Monthly Archives: July 2012

Italy, Sicily

Il ritorno del Berlusconi — why his re-emergence in Italian politics is completely logical

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There will be plenty of time to think about the next Italian general election if, as is likely, current prime minister Mario Monti is permitted to carry on with his technocratic government until April 2013, the last date upon which the next general election must be held.

It’s worth taking in two important stories from last week:

The Economist points us to reports in the Italian press that Silvio Berlusconi (pictured above, right), the éminence grise (well, surprisingly jet black) of Italian politics since about 1994, is likely to lead the center-right in the upcoming election and is taking an increasingly critical position against Monti’s government.

Italy’s federal government, a technocratic government formed under Monti, an economist and former European Commissioner, with a mandate to reform Italy’s sclerotic economy and shrink its bloated public sector — with the support of Berlusconi’s own center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Liberty) and the main opposition center-left Partito Democratico (Democratic Party), has managed to keep a skittish bond market at bay, which has been spared, for now, the same fate as Spain in the bond market last week.

Meanwhile, The New York Times last week showcased the fiscal problems of Sicily, which is tottering further on the edge of a debt crisis than Italy itself.  Monti’s government recently sent €400 million to Sicily to forestall a potential default by a region that has long been plagued by low growth, outsized government patronage and abuse of its considerably autonomous power — to say nothing of the Mafia corruption issue.

Today, in fact, Sicily’s regional president, Rafaelle Lombardo resigned following an indictment for corruption — elections follow for October 28 and 29 of this year.

Since November 2011, when Berlusconi stepped down, more or less in disgrace, he has kept a fairly low profile.

But everyone knows as long as he’s around, he would have been the chief behind-the-scenes power of Italy’s center-right.  So when he seemed to designate a successor in November in former justice minister, Angelico Alfano (pictured above, left), now the secretary of Berlusconi’s PdL, it seemed difficult to believe that Il Cavaliere, as Berlusconi is known in the Italian press, was really stepping aside.

Alfano, who is Sicilian, has not managed to recover any ground for the PdL (formerly — and potentially again in the future — known as Forza Italia) — one poll from SpinCon released on July 19 shows the PdL winning just 18% of the vote to 27% for the Democratic Party and 14% for the newly formed Euroskeptic and populist party of comic and blogger Beppe Grillo, the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement).**

Italian politics have long been fragmented, but like Greece earlier this year, Italian voters seem to be fragmenting even further under the weight of austerity measures introduced by Monti’s government. Monti himself has said he will not run for election in his own right under any banner.

But above all, Berlusconi’s ace is that he still has more media power than anyone else in Italy.  He also remains the most charismatic leader among a political class of bores — for instance, has anyone outside of Italy even heard of Pier Luigi Bersani, the main center-left opposition leader?

Berlusconi practically invented Italian television in the 1980s by buying TV stations across Italy and harmonizing their content at a time when RAI (Italy’s public television network) was supposed to hold a monopoly on national stations.  He still holds an incalculable political advantage because of that power — it’s what helped him burst onto the political scene in 1994 and what helped him keep power in much of the 2000s, even through the last days of sordid accusations of his cavorting with underage girls and prostitutes at ‘bunga, bunga’ parties.

It’s not clear that Italian voters are willing to turn back to those days (a strong majority of voters say they refuse to back Berlusconi ever again), but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Berlusconi.

Also, for a premier who spent a significant amount of legislative time in the 2000s crafting immunity bills to protect himself from prosecution relating to all sorts of seamy dealings, Berlusconi is likely tempted by the shield from prosecution that yet another stint in office would bring — or at least tempted by the opportunity to parlay a political comeback into a term as Italy’s president in the future.

And at age 75, Berlusconi is a fairly young man by the standards of Italian institutions; Alfano was born in 1970. Italy is a country of old men — to have a forty-something prime minister is unheard of. (Recall that the 93-year-old Giulio Andreotti, a former prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, now an Italian ‘senator for life’, was instrumental in bringing down the short-lived leftist government of Romano Prodi just six years ago.)

But Alfano’s Sicilian heritage raised an eyebrow in November and it does so especially now, with Sicily’s finances in the headlines and yet another Sicilian president resigned under ties to the omni-present curse of Mafia infiltration.

It’s worth remembering that “Italy” as a national concept really only emerged in the 1860s — and even today, just over 150 years after “unification,” it’s hard to think of Italy as a true country, even if you don’t believe that nationhood in Italy is really a myth-laden fluke.  You have to go back to the mid-1950s to find a Sicilian who has served as Italy’s prime minister — Mario Scelba.  No Sicilians have served as president of Italy in the current republic.  No Sicilians have served as president of Italy in the current republic.  That may not be so surprising, given that Sicily is so far away, not just geographically, but culturally from Rome, to say nothing of Milan or Florence or Turin.  Although Sicilian votes essentially enshrined Italy’s old Christian Democrats in power until the 1992 Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that, in effect, wiped clean Italy’s political slate, Sicilians have rarely held the highest office in Italian politics.

