Monthly Archives: August 2012

United Kingdom

Tensions start to appear in Tory-Lib Dem coalition in the UK

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There might be no more yawn-inducing issue in UK politics than House of Lords reform.

But that issue has led to the greatest moment of crisis between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democratic Party, which together govern the United Kingdom in a first-of-its-kind Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.

The importance of the week’s jousting is not about electoral reform, to save the suspense.

It’s about the that it marked the first major tear in the Coalition: a Tory bid to stymie Lords reform led Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg (pictured above, right) to declare that he would direct his party to vote against another electoral reform measure supported by the Tories.  It’s the first time Clegg has so aggressively and directly fought back against his Coalition partner.

Right-wing newspapers are already savaging Clegg.  But for its faults, the two-party Coalition still remains more united and disciplined than the Tories were (when they were governing by themselves!) in the last years of John Major’s government in the mid-1990s, when Europe and scandal hopelessly split an undisciplined party.  It’s probably more united than the New Labour government in its last years, hopelessly split between Blairites and Brownites on the basis of no true underlying policy differences.

The most alarmist talk about the danger to Cameron’s government is overstated — more most surprising, perhaps, is that the Coalition made it nearly halfway through the natural term of the parliament with so much unity.  Clegg has not yet flinched in giving his party’s support to Tory leader and prime minister David Cameron (pictured above, left), even as the budget cuts of a severe austerity program implemented by Tory chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne seem to be dragging the UK economy back into a double-dip recession, to say nothing of student fees or other policies that are less than satisfying to the Lib Dem rank-and-file, which has typically been more of the left than of the right.

As The Guardian notes, Clegg can claim a moderating influence on the current government:

Most of the cases that [Clegg] can demonstrate are negative ones. The Lib Dems have played a vital role in making Tory legislation less extreme, less red meat. The health reforms could have been worse; Europe policy would have been more barking; welfare changes would have hurt the vulnerable even more.

But voters don’t seem to be giving Clegg much credit.  The center-left Labour now has a five-point lead over the Tories (39% to 34%) in the latest Guardian/ICM poll from late June, but the Lib Dems have taken the greatest electoral brunt with just 14% support, a sharp fall from its 23% vote in May 2010.

Luckily for Clegg and Cameron, most of the UK was too busy on holiday or watching the Olympic Games in London to notice (although Cameron must not be thrilled that his semi-rival, London mayor Boris Johnson, has received such fawning attention).

So what happened? Continue reading Tensions start to appear in Tory-Lib Dem coalition in the UK →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: August 9

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The great Teddy Bear War of 2012 between Sweden and Belarus intensifies.

Per The Economist‘s Banyan, India gets a new anti-corruption party.

Will Anglophone Quebeckers be tempted away from Jean Charest’s Liberals by the center-right Coalition Avenir Québec?

All eyes in China (and Hong Kong) are fixed on the the murder trial of Gu Kailai, the wife of disgraced Chongqing chief Bo Xilai.

Lebanon’s current “March 8” government, headed by Tripoli businessman Nijab Mikati, has not surprisingly drafted an elections law that would benefit the “March 8” coalition against the “March 14” coalition.

Libya’s National Transition Council hands over power to the new 200-seat electoral assembly in the other Tripoli.

Why the Israeli left can’t effectively market itself.

 

Greece

How many days (weeks) away are we from another Greek solvency crisis?

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When the world last left Greece, it was breathing a sigh of relief upon the news that Antonis Samaras would be able to cobble together a coalition following a narrow win in the June elections — the second such election in as many months.

Samaras (pictured above), now a little over six weeks into his government, is finding it increasingly difficult to get his coalition to agree on €11.5 billion in cuts, required by Greece’s bailout from the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund.  Those entities, known as the ‘troika,’ have pushed off a long-delayed review of Greece’s bailout program from September to October, but that means only that Greece’s government will have until mid-September to make the cuts. The ‘troika’ will then make a decision about disbursing the next €31 billion tranche of bailout funds to Greece, and Greece will then try to push for a renegotiation of the bailout terms to lighten the austerity that has added pressure to Greece’s downward economic spiral.

