Monthly Archives: November 2012

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: November 30

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Many liberals and Islamists alike are boycotting tomorrow’s Kuwaiti parliamentary elections.

Inder Kumar Gujral, a former prime minister of India from 1997-98, has died.

Cairo’s street graffiti.

Nigel Farage gloats after his UK Independence Party places second in by-election result.

Growing pains for Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto with Diet elections in Japan just 17 days away.

Further thoughts on Japan’s political fragmentation.

Meanwhile, Tokyo also has a mayoral race on December 16.

Enrique Peña Nieto, on the eve of his inauguration, announces his cabinet. [Spanish]

Former French president Jacques Chirac celebrates his 80th birthday quietly.

Germany approves €43.7 billion in Greek aid.

Georgia’s new foreign secretary comes to Washington.

Protests continue against the new Egyptian constitution and the process by which it was adopted.

A cabinet reshuffle in Ethiopia.

 

South Korea

Ahn’s exit clears way for competitive Moon presidential campaign against Park in South Korea

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Last Friday, independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo dropped out of the South Korean presidential race.

Without a doubt, his decision has transformed the race from a three-way contest between one conservative and two liberals, which was destined to favor the conservative candidate, Park Geen-hye of the Saenuri Party (새누리당 or the ‘Saenuri-dang’) into a direct showdown between the two dominant brands of politics in South Korea over the past half-century.

Before his withdrawal, Ahn was splitting the support of liberal voters with Moon Jae-in of the Democratic United Party (민주통합당, or the ‘Minju Tonghap-dang’).

Now Moon and Park are in a much closer race, although the latest polls give Park a slight edge (the latest Realmeter poll from Nov. 30 shows Park with 49.9% support and Moon with just 44.2%).  Polls routinely showed that before his withdrawal, Ahn, if anything, was the stronger candidate against Park (not Moon).

It’s still unclear why Ahn dropped out so suddenly — in an interview last week prior to his withdrawal, he indicated he had no intentions of bowing out.  But by falling on his own sword, Ahn has made himself even more popular by apparently putting the cause of defeating Park ahead of his own personal ambitions.  Now in the position of a potential kingmaker, Ahn can trade his vigorous support for Moon (Ahn has already somewhat gracefully called on his supporters to vote for Moon) for a role in a potential Moon administration, which could give Ahn governmental experience in advance of the 2017 election.

For such a liberal candidate, it’s a little shocking to see polls that show only 50.7% of Ahn’s former backers are committed to Moon with less than three weeks to go until the election, even though over 70% of Ahn’s supporters want to see a change in administration from the current Saenuri Party.  Fully 26.4% of Ahn backers apparently support Park and 21.9% remain undecided — Moon cannot win unless he (with or without Ahn’s help) can migrate more of Ahn’s former supporters into his own camp.

Ahn’s popularity has been somewhat of a phenomenon in South Korea since he first flirted with running in Seoul’s mayoral race in October 2011 — although he failed to enter that race, which polls showed he could have won, he backed Park Won-soon, another liberal independent, who ultimately won the Seoul election.  Ahn spent the better part of 2012 teasing a presidential campaign that he announced only in September of this year.

Ahn, himself, is a businessman by background — he founded AhnLab, Inc. in March 1995 (think of it as South Korea’s version of McAfee or any other anti-virus software company).  Until he launched his now-aborted presidential campaign, Ahn was a graduate school dean at Seoul National University.   Continue reading Ahn’s exit clears way for competitive Moon presidential campaign against Park in South Korea →

Egypt

Morsi: ‘We’re learning. We’re learning how to be free.’

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Less than a week after Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi’s extraordinary decree asserting exception presidential powers, he’s given an English language interview to Time magazine.

It’s incredibly fascinating.

Read it all.

Among other things (including a hard-to-follow metaphor about Planet of the Apes — the old one, not the new one), Morsi shows no regret about his decree:

What I can see now is, the Egyptians are free. They are raising their voices when they are opposing the President and when they are opposing what’s going on. And this is very important. It’s their right to express and to raise their voices and express their feelings and attitudes. But it’s my responsibility. I see things more than they do…

But there is some violence. Also, there is some relation shared between these violent acts and some symbols of the previous regime. I think you and I — I have more information, but you can feel that there is something like this in this matter.

