Longtime conservative Albertan premier Ralph Klein has died

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No one symbolized the conservatism of western Canada more than Ralph Klein, who died today at age 70.

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Elected Alberta’s premier in 1992, Klein served until 2006, championing the ‘Alberta Advantage,’ and presiding over what became Canada’s wealthiest province, the heartland of today’s Conservative Party.

Tory leader Stephen Harper has represented a Calgary riding in the House of Commons since 1993, and the Reform Party, later the Canadian Alliance, got its start among Calgarian conservatives like Harper and Preston Manning.  Harper engineered a merger with the then-decimated Progressive Conservative Party at the national level, resulting in the united center-right government he leads today.

Klein, who remained firmly planted in Albertan provincial politics, nonetheless became the ideological godfather of the more fiscally conservative, more Western, and more aggressive conservatism that came to Canadian federal politics in the early 2000s under Harper.

Despite his resignation (with a push from his Progressive Conservative colleagues) as premier in 2006, Klein’s legacy may also be one of the reasons that Albertan premier Alison Redford, despite slumping polls, held on to win a full term as premier in the April 2012 Albertan provincial election in the face of a more stridently populist and socially conservative challenge from the newer Wildrose Party.  The win continued a Progressive Conservative run of power that’s been uninterrupted since 1971.

As Don Braid of The Calgary Herald writes, much of Klein’s legacy is in his campaign to eliminate Alberta’s debt:

It’s deeply ironic that at the moment of his death, Ralph Klein’s legacy has been formally overturned, as a new wave of Alberta politicians revert to debt, borrowing and deficit as the chief tools of government. Klein banned those things. He paid off debt and then made it illegal. A man who knew how to squeeze a penny, he was the perfect leader to throw off the crushing debt Alberta faced when he took office in late 1992.

Read it all, but there’s much more from The Calgary Herald here, including this video and this timeline of his life.

Colby Cosh at MacLean’s notes his legacy on debt, but also on federalism and the assertion of Alberta’s growing regional power, despite Klein’s prickly attitude toward eastern Canada — he once termed eastern migrants to his province ‘creeps and bums’:

The ways in which Ralph Klein is misunderstood outside Alberta seem to mirror the ways in which Alberta itself is misunderstood; although attachment to religion is actually lower in Alberta than in Ontario and the Atlantic Provinces, it is Alberta that is thought of as an atavistic, “socially conservative” hate factory. The real difference between Alberta and other provinces is more structural than ideological or religious. Alberta has a strong lingering streak of laissez-faire utilitarianism because most of its citizens are no more than a generation removed from those who came here for jobs.

The Globe and Mail gathers some of Klein’s more memorable quotes here, including this quintessential quote from when he was Calgary’s mayor from 1980 to 1989:

“Everyone knows I have sins. I eat too much. I still drink. I gamble and, God forbid, I still see some of my old friends.” – In April, 1982, explaining how he hadn’t let being mayor completely alter his lifestyle.

The Toronto Star‘s Petti Fong considers Klein’s relationship with the Chinese community here, and Don Martin’s take at The National Post here.

Photo credit to John Ulan of the Canadian Press.

Bachelet enters Chilean presidential race as top contender

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Michelle Bachelet returned to Chile on Wednesday, wasting no time in declaring her much-awaited candidacy for president, with an air of inevitability that makes former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s hold on the U.S. presidency in 2016 seem tenuous.chile

Bachelet (pictured above), who previously served as president from 2006 to 2010, and more recently as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, would be the first Chilean president in the post-Pinochet era to win a second term to the presidency.

Under the Chilean constitution, no president may run for reelection, though presidents can return for non-consecutive terms.

She is almost certainly a shoo-in to win the presidential nomination of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy), usually known simply as the Concertación, the coalition of center-left parties that has dominated Chilean politics in the era following the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Bachelet is also the favorite to win the general election on November 17 — although incumbent Sebastián Piñera will not be on the ballot, he’s had a turbulent time as president since his election in 2010.  Piñera’s greatest contribution to Chilean democracy may well have been his election — after running a moderate, respectful campaign, his election marked the return of conservatives to power for the first time since Pinochet left office, trumpeting the full normalization of Chilean politics.

But Piñera will leave office relatively unpopular — despite his government’s successful rescue of 33 trapped miners in October 2010, more recent troubles, such as rising poverty, income inequality and massive student protests in 2011 and 2012 in favor of the creation of new public universities, the end of for-profit education, and a new system to facilitate the financing of secondary education, have left his administration unloved and mocked for its numerous hiccups and misfortunes — so-called piñericosas.