It’s clear that the ‘troika’ is getting impatient: the IMF has started to balk at throwing more money at Greece, has called on the European Union to take the lead on any further bailouts and the ECB in late July stopped accepting Greek bonds as collateral altogether.

But the Greek economy is in shambles, and is expected to contract by a full 7% this year — much more than an original forecast of 4.7%.  Greece’s recession is only getting worse, not better, and that’s after the economy contracted almost 14% in the past four years.  As tax receipts correspondingly shrink, Greece’s debt sinkhole becomes ever larger.  Greater debt requires more austerity, which cripples the economy, which leads to greater debt, and so on.

The only solutions seem to be:

  1. a miraculous economic turnaround. Not likely anytime soon.
  2. a full bailout from the European Union. Whether that means a direct cash bailout or “eurobonds” or a more inflationary ECB monetary policy, it all boils down to a transfer of wealth from Germany to Greece  — it’s an option that German chancellor Angela Merkel has resisted and which has become increasingly unpopular in domestic German politics.
  3. the “Grexit”. Greece leaves the eurozone, adopts a new drachma, and devalues it until its debts are manageable and its exports are cheap.  But that could lead to snowballing worries about Spain, Portugal, Italy and the rest of the eurozone and precipitate Europe’s own “Lehman” moment of financial panic.

The next deadline is August 20, when Greece must pay a €3 billion maturing to the ECB — and the ECB (despite its edict that it will no longer accept Greek bonds as collateral) is weighing the option of lending money directly to the Greek central bank (which can accept Greek bonds as collateral), so that Greece in turn can pay back the debt it owes to the ECB.

It’s a tidy Alice-in-Wonderland arrangement in which only a central banker could delight.

ECB president Mario Draghi deserves credit for getting Greece past yet another hurdle, but it doesn’t inspire any long-term confidence in either Europe or Greece to get the country out of its nosedive.  It takes little imagination to see how Greece could bumble out of the eurozone in short order without further intervention if and when it runs out of cash (which could now still happen in September): Greece would then be forced to pay its employees and pensioners in IOUs (think of the kind of IOUs that California issued — registered warrants — when it fell short of cash reserves in 2009), Greece would take longer and longer to pay back the IOUs, individual Greeks would start trading the IOUs for euros, and a market would develop that sets a price for the IOUs in euros.

In time, the IOUs will have become de-facto drachmas.

Meanwhile, the coalition that everyone thought would easily come to an agreement on those additional budget cuts has stalled. Continue reading How many days (weeks) away are we from another Greek solvency crisis? →

Singapore

It’s “National Night” in Singapore…

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…and here’s what the Singapore Development Unit (yes, there’s an official matchmaking agency for Singapore) is promoting for the night after National Day, which is today, August 9.

“We gotta go all the way for Singapore, you know what I’m saying.”


Singapore has one of the lowest birth rates in the world at around 115, according to the World Bank’s 2010 list.  By contrast, the demographically challenged Italy is at 1.4 and Russia at 1.54.

So: ‎”It’s National Night, let’s make Singapore’s birthrate spike.”

H/T to James Fallows at The Atlantic, one of the most consistently thoughtful voices in Western media on Asia (and if anyone’s looking for a good August book recommendation, his new book, China Airborne, is out):

About the only thing that needs explaining is when, around time 2:18, the video talks about “putting a bao in the oven,” a bao is like a little bundle or dumpling or bun. And before that, in the line: “I know you want it / so does the SDU,” here is what they’re talking about. But even if you didn’t know that you’d get the idea. There’s a little more explanation to the right, which says a lot about Singapore in just a few lines.

The Singapore government has often been criticized for being too Gradgrind-like and strait-laced. So, no joke, congrats to whoever broke the stereotype by doing this. And … ummm, Happy National Day / Night!