So with Sicily’s finances and its corruption in global headlines, the “Sicily question” is yet another for Berlusconi to sideline Alfano as the 2013 elections approach — for the time being, at least.

Romania

Aftermath of Romanian referendum leaves both sides with victory

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Romania’s president Traian Băsescu narrowly survived a referendum on Sunday that would have removed him from office, but his meager support in the referendum will only further encourage his political rival, prime minister Victor Ponta. 

Although 87.52% of those who voted supported Băsescu’s impeachment (just 11.15% voted against it), only 46.23% of eligible voters turned out to vote on the referendum — lower than the 50% threshold required to remove the president.

In many ways, the vote may be the best situation for Ponta, whose social democratic Partidul Social Democrat (PSD, the Social Democratic Party) has formed an electoral union with the free-market liberal Partidul Naţional Liberal (PNL, the National Liberal Party).  Băsescu, who belongs to the rival center-right Partidul Democrat-Liberal (PD-L, the Democratic Liberal Party), will remain in office, but with significantly less political standing.

Ponta, whose electoral union won a landslide victory in recent local elections, is now the undisputed top mover in Romanian politics, and he will go into November elections with a very strong hand, given that Romanian voters blame the PD-L for austerity measures designed to bring Romania’s budget down to just 3% of GDP (as required pursuant to the terms of a loan from the International Monetary Fund that originated in 2009).

Ponta also remains another potential troublemaker (alongside Hungary’s Viktor Orbán) for the European Union to worry about.  He may have gone too far in the past three months since becoming prime minister — the European Union has been sounding the alarm at top volume for the past couple of weeks that it is not happy with Ponta’s efforts to undermine Romanian democracy and already-fragile legal institutions — calling the referendum, limiting Romania’s Constitutional Court, stacking Romania’s parliament with his own hand-picked leaders.

That he called the referendum was bad enough, but European leaders had made clear that Băsescu’s removal would have not been looked upon kindly.  Ponta and his allies therefore will emerge from Sunday’s vote having punished Băsescu, but not enough to bring the full force of EU ire upon them.

Romania

Romania votes today

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Romanians go to the polls today for a special referendum to determine whether to remove Traian Băsescu, Romanian’s president since 2004, from office.

Voters will be faced with one question:  Sunteți de acord cu demiterea Președintelui României, domnul Traian Băsescu?  (Do you agree with the dismissal of the President of Romania, Mr. Traian Băsescu?)

If over 50% of eligible voters turnout, and if a majority answer “Yes,” then Băsescu will be removed from office.  Such a dismissal would be a massive political victory for Victor Ponta, Romania’s new prime minister since May 2012.  Ponta (who belongs to Romania’s leftist Social Democratic Party and whose allies include the free-market National Liberal Party) is looking to consolidate his power before heading into parliamentary elections on November 25 — his alliance currently seems much more popular than the Democratic Liberal Party to which Băsescu belongs and to which Emil Boc belongs — Boc was Romania’s austerity-minded prime minister from 2008 until February of this year.

Ponta and his allies have accused Băsescu of overstepping his constitutional authority as president, despite a ruling by Romania’s Constitutional Court to the contrary.

Ponta been accused by European Union officials of undermining democratic institutions in Romania — the removal of Băsescu, however unpopular he may be, will only reinforce doubts about the direction of Romanian rule of law.

As we wait for word from Bucharest, here are some of the first movements of Romanian composer György Ligeti’s Musica ricercata:

Romania

Ponta takes Romania to ‘cusp of dictatorship’ as Sunday’s presidential referendum approaches

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Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seems to be in good company these days.

As it turns out, he’s no longer the only Eastern European leader who gives pause to European Union leaders worried about a backslide to democracy.

Since becoming prime minister of Romania in May of this year, Victor Ponta (pictured above) has taken an unorthodox approach to respecting Romania’s constitutional framework.  Ponta’s biggest gamble so far comes to a climax this weekend — on Sunday, Romania will hold a referendum on whether to remove Romania’s president, Traian Băsescu.  Ponta and his political allies argue that Băsescu overstepped his authority, and have moved to have him suspended from office pending the referendum.  Romania’s Constitutional Court has ruled otherwise, but the referendum is still going forward.

Accordingly, if over 50% of eligible voters turn out, and a majority vote to remove Băsescu, it could trigger even more worries about a quasi-constitutional coup d’état.  The European Union earlier this month issued a stinging report about Romania’s new government since Ponta’s ascension as prime minister, and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso minced no words about his concern:

“Challenging judicial decisions, undermining the Constitutional Court, overturning established procedures and removing key checks and balances have called into question the government’s commitment to respect the rule of law,” Barroso said. “Party political strife cannot justify overriding core democratic principles. Politicians must not try to intimidate judges ahead of decisions or attack judges when they take decisions they do not like.”

