Monthly Archives: August 2013

Australia

Feisty debate leads Abbott to ask Rudd, ‘Does this guy ever shut up?’

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The consensus is that prime minister Kevin Rudd, behind narrowly in the polls, had a better performance in the second leaders’ debate earlier in Brisbane, turning his underdog status as a way to poke holes in the platform of his rival, opposition leader Tony Abbott.Australia Flag Icon

At one point, Rudd harped so much about the cuts that Abbott might make as prime minister that Abbott snapped, ‘Does this guy ever shut up?’

It’s a sentiment many of Rudd’s rivals — from former Liberal/National Coalition prime minister John Howard to Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, who Rudd deposed as Labor leader only in June.

But Rudd’s tenacity resulted in at least one major concession from Abbott — that Abbott’s plan to cover the costs of a $5.5 billion paid parental leave scheme are insufficient.

Rudd parried with Abbott on the carbon tax that Rudd initially championed, Gillard ultimately enacted and Abbott hopes to repeal.  Rudd warned Abbott that the rest of the world, including the People’s Republic of China, is moving toward Australia’s carbon scheme — China launched its first experimental carbon scheme earlier this year in Shenzhen.

Rudd returned to his pledge from the first debate to introduce a bill legalizing same-sex marriage if Labor wins a third consecutive term, and Abbott reiterated his opposition to marriage equality, however gingerly — Abbott’s sister is gay:

All I can do is candidly and honestly tell people what my view is. I support the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. I know that others dispute this, because I have lots of arguments inside my own family on this subject now.

The two also bickered over asylum policy, an issue upon which Rudd and Gillard have now both made such a 180-degree turn that Labor’s policy on granting asylum to migrants who attempt to arrive in Australia by boat is now much tougher than the Howard government’s policy in the mid-2000s.

Rudd also repeatedly singled out Abbott’s record as health minister and he cheerfully alleged that Abbott cut $1 billion from public hospital budgets while in government.  Abbott denied the charges, arguing that the Howard government cut the rate of growth in spending, and he asked Rudd to stop telling fibs.

Commentators did not necessarily believe it was the kind of debate that marked a massive turning point in the campaign, though most agreed Rudd performed better than in his first debate:

In an early sign that the Labor leader needed a punchier performance than he had put in at the first debate nearly a fortnight ago, Mr Rudd capitalised first on the more flexible format of the people’s forum in Brisbane’s Broncos Leagues Club to accuse Mr Abbott of having ”ripped” $1 billion from hospital budgets and of planning further cuts. It was a charge Mr Abbott flatly denied after using his opening remarks to remind voters of Labor’s record in office.

Michael Gordon, political editor for The Age, argues that Rudd won narrowly:  Continue reading Feisty debate leads Abbott to ask Rudd, ‘Does this guy ever shut up?’ →

Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Zimbabwe

Despite Zimbabwe, sub-Saharan Africa is becoming more democratic, not less

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African legal scholar Andrew Novak and I make the case at Reuters today that despite the reelection of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, sub-Saharan Africa is making gains with respect to democracy, and we examine the eight countries with elections between mid-July and September 30 alone (though as of earlier this week, Madagascar seems to be postponed until later this year).madagascar-flagMali Flag Iconzimbabwe new icon

We look to three catalysts in particular:

Recent African elections demonstrate progress in three ways.  First, long-delayed or boycotted elections are finally taking place, removing military regimes or one-party states from power.

Second, for the first time, several countries having enjoyed two or three free and fair elections in a row. This is significant because running two well-managed elections improves the odds that there will be a third, and then a fourth — turning an isolated electoral experiment into a true democratic tradition.

Third, elections once marred by violence have been carried out peacefully, improving the credibility of political leaders and encouraging coalition-building and a non-zero sum attitude toward governing.