 

Bavaria, European Union, Germany

Is Bavarian finance minister Markus Söder really the most dangerous politician in Europe?

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Der Spiegel ranks the top 10 most dangerous politicians in Europe, and you might be surprised at who comes out on top.

The piece targets Markus Söder, the finance minister of Bavaria since November 2011:

The politician from the [Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union)], the conservative sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, is known for his tub-thumping rhetoric and has stepped up a gear in the euro crisis with vitriolic comments about Greece. “An example must be made of Athens, that this euro zone can show teeth,” he told the Bild am Sonntag tabloid newspaper this week. “Everyone has to leave Mom at some point and that time has come for the Greeks.”

It also points the finger at Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the CSU to which Söder also belongs — Dobrindt has also called on Greece to exit the eurozone by paying its debts in drachmas instead of euros.

Söder, an up-and-coming politician in the CSU, has previously served as minister for environment and health from 2008 to 2011 and from 2007 to 2008, as minister for federal and European affairs.  He’s a solid populist, to be sure — for example, he’s in favor of Bavaria’s ban on the wearing of Muslim head scarves (but not nun’s habits).

But it’s easy enough to explain away the relatively strident tone from Söder and the CSU as political posturing in advance of Bavarian state elections that must take place sometime in 2013.  The CSU will be struggling to maintain the grip that its held on Bavarian state politics since the 1950s.  At the federal level, although the CSU-backed Angel Merkel has walked a tight line when it comes to balancing national and federalist European interests, but her leftist opponents are even more federalist when it comes to Europe and the eurozone.

The Spiegel list is dominated by some of the nationalist right’s usual suspects: Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and a member of the European Parliament; Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front national in France; Timo Soini, leader of the Perussuomalaiset (PS, True Finns) party, also a member of the European Parliament; Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, Party for Freedom); and Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party).

They seem like odd choices, though, because none of them (except perhaps Strache) seem to be on the upswing.  Wilders is polling quite dreadfully in advance of the Dutch elections on Sept. 4.  Farage and Soini are sideshows at best.  Despite her strong showing in the French presidential election in April and the shadow she casts over the French center-right, Le Pen failed to win a seat in France’s national assembly in the June elections — and her party won just two seats in total.

To me, the following politicians are far more “dangerous” — by “dangerous,” I mean the ability to win real power or to be more effective in making mischief: Continue reading Is Bavarian finance minister Markus Söder really the most dangerous politician in Europe? →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: August 8

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FT Alpahville has a nice primer on the appreciation of the Australian dollar (or the South Pacific Swiss franc).

Fresh out of prison, Conrad Black calls Pauline Marois a “mediocre sovereigntist bag-lady.”

Italian prime minister Mario Monti walks back his comments from yesterday that Italy’s debt yield spread would be 1200 basis points if his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, were still in charge.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy makes his first public comments since losing the May presidential election in calling for France and international intervention in Syria.

The Dutch Socialists takes the lead in the poll in advance of Sept. 12 elections.

Pia Kjærsgaard, who founded Denmark’s populist right-wing party, the Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) in 1995 (which is now the third-largest party in the Danish parliament, is stepping down as leader.

Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi fires his intelligence chief (with the military’s blessing).

Canada, Quebec

Sovereigntist PQ leader Marois walks a fine line on tuition fees in Québec

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The day after Jean Charest, Québec’s premier, launched a snap election for September 4, his principal rival, Pauline Marois, came out in clear contrast to Charest on perhaps the most high-profile issues in the election (short of Québec’s sovereignty): tuition hike fees for students.

Marois (pictured above, right), the leader of the leftist, sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ), promised to take a radically different approach to tuition fees in the province: cancel the planned hikes, revoke the controversial emergency protest law (Bill 78) and convene a summit within 100 days of election on the issue of university funding.