I’m sure Egyptians will pass through this. We’re learning. We’re learning how to be free.

I’ve typically been inclined to give Morsi the benefit of the doubt (i.e., during the U.S. embassy protests earlier in September), but last week’s decree was difficult to understand — and today’s rushed vote by the constituent assembly to push through a new constitution is equally troubling.

Morsi has had to balance a difficult set of competing interests, and until last week, I thought he has done a better-than-expected job in managing those competing interests, but I wonder how much longer the current crisis can go on until Egyptian’s still-powerful military begins to assert itself.

Ethiopia, Personal

Some thoughts on Meles Zenawi’s legacy in Ethiopia

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Although Meles Zenawi died in mid-August, he’s still very much an active presence in Ethiopia — so much that he still eclipses his successor, prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn.

Not to be flip, but I know a personality cult when I see one — and no matter where you go in Ethiopia, Meles follows.

He looks down from large signs, not just in the capital of Addis Ababa, but far beyond throughout the Amharic and Tigray hinterlands of northern Ethiopia as well.  He’s also on dashboards of vehicles, and he graces storefronts, the stalls in labyrinthine markets and insurance companies, not to mention government offices and museums..  In downtown Addis, near the Hilton, there’s an entire wall featuring a dozen or so larger-than life panels picturing Meles.

You’d be forgiven if you thought Meles was actually still in charge, although there are more than enough memorial displays, too, to let you know Ethiopia’s still in a sort of mourning:

In the ten days I spent in northern and central Ethiopia, I found much in the country — 85 million people and growing fast — and its people to give me hope about the country’s future, but I also saw a lot of room for institutional improvement — in education and literacy, in transportation and infrastructure, in providing services to improve health and lessen poverty, and also in building more robust democratic institutions and better regional relations.

In the same way, I found that if you dig underneath the surface of it all, many Ethiopians have an equally conflicted view of Meles’s legacy. Continue reading Some thoughts on Meles Zenawi’s legacy in Ethiopia →

Italy

Bersani leads as Italian ‘centrosinistra’ primary heads to Sunday runoff

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After last weekend’s first round of the primaries to choose the Italian center-left (‘centrosinistra‘) candidate for prime minister in advance of expected national elections in April, the current leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Pier Luigi Bersani looks like a favorite — even if just slightly — to win the runoff this Sunday.

Bersani (pictured above) won 44.9% of last weekend’s primary vote of around 3 million Italian voters, while the youthful mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, placed a close second with 35.5%.  The two faced off in a television debate earlier Wednesday, although the two candidate disagree more on tactics and broad themes than individual policies.

The regional president of Puglia — Italy’s southeastern corner — Nichy Vendola, who is openly gay and the most leftist of the three candidates, as well as the founder and leader of the more radical Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom), placed third with 15.6% — the SEL and a handful of other small parties have agreed to unite behind the winner of the centrosinistra primary as the prime ministerial candidate of the broad Italian left.

So with the centrosinistra primary set to end with the December 2 runoff between Bersani and Renzi, it appears that Bersani will win, despite the momentum behind Renzi’s candidacy and his promise to bring a new generation of leadership to Italy.  Vendola, earlier today, endorsed Bersani after indicating earlier that Bersani’s words were more ‘profumare di sinistra‘ — perfumed with leftism — than Renzi’s.

The battle between Renzi and Bersani is less ideological than generational — at 61, Bersani personifies the boring and staid leadership of the past 20 years of the Italian left.  At age 37, however, Renzi is something quite new in Italian politics.  His campaign’s theme is essentially that Italy is in need of a new generation of leadership — namely, Renzi’s, on the basis that a Renzi premiership would open a new and more productive era in Italian governance.  He’s not only called for an end to the era of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, but for a clean sweep of the Italian left as well.  Renzi’s even picked a fight with Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Italian carmaker Fiat.