So for every Zimbabwe, there’s a Mali, which represents a return to two decades of democratic traditions.  There’s a Kenya, where president Uhuru Kenyatta’s election earlier this spring wasn’t marred by violence, despite a close race.  There’s a Guinea, where long-delayed elections are moving forward after fraught negotiations between the ruling party and the opposition.  Even in Zimbabwe, July’s elections passed without the violence that resulted in 2008, and Mugabe’s successor will likely have to be much more responsive to economic and social pressures than Mugabe, who too often gets a free pass from Zimbabweans and other Africans due to his founding-father status in leading the country out of white minority rule in 1979-80.

Our conclusion is that there’s room for measured optimism:

It would be a mistake to view the developing African democracy with the same kind of rapture than some international investors have developed in recent years for Africa’s “cheetah” economies.  But in the wake of international discouragement over Zimbabwe’s vote, it would also be a mistake to conclude that African democracy is in retreat, when there are so many signs that it continues to grow stronger.

Photo credit to Joe Penney / Reuters.

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) →

United Kingdom

Would a Miliband-led Labour government be an improvement on British civil liberties?

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The troubling case of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who was detained by British police at Heathrow yesterday for nine hours under schedule 7 of the U.K. Terrorism Act, is now a full-blown fully international incident. United Kingdom Flag Icon

The case has implications not only for U.S. politics (Greenwald has been the chief source for the leaks about the U.S. National Security Agency’s Internet intelligence-gathering programs) and even Brazilian politics (Greenwald lives in Brazil with Miranda, a Brazilian native), but for British politics as well, where the issue of civil liberties has been contentious for the past decade and a half under both the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and the Conservative-led government of current prime minister David Cameron.

Political strategist Ian Bremmer is already suggesting that the United States and/or the United Kingdom may be preparing an indictment against Greenwald (presumably under the U.S. Espionage Act), which would explain why Miranda’s laptop computer and other personal effects were confiscated in London.  We already know that the United States, by the admission of White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest was given a heads-up by London prior to Miranda’s detention, though Earnest has denied that the United States requested or collaborated with the detention.  It’s equally plausible that overeager police officials in London jumped at an opportunity to gather information they thought top U.S. and U.K. officials would appreciate — if the United States and the United Kingdom really are pursuing an international case against Greenwald, you’d think they would be careful not to commit what seems like a prima facie violation of the U.K. Terrorism Act.

With both Scotland Yard and Cameron saying little about the incident, and with U.S. officials remaining relatively mum, most of today’s discussion has been dominated by vehement critics of the detention on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the most striking has come from Labour Party’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, a rising Labour star who may herself one day lead the party, who has called for an investigation into whether the detention was appropriate under the Terrorism Act:

Schedule 7, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, controversially allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals. Miranda was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual.

According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours. It has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers.

As we approach the annual convention period in British politics, pressure on Labour leader Ed Miliband is growing to draw a deeper contrast with the current coalition government on many issues, including civil liberties.  Soon after his election as Labour leader in September 2010, Miliband criticized his party’s overreach on civil liberties, identifying in particular the Blair government’s plan to hold suspects for 90 days without trial and the broad use of anti-terrorism laws.  At the time, Miliband argued that he wanted to lead Labour to reclaim the British tradition of liberty, though Miliband also indicated at the time he supported Blair’s widespread introduction of what are now over 4 million closed-circuit television surveillance cameras throughout the country.

As the parties begin to jostle for position for an election that’s now just 21 months away, Cameron certainly won’t be able to run for reelection on as vigorous a pro-liberty position as he did in 2010, though his junior coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, can point to their success in repealing Labour’s plan to introduce national ID cards and scrapping the Tories’ proposed communications data bill this year.

That leaves a key opening for Miliband to champion civil liberties, but given the durability of the British surveillance state and Labour’s role in creating the legal framework last decade for the British surveillance state, it is unclear whether Miliband will do so, though Cooper delivered a high-profile speech in July arguing for more oversight and protections in relation to the U.K. intelligence and security services.  It’s likelier, however, that a future Labour government will pursue many of the same pro-security policies that each of the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments have pursued.

