Daily Archives: August 20, 2013

Venezuela

Where Capriles and the Venezuelan opposition go from here

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Henrique Capriles’s last hopes of winning a recount in the April 2013 presidential election slipped away earlier this month when the chavista-controlled judicial system dismissed his complaints over the election.Venezuela Flag Icon

No one thought that, four months later, the opposition candidate had much of a chance of unseating Nicolás Maduro, no matter whether he actually won more votes.  But the decision two weeks ago of Venezuela’s top constitutional court not only dismissed Capriles’s complaint but fined Capriles around $1,700 for insulting the integrity of the court, and it suggested that Venezuelan prosecutors file a case against Capriles, who is also the governor of Miranda, for offending the institutions of the state.

No one thinks that the April 14 vote was incredibly fair — Maduro’s ruling chavista party, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, United Socialist Party of Venezuela) has co-mingled party and government for so long that it’s impossible to separate the two.  Chavismo remains both the dominant party and ruling ideology in Venezuela, even after Chávez’s death in March.  The Maduro campaign wielded a huge advantage in its access to state-controlled media and funds, and that followed a massive spending spree last year in the leadup to Chávez’s own reelection in October 2012.  But there’s credible evidence that the vote was not incredibly free either, with reports of voter intimidation and manipulation by chavistas and by police and army officials.

Officials in Venezuela’s electoral commission (the CNE) point to a June audit that ‘confirmed’ Maduro’s 1.49% margin of victory.  But the CNE won’t release the logs of voter signatures and fingerprints that correspond to the voting machines, which might otherwise reveal how fraudulent the voting actually was.  Neither Capriles nor the broad opposition group, the Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD, the Democratic Unity Roundtable), believe the result is legitimate.

Meanwhile, the chavistas are engaged in a slow-motion, cold civil war, and the Venezuelan economy is struggling with a combination of low growth, import dependency, depressed oil output, dysfunctional currency markets, and hyperinflation unseen since the 1980s.

So what happens next — and how does the opposition think about the future?  Continue reading Where Capriles and the Venezuelan opposition go from here →

Norway

Despite doubts about far-right Progress Party, no talk of Norwegian ‘grand coalition’

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Though the Høyre (‘Right,’ or Conservative Party) consistently leads polls as the party mostly likely to emerge with the most support in Norway’s September 9 elections, there’s still uncertainty about the future of Norway’s government.norway

That’s because while Conservative leader Erna Solberg is very likely to become Norway’s next prime minister and the Conservatives are widely tipped to win on September 9, the policies that her government will pursue will depend on the relative strength of the other center-right parties — notably the populist, anti-government, anti-immigration Framskrittspartiet (Progress Party), which remains the most controversial of Norway’s major parties.  If it joins the Conservatives in government as predicted, it will be the first time that the Progress Party has joined any government since it was founded in the 1970s.

If the election unfolds as polls predict, the Conservatives would win the largest share of the vote, around 32% and around 56 seats, which would be a historical victory against the Arbeiderpartiet (Labour Party), which is polling around 29% and around 51 seats.  The Progress Party currently polls as the third-most popular party with around 14.5% support and around 27 seats.  That means that the next government will require some kind of coalition between two of those three parties.

So while it’s not surprising that tensions are emerging during the campaign between Solberg and Progress Party leader Siv Jensen (pictured above) and that it’s clear coalition negotiations among the Conservatives, the Progress Party and other center-right allies are likely to be incredibly difficult, it is perhaps surprising that no one has really suggested a ‘grand coalition’ between Labour and the Conservatives as an alternative.  While there’s no real precedent of ‘grand coalitions’ in recent Norwegian history, neither is there precedent for a Conservative-Progress government — both options would mark new ground for Norway.