Both Renzi and Bersani have pledged to continue the era of budget discipline enacted by Italy’s current ‘technocratic’ prime minister Mario Monti, who took office in December 2011.

Monti has consistently refused to run for prime minister in his own right in the upcoming elections.  Monti, however, has indicated that he would be available to serve as technocratic prime minister again in the event of a hung parliament, and business leaders overwhelmingly favor a second Monti government to see through the budget cuts, labor reforms and tax increases that have brought Italy back from the brink of financial crisis.

Both candidates, too, have pledged to pursue more growth-oriented policies, even though it remains unclear exactly what either candidate could actually accomplish in an era of austerity throughout much of Europe.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ideological differences between the two.

Bersani, with greater ties to Italy’s largest union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL, General Confederation of Labour), comes from a stronger social democratic tradition than Renzi, who has styled himself as a modernizer not unlike former UK prime minister Tony Blair.  Bersani, the son of a mechanic, served as regional president of the leftist region of Emilia-Romagna in central Italy in the 1990s and as minister of economic development under former prime minister Romano Prodi from 2006 to 2008, where he tried to liberalize the Italian labor market.

Renzi, however, has refused to consider a potential governing coalition with the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre), a small centrist group led by Pier Ferdinando Casini.  The UdC essentially represents the remnants of the long-dominant Italian Christian Democrats and, while Casini and the UdC would likely find overlapping interests on economic policy, the UdC, with its ties to the Vatican, remains socially conservative (e.g., it opposes same-sex marriage).  Bersani, although he is seen as slightly more leftist than Renzi, has nonetheless remained open to a coalition with Casini’s centrists.

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to believe that Renzi will actually win on December 2.  The ‘primary’ itself seems skewed in Bersani’s favor — he’s already the leader of the PD, has the support of much of the ‘old guard’ of the Italian left (such as former prime minister and foreign minister Massimo D’Alema), and accordingly, he has access to the left’s strongest party machinery, not to mention the benefit of his CGIL ties.  He now apparently has Vendola’s support from the SEL as well.

Furthermore, in a country that shows perhaps more respect for its elders than anywhere else in Europe, it seems unlikely that Italy will anoint as a potential prime minister someone so incredibly young.  The contest is especially meaningful because the PD looks set to win the upcoming elections (although the contest remains exceptionally fluid and unpredictable, even by the sometime operatic standards of Italian politics).

Continue reading Bersani leads as Italian ‘centrosinistra’ primary heads to Sunday runoff →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: November 28

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An update on Mauritania’s politics, with the return of president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz following his treatment for a gunshot wound last month.

Plan C for Greece.

Who knows why Ahn Cheol-soo does anything anymore?

Even after Oslo, no one said peace in Colombia would be easy.

Eric Pape’s tour de force on the French right’s civil war — the UMP fight between François Fillon and Jean-François Copé.

The UMP may hold a referendum on whether to re-run the leadership vote.

Egypt’s constitution is set to go to a vote on Thursday.

More backsliding in Hungary.

Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert backs Kadima, while former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni is forming a new party to launch her political comeback.

Boris Johnson takes India.

Catalunya’s Republican Left, the second-place winner in Sunday’s election, will not join a formal coalition with Artur Mas’s CiU, but will provide support for Mas’s government.

On the rift between Nigeria’s president and its former president.

On the eve of his inauguration, Mexico’s president-elect Enrique Peña Nieto is ready for his North American close-up.

Israel

What Barak’s apparent departure means for Israeli politics

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Israeli defense minister — and prime minister from 1999 to 2001 — Ehud Barak announced earlier this week that he would not be contesting Israel’s Knesset elections on January 22. 

Although he’ll stay on as defense minister until a new government is formed, Barak’s departure, at age 70, appears to end what has been a long and twisty career in Israeli politics — there remains a chance, however, that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could re-appoint Barak (pictured above with U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton) as defense minister from outside the Knesset if Netanyahu forms the next government.  That outcome, by the way, seems more than plausible, given Barak’s longtime impatience with parliamentarian politics.