British voters will certainly remember the truly dismal record of the past Labour government under Blair and Brown on liberty (whether the efforts made the United Kingdom more secure is another question) — the list of curbs on personal freedom is long, and it includes not only the push for CCTV cameras: Continue reading Would a Miliband-led Labour government be an improvement on British civil liberties? →

Brazil, Vatican City

Pope-acabana: How the Catholic Church and the Latin American middle class could forge a symbiotic electoral majority

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popeacabana

Although Pope Francis made global headlines last month by appearing to accept that some priests might have same-sex attractions, it’s easy to forget that the comments, which came at a press conference on his flight back to the Vatican, capped the new pope’s first trip abroad to Brazil, which neighbors former cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s native Argentina.vatican flagbrazil

Francis’s comments touched on a wide range of issues, including the role of women in the Catholic Church, but his remarks risk overshadowing that the pontiff’s visit to Brazil, where Francis delivered a mass to three million Brazilians on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, had already been viewed as a massive success, and showcased that Francis is determined to lead a global Church.

What does all of this have to do with Latin American politics?

First, after the perceived hardline doctrinal conservatism of Benedict XVI and John Paul II, the new pope is certainly more media-savvy about communicating that the Catholic Church will be more open than it’s been perceived in previous years.  Francis may not necessarily be any more doctrinally liberal about social issues like homosexuality, abortion or birth control, but his tone, warm and unjudging, is much different.  The fine print may not even matter if Francis downplays more contentious doctrine in favor of issues of more relevance to economic policymaking.  Even though one of Benedict XVI’s three encyclicals covered the topic of the virtue of social justice and the dangers of global development (Caritas in Veritate — ‘Charity in Truth’), published in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, it is instead Francis who has been credited as the pope willing to take the Church’s teachings into the most dangerous corners of the world and to the poorest in society.  Francis has spoken out against poverty repeatedly since his election as pope earlier this year and while in Brazil, he toured Varginha, one of Rio’s most notoriously poor and violent favelas.

Secondly, the Catholic Church, which has long been a global church (one out of two Catholics worldwide now lives in the Americas, and three-fourths of the world’s Catholics live outside Europe), now has a truly global leader.   Continue reading Pope-acabana: How the Catholic Church and the Latin American middle class could forge a symbiotic electoral majority →

Venezuela

‘Pragmatic’ Merentes winning control over Venezuela economic policy, but to what end?

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When Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro appointed Nelson Merentes as his new finance minister shortly after Maduro’s controversial election in April, no one knew whether Merentes would actually be the official in charge of economic policy.Venezuela Flag Icon

That’s because the former finance minister Jorge Giordani, the longtime policymaker in the era of former president Hugo Chávez, remained planning secretary — and in a huge public-sector country like Venezuela, there’s little left untouched by central planning.  Giordani, more than anyone else, was responsible for the statist economic policies of the Chávez era, including currency and price controls.

But this week, there was no mistaking that Merentes is now ascendant — Edmée Betancourt, who had served as president of Venezuela’s central bank (BCV) for just over three months, stepped down in favor of Eudomar Tovar, an economist who was most recently the head of Venezuela’s currency exchange (CADIVI).  Betancourt, a former commerce minister, was seen as closer to Giordani and the more ideological, statist wing of chavismo, while Tovar and Merentes are associated with a more pragmatic, moderate view of economic policy.  Rumors swirled last week that Giordani might soon leave the planning ministry, abandoning a recent push to raise taxes, to take up an ambassadorship soon.

Leave aside for a moment that in an era of central bank independence, neither Giordani nor Merentes would be dominating the BCV’s monetary policy in a country with sounder financial institutions.  If Merentes and Maduro really want to shake up Venezuela’s economy for the better, they should start by reintroducing a line between the ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and the institutions of the Venezuelan state — starting with the BCV, but also with the national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA).