Romania, a country of 19 million people centered on the eastern edge of the EU, joined the EU only in 2007 after emerging in 1989 from a Communist dictatorship under longtime strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu — EU leaders are currently assessing whether to permit Romania to join the Schengen Area — Europe’s free-travel zone which has no internal border controls.

Like most countries in Europe, Romania’s political climate has been altered by difficult budget choices in light of the sovereign debt crisis across the EU.  The country is dependent upon loans granted initially in 2009 from the International Monetary Fund in exchange for commitments to bring down Romania’s annual budget deficit from a high of nearly 7% in 2009.  Despite rapid growth throughout the 2000s, Romania’s economy contracted by almost 10% in 2009 and 2010, and grew at only an anemic 1.5% in 2011.

Emil Boc, whose Christian democratic/conservative Partidul Democrat-Liberal (PD-L, the Democratic Liberal Party, and which is also Băsescu’s party) won the greatest number of seats in the 2008 Romanian legislative election, governed until February 2012 and attempted to enact austerity measures in order to bring Romania’s budget under firmer control.

When Boc’s government fell, Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu of the free-market liberal Partidul Naţional Liberal (PNL, the National Liberal Party), attempted to build a new government, with the support of the social democratic Partidul Social Democrat (PSD, the Social Democratic Party), the third of Romania’s three major parties.*  Although Ungureanu attempted to continue economic reforms, his government fell on a no-confidence vote on May 7, when the PSD’s Ponta replaced him.

Since then, it’s been an incredible two months for Ponta, whose government has attracted concern with staggering speed. Continue reading Ponta takes Romania to ‘cusp of dictatorship’ as Sunday’s presidential referendum approaches →

Ghana

In Mills’s passing, Ghana remains a touchstone for African democracy

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Guest post by Andrew Novak.

Ghanaian President John Atta Mills, 68, passed away on July 24, 2012.

The former vice president of Jerry Rawlings, the longtime, charismatic military ruler of Ghana turned democratically-elected head of state, Professor Mills was deferential to and often overshadowed by Rawlings throughout his political career.  The modest and scholarly Mills, who taught law at the University of Ghana, first ran for the presidency himself in 2000, when Rawlings was term-limited, but lost to opposition leader John Kufour of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Ghana’s first peaceful change of power since independence.

In 2008, when Kufour himself was term-limited, Mills ran against Kufour’s vice president, Nana Akufo-Addo, whom he trailed after the first round by a margin of 47.92% to 49.13%.  However, Mills ultimately defeated Akufo-Addo in the second round, with a margin of 50.23% to 49.77%, making it the closest peaceful election of its scale in modern African history.  Perhaps even more surprising, closely following the 2007 elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, the vote led to Ghana’s second peaceful transition of power without a single life lost.

Professor Mills, said to have been at heart an academic rather than a politician, was a stickler for the constitutional rule of law.  By the end of his term Ghana was the fifth least corrupt country on the African mainland according to Transparency International.

When Ghana began offshore oil production for the first time in 2010, Mills vowed to avoid the waste and corruption associated with the oil industry in nearby Nigeria.  Last month, Mills accepted nearly all of the recommendations of the Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) to comprehensively update Ghana’s constitution, with proposed amendments to be submitted to popular referendum.  The CRC’s White Paper called for, among other issues, abolition of the death penalty, protection of consumer rights, constitutionalization of the right to a healthy environment, and establishment of a comprehensive legal aid scheme.  Whether the CRC’s recommendations will be implemented remains to be seen should Mills’s ruling party, the National Democratic Congress, lose the upcoming elections in December 2012 to the NPP.

Even at his death, the rule of law triumphed in Ghana when Vice President John Dramani Mahama was sworn in within hours.  In this way, Ghana avoided the same uncertainty as when Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika passed away in office last April, sparking speculation that Vice President Joyce Banda would be passed over for the presidency in defiance of the constitution.

But unlike Ghana, Malawi’s change in power was dramatic — Mutharika ran an unpopular regime, one bleeding support from foreign donors and dogged by street protests, and Banda had previously been expelled from the ruling party.

Nonetheless, the peaceful transfers of power across the continent over the past year in Zambia, Senegal, Malawi, and Lesotho may well prove that democracy is maturing in Africa for one simple fact: three of these four countries, like Ghana, have experienced not just one but two peaceful transitions of power since independence.

Andrew Novak is the adjunct professor of African Law at American University Washington College of Law.  He has a J.D. from Boston University and an M.Sc. in African Politics from the London School of Oriental and African Studies—President John Atta Mills’s alma mater.