A longtime veteran of the Israeli Defense Force and its most decorated veteran (his most famous exploit in Israel’s elite special forces was a commando raid against Palestinians dressed incognito in high heels and a wig), Barak entered politics in 1995 as foreign minister in Shimon Peres’s government and after Peres lost the 1996 Israeli election to Netanyahu, Barak became the leader of Israel’s Labor Party (מפלגת העבודה הישראלית‎).

His political career has been a bit schizophrenic — he won, overwhelming, a race to become prime minister, but he’s more often than not been relatively unsuccessful and unloved in Israeli politics.

In the 1999 direct prime ministerial election, Barak defeated Netanyahu by 56% to 44%.  As prime minister, he oversaw Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon (after more than two decades of occupation) and engaged in the most serious negotiations since 1993 with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (نظمة التحرير الفلسطينية‎), then still under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, culminating in the Camp David summit in 2000 that nearly succeeded in bringing about a peace accord between Israel and the PLO — last week’s Israeli attack on Gaza, masterminded by Barak himself, was a depressingly clear sign that Israeli-Palestinian relations, at least with respect to Gaza, have worsened in the past 12 years.

Barak lost the 2001 election to Likud’s then-leader Ariel Sharon in the wake of the failure of the PLO talks.  He aborted an early attempt to return to the Labor leadership in 2005 (Barak ultimately backed Peres in that year’s leadership race, who lost to Amir Peretz), but won the Labor leadership in 2007 and became defense minister in 2007 under then-prime minister Ehud Olmert.  Although Labor won just 13 seats in the 2009 election — the lowest-ever total for Labor or its predecessor — Barak has continued as defense minister under Netanyahu.  Barak’s continued presence in the Netanyahu government wasn’t without controversy within Labor and in 2011, he left Labor altogether to form his own pro-Netanyahu faction, Independence (סיעת העצמאות‎), comprised of Barak and four other former Labor MKs.

Shelly Yachimovich was elected Labor’s leader in March 2011 and has led the party very much in opposition to Netanyahu, and Yachimovich is generally seen as the chief opposition leader to Netanyahu going into the elections (although she has some competition from political newcomer Yair Lapid and former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni).

Even as relations between the U.S. government under president Barack Obama and Netanyahu remain strained over Iran — and now over Gaza — Barak has long been widely respected by U.S. policymakers as a thoughtful voice within Israel’s government.  Although he has sounded the alarm louder than anyone in Israel’s government over the threat of an Iranian nuclear program, Barak is thought to be a moderating force with respect to any future attack on Iran.

Most immediately, Barak’s departure means that if Netanyahu wins the Jan. 22 elections, as expected, and Barak does not continue as defense minister, it will result in the amplification of relatively more hawkish voices of allies such as Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s foreign minister and leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu (ישראל ביתנו‎, ‘Israel is Our Home’) party that recently merged with Netanyahu’s Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎) for purposes of the upcoming elections. It would also mean that yet another figure with the gravitas of a former Israeli prime minister — and a figure who carries Netanyahu’s trust and respect — will no longer be around to counterbalance Netanyahu: Continue reading What Barak’s apparent departure means for Israeli politics →

Basque Country, Catalunya, Galicia, Spain

Rajoy survives election season in Spain’s most separatist regions

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It’s not exactly accurate to say that Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy has ‘won’ in the aftermath of three regional elections in the past two months in Galicia, Euskadi (i.e., the Basque Country) and Catalunya.

But it’s fair to say that, compared to the worst-case result in each region, Rajoy’s government is likely relieved at the results of each of the three elections, especially last weekend’s Catalan elections, which threatened not only to undermine Rajoy’s federal authority, but to undermine the stability of Spain as a nation-state.

Rajoy (pictured above, right, with Catalan president Artur Mas) has had an incredibly difficult first year since taking office in December 2011 — he’s  continued Spanish austerity policies in the face of continued recession and amid the highest unemployment within the eurozone (over 25%).  With Spanish voters disillusioned about the economy and with Catalan voters, in particular, agitating for greater autonomy — if not full independence from Spain’s federal union — Rajoy and his center-right Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party), together with the PP’s various local, regional iterations, were playing defense, at best, in each region.