Merentes’s rise should provide at least some cautious optimism — if Giordani would have doubled-down on statist Chávez-era policies, at least Merentes seems to realize that Venezuela’s basketcase economy has some problems.  The central bank’s reserves are dwindling, Venezuelan GDP growth has slowed to nearly nothing, and inflation has reached its highest level since before Chávez came to power in 1999 on the road to a potential hyperinflationary collapse.

But it remains far from clear that Merentes is willing to embark upon a program of true economic reform or whether Maduro has both the political capital and the political will to enable him to do so.  Moves to devalue the bolívar both officially and unofficially earlier this year was a start in bringing the Venezuelan currency’s stated value in line with its real market value, but the currency has decline further in value throughout they year: despite an official value of 6.3 bolívares to the dollar, its real value has dropped from around 20 at the time of the April 14 election to more than 30 or 35 today.  Maduro took steps to tweak the currency exchange system through the introduction of SICAD auctions earlier this spring — because the vast majority of U.S. currency comes to Venezuela through the government’s sale of oil products, the government must develop a mechanism to sell those dollars to importers who need hard currency.  But neither Maduro nor Merentes have been in a rush to hold regular dollar auctions (only around $600 million has been auctioned off so far in 2013) or to deliver the actual dollars from the government to the private sector.  But the fuss over SICAD and currency exchange is really just a stop-gap measure — if the ‘pragmatists’ can’t even get this right, it leaves little faith in their ability to overcome more fundamental problems with Venezuela’s economy.

Maduro and Merentes still hope that they can borrow their way out of Venezuela’s current malaise, and the government had the brass to float the possibility two months ago that Merentes would go on a roadshow to New York and London to gauge appetite for Venezuelan bonds.  That roadshow plan quickly fell apart when it became clear that there’s little appetite for risky Venezuelan debt among global investors — yields on Venezuela’s benchmark bond have been in the double digits since Maduro’s election. Continue reading ‘Pragmatic’ Merentes winning control over Venezuela economic policy, but to what end? →

Germany

Assessing the potential coalitions that might emerge after Germany’s federal elections

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With now less than 40 days to go until Germany’s federal elections, polls show that chancellor Angela Merkel is by far the most popular candidate to return as chancellor and her party, the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU, Christian Democratic Union), will clearly be the largest bloc in Germany’s Bundestag after the election. Germany Flag Icon

Polls have been remarkably consistent throughout much of the year leading up to the September 22 vote.  The center-right CDU, together with its Bavarian sister party, the Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union), overwhelmingly leads Germany’s largest center-left party, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, the Social Democratic Party), and voters overwhelmingly prefer Merkel to the SPD’s candidate for chancellor, Peer Steinbrück — by a nearly two-to-one margin.  Here’s the trendline from Infratest dimap, which released its latest poll this week:

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This week’s news that Germany leads GDP growth in the eurozone, which itself pulled out of recession in the second quarter of 2013, will only buoy Merkel’s chances.  Barring a huge shift in public opinion that has only calcified over the past year, Steinbrück, a bland technocrat who comes from the right wing of the SPD and who served as finance minister in the ‘grand coalition’ government of 2005 to 2009, will lead the SPD to a loss of nearly historic proportions.  But while that means Merkel is very likely to return as chancellor, the composition of Merkel’s third government is less certain.

That’s because support for Merkel’s current coalition partners, the free-market liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), has collapsed since the previous September 2009 election, when it won 14.6% of the vote and 93 seats in the Bundestag, a record-high electoral performance for the party.  But since 2009, the FDP has struggled to maintain a presence in local Germany elections, losing support in state after state.  Its decade-long leader Guido Westerwelle, the first openly gay party leader in German history, stepped down in April 2011 as party leader and vice chancellor (though he remains foreign minister) after the FDP won barely 5% in the state elections of Baden-Württemberg.  His successor as FDP leader is the Vietnamese-born Phillip Rösler (pictured above), who began his career in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and who had served previously as health minister in the CDU/FDP coalition government from 2009 to 2011.