United Kingdom, United States

Romney/Cameron tiff showcases often odd relationship between US, UK leaders

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Mitt Romney’s debut on the world stage is off to a bad start.

It’s become a bit of a campaign ritual in the United States for a presidential challenger to go on a mid-summer international trip to showcase the challenger’s ability for diplomacy in anticipation that the challenger may become the president of the United States — as executed ambitiously by Barack Obama’s July 2008 trip to Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, England, France and Germany.  (In Berlin, he even held a huge rally that drew thousands.)

Romney, the Republican nominee for president in the United States now challenging Obama, is currently on a tour to the United Kingdom, Poland and Israel.  The trip to the UK, in particular, as the 2012 Olympic Games open in London, was designed to highlight Romney’s role leading the Winter Olympics in 2002 in Salt Lake City.

He had already annoyed Obama supporters yesterday when his aides awkwardly asserted that Romney’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” would somehow help him understand better the “special relationship” that both Americans and the British so fondly fete:

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the Telegraph quoted the adviser as saying, “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”

Although the Romney camp likely meant to highlight that he would be a more “Atlanticist” president than Obama (whose foreign policy emphasis has been more on China and the Pacific than many of his predecessors), there were no mistaking the awkward racial overtones in the criticism of the United States’s first non-white president.

He then mistakenly referred to Ed Miliband, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, as “Mr. Leader.”

But the real shocker has come today, when Romney not-so-subtly hinted that the Olympics aren’t assured of success and that some difficulties in preparations had been “disconcerting.”  British prime minister David Cameron, himself beleaguered by a sinking double-dip recession and a phone-hacking scandal that has enveloped some of his closest aides, snarked back:

“We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world. Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere,” an allusion to Salt Lake City, which hosted Games that Mr. Romney oversaw.

Ouch! Continue reading Romney/Cameron tiff showcases often odd relationship between US, UK leaders →

Ghana

Death of Ghana’s president John Atta Mills leaves December election unsettled

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John Atta Mills, the president of Ghana, died yesterday somewhat unexpectedly, leaving Ghana’s future less clear in advance of December’s presidential election.

His vice president, John Dramani Mahama, has been sworn in as his replacement, and according to the Daily Graphic, will likely be the presidential candidate of Mills’s National Democratic Congress in December.

A longtime crusader for constitutional reform in the West African country of nearly 25 million people, and a symbol of a peaceful, democratic tradition still relatively rare throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Mills was elected in December 2008 in a very close election against Nana Akufo-Addo.

Mills, a quiet-mannered law professor, previously served from 1997 to 2001 as vice president to Jerry Rawlings.  Rawlings initially took power in a 1979 coup, but subsequently retired from the military and managed Ghana’s largely successful transition to democracy following a 1992 constitutional referendum.  He was elected president in his own right in 1992 and 1996.  That transition, two decades years ago, has held up relatively well — Rawlings transferred power peacefully to his political rival, John Kufuor, in 2001, who transferred power peacefully in 2009 to Mills.

The strength of Ghana’s institutions was on display yesterday, with no significant hitches in Mahama’s swearing-in:

Analysts took that smooth transition as reassurance of the robustness of Ghana’s institutions. “The constitutional process kicked into gear pretty well,” said Antony Goldman of the Africa-focused group PM Consulting. Razia Khan, head of Africa research at Standard Chartered bank, said: “The smooth inauguration of Mahama as President is an encouraging sign of strength of Ghana’s democratic institutions.”

Mills oversaw the first-ever oil production in Ghana in 2010 on the appropriately-named Jubilee oilfield, which has sparked maginificent double-digit growth rates — Ghana’s economy previously rested on gold mining, cocoa and other exports.  While its GDP per capita (even with newly discovered oil reserves) remains small in comparison to South Africa or Botswana  — or even Angola — Ghana has outpaced per capita GDP per capita of other West African countries like Sengal by 150% and countries like Mali and Burkina Faso by 200% to 300%.

In contrast to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana has not been torn apart by ethnic or sectarian or tribal strife.  Unlike central and southern Africa, it does not have outrageously high HIV/AIDS rates and life expectancy lags not far behind that in Europe or the United States.

The spotlight now turns to Mahama, especially if, as expected, he becomes the standard-bearer of the NDC, the party that Rawlings founded and the more social democratic of two major parties in Ghana (the other main party in Ghana’s two-party system is the more center-right New Patriotic Party of Kufuor and of Akufo-Addo).

Presidential and legislative elections are scheduled for December 7 of this year, with runoffs to follow as necessary on December 28.  Like in the United States (and unlike, say, parliamentary systems in Germany or the United Kingdom), Ghana’s president is both head of government and head of state, so the presidential race will be a huge prize. Continue reading Death of Ghana’s president John Atta Mills leaves December election unsettled →

Egypt

Morsi announces surprise choice as new Egyptian prime minister

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This is a little strange.

Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi has appointed little-known Hisham Qandil, the current transitional minister of water resources and irrigation, as Egypt’s new prime minister.

This upends several media reports over the past few weeks that Morsi was narrowing his search to more well-known economist types, such as former Central Bank of Egypt president Mahmoud Abul-Eyoun.  The announcement came nearly a month after Morsi was sworn in and after multiple delays.

Since inauguration, Morsi has struggled with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces over everything from the appointment of the Constituent Assembly (which will write Egypt’s new constitution) to the disbanding of Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament.  One of the key problems in assessing Qandil’s appointment is that no one knows what Morsi’s powers will be as Egypt’s president (especially vis-a-vis SCAF), let alone what to expect from his prime minister.

We also know what Egypt’s investors think of the appointment: not much. Stock prices in the benchmark EGX 30 fell 1% today.

Qandil, relatively young at age 50, is not a particular specialist in economics and, prior to his appointment as water minister in July 2011, was a senior bureaucrat in the water ministry.  At a press conference later, he announced that he intends to appoint a technocratic cabinet shortly, and that he would focus on Morsi’s five top priorities — his ‘100 day plan’ to focus on security, traffic, bread, public cleanliness and fuel.

The announcement does not tell us with any further clarity what official role, if any, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Khairat al-Shater will play in the new government — al-Shater, a businessman and Islamic activist, was the Brotherhood’s original candidate for president prior to his disqualification earlier this spring, and is believed to wield signficant influence behind the scenes with the new Morsi administration.

I’ll note, however, that “water” is not among those five priorities, but water management and supply is a critical issue for a desert country whose main river, the Nile, is absolutely critical to its economy, transportation, agriculture, health and sustainability.

Like Morsi, he appears to have studied in the United States — he apparently has a doctorate in irrigation from the University of North Carolina in 1993.  He has also served as a senior manager for the African Development Bank.

It’s also strange that the announcement came initially via the Facebook page of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party — Morsi has gone to lengths to sever official ties with the group since his election last month as Egypt’s new president, and he stressed in his press conference that Qandil has belonged to no official political party, but Egypt Independent has already noted one detail that could concern secularists:

The former irrigation minister’s beard has caused speculation of Islamist tendencies. He denied any affiliation with Islamist groups when he told Al Jazeera his beard was grown in keeping with religious obligations.

Photograph by Al-Masry Al-Youm of the Egypt Indpendent.

The Netherlands

Up next in the spotlight during the EU’s summer of discontent: the Netherlands

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It may seem hard to believe, especially as yet another bond crisis envelops Europe, but the Netherlands has less than two months to go before a new general election on September 12.

As with so many elections in Europe lately, this one will be fought and won primarily on the issue of austerity.

The early election was called at the end of April following the resignation of Mark Rutte (pictured above, right) over disagreements on the Dutch budget.  Rutte, whose fragile minority government was being supported by Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, the Party for Freedom), had been in talks with Wilder and other government partners for weeks in an attempt to cut €16 billion from the Dutch budget, lowering the 2013 budget deficit from 4.7% of GDP to just 3% of GDP.

Wilders (pictured above, left), whose PVV vaunted to the heart of Dutch politics following the particularly fractured 2010 general election, refused to accept the cuts.

In no small part due to the populist, anti-Muslim Wilders, previous Dutch elections have focused on identity politics: protecting the particularly liberal social rights in the Netherlands (as to same-sex marriage, drug legalization and euthanasia, among others), immigration and the role of Muslims in Dutch society.

This campaign, however, is focused squarely on austerity, and while polls today show that voters are inclined to reward Rutte and his free-market, liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), voters are also inclined to give Emile Roemer’s Socialistische Partij (SP, the Socialist Party) its best showing in Dutch political history — with projections of 30 to 32 seats.  This would only further fragment the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the 150-seat lower house parliament of the Netherlands.

After the 2010 elections, it took Rutte six months of long discussions to put together a minority government.  As it turned out, Rutte entered into a formal coalition with the center-right Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), with outside support coming from Wilders’s populist, right-wing and anti-immigrant PVV.  The latest Ipsos Netherlands poll shows that both the CDA and the PVV will lose seats in September, which could complicate Rutte’s ability to form any government and which could also prevent the adoption of the 2013 budget.

Here’s the latest composition of the lower house of the Dutch parliament:

Continue reading Up next in the spotlight during the EU’s summer of discontent: the Netherlands →

Canada, Quebec

As snap election looms in Québec, what accounts for the charmless success of Jean Charest?