In each election, however, there are reasons for Rajoy to take heart.

It’s obvious that the autumn’s regional elections could have been much worse: Rajoy’s party could have lost power in Galicia, the former radical leftist ETA sympathizers could have won control of the Basque government, and an outright majority win by Mas and the CiU in Catalunya would have likely caused an immediate political and, indeed, constitutional crisis — and, given the bond market’s jitters, likely a financial crisis as well.

Continue reading Rajoy survives election season in Spain’s most separatist regions →

Sierra Leone

Final Sierra Leone election results confirm Koroma’s reelection, APC parliamentary win

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The results of Sierra Leone’s November 18 presidential election were finalized late last week — and president Ernest Bai Koroma, the candidate of the ruling All People’s Congress (APC), first elected in the last election (very narrowly) in 2007, was reelected by a robust margin.  Koroma has already been re-inaugurated, in fact, despite protests of fraud from the opposition.

Koroma won 58.7% of the vote against Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), who won just 37.4%.  Bio, who participated in a coup in 1996 before helping to reestablish a more democratic government in the midst of Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, briefly served as Sierra Leone’s president in the aftermath of the 1996 coup.  Koroma needed to win 55% of the vote outright in order to avoid a runoff, although no additional candidate, aside from Bio, won a significant share of the vote.

Koroma’s APC also appears to have won a majority of the seats in Sierra Leone’s 124-member unicameral parliament — today’s preliminary results showed the APC with 67 seats (an increase on the 59 seats it held after the 2007 election) to just 42 seats for the SLPP.

Ultimately, Koroma’s APC won its base in the north, the heartland of the Temne ethnic group, while Bio won in the SLPP’s southern base, where the Mende ethnic group predominates.  The lopsided victory owes somewhat to Koroma’s victory in Kono district.  In the map above, Koroma won the northern districts (shown in black), and Bio won the southern districts (shown in grey).

Kono, the east-central district that borders Guinea directly to its east (it’s the southeastern most district that Koroma won, shown in black above), is the most diamond-rich area of Sierra Leone, the source of those infamous ‘blood diamonds’ that so plagued the country during its civil war.  It’s also one of the most diverse districts of Sierra Leone, in terms of both ethnic groups and religions (around 73% of Sierra Leone and are Muslim, though the country has a strong Christian minority), making it somewhat of a ‘swing’ district as well.

Corruption remains a problem in Sierra Leone, but Koroma — and his predecessor, the SLPP’s Ahmad Tejan Kabbah — has worked to rebuild Sierra Leone’s democratic, legal and economic institutions since 2002 when the civil war ended.  In particular, Koroma’s administration has introduced free health care for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under age 5, and it has rebuilt roads and hydroelectric capacity.

Sunday’s election was the third since the end of the civil war, and although Koroma will likely benefit from robust GDP growth in Sierra Leone (6% in 2011, for example), he’ll face the challenge of a country still mired more in poverty than flush with mineral wealth.  Nonetheless, Koroma will turn to several foreign development issues, including the awarding of contracts for mining and for offshore oil exploration.

Although international observers have praised the elections as largely peaceful, fair and free, Bio and the SLPP have accused the APC of committing fraud in the election:

“The process was fraudulent and the results do not reflect the will of Sierra Leoneans,” [Bio] said.

“The party has raised concerns about electoral irregularities including faked and unstamped reconciliation and results forms, pre-marked ballot papers, ballot stuffing and overvoting in Kono (diamond-rich east), the western area and the northern province.

Catalunya, Spain

Mas push for CiU dominance — and Catalan independence — backfires

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When Artur Mas (pictured above) called early elections in late September, there was every reason to believe he would improve the position of his autonomist, center-right party, Convergència i Unió (CiU, Convergence and Union), in the wake of protests in Barcelona and throughout Catalunya (specifically on Sept. 11, a nationalist holiday in Catalunya) in favor of greater independence from Spain’s beleaguered federal government. 