Although Rösler has not lifted the FDP back up to its 2009-level heights, he has managed to staunch the party’s decline.  In the May 2012 elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the FDP managed to win 8.6% of the vote, an increase of nearly 2% from the previous election, though that’s largely due to the popularity of Christian Lindner, who led the FDP’s 2012 campaign.  More recently, though, in Lower Saxony’s state election in January 2013, the FDP won 9.9% of the vote, a gain of 1.7%.

It’s also because Germany’s electoral system is notoriously complex.  Germans will actually cast two votes in September — the first is for a candidate to represent one of 299 electoral districts in Germany, the second is for a German political party.  The second ‘party vote’ is meant to determine the party’s ultimate total share of seats in the Bundestag, and so a party will receive additional seats on the basis of the party vote sufficient to provide that its percentage of seats in the Bundestag is roughly equal to the percentage of votes it received pursuant to the party vote (so long as the party receives at least 5% of party vote support).  That means that the number of seats in the Bundestag changes from election to election — although it must have a minimum of 598 seats, it has had as few as 603 and as many as 672 since German reunification.

The FDP has struggled all year long to achieve merely 5% support in opinion polls and, while it’s doing better in polls than it was at the beginning of the year, there’s no guarantee that it will meet that threshold:

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That means that, more than anything else, the composition of Germany’s next government turns on the FDP’s performance.  If it wins less than 5%, Merkel will not have the option of continuing a coalition with the FDP.  Moreover, even if the FDP wins more than 5%, it may still not win enough seats to cobble together a CDU/FDP majority in the 598-member Bundestag.

Furthermore, polls show that while German voters overwhelmingly prefer Merkel as chancellor, they actually favor a return to the CDU/SPD grand coalition, more than the current CDU-led government or a potential SPD-led government:

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Two additional coalitions — a CDU/Green government and a united left coalition among the SPD, Green and Die Linke (the Left Party) — also win significant support.

But what are the chances that any of these five coalitions will actually emerge after September 22?  Here’s a look at each potential coalition and the chances that it could form Germany’s next government.

CDUpreferredcoalitionThe current government: CDU/FDP.

Merkel prefers to continue her current coalition over any alternative because her political agenda matches well with the FDP’s political agenda.  Any negotiations between Merkel and the SPD or the Greens would entail huge concessions from Merkel that she would not otherwise have to make in coalition with the FDP.  But, as noted above (and as represented in the graph to the right, on the basis of current polls), it’s unclear if that coalition can win a majority.

Under Rösler’s leadership, the FDP is running on a campaign of lower taxes and liberalizing Germany’s economy, which is standard Free Democratic fare, and both the FDP and Merkel’s CDU oppose new tax increases.  Their largest policy difference might be same-sex marriage — the FDP supports it and the CDU (and especially the Catholic-influenced CSU) oppose it, although the FDP has taken a much stronger stand on privacy rights than Merkel’s CDU.

Even if they win enough seats to form a majority, no one expects the margin to be larger than the government’s current 21-seat margin.  So even a single-digit majority could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory if Merkel finds herself forced to look outside her own government to enact her legislative agenda on an ad hoc basis, especially with respect to European Union matters, given the sometimes eurosceptic nature of many CSU deputies.  That’s hardly a recipe for stable government.

Polls in August show that together, the current government will win between 44% and 47% of the vote if the election were held today.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us much of an idea about whether they’ll have enough support in the Bundestag to form a majority.  Since reunification, Germany has held only six federal elections — they’ve resulted in three CDU-led governments, two SPD-led governments and a single CDU-SPD grand coalition. Continue reading Assessing the potential coalitions that might emerge after Germany’s federal elections →

Lebanon

Lebanon’s political community unites against blast apparently targeting Hezbollah

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haririgeagea

Generally, the depressingly familiar storyline in Lebanon goes something like this:Lebanon

First, the powerful Shiite political organization Hezbollah does something outrageous with respect to opposing Israel or supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  In doing so, Hezbollah makes it clear that not only is it willing to prioritize its own international policy over maintaining Lebanese unity, but that it has sufficient military and political power to do so no matter what anyone else in Lebanon thinks.  Finally, everyone else in the Lebanon grumbles at Hezbollah for usurping the military and political roles that should properly belong to the Lebanese government, and in so doing, jeopardizing the fragile national unity that everyone else in Lebanon has been boosting since the end of Lebanon’s own civil war in the 1980s.

