with a policy, the policy will be based on science, evidence-based science, and also should take into account athlete well-being and the other conditions that concern these policies.”

FIFA has yet to formally announce the location of the 2031 tournament, for which the U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica and Jamaica have submitted the sole joint bid. Giuliani said Thursday that the organization had already told President Donald Trump that the U.S. would host the contest.

Powar pleaded with other sporting groups to consider the human price of hosting their tournaments in the U.S., despite the lucrative commercial appeal of the country.

“We would urge all sports bodies to think of the credibility of their sport and the harmful impact of accepting all U.S. conditions of hosting — it may come at the cost of excluding participants,” Powar wrote. “And in football, a sport that has always been the most open and accessible, that could be devastating.”

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It’s now more than three years since this site drew attention to the curious case of Progress Scotland, the zombie “polling company” run by the SNP’s Angus Robertson that had no employees and hadn’t published any polls since October 2020, but was apparently still accepting, and soliciting, donations from subscribers, and appeared to have disposed of a rather substantial amount of money (well into six figures) without producing anything to show for it.

We followed up the next day with another article about the company’s repeated delays in producing its 2021 accounts, which finally showed up in May 2023.

Here’s what the Progress Scotland website looks like today.

And once more, a few questions spring to mind.

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Its most recent accounts, published a few weeks ago, showed a dramatic drop in assets, from almost £60,000 to just over £8,000.

As the company is only required to publish “micro-accounts”, there was no explanation of where the money had gone, and the identity of the sole employee (and what they do all day) is a mystery. The micro-accounts contain a note saying “The director of the company has elected not to include a copy of the profit and loss account within the financial statements”.

Robertson’s last recorded entry in the MSP register of interests (from March 2026) said that he hadn’t done any work for the company since 2021 and expected to receive only a “final payment” of £501-£1000 for work before then.

The only other person believed to have worked for Progress Scotland, Robertson’s brother-in-law Peter Dempsie, stepped down in 2022.

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So a company with no known paid staff, that’s been effectively dormant for almost six years and now doesn’t even have a website, has assets that look like this:

That is… a pretty strange trajectory, wouldn’t you say, readers? The firm’s assets have peaked four years after its last known work, and then just vanished overnight, and none of the numbers bear any relation to what it claimed about its subscriber base or any known costs of polling.

With the whereabouts of millions of pounds of money that was supposed to be used for the fight for independence – the SNP’s “ringfenced” fundraisers, the mysterious expenditure of Yes Scotland, and now Progress Scotland slipping quietly offstage – all now in some dispute, it looks more and more as though indy supporters have been taken for a very long ride to nowhere.

“Micro accounts” are also deployed by Believe In Scotland/Business For Scotland, who claim to have raised many hundreds of thousands of pounds in recent years but publish figures comprising only a tiny fraction of that. In 2024 BFS claimed a turnover of £300,000 but reserves of just £1,022 (alongside assets of £40,000) with no information about expenditure, salaries or the like. Where did it go? Wheesht for indy.

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(Believe In Scotland has been listed as “dormant” for the past three years despite being the brand used on marches and rallies and in campaigning.)

The system offers a near-bottomless pit for people to hide their finances in, away from public scrutiny, for good reasons or bad.

The money comes in, and then… nobody knows.

?

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And while we wish we had a punchy or optimistic line to end this article on, that seems to be pretty much the end of the story. There’s very little anyone can do to probe the affairs of such companies and find out exactly what happened to the vast bucketloads of cash they extracted from hopeful Yes supporters’ pockets, except that we do know none of it has effected a single step of progress towards independence. The only thing moving forward in the last decade has been certain people’s bank balances.

?

Not only do we not know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been, and we can’t even say what we’ve seen. This, folks, is not the road to Paradise.

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BERLIN — As the World Cup comes to a close, there’s one group of politicians who’ve remained unusually quiet about the fate of their own national teams: Europe’s far-right party leaders.

Top officials from France’s National Rally, the Alternative for Germany, England’s Reform UK and others faced complicated dynamics in deciding how to talk about the World Cup. The broad, socially acceptable form of patriotism inspired by international sporting events like the World Cup seems at first glance like an easy fit for parties whose core message includes a return to strong national pride.

But in many of the countries where these parties are growing, increasingly diverse teams with immigrant backgrounds are at odds with the way these parties think about national identity — making it tougher for them to vocally support the home team without implicitly supporting the individual players who are part of it.

“For the right, for whom national identification and identity has always been more salient than for the center and the left, soccer fandom was a natural conduit to express its passion and commitment,” said Andrei S. Markovits, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the intersection of sports and nationalism. “This has become a tad more difficult when the players hail from multicultural backgrounds, many of which the right sees as inferior.”