Even as recently as a month ago, it seemed that CiU was poised to gain enough seats to take an absolute majority in the 135-member Catalan parliament (the Parlament de Catalunya).

Instead, Mas’s party lost 12 seats and will fall to just 50 seats in the Catalan parliament.  The CiU has long been Catalunya’s dominant party, and it controlled Catalunya’s regional parliament from 1980 until 2003 — it has won the largest share of seats in every regional election since Spain’s return to democracy, and that was always unlikely to change after Sunday’s election.  Moreover, the result leaves the CiU in a stronger position than after the 2003 and 2006 elections, when a resurgent federalist, center-left Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC, Socialists’ Party of Catalunya) won enough seats to lead governing coalitions in the regional government.

All the same, Mas’s gambit — hopping on the bandwagon of wide Catalan discontent by wrapping himself in the cause of Catalan independence — has clearly backfired, and Mas will have fallen back from a near-absolute majority status two years sooner than necessary.

The CiU won just 30.68% of the vote on Sunday, a drop of 7.75% from the 2010 election that returned the CiU to power.

Meanwhile, the PSC won 14.43% and just 20 seats — eight fewer than its historically poor result in 2010.

The ‘winner’ of the election in relative terms is clearly the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, Republican Left of Catalunya) — a leftist party in favor of Catalan independence, which won 13.68% and 21 seats, giving it the second-largest number of seats in the parliament (although just barely).  The CiU will most likely seek a governing coalition with the ERC for a broad separatist coalition.  Although the ERC joined in a governing coalition with the PSC from 2003 to 2010, its current leader since 2011, Oriol Junqueras, has moderated the ERC’s sometimes-radical leftist tone, while pulling the ERC toward a more pro-independence line.

Both moves make it a likelier coalition partner for the CiU, and Junqueras looks set to become the second-most important politician in Catalunya after Mas.  The ERC has indicated, however, that it will seek some moderation of the CiU’s support for austerity policies in exchange for joining any coalition.  If negotiations fail with the ERC, however, the CiU might also seek a coalition with the PSC or other parties.

The Partit Popular de Catalunya (PPC, People’s Party of Catalunya) — the local variant of Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) won 12.99% and gained one seat for a total of 19.

The Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds – Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (ICV-EUiA), a green/leftist coalition, won 9.89% and 13 seats, while Ciutadans – Partit de la Ciutadania (C’s, Citizens — Party of the Citizenry), a center-left, federalist and euroskeptic Catalan party, won 7.58% and nine seats.  A group of radical leftists, the Candidatures d’Unitat Popular (CUP — Popular Unity Candidates), broke through for the first time at the regional level with 3.48% and three seats.

To understand Sunday’s vote, it’s helpful to look at the result on three axes:

  • On the axis of ‘federalist’ parties (PSC, PPC and Ciutadans) versus autonomist and pro-independence parties (everyone else), the ‘federalists’ won 48 seats to 87 seats for the ‘separatists.’  If you break down the 2010 result, this is a one-seat ‘gain’ for ‘separatists.’ So the Catalan parliament will actually remain remarkably stable in terms of the balance of power on the separatist axis.
  • On the axis of center-right parties (CiU and PPC) versus leftist parties of all stripes, it’s clear that Sunday was a win for the broad ‘left’: the center-right parties, together, won 80 seats in 2010 versus just 55 for leftist parties; in 2012, the broad ‘right’ will control just 69 seats to 66 seats for the broad ‘left.’
  • But the real story of the election comes when you look at the axis of parties that are ‘tainted’ with having supported austerity policies — that includes not just the PPC and CiU, but also the PSC, which controlled Catalunya’s fiscal policy through 2010 and is the local arm of the national center-left Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) that governed Spain until December 2011 and implemented the first of Spain’s federal austerity policies.  Those three parties’ share of the Catalan parliament’s seats dropped from 108 to 89 on Sunday, while the other parties — all of which are anti-austerity and/or protest parties of some degree — surged from 27 seats to 46 seats.