It was Hezbollah, after all, that was responsible for rope-a-doping Israel into the 2006 summer war — though it turns out that Hezbollah was successful in forcing an end to Israeli military occupation in southern Lebanon, it was Hezbollah (not the Lebanese government) that decided that it was appropriate to provoke Israel into a months-long bombing campaign that destabilized all of Lebanon, not just the southern Shiite strongholds where Hezbollah’s influence is strongest.

That storyline has become increasingly complicated with Sunni groups that are now becoming more ‘Hezbollah-like’ in prioritizing their support of (largely Sunni) anti-Assad rebels in the Syrian civil war as Hezbollah has made it clear that it will openly and notoriously support the Assad regime, thereby risking Lebanese unity even more.  But by and large, the story of Lebanon’s attempt to stay out of trouble in the Middle East over the past decade has involved trying to pull Hezbollah back from the ledge.

So while no one ever welcomes a bomb blast of the kind that Lebanon suffered yesterday — a blast in the largely Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut that killed up to 20 people and injured nearly 300– it is heartening to see that the response from the entire political community in Lebanon has been to condemn the bombing.  Though a murky, heretofore unknown group calling themselves the ‘Brigade of Aisha, the Mother of the Faithful’ took credit for the attack, it could have been any number of Hezbollah’s enemies — radical Sunni groups within Lebanon, anti-Assad rebels from Syria angry at Hezbollah’s growing role in propping up Assad or, perhaps more outlandishly, Israeli special agents who want to take Hezbollah down a peg or two (as Lebanese president Michel Suleiman appeared to suggest yesterday).

The larger point here isn’t who was responsible for a bomb that seems squarely aimed at Hezbollah, but that even when the shoe is on the other foot, when it’s Hezbollah that’s the victim and not the instigator of violence in Lebanon — even despite its role as a wayward force that causes all sorts of problems for everyone else in Lebanon who just want to live their lives peacefully and in harmony — the attack is condemned not only by Lebanese Shi’a, but by mainstream Sunni and Maronite leaders as well.  Former prime minister Saad Hariri, who is about as strong an opponent of Hezbollah as anyone, denounced the attack, as did Samir Geagea (pictured above, left, with Hariri, right), the leader of the Lebanese Forces, a Maronite group.

and Christian Maronite (president Michel Suleiman) leaders who are certainly do not count themselves among Hezbollah’s fans.

If there’s one silver lining to Thursday’s attack, it’s that the Lebanese political community had an opportunity to show Hezbollah and its supporters that national unity means just that — when you attack one group of Lebanese, you attack all of them, despite the fact that there are many, many differences among Lebanon’s myriad political and religious communities.  It’s a subtle point, but it’s important, and it’s one of the reasons why Lebanon (much to its credit) has avoided much of the blowback from Syria’s destabilizing civil war.

Argentina, Buenos Aires

Peronist party, Fernández de Kirchner face insurrection even as opposition remains divided

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After primary elections earlier this week, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is in even more trouble than you might have thought, even though her peronista ruling party seems likely to win elections later this year.bsasargentina

That Argentina’s political opposition has been divided for over a decade is clear, but at a time when kirchnerismo is as unpopular as ever, there are no signs that the disparate forces opposed to the increasingly isolated Fernández de Kirchner administration are in a position to capitalize on the government’s unpopularity.  So while Tigre mayor Sergio Massa, a former Kirchner ally turned opposition peronista, made the largest headlines by defeating Kirchner’s candidate in Sunday’s high-profile primary in the province of Buenos Aires, home to 40% of Argentina’s population, there’s really no movement to unite his opposition movement with the more traditional center-right and other regional opposition fronts in advance of the October 27 midterms.  That’s still probably good news for Massa, though, who will have managed to distance himself from the Kirchners without abandoning the resilient peronista label, and winning a test run for the 2015 presidential race in the country’s dominant province.