The two likely candidates to challenge Bachelet will face off in a June primary among the parties of the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change), which formed in 2009 to boost Piñera’s campaign as a merger of two parties (and some other smaller parties):

  • The Unión Democrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union), a party formed in the early 1980s among civilian supporters of Pinochet’s economic policies and military rule, and which moderated itself in the early 2000s.
  • Renovación Nacional (RN, National Renewal), which broke away from the UDI over the issue of the 1988 plebiscite on Pinochet’s continued rule — although RN ultimately largely supported Pinochet’s reelection, it originally favored an alternative candidate.  Piñera himself comes from the RN leadership, not from the UDI.

The UDI’s has indicated that its candidate will be independent Laurence Golborne, an engineer by training and the former CEO of Cencosud, a Chilean retailer.  He was, until recently, the Chilean minister of public works and before that, the former minister of mining and energy, where he became very popular in the wake of the government’s successful 2010 Copiapó mine rescue.  The RN candidate, Andrés Allamand, until recently, was Chile’s defense minister.

A CEP Chile poll in early January showed 49% favored Bachelet, while 11% supported Golborne and just 5% backed Allamand.  Another late January poll showed Bachelet leading 42% to 15% for Golborne and 5% for Allamand.

That lead will invariably narrow between now and November, however, when the center-right candidate emerges in June.  Despite the highest income inequality in the Organization for Economic Development (note that Chile is the only South American OECD country), Chile’s strong mining industry has powered growth rates of 6% since 2011, its GDP actually growing faster than before a temporary dip during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

It’s quite incredible to think that the Concertación, which controlled the Chilean presidency from 1990 to 2010, held consecutive power three years longer than the military mostly under Pinochet (17 years).  The Concertación includes four parties: Continue reading Bachelet enters Chilean presidential race as top contender

Book review: ‘Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela’ by Rory Carroll

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I’ve been reading an increasing amount of material in advance of the Venezuelan presidential election on April 14 (and will be covering it in Caracas), so luckily for me, Rory Carroll’s newly released book on the Chávez era was right on cue.Venezuela Flag Icon

Like most thoughtful writing on Chávez and chavismo, Carroll notes how incredibly complex the phenomenon has been — Chávez is neither hero nor villain, and he captures with credibility the reasons why Chávez was, and remains, so popular with a majority of Venezuelans, especially the country’s poorest.

It’s a fascinating read throughout, very highly recommended — I learned something about Venezuela on nearly every page.

The most jaw-dropping parts of the book are those that explain the ‘through-the-looking-glass’ nature of Miraflores, the presidential palace, and El Silencio, the colonial Caracas neighborhood that’s home to Venezuela’s government ministries.

This part of the book felt inspired by Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Emperor, a short (perhaps fictionalized) work on the final years of Ethiopian emperor Haile Sellassie II’s reign, so thick does the sycophancy hang in the air among Venezuela’s ministers — ministers nervously laugh over Chávez’s public claim that capitalism may have killed off life on Mars, and they fret when suddenly Chávez appeared in a yellow shirt (not the trademark red shirt that had become associated with his Bolivarian revolution) and announced there was too much read.  What follows is something out of Kapuściński or even Kafka:

Consternation around the palace. What to do? Some ministers hesitantly abandoned the color, worrying it was a trick.  Others flashed just a bit of red, trying to gauge the correct level.  When, a few weeks later, the comandante resumed wearing red again without elaboration, the crisis passed, and ministers reverted to red.

The winner of the survival game, Jorge Giordani, Chávez’s longtime finance minister, comes off as especially craven and incompetent, the ‘monk,’ a man of austere personal finances who turned a blind eye to widespread corruption and economic mismanagement, all while expending energy to retain his own favor in the administration.

The Castros in Cuba come off as wily as ever, having tapped into Chávez a willing disciple (or, less charitably, a dupe) to provide the ostracized island with precious fuel subsidies and cheap credit, and the relatively rapid infiltration of the G2 Cuban intelligence apparatus into Chávez’s security regime.

Here too are also details from the ill-fated April 11, 2002 coup against Chávez, and Carroll here paints one of the most damning portraits of Pedro Carmona, who took power for just hours and who, ‘drunk with power,’ literally failed to fit into the gold-plated sphinx chair, feet dangling, in the presidential office in Miraflores.

There are anecdotes a-plenty, too, like the episode of ¡Alo, Presidente! in which Carroll is invited to ask Chávez a question, lobs a mildly critical question, and is treated to a long diatribe about colonialism in the New World, Christopher Columbus and, oddly enough, given Carroll’s Irish background, the British monarchy.

We meet Giovanni Scutaro, tailor to chavismo (and, one suspects, everyone with enough money for fashion in Caracas), the American writer and Chávez enthusiast Eva Gollinger, and Baldo Sansó, a fast-talking executive at Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.