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Almost every commentary on Canadian politics seems certain that Québec premier Jean Charest is set to launch a snap election in La belle province in the early autumn — with an announcement as soon as August 1.

Charest, whose Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) has controlled the Québec provincial government since 2003, must call an election before December 2013.  But with Québec’s education minister, Michelle Courchesne and its international relations minister Monique Gagnon-Tremblay both announcing that they will step down at the end of the current term of the Assemblée nationale du Québec, and with a politically-charged Charbonneau Commission set to resume hearings on whether Charest’s government awarded government construction contracts in exchange for political financing, speculation is electric that Charest will call an election for early September.

The predominantly French-speaking Québec is Canada’s second-largest province with almost one-quarter of its population, so an election could well have national consequences.

An autumn election would follow a particularly polarizing spring, when student protesters rocked Montréal over a proposed hike in university tuition fees.  The tumultuous protests, which hit a crescendo back in May, have already resulted in the resignation of a previous education minister, Line Beauchamp.  Although Quebeckers seemed divided fairly equally in sympathy between the government and the student protestors, the battle has essentially cooled off as students depart for the summer.  Nonetheless, the government’s decision to enact Bill 78 — which provides that any gathering of over 50 people is illegal unless reported to police in advance — was less popular, leading many voters (not to mention national and international human rights advocates) to decry Charest.

For all of the stability he may have brought to Canadian federalism in the last decade, on the face of it, it would seem a rather difficult time for Charest to win a fourth consecutive mandate.  Charest’s Parti libéral recently lost a by-election in June in the riding of Argenteuil in southern Québec, a Liberal stronghold since 1966.

And yet — through all of this — Charest and his Parti libéral are, at worst, even odds to win a fourth term, an electoral achievement unprecedented since the era of Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale in the 1940s and 1950s.

Say what you will about Duplessis, his presence is unrivaled in 20th century Québec — he is synonymous with the province’s internal development, a staunch anti-Communist, French Catholic conservative whose rule over Québec was nearly unchallenged for two decades.

Which is to say: Jean Charest is no Maurice Duplessis.

Yet the always-impressive ThreeHundredEight blog’s latest forecast shows Charest’s PLQ with 60 seats to just 55 seats for the more leftist and separatist Parti québécois (PQ).  The newly-formed center-right, vaguely sovereigntist Coalition Avenir Québec, meanwhile, would win just 8 seats, and the radical leftist Québec solidaire would win 2 seats.

What can explain Charest’s staying power?

To understand Charest’s career is to understand that his political saga is an “only in Canada” story. Continue reading As snap election looms in Québec, what accounts for the charmless success of Jean Charest? →

Libya

The GNC’s independents — not Mahmoud Jibril — will determine Libya’s path

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Official results from Libya’s July 7 election have trickled in, and the result is being hailed as a victory for Mahmoud Jibril (محمود جبريل), pictured above.

His National Forces Alliance (تحالف القوى الوطنية) won 39 seats among the 80 seats that were available for political parties in the General National Congress, while the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party (حزب العدالة والب) won just 17 seats.  The GNC will run Libya’s government until an elected Constituent Assembly can draft a new constitution for Libya — among its 200 members will be 120 “independents,” many of whom are unaligned with either Jibril’s coalition or the Brotherhood.

International and Libyan media immediately started to crown Jibril and the “secularists” as the winners as it became clear the NFA was leading against the Brotherhood’s candidates, but it remains unclear that Jibril’s group — which has distanced itself from the “secular” label — will necessarily control the GNC.  Jibril himself was not eligible to stand for election, so he will not actually be a member of the GNC.

Among the 120 independent candidates elected, and among the 21 members who were elected from other smaller parties, many members of the GNC will be sympathetic to a more Islamist view.  Others are already looking to strike a more nationalist third-way tone:

“We are trying to create a third way,” said Saleh Gawouda, a prominent political activist and writer who won a seat in Libya’s second largest city, Benghazi.  “The parties are trying to rally independents but until now they only met with nine or something, not big deal.”

“This new coalition will be a nationalist one,” he said.

Jibril served as the interim prime minister for a little over seven months as head of the National Transitional Council, which gained international recognition as the Libyan government from mid-2011 onward.  Jibril stepped down, as promised, upon the capture of Sirte and the killing of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.  His newly-formed National Forces Alliance is a union of liberals that have called for a civil democratic state and are proponents of moderate Islam.

But many Libyans are also wary of Jibril, who has very close ties to the United States and to Europe, and who served from 2007 until 2011 as the head of Libya’s National Economic Development Board, where he developed a close relationship with Saif al-Islam Gadaffi.  He was one of Libya’s leading proponents of privatization of state-run industries and liberalization of the Libyan marketplace to greater commercial ties with and development from the U.S. and Europe.