While Marois is taking a very understated position on Québécois sovereignty and any future referendum on an independent Québec, she is not shying away from embracing a contrast to Charest on the student tuition issue.  Indeed, one of the most impressive and eloquent of the student leaders from those negotiations, Léo Bureau-Blouin (pictured above, left), at age 20, is among the PQ’s marquee candidates in the upcoming election — he’ll be running against a junior minister in Charest’s government in a riding in Laval, a suburb of Montréal.

Earlier this year, a battle between Charest’s government and student protesters ended in somewhat chaotic protests throughout Montréal.  Students protested the hikes, which amounted to a $1,625 increase over seven years — a 75% increase over what Québec students pay today (although the total would be far less than what students in other Canadian provinces pay).  Ultimately, Charest’s education minister, Line Beauchamp, resigned over the impasse with student leaders in negotiations over the hikes, and Charest’s current education minister is not running for reelection.

Charest responded to the protests by passing Bill 78, which makes any gathering of over 50 people illegal unless they tell police in advance the start time, finish time and route of such gathering.  Although the bill is just a temporary measure, expiring on July 1, 2013, it brought international condemnation as an unconstitutional restraint on protesters’ rights.

With the protests dying as summer approached, however, the issued faded in both provincial and international headlines.

Polls have shown that Québec’s electorate is essentially even — they may not like the increasingly heavy-handed approach that Charest took with protesters, but nor were they especially keen on protester shutting down schools (not to mention entire neighborhoods) in Montréal.

So it’s not without some risk that Marois has embraced the student movement — by doing so, she is hoping to energize Québec’s young voters and otherwise capitalize on doubts about the Charest government’s effectiveness without alienating other voters who support Charest’s approach and who take a wary view of the student protests.

Charest, who has been premier since 2003, is looking to win a fourth consecutive mandate for his federalist, centrist Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ).  Polls show the PLQ and the PQ tied for first place, with the center-right Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) polling a strong enough third place to make it likely that Québec’s next government will be a minority government.

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: August 7

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South Korea’s leading presidential candidate Park Geun-hye takes a more flexible stance on the history of her father’s coup (which led to his rule of South Korea from 1961 to 1979).

Mario vs. Mario vs. Mariano.

Brussels is impressed with neither Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte nor the Dutch electorate (English summary here).

Spencer Ackerman at Foreign Policy takes a look at Pussy Riot and their turn as the face of the Russian opposition.

NPR continues some superb coverage of the Mali separatist crisis.

Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, former governor of the Bank of Ghana, has been sworn in as the new vice president of Ghana.

Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet argues that economic empowerment for women is central to future Latin American prosperity.

Panama

The internal politics of the widening of the Panamá Canal

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Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy‘s blog Passport today points to the global ramifications of the widening of the Panamá Canal — a third lane is set to open in 2014, and it will allow much wider ships to pass through the Canal than the “Panamax” vessels currently designed to pass the Canal.

The new lane, which will allow for more efficient ships — economically and environmentally — is expected to affect global trade and energy flows in multiple ways, absolutely.

It’s not quite as rosy as all that — the third lane’s opening date is now all but certain to be later — in 2015 (well after the date of the next Panamanian general election in May 2014).

Although the Canal’s expansion is indisputably an economic boon to the small Central American country, it may not be such a boon for the fortunes of Panamá’s current president, supermarket magnate Ricardo Martinelli, who swept into office in a landslide 2009 promising to restore Panamá’s record GDP growth rates following the worldwide economic slump in 2008.

Since the U.S. handed over sovereignty and control of the Canal to Panamá in 1999 (the result of a controversial agreement — at least in the U.S. — signed by Jimmy Carter in 1977), Panamá’s already solid postwar GDP growth skyrocketed.  Starting in 2000, Panamá saw a rise in GDP growth that peaked at 12% growth in 2007 — it bottomed out at 3% in 2009 before bouncing back up to nearly 11% growth last year.

Much of that growth is of course linked to the Canal and construction and service industries tied to it.