Later in 2010 during an energy shortage, we’re treated to Chávez counseling Venezuela to take three-minute showers:

‘Some people sing in the shower, in the shower half an hour.  No, kids, three minutes is more than enough.  I’ve counted, three minutes, and I don’t stink.’ He wagged his finger. ‘If you are going to lie back in the bath, with the soap, and you turn on the, what’s it called, the Jacuzzi… Imagine that, what kind of communism is that? We’re not in times of Jacuzzi.’

But it’s not all fun and games and showers.

Despite the histrionics of U.S. conservatives and others, Chávez’s administration been a largely bloodless regime, though there are plenty of chilling tales human rights shortcomings: stories of folks like Raúl Baduel, who was imprisoned on a politically motivated conviction after asserting the separation of the Venezuelan military from politics and becoming increasingly critical of Chávez’s rule, and María Lourdes Afiuni, a judge who delivered an acquittal of disgraced superstar Eligio Cedeño, who thereupon found herself imprisoned.  We also meet the Nuñez brothers of the El Cementerio barrio, caught in a bleak life-and-death struggle for survival as the leaders of El Cementerio’s gang in the rough hills above the Caracas valley.

Though Carroll could hardly have known his book would emerge nearly simultaneous with the death of Chávez, its publication comes at a time when both Venezuelans and non-Venezuelans are wondering about what comes next — under either Nicolás Maduro or Henrique Capriles.

I would have liked to see more discussion on how chavismo actually replicates many of the elements of the petrostate of the regimes that preceded it in Venezuela, and in other petrostate regimes throughout the world, as well as more discussion of the future of chavismo after Chávez, but those are topics that could easily be volumes of their own.  And it’s notable that neither Maduro nor Capriles play a starring role over the past 14 years.  Máduro himself is a bit player in the book, a sycophant who’s managed to survive in El Silencio from the earliest days of Chávez’s ‘Movement for a Fifth Republic’:

Whatever hour Chávez phoned, whatever law he wanted amended or revoked, Maduro assented.  He became head of the assembly in 2005 and then, despite not speaking any foreign languages, foreign minister in 2006, a post he held for six years.  He crisscrossed the world following Chávez’s orderes and reading Chávez’s script, never deviating, never ad-libbing, never proposing his own initiatives… When the comandante praised Maduro in public — ‘Look at Nicolás there, handsome in his suit, not driving a bus anymore’ — he just smiled.  Foreign ambassadors said the foreign minister grew into his job but that he never took a big decision.  Only Chávez was allowed to shine, so Maduro did not shine.  And thus he prospered.  He acquired an extensive wardrobe, put on weight, grew thick around the trunk.

That perhaps explains why Maduro, not the more cunning current assembly president, Diosdado Cabello, won Chávez’s pre-death endorsement as his successor.

Carroll begins with an anecdote from an interview from beloved Latin American writer Gabriel García Márquez, who wrote the following about Chávez on the eve of his inauguration in 1999:

While he sauntered off with his bodyguards of decorated officers and close friends, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had just been traveling and chatting pleasantly with two opposing men.  One to whom the caprices of fate had given an opportunity to save his country.  The other, an illusionist, who could pass into the history books as just another despot.

Carroll’s sophisticated treatment of chavismo produces examples of all of the above — Chávez as savior, Chávez as illusionist and Chávez as despot — and takes chavismo up as a mirror to reflect how all of those impressions have marked Venezuela for the past decade and a half.

First Past the Post: March 28-29

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Light links at the end of this week, apologies!

East and South Asia

Pervez Musharraf goes to court.

Things are getting real on the Korean peninsula.

Via Tyler Cowen, a defense of the Chinese political system.

North America

It’s a fool’s errand to stand in the way of this, but here’s the meat-and-potatoes argument against same-sex marriage in the United States.

Venezuela

A former Bush administration Latin American official argues that United States actually tried to save Hugo Chávez’s life, and Foreign Policy prints it.

Latin America / Caribbean

Bolivia is about to become the Saudi Arabia of lithium.

Chilean student protests become heated.

Argentina tangoes one step closer to a sovereign default.

Perú controversially reinstates a military draft.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Kenya awaits a Supreme Court ruling Saturday.

Fallout from the CAR coup.

Can you imagine Barack Obama on a trip like the one Xi Jinping is now finishing — in Congo?

Europe

No new government in Italy after a day of talks headed by president Giorgio Napolitano.

Banks reopened in Cyprus.

Felix Salmon wonders if Cyprus will take the Ecuadorian path.

Middle East and North Africa

A comeback for Najib Mikati as Lebanon’s prime minister?