Taken together, the result indicates that Catalans haven’t necessarily reached a point of historically high support for independence as much as they, like most electorates throughout Europe in the past three years, remain weary of recession and unemployment, coupled simultaneously with budget cuts and tax increases.

At the end of the day, when you get past all of the sturm und drang about Catalan independence leading up to the election, the Catalan result fits fairly neatly within the context of the wider eurozone debate (which Edward Hugh noted back in October).  I’ll have some further thoughts later today or tomorrow in a separate post on what the result means for ‘Catalan independence’ as such.  Continue reading Mas push for CiU dominance — and Catalan independence — backfires →

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: November 26

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I’m back from Ethiopia — I’ll have many more thoughts on Ethiopian politics, last week’s electoral politics from Spain to Egypt to Sierra Leone, not to mention a plethora of elections in December and January.

In the meanwhile, some daily links to get back in the swing of things.

* * * *

The new governor of the Bank of England is… the governor of the Bank of Canada. The view from Ottawa.

British conservatives are having jitters about gay marriage in the United Kingdom.

Reassurances about Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah following health problems and surgery.

Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra is facing a vote of no confidence over corruption charges.

South Korea’s presidential campaign officially kicks off, following the withdrawal on Friday of independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo.

Japan’s LDP leader and former prime minister Shinzō Abe is calling for a full-fledged Japanese military.

Germany’s Pirate Party is still struggling over its policy agenda.

Algirdas Butkevičius has been officially elected prime minister by Lithuania’s Seimas.

Jean-François Copé is confirmed as the leader of France’s center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire.

Pier Luigi Bersani narrowly leads Florence mayor Matteo Renzi in the contest to become the prime ministerial candidate for the Italian center-left, with a runoff set for December 2.

Silvio Berlusconi is (once again) threatening a comeback to become to prime ministerial candidate for the Italian center-right.

Mohamed ElBaradei speaks out against Mohammed Morsi’s controversial decree from last week asserting extraordinary powers.

Catalan president Artur Mas remained defiant despite setbacks in Sunday’s regional elections.

Belgrade mayor Dragan Đilas is the new opposition leader in Serbia after his election as the new leader of the Democratic Party.

Georgia’s new prime minister is already looking to find ways to curb Mikheil Saakashvili’s powers.

Israeli defense minister and former prime minister Ehud Barak is leaving frontline politics.

Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, meanwhile, are joining forces in advance of January’s Knesset elections in Israel.

Sierra Leone’s reelected president Ernest Bai Koroma pledges economic growth following first-round electoral victory last week.

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard is in hot water over a 20-year-old union fund.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford is removed from office.

The shooting death of boxing champion Héctor ‘Macho’ Camacho underscores Puerto Rico’s growing crime problem.

Elton John dedicates his Beijing concert to dissident artist Ai Weiwei.

Felix Salmon is the latest to forecast the coming Argentine debt crisis.

 

 

France

Four reasons why Cope’s narrow Sunday win of France’s UMP leadership could be ruinous

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After a tense Monday during which both candidates declared victory and accused the other of fraud, it appears that Jean-François Copé (pictured above) has emerged as the presumptive leader of the French right.

With just a 98-vote margin, Copé won the election for general secretary of the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, after an election held among UMP members on November 18.  Copé defeated former prime minister François Fillon by about 50.03% to 49.97%.

Although Copé has served as general secretary since 2010, this election has taken on significant importance as a proxy fight not only for the upper hand to win the UMP’s 2017 presidential nomination, but as a proxy fight for the future of the French right.  Fillon, a cosmopolitan and relatively moderate figure, was viewed by the French public as more serious about government than Sarkozy, and it was Fillon who pushed through many of Sarkozy’s reforms as the head of his government.  Fillon, generally speaking, is more popular among the French electorate than Copé.

So there’s good cause for the French right to be worried about Copé’s victory.  Here are four reasons why. Continue reading Four reasons why Cope’s narrow Sunday win of France’s UMP leadership could be ruinous →

Sierra Leone

Koroma leads provisional count in Sierra Leone

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It appears that — from provisional results at least — that Sierra Leone’s president Ernest Bai Koroma is leading in the count following the November 17 election.