Each successive administration has taken advantage of Panamá’s increased wealth: Mireya Moscoso, who came to power in 1999 and presided over the transfer of the Canal to Panamá, used Panamá’s economic prospects to strengthen social programs, especially for children.  Her successor, Martín Torrijos, initiated the Canal expansion project in 2006, and tried to lessen political corruption in Panamá.

Martinelli has presided over the return to breakneck GDP growth, and he’s also enacted a fair share of legislative reforms, which have merited approving nods from global investors.  As you might expect from a center-right businessman-president, Martinelli has enacted tax reforms to simplify tax collection, he has invested $20 billion into Panama’s infrastructure and he has championed the U.S.-Panamá free trade agreement, which was approved by the U.S. Congress and enacted into law by U.S. president Barack Obama in late 2011.  But Martinelli has also enacted an increase in the minimum wage and instituted pensions for the elderly.

Given his success so far, given the return of the Panamanian economy to double-digit growth rates, and given the lead up to the opening of the Canal’s third lane, you’d think that Martinelli would stand to gain most of the credit for that.  Instead, however, it’s much more unclear — Martinelli’s party is far from certain to make gains in 2014.

Continue reading The internal politics of the widening of the Panamá Canal →

Angola

Dim hope for free and fair elections under dos Santos in oil-boom Angola

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Angola is booming these days — and its capital Luanda, in particular (pictured, above), is booming, flush from the diamonds-and-oil wealth of a country that’s entering just its second decade of peace following independence in 1975 and a civil war that divided the lusophone southern African country of 18.5 million for the ensuing three decades.

For most Angolans, however, around 40% of whom still live in poverty, the benefits of one of the world’s best performing economies of the past decade have still not trickled down.  And that’s what should be the top issue when Angolans head to the polls on August 31 to elect members to the Assembleia Nacional.

Nonetheless, there’s no real indication that the elections will be any more than a show elections for the current regime:

The Angolan government is responsible for numerous incidents of political violence, intimidation of protesters, and crackdowns on peaceful demonstrations that might have a negative impact on the August 31, 2012 parliamentary elections, Human Rights said in a report released today. The government should end its crackdown on peaceful protests and the media with the start of the election campaign on August 1.

The 13-page report, “Angola’s Upcoming Elections: Attacks on the Media, Expression, and Assembly,” describes increasing incidents of political violence and intimidation. Human Rights Watch called on the government of Angola to promptly address these concerns, and urged the Southern African Development Community and the capital’s foreign diplomats to raise these issues with the government.

“The human rights environment in Angola is not conducive for free, fair, and peaceful elections,” said Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The Angolan government needs to stop trying to stifle peaceful protests, gag the independent press, or use the state media for partisan purposes if these elections are to be meaningful.”

 The president of Angola, at least nominally, since 1979, has been José Eduardo dos Santos, who is Africa’s second-longest serving leader.  Functionally, from 1979 until the end of Angola’s civil war in 2002, he was merely the leader of one side in a grueling civil war in a country used by both the United States and the Soviet Union as a deadly hot proxy for the Cold War through much of independent Angola’s early history — the civil war reached a less lethal phase only in 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the cessation of arms shipments to the combatants from the United States and from the Soviet Union.

Luanda, now one of the boomtowns of sub-Saharan Africa, is a city transformed.  As Felix Salmon noted last year, only 156 Angolan visas were issues to southbound Portuguese, but by 2010, that number was 23,787.  That may tell you something about the state of Portugal’s economy, but it also says something about Angola’s.  Despite significant slowdown (2010’s GDP growth rate was only 3.4%), Angola managed GDP growth of over 20% for each of 2005, 2006 and 2007, and hit nearly 14% in 2008 as well.  Angola’s oil production has increased so rapidly that it is thought to be China’s top oil supplier.