The country will go to the polls on October 27 to determine one-half of the composition of the 257-member Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies) of the lower house of the Argentine National Congress and one-third of the composition of the 72-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.  The open primaries earlier this week, in essence, functioned as a massive poll indicating where the country might head in those elections — they are not primaries in the traditional U.S. sense whereby candidates from the same political party duel for their party’s nomination, but a gating mechanism to weed out smaller parties from the October midterms.

The good news for Fernández de Kirchner is that her base of support of around 30% of the vote nationwide should be enough to win those elections, especially considering that her party, the ruling Frente para la Victoria (FpV, the Front for Victory), is the only truly national political party in that it is fielding competitive candidates nationwide.  Ironically, the Front for Victory did better in the 2011 elections (when it won 78 seats), largely on the strength of Fernández de Kirchner’s reelection, than in the previous October 2009 midterm elections (when it won 38 seats), when the opposition actually outpolled the kirchneristas.  That means that, despite the party’s current unpopularity, the opposition will be defending nearly twice as many seats as the Front for Victory due to the staggered nature of Argentine congressional elections — remember that only one-half of the Chamber of Deputies are up for reelection in a given election cycle.

The bad news for Fernández de Kirchner is that former allies are now peeling away from the Front for Victory to run through separate peronista movements as a result of Argentina’s increasingly bizarre economic management and in anticipation of the October 2015 presidential election.  If the primary result is an indication of what will happen in 10 weeks’ time, Fernández de Kirchner will not win the two-thirds congressional majority that she would need to change the country’s constitution and allow her to run for a third consecutive term in 2015.  Kirchner’s party would have to hold onto every seat they currently have and pick up 55 more seats to command that kind of majority, a feat that would outperform the Front for Victory’s 2011 congressional performance.  The bottom line is that the 2013 midterms are an opportunity for potential candidates to break through in what could be the first opportunity in over a decade for an Argentine president not named Kirchner, despite a fiery speech Wednesday to relaunch her party’s campaign for October.

The really bad news is that the Front for Victory placed either second (or worse) not only in Buenos Aires province, but the next three-most populous provinces in Argentina, the federal district and 11 more provinces (in total, 14 out of 23 provinces), including the southern Santa Cruz province that had been her late husband Néstor Kirchner’s base.  See below an electoral map from Clarín: blue indicates victory for the Front for Victory; purple for opposition peronista fronts; and red for coalitions dominated by the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical Civil Union).

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That leaves Fernández de Kirchner as a lame-duck president who will preside over an economy that’s now stalled after years of growth — she risks  leaving office with few allies on the traditional left or the traditional right and the steward of a new potential Argentine economic crisis.  After her husband’s administration defaulted on Argentine debt from the previous decade’s peso crisis, thereby benefitting from nearly immediate economic growth, Fernández de Kirchner has struggled at times to find enough foreign exchange reserves with the country shut out of financial markets, and Argentina, according to at least financial adviser, has an 84.5% likelihood of defaulting in the next five years, and that doesn’t even count the legal embroligio between Argentina and U.S. hedge fund Elliott Associates, a holdout from the prior Argentine debt haircut, that may well go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Felix Salmon at Reuters has made a hilarious video explaining this case here).

That has forced her government to seek out cash in creative ways.  Although Fernández de Kirchner backed down from a plan to raise taxes on agricultural products in summer 2008 after massive farmer protests, she instead nationalized around $30 billion worth of Argentina’s private pensions later that year.  More recently, she nationalized Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), Argentina’s largest energy company previously owned by a Spanish firm, in May 2012.  GDP growth slumped to just 2.6% in 2012 and Argentine economists still forecast 4% growth this year, but the country has long struggled with double-digit inflation that many argue is even higher than the government reports.  Continue reading Peronist party, Fernández de Kirchner face insurrection even as opposition remains divided →

United States

Yellen is the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair — and that’s why Obama should pick her

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Financial reporter David Wessel provides a hilarious anecdote about Ben Bernanke, currently the chair of the Federal Reserve, from his days on the Bush administration’s economic team in his 2009 book, In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, that captures in capsule form one of the reasons why Bernanke has made such a great Fed chair: USflag

One day, Bernanke showed up for a monthly Oval Office meeting wearing a dark blue suit and light tan socks.