With militia leaders still active throughout Libya after a hard-fought civil war in 2011, Libya is not back to “normal” — and it’s not like there’s a “normal” to which Libya could return. Continue reading The GNC’s independents — not Mahmoud Jibril — will determine Libya’s path →

Egypt

Former Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman has died

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Omar Suleiman has died at 77, while undergoing medical tests in the United States.

He will not be missed among Egypt’s revolution-minded citizens, and he will be remembered both for the human rights violations that he is alleged to have committed as Egypt’s top intelligence chief for decades.  I think most of all, he’ll be remembered for his visible role as the vice president in the last, hectic days of Hosni Mubarak’s regime.  When the end came for the regime, it was Suleiman’s glassy face we remember, hours before the military brass issued its Communiqué No. 1, bringing the curtain down.

But recall that Suleiman was disqualified — along with several other top candidates — for the presidential race.  In the wake of that decision, former Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafiq effectively consolidated the pro-security, pro-military sector of the electorate to place second in the first round of the presidential election on May 23 and 24, and he only narrowly lost the runoff on June 16 and 17.

Had Suleiman not been disqualified, he may well have won the voters that ultimately supported Shafiq and perhaps had a real shot at winning the Egyptian presidency.

It’s hard to imagine how Egypt’s transfer could be any bumpier than it’s been, but it’s worth pausing to note that a Suleiman victory would have been an even greater disaster.  In addition to what would have been a controversial return of the felool — ‘remnants’ — of the old regime to power, Egypt would today be dealing with the fallout of that president’s death in office just three weeks after his inauguration.

Instead, we are awaiting the appointment of Mohammed Morsi’s prime minister, and Egypt’s Administrative Court has passed on the opportunity to disrupt the work of the Constituent Assembly, the group that is drafting Egypt’s new constitution.

Egypt

Forget PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian — Egypt’s new PM is likely to be Mahmoud Abul-Eyoun

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UPDATE, July 24: In a surprise move, Morsi has announced water minister Hisham Qandil as his new prime minister.

* * * *

Newly inaugurated Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi is set to announce his pick for prime minister on Wednesday, which will be perhaps the single most important signal yet from the Morsi administration as to how he will govern.

Western media are speculating that it will be none other than Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co.  The idea that El-Erian would leave PIMCO and return to Egypt after an entire adult life spent abroad to take on an undefined role for a Muslim Brotherhood-backed president whose role is equally undefined is, to say the least, farfetched.  Even El-Erian himself appears to have denied the reports.

In contrast, several Egypt-based news sources seem almost certain that the new prime minister will be former Central Bank of Egypt president Mahmoud Abul-Eyoun (shown above), who served as the CBE president from 2001 to 2003 and served as CEO of the Kuwait International Bank until December 2011.

If not Abul-Eyoun, sources have indicated that the prime minister will come from among three additional possibilities, each of whom is an economist: Farouq al-Oqda, the current governor of the Central Bank of Egypt since 2003; Hazem al-Biblawy, a former finance minister; or Osama Saleh, head of the General Authority for Investment.

Those reports make a lot of sense to me:

  • Morsi is not an economist, but the biggest challenge for his administration will be to boost Egypt’s sclerotic economy — international reserves have plummeted by half and borrowing costs have risen 50% since Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Febraury 2011 after three decades in power.  Unemployment is high, especially among the young, and GDP growth is expected to slow from an already tepid 2.5% in 2011 to just 1.5% this year.
  • Morsi has stated  that he wants to appoint a cabinet gradually, so as to ensure the seamless nature of the transition.
  • If he appoints a Muslim Brotherhood member or an Islamist, it will be instantly divisive , drawing mistrust from Coptic Christians, secularists and liberals, to say nothing of SCAF, the military and the so-called ‘deep state’ elements that remain entrenched in the fabric of Egyptian political power.
  • As the former parliamentary leader of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s political arm, however, Morsi will not want to appoint a prime minister deemed too unacceptable to the Brotherhood.
  • If he appoints someone too close to SCAF or Hosni Mubarak’s old regime, he’ll draw criticism from Islamists and secularists alike.
  • If he appoints someone too famous (like El-Erian or other well-known figures), he could also risk being overshadowed or outmaneuvered — after all, Morsi’s image in Egypt is of a “spare tire” who was only the Brotherhood’s last-minute choice for the presidency.

So among those four options, Abul-Eyoun seems the most likely.  The 75-year-old al-Biblawy served as finance minister recently under the transitional SCAF government, but tried to resign after clases between police and Coptic Christians in October 2011.  Morsi may also prefer to keep al-Oqda and Saleh in their current roles, so as not to disrupt Egypt’s economy any further.