Angola’s Assembleia Nacional has 220 seats. In the last election, dos Santos’s Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho (MPLA or the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party; yes, quite a mouthful) won fully 191 of those seats.  Since then, dos Santos has survived an assassination attempt and increasingly vocal protests against his rule.  Despite this unrest, and despite the passage of an anti-fraud electoral law in late 2011, no one believes dos Santos and the MPLA will wake up out of power after the August 31 election.

The country’s politics are still divided on lines that go back to its civil war — the main opposition is the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).  The one-time Soviet-backed MLPA is still dominated by the more northern Ambundu ethnic group (which represents around 25% of Angolans), while the US-backed UNITA is still dominated by the more southern Ovimbundu (37% of Angolans).  Even today, though, oil-rich Cabinda province, a sliver of Angola separated from the rest of the country by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, remains separatist-minded, despite the end of the civil war 10 years ago — it is dominated by Angola’s third-largest ethnic group, the Bakongo (about 13% of all Angolans — this group, too, had its own political entity in the Angolan civil war).

UNITA launched its campaign Wednesday, promising a more equal distribution of the gains from Angola’s economic boom, especially in the form of renewed investment in health, education, housing and employment.

While, it’s a platform that sounds fairly pedestrian and reasonable, but it’s still risible to think that UNITA would even have the opportunity to carry through with that agenda.

Angola may have mercifully put its civil war behind it, and a brighter economic future may well beckon, but it looks like the evolution of true democratic institutions will wait for a day beyond 2012.

Photo credit to Veziana Armandi via Flickr.

Peru

One year into the administration of Perú’s Ollanta Humala: a mixed bag

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July 28 marked the one-year anniversary of Ollanta Humala (pictured above) as Perú’s new president — and it was marked by the appointment of Humala’s third prime minister since taking office.

The fear that many Peruvians had about Humala’s administration turned out to be a non-issue — whereas many Peruvians once feared that Humala would disrupt a decade-plus of staggering economic growth by turning Perú toward charisma nationalism.  Although the Peruvian economy keeps chugging along, however, social unrest has turned out to be a thornier problem for Humala.

The 2011 presidential campaign ended in a runoff between the two most polarizing candidates among five plausible presidents: the leftist Humala, the 2006 runner-up and a former Army officer, and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, Perú’s president in the 1990s.  Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, famously compared the choice as being akin to terminal cancer and AIDS — despite reservations about Humala, Peruvians also worried that Fujimori would pardon her father, currently in prison for committing embezzlement and for committing human rights abuses during his time in office, unleashing demons from an era that many Peruvians would rather not revisit.

When Humala won by a 3% margin, however, he moved quickly to assure Peruvians that he wouldn’t disrupt the booming economy, promptly appointing as his finance minister Luis Miguel Castilla, a deputy finance minister from the previous administration of Alan García.  Far from nationalizing Peruvian industry, Humala has essentially left economic policy unchanged from his predecessors of the past decade.

Félix Jiménez, Humala’s top campaign economic adviser, who briefly served as a presidential economic adviser, left Humala’s government in January 2012, and has since criticized Humala for being too beholden to orthodox economic policy and Peruvian economic elites.  Another former adviser, Oscar Dancourt, a former acting Central Bank president, also left the administration.

Those resignations were also, in part, a response to a December reshuffle that brought Oscar Valdés — an army officer and former military colleague of Humala’s — to power as prime minister.  His appointment caused several prominent leaders, including former president Alejandro Toledo, to decry the growing militarization of the Humala administration.

Valdés’s resignation last week, and his replacement by Peruvian justice and human rights minister Juan Jiménez, seems calibrated to adjust to many of those criticisms, which are tied to some of Humala’s biggest problems.  Jiménez had increasingly become a key troubleshooter for Humala, especially in contrast to the increasingly unpopular Valdés.

Chief among those problems, however, are the protests that have emerged in the mostly-indigenous Cajamarca and surrounding region in the northern highlands (in South America, as far as culture goes, it is said that altitude often matters more than nationality, but that holds true for politics and economic policy as well). Continue reading One year into the administration of Perú’s Ollanta Humala: a mixed bag →

The Netherlands

Who is Emile Roemer?