(Former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy learned the hard way how people react when someone points out those multicultural backgrounds: The center-right pol came under fire for saying ahead of Spain’s semifinal match against France that the French national team was “without Frenchmen,” a not-so-subtle dig at the African origins of many of the team’s star players.)

“It would not be good in terms of their electoral strength for [far-right parties] to be critical of these teams,” said Alan Bairner, a professor at England’s Loughborough University who has researched sports and national identity. “But the fact that they might seem a bit lukewarm is in itself a telling thing.”

That’s perhaps why criticism from far-right leaders has been directed not at their own teams, but at other teams — or at using the tournament to chime in with nationalist narratives that serve their own purposes.

Geert Wilders, leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Freedom Party, posted an image of himself in a bright-orange suit to cheer on the Dutch team in the early stages of the World Cup. It was a sharp contrast with his comments a day earlier, when he’d reposted a picture of members of the Moroccan squad praying on the field with an anti-Islam insult as the caption. (Several players of Dutch-Moroccan origin opted to play for Morocco, rather than the Netherlands this year.)

And after the Netherlands lost to Morocco in a penalty shootout late last month and post-game celebrations led to clashes with police in The Hague, Wilders — long a vocal supporter of stricter immigration controls in Europe — used the occasion to call for the deportation of all Moroccans involved in the clashes.

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, too, used England’s semifinal match against Argentina on Wednesday to hearken back to the two countries’ 1980s-era war over the Falkland Islands: “Let’s do it all over again just like 1982,” he posted on X.

(Farage got in trouble earlier in the tournament for posting a photo of himself celebrating an England win by chugging a pint in a Three Lions jersey … only for observers to note it was a picture from the 2024 Euros.)

But in most cases, far-right leaders have swallowed their criticism of their diverse national teams and offered the basic messages of support expected of them, or in some cases, just stayed quiet.

National Rally leader Jordan Bardella, despite his past jabs at French striker Kylian Mbappé, congratulated the French team on a good run after losing to Spain earlier this week and said they “thrilled an entire nation” with their World Cup performance.

And AfD leaders Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla sought to downplay criticism of the German team’s diversity from within their party: Asked about one AfD state-level politician’s assertion that Germany’s national squad “has lost the quality of an authentic German national team” due to its diverse roster, both Weidel and Chrupalla were dismissive of those comments.

“If a player of an ethnic group whom you deem inferior scores goals for you, what are you going to do? Disavow him as belonging to the nation that you love?” asked Markovits. “No … you may deep down still doubt the genuine essence of his nationality, but you accept his goals and appropriate them as your own.”

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The Democratic National Committee is betting the world’s biggest sporting event can help build its voter base.

The DNC is launching a nationwide voter registration effort for Sunday’s World Cup final, dispatching organizers, volunteers and campaign staff to FIFA Fan Zones, sports bars and community watch parties with the goal of registering more than 3,000 new Democratic voters.

The effort underscores how both political parties are increasingly viewing major sporting events as opportunities to reach voters — particularly young Americans who may be less likely to attend traditional political events but are gathering in large numbers around the monthlong tournament. In the case of the World Cup final, more than 80,000 people are expected to attend in person.

“From outside FIFA Fan Zones and at World Cup watch parties to bars, restaurants and parks, we’ll spend the weekend registering thousands of new Democrats and having conversations about how we win races up and down the ballot,” DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement.

The weekend push spans nearly two dozen states, with Democratic organizers attending events in battlegrounds including Arizona, Pennsylvania and Florida. In Arizona, Democrats plan registration efforts in Phoenix, Chandler, Tempe, Tucson and Yuma.

The campaign builds on the DNC’s broader “When We Count” initiative focused on young voters ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Unlike traditional registration drives centered on college campuses, the program deliberately targets young Americans who are already in the workforce.

About one-third of the program’s fellows are native Spanish speakers.

The party is pairing the registration effort with a four-part national training series that it says will equip more than 1,500 organizers, campaign staff and volunteers with best practices for partisan voter registration.

Professional sports leagues have increasingly embraced civic engagement around elections, and the NBA and WNBA are some of the most visible examples, using arenas as polling locations and partnering on nonpartisan voter registration drives. And conservatives have previously registered voters at NASCAR events.

“The power in sport is that people gather. It creates a sense of belonging,” said Lee Igel, a professor of global sport at New York University. “If you want to get 3,000 people registered to vote at a watch party for a sports mega-event, you’d be hard-pressed not to get closer to 30,000 people” registered.

Igel said the DNC’s initiative takes that relationship between sports and civic participation a step further.

“There’s some precedent when it comes to voting and sports,” he said. “But this picks up on a more recent trend of politicians, elected officials and the organizations they’re connected to tapping into the power of sport.”

He pointed to leaders across the political spectrum, including President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as examples of politicians increasingly recognizing sports’ cultural reach.

“Sport is fun and games,” Igel said, “but the attention it attracts in communities — from eyeballs to people in person — is enormous.”

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