That hasn’t stopped rumors like the El-Erian one, nor has it stopped speculation that Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, might be appointed prime minister, or that the Muslim Brotherhood would prefer Khairat al-Shater, a businessman who was the Muslim Brotherhood’s first choice for the presidential race, until his disqualification in May. Continue reading Forget PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian — Egypt’s new PM is likely to be Mahmoud Abul-Eyoun →

Mexico

Despite likely fraud, AMLO, #YoSoy132 protests seem destined to fail

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It’s been over half a month since Enrique Peña Nieto’s victory in the presidential election on July 1, but the protests against the electoral fraud alleged to have been committed by his party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), continue, however haltingly, especially in Mexico City.

Although the street protests are mostly at the impetus of a student protest movement called #YoSoy132 — it’s a long backstory, but think of it as sort of an ‘Occupy Zocalo’ movement, formed to call for greater electoral integrity and the elimination of corruption in Mexican government.  To be fair, the group has kept up a lot of pressure on the PRI both before and now after the election, especially in light of a scandal, revealed by The Guardian, suggesting a too-cozy relationship between Peña Nieto and Televisa, a top television news source in Mexico.

To be sure, it’s great that #YoSoy132 and other watchdogs will be watching the PRI like a hawk.  Notwithstanding its 12 years in the wilderness, it did control Mexico in a semi-authoritarian grip for seven decades (although I have argued that Mexico’s democratic and civil society institutions are sufficiently robust to withstand the PRI’s return to power, and the PRI may succeed where recent presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón have failed — in tax reform, on energy reform and on ending Mexico’s war on drug cartels).

Meanwhile, the runner-up in the July 1 presidential race, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (commonly, “AMLO” in the press), the candidate of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), has cried foul play — he’s filed a complaint to invalidate the election with Mexico’s elections institute. He’s alleged that the PRI bought votes in the 2012 election and exceeded spending limits.  He’s probably right.

But unfortunately, he lost by between 6% and 7% of the vote.  A lot of folks in Mexico acknowledge that the PRI may have bought a lot of votes in the recent election and probably exceeded spending limits — even the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), which currently controls the presidency, admits this. But there’s really no substantive legal recourse (just a post-facto fine). The relevant fact is that no one thinks Peña Nieto’s margin of victory is small enough for this to have actually mattered.  Continue reading Despite likely fraud, AMLO, #YoSoy132 protests seem destined to fail →

Israel

Kadima leaves Israeli grand coalition over national service ‘Tal Law’ proposal

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Well, that was short-lived.

After just 70 days in what was meant to be the broadest coalition in a generation of Israeli politics, Shaul Mofaz, the leader of the centrist Kadima party, announced that Kadima will leave Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition over the terms of a controversial law designed to address the exemption of ultra-orthodox haredim Jews — yeshiva students of traditional religious texts — from mandatory service in the Israel Defense Force.

Netanyahu will continue as prime minster, albeit with his original 66-member coalition in the Knesset, Israel’s 120-seat parliament, with an August 1 deadline for enacting a new law.

Under the latest proposal, half of haredim between age 18 and 23 would be drafted into the IDF and another half would be drafted into national service between age 23 and 26.  It is only the latest attempt — the so-called “Tal Law” first emerged in 2002 and was extended in 2007, and has been controversial throughout its history.  Israel’s High Court of Justice, however, ruled that the Tal Law is unconstitutional and ordered the government to enact a replacement to the current law by August 1.

Mofaz, who had argued for a compulsory draft of everyone up to age 23, complained that the latest proposal did not go far enough:

Mofaz said that the proposal violates the ruling of the High Court on the issue, the principle of equal sharing of the burden of military service, is not proportional and does not meet the ultimate test of effectively resolving the issue.

Mofaz also noted that the proposal also did not include all draftable persons, and therefore, in reality, would merely maintain the unmanageable status quo.

The decision reinforces the difficult in crafting an alternative to the Tal Law in a manner that satisfies everyone in Netanyahu’s coalition. In addition to his own Likud Party and a small breakaway faction of Labor Party MKs loyal to defense minister and former prime minister Ehud Barak, the coalition contains several ultra-orthodox parties, including Shas, who are the most pro-exemption parties in the Knesset.  But it also contains the nationalist and secular Yisrael Beiteinu, which is introducing to the Knesset a bill that would require all 18-year-olds to serve (although Netanyahu has allowed Yisrael Beiteinu to introduce the bill, the remaining members of his coalition will defeat it).

Earlier this month, Netanyahu dissolved the Plesner Committee, which had been tasked with coming up with an alternative to the Tal Law, after committee members representing both Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu resigned from the committee in protest.

The question of whether to exempt haredimfrom IDF service — or whether to fashion some alternative form of civil service on the basis of equal burden-sharing — is an emotional issue in a country where security threats remain a top concern of all Israelis. Continue reading Kadima leaves Israeli grand coalition over national service ‘Tal Law’ proposal →