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Europeans, including the Dutch, may well be unplugged and disengaged this month.

But ready or not, September 12 is nearly a month away, which means yet another European election — this time in the Netherlands, one of the six founding members of the European Economic Community in 1957, that body would develop into today’s European Union.  Dutch voters will elect 150 members to the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the parliament of the Netherlands.

And today, after years of elections on social issues, the Dutch parliamentary election is poised to be fought, won and lost on one issue: budget austerity and bringing Dutch fiscal policy in line with the European ideal.

Given what we’ve seen this year all across Europe — the success of Alexis Tsipras’s anti-austerity SYRIZA coalition in Greece, the emergence of the anti-austerity Victor Ponta in Romania and the surge of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Front de gauche in the first round of the French presidential election — it’s no surprise that the breakaway pace-setter in the Dutch election has been not any anti-Muslim group, but the Dutch Socialistische Partij (SP, the Socialist Party), led by Emile Roemer.

As I noted last week, the prior 2010 election saw unprecedented levels of fragmentation among the Dutch electorate, and it led to six months of talks before a governing coalition emerged — Mark Rutte and his free-market, liberal Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) ultimately formed a weak minority government in coalition with the once-strong, now-withering center-right Christen-Democratisch Appèl (CDA, Christian Democratic Appeal), with outside support on a vote-by-vote basis from Geert Wilders’s right-wing populist and anti-Muslim Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV, the Party for Freedom).  Rutte’s government fell in April when Wilders denied his support for a budget that would have reduced the Dutch budget deficit to just 3% of GDP next year.

In the current campaign, Wilders has attempted to deploy anti-Europe sentiment with as much gusto as he previously deployed anti-Muslim sentiment in 2010 (including wild rhetoric that would pull the Netherlands out of the eurozone).  But according to the latest IPSOS poll, both Wilders’s PVV and the CDA are sinking.  Even though Rutte’s VVD is holding steady as the top vote-winner, Roemer’s Socialists have vaunted into second-place — and are gaining.  Currently, the Socialists are projected to take 29 seats to 35 seats for Rutte’s VVD.  Other polls, moreover, give the Socialists a lead or put them in a tie with the VVD.

What does that mean? Even if the Socialists cannot form a coalition with, say, the longtime center-left Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, Labour Party), which is currently polling in third place (projected to win 23 seats), the Socialists will nonetheless be a force to be reckoned with as never before.

And that means Emile Roemer will become a key power broker in Dutch — and European — politics.

So who is Roemer — and what can we expect from him?

Roemer remains a bit of a blank slate within the international media — for now, at least.

Continue reading Who is Emile Roemer? →

Egypt

Egypt’s new government sworn in today, featuring continuity from SCAF transitional government

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The first Egyptian cabinet of newly elected Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and his new prime minister Hisham Qandil was sworn in today.

That Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi (pictured above, with US defense secretary Leon Panetta) will continue to serve as defense minister in the cabinet of tells you everything you need to know about Egypt’s new cabinet.

Qandil admitted as much in a press conference following the ceremony — the cabinet will feature continuity over rupture.

Tantawi, Egypt’s minister of defense since 1991 and the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that took over Egypt’s government after the resignation of former president Hosni Mubarak, is the personification of the Egyptian military.  Although it was widely expected that he would continue in some role in Morsi’s government, at least initially, it makes clear that Egypt’s military will still wield a considerable amount of power, notwithstanding the transition to a democratically-elected president.

Otherwise, many of the “new” cabinet ministers are holdovers from the prior transitional government of SCAF prime minister Kamal al-Ganzouri, including the finance minister, Momtaz el-Said, and the foreign minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, both career diplomats.