The provisional results are just that, though, so there’s nothing official and there’s nothing indicating that Koroma has yet cleared the 55% for direct reelection (thereby avoiding a runoff).  His chief opponent, Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), who actually served briefly as acting president in 1996 following a coup against Sierra Leone’s increasingly corrupt government, has certainly not conceded the race.

Koroma’s party, the All People’s Congress (APC) is doing much better, accordingly to those results, than it did in the prior 2007 election in the key diamond-rich province of Kono, control of which featured prominently in the decade-long civil war that ended in 2012.  As predicted, the APC’s result is strong in the country’s north, home to the Temne ethnic group that has historically supported the APC; the SLPP, meanwhile, has done very well in the south, where the Mende ethnic group predominates.

Official results are required to be announced within 10 days of the vote. The European Union’s monitors issued a report yesterday that claimed the elections were well-conducted in a peaceful environment, despite the SLPP’s accusations of voter fraud.

 

 

Italy

Bersani and Renzi offer two distinct personalities for Italy’s center-left

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Many have led Italy’s long-fractuous center-left over the past two decades, but none have succeeded in building a durable coalition that can win an election and govern for a whole parliament.

Achille Occhetto, the leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano, Italy’s then-Communist Party, failed miserably in the 1994 elections against Silvio Berlusconi.  Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome throughout much of the 1990s, led the center-left L’Ulivo ‘Olive Tree’ coalition to defeat in 2001, and his successor, Walter Veltroni led the newly-formed Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) to defeat in 2008.  The only successful leftist has been the plodding Romano Prodi, who barely won the 1996 and 2006 elections, only to watch his coalitions, after both elections, crumble within a year or two.  And that’s not even counting the pretenders, such as Massimo D’Alema, who succeeded Prodi as prime minister from 1998 to 2000 and who served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2008.

With Berlusconi now (mostly) in the sidelines as the upcoming general election approaches, the Italian left is hoping to change that, and the first step will be November 25’s primary election to determine who will lead Italy’s broad left into the general elections, which will be held on or before April 13.  In addition to the PD, the more radical left Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of Puglia’s regional president Nicchi Vendola, the minor Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI, Italian Socialist Party), the centrist Alleanza per l’Italia (ApI, Alliance for Italy) launched by Rutelli in 2009 and the perennial anti-corruption party Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) led by former prosecutor Antonio di Pietro.

The current PD leader, Pier Luigi Bersani (pictured above, top), follows in the long line of steady, if boring and uninspired center-left politicians in Italy.  He served as the regional president of the traditional leftist stronghold of Emilia-Romagna in central Italy from 1993 to 1996, as a minister in the Prodi and D’Alema cabinets in the late 1990s and most recently, as the minister of economic development in Prodi’s second government from 2006 to 2008.  As economic development minister, he worked to bring about reforms to liberalize Italy’s labor market and its economy.  But at age 61, Bersani nearly personifies the staid tradition of the Italian left, and he would likely be a prime minister in the Prodi tradition — solidly leftist, but more of the social democratic variety than the socialist.  He has the support of most of the center-left establishment, including that of D’Alema.

His main rival, however, is hoping to end that trend — Matteo Renzi (pictured above, bottom) is the 37-year old mayor of Florence, the largest city in the central region of Tuscany.  Renzi, who served as president of the province of Florence from 2004 to 2009 before his election as mayor, has called on all of the current politicians on the left and the right to step aside to make way for a new generation of leadership — presumably his.

Despite Renzi’s considerably more populist approach to the primaries and to Italian politics, evocative of times of the ‘third-way’ style of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, both Bersani and Renzi would posture more to the center in the general election.

In addition to Bersani and Renzi, Vendola, who was served as Puglia’s leftist — and openly gay — regional president since 2005, is also running, to the strident left of both Bersani and Renzi.  Bruno Tabacci of the ApI, a former regional president of Lombardy, and Laura Puppato of the PD, a regional councillor in Veneto, are also running.

Continue reading Bersani and Renzi offer two distinct personalities for Italy’s center-left →