Solberg is riding high in polls today after a long stint in the wilderness for the Conservatives and a rebranding exercise designed to pull the Conservatives more fully to the center and expand the party’s relevance beyond its traditional image as a party solely for Norway’s business elite.  That means that it has moved more closely to Labour’s position on many issues and it’s much closer to Labour than to the Progress Party on both economic and social issues alike.  Nonetheless, there’s curiously little discussion about a ‘grand coalition,’ even as Norwegians assume that the Conservative-Progress coalition is virtually a done deal.  That means that the Conservatives, a party that favors continuity over rupture, will govern with the Progress Party, which has historically favored rupture over continuity.  It will also likely mean that Jensen will become Norway’s next finance minister, an outcome that could scare moderate voters otherwise disposed to a Solberg-led government into supporting Labour instead.

If, for some reason, the Conservatives win the election and don’t form a coalition with Progress, because negotiations stall or because Progress’s vote collapses, the Conservatives would more likely form a coalition with two smaller center-right parties or even try a minority government before pairing up with Labour, not least of which because Labour prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has spent much of his campaign warning about all the damage that a right-wing government would cause to Norwegian society.

But on policy terms, there’s a lot to recommend a Norwegian ‘grand coalition.’  And if it can happen in Germany, Austria and Italy, why not in Norway too?  Continue reading Despite doubts about far-right Progress Party, no talk of Norwegian ‘grand coalition’ →

Madagascar

Disqualifications of current, former presidents give Madagascar chance for fresh start (eventually)

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In the latest twist of Madagascar’s long-running electoral saga, the African island country’s electoral court earlier this week decided to disqualify the three leading candidates in the election, which had been scheduled for August 23.madagascar-flag

That means neither current president Andry Rajoelina nor former first lady Lalao Ravalomanana (a stand-in for exiled former president Lalao Ravalomanana) nor former president Didier Ratsiraka will be in the running for the first presidential vote in seven years.

In a sense, it may have been a better solution to let all of the candidates run — why not let them have at it in a free-for-all to determine who should lead Madagascar?  In a free and fair election, the winner would have that much more of a mandate for his (or her) government.  This way, all three can now credibly claim that, but for the judicial intervention, he (or she) would have been elected, which will inevitably weaken the person who is ultimately chosen in the election.

But in a world where the election court is going to start disqualifying candidates, it’s better that all three heavyweights are excluded rather than just one or two.  Moreover, the European Union, the African Union and the Southern African Development Community had all pushed for their disqualification, and EU high representative for foreign policy Catherine Ashton had set a sharp deadline for Madagascan elections to be held by the end of the year in order to avoid further sanctions.

The immediate roots of Madagascar’s current political crisis lie in the early days of 2009, when Rajoelina, then the major of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital and largest city, led sustained protests against Ravalomanana’s government.  When a pro-Rajoelina crowd marched on the presidential palace, Ravalomanana ordered his guard to fire on the crowd, killing 30 protesters and leading to a military coup that essentially deposed Ravalomanana in March 2009 and installed Rajoelina in his place — illegitimately, in the eyes of the rest of the world.  Rajoelina, only 34 years old at the time, was supposed to serve as president of a semi-transitional government — the ‘High Transitional Authority of Madagascar’ — that was supposed to pass a new constitution and hold new presidential elections as soon as 2010.

But Rajoelina has now served almost as long as he would have if elected to a full term as president — four years.  Although the country passed a new constitution into effect in November 2010 with the support of the international community, Madagascar’s presidential election was postponed six times from an initial date in May 2011 until the August 2013 date, which now too looks like it will be postponed.  Much of the problem has had to do with who’s running — Rajoelina and Marc Ravalomanana, who remains in exile in South Africa, had struck an agreement in January that neither would stand in the election.  But when Lalao Ravalomanana decided to enter the race in lieu of her husband in May, Rajoelina argued that Ravalomanana broke their agreement and accordingly, Rajoelina declared his own candidacy.   Continue reading Disqualifications of current, former presidents give Madagascar chance for fresh start (eventually) →