The remaining positions went mostly to longtime Muslim Brotherhood figures (although not to Khairat al-Shater, the Brotherhood’s first-choice presidential candidate), including:

  • Mostafa Mosaad, a member of the Brotherhood’s direct political vehicle, the Freedom and Justice Party (حزب الحرية والعدالة‎), was appointed higher education minister.
  • Tarek Wafiq, an engineer and head of the FJP’s housing committee, was appointed housing minister.
  • Salah Abdel Maqsoof, an outspoken Muslim Brotherhood journalist, was appointed minister of information (and will, notably, control access to state television and other key media sources).

The SCAF-heavy cabinet is already being criticized as lacking enough fresh faces, lacking women and lacking any political appointees from outside the Muslim Brotherhood.  Qandil’s appointment last week has been subject to much criticism — he’s been perceived as having insufficient political experience, a lacking economic background and very close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of the most promising appointments is the new justice minister, Ahmed Mekky, a prominent and reform-minded judge who is the former vice president of Egypt’s Court of Appeals, and Mohamed Mahsoub, a member of the centrist Al-Wasat party will be the minister of parliamentary affairs.

Despite an initial decision to appoint hard-line Salafist scholar Mohamed Ibrahim as minister of religious endowments, Morsi and Qandil appear to have backed down amid criticism and instead appointed Osama El-Abd, the vice-chancellor of Al-Azhar University, the oldest university in Egypt. Continue reading Egypt’s new government sworn in today, featuring continuity from SCAF transitional government →

Spain

‘Politically bankrupt’ Rajoy running out of options in Spain

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Speigel International earlier this week described a bit of the hopelessness of prime minister Mariano Rajoy who, only eight months into a government that was supposed to allow Spain to turn the corner, is watching his country sink even further into crisis.

Read it all, but this part, in particular, struck me as particularly insightful:

For too long, the prime minister believed that his mere presence at the head of the government was enough to ensure that Spain would stop “being a problem and become part of the solution.”

Rajoy’s bet was that a win by his center-right Partido Popular (PP, People’s Party) over the center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) would be enough to assure investors that Spain could make it through the crisis. Sure enough, Rajoy’s PP won 186 seats to just 110 for the PSOE, even after José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, prime minister since 2004, made clear he was stepping down as prime minister.

But that hasn’t stopped the crisis — if anything, Spain’s nightmare has accelerated in the past eight months, which makes Spiegel‘s description all the more depressing:

And what has Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy done? He hasn’t given a television address or uttered so much as an explanatory or reassuring word to Europe or his people. Instead Rajoy, 57, has disappeared into his office at the Moncloa Palace on the outskirts of the capital Madrid. Some say that he spends his time there staring helplessly and powerlessly at charts. He meets with business leaders like Siemens CEO Peter Löscher in rooms decorated with modern art, and he has even met with Spanish trade union leaders for the first time, though it was after they had already spoken off the record with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Others say that Rajoy is irritating his European partners with hectic phone calls.

This behavior doesn’t inspire confidence. It seems more like a declaration of political bankruptcy.

What went so wrong? Continue reading ‘Politically bankrupt’ Rajoy running out of options in Spain →

Canada, Quebec

Charest makes it official: Québec goes to the polls September 4

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Jean Charest, Québec’s premier since 2003 (pictured above), has dissolved his province’s Assemblée nationale and called a snap election for September 4 — just 33 days away.

His Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) will be seeking its fourth consecutive mandate and Charest will be leading the PLQ for the fifth consecutive time since 1998, when he first left Canadian federal politics for Québecois provincial politics.  He’s been a decade-long fixture of the province’s government, and he starts out the race with even odds at best.

His main opposition is the sovereigntist (and leftist) Parti québécois (PQ), who leader, Pauline Marois, makes Charest look like a star campaigner.

But further to the right is former PQ minister François Legault, whose Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a new center-right party formed only earlier this year, will attempt to pull votes from both the PQ and the PLQ.  Further to the left, Québec solidaire will also attempt to pull seats from the PQ and, to a lesser extent, the PLQ.

So what are the starting positions for the parties? Continue reading Charest makes it official: Québec goes to the polls September 4 →