Bush notices. ‘Ben,’ the president said, according to one participant, ‘where did you get those socks?’

‘Gap,’ replied Bernanke. ‘Three pair for seven dollars.’

The president wouldn’t let it go, mentioning Bernanke’s light tan socks repeatedly during the forty-five-minute meeting.

At the next month’s meeting, Bernanke had convinced nearly the entire staff, as well as U.S. vice president Dick Cheney, to wear tan socks, getting the last laugh on Bush.  Beyond the innocent prank, the implication is clear enough — Bernanke, always a bit of an outsider in Washington, was wearing tan socks in a city of black socks.  That’s perhaps appropriate for a Jewish economist who grew up in South Carolina.

That distance has been one of the understated keys to Bernanke’s success as Fed chair since 2006 — he’s a rare Fed chair who has enough distance from official Washington to be a credibly independent central banker but also sufficient experience to navigate Washington’s politics.  Despite his eight-month stint as chair of the Bush administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, Bernanke had also chaired Princeton University’s economics department for six years and served as a member of the Fed’s seven-person Board of Governors from 2002 to 2005.  He’s not the kind of Washington fixture that Alan Greenspan had increasingly become in his 19 years as Fed chair, nor is Bernanke’s wife a consummate political insider like NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Greenspan’s wife.

As Felix Salmon writes today at Reuters, the Fed chair is one of the two most important officers in the United States.  Bernanke’s successor, who will take office in February 2014, will be even more important to world politics, in at least an indirect capacity for his role in global markets, than U.S. secretary of state John Kerry, U.S. treasury secretary Jacob Lew or U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel.

Right now, there are two frontrunners:

  • Lawrence Summers, treasury secretary in the Clinton administration from 1999 to 2001, Harvard University president from 2001 to 2006 and the hard-charging director of the Obama administration’s National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010; and
  • Janet Yellen, vice chair of the Federal Reserve since 2010, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010, and the chair of the Clinton administration’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1997 to 1999.

The conventional wisdom is that Summers has an edge, because Obama knows him so well, and trusts him, on the basis of his role earlier in the administration.  So Obama therefore prefers to appoint Summers, as do all of the top economic policymakers close to Obama, such as Lew, former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and current NEC director Gene Sperling.

The conventional wisdom is also that while Summers is a exceedingly brilliant and talented economist, he is not someone who values collaboration, a key trait for someone whose goal is to lead the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee that is comprised of the seven members of the Board of Governors and a rotating slate of five of the 12 regional Federal Bank presidents.  The substantive knocks on Summers are even greater.  He supported deregulation within the financial industry during the Clinton administration that allowed for the proliferation of new financial derivatives markets, and he opposed the ‘Volcker Rule’ in the 2010 Dodd-Frank package of financial reforms that restricts banks from using deposits in riskier trading.  That’s not counting his controversial turn at Harvard, when he was forced to resign over comments suggesting that men have a greater natural aptitude for the sciences nor does it take into account the conflicts of his post-government employment with private-sector Wall Street firms like Citigroup and hedge fund D.E. Shaw or his lack of actual experience within the Federal Reserve system.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution argues that Summers is preferable to Yellen because Summers has more ‘right-wing street cred,’ and therefore might work more easily with the current Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and a potential future Republican presidential administration, both because he’s taken more criticism from the left than Yellen and because of Yellen’s background at Berkeley.

But Salmon argues that Yellen would be a better chair on the day-to-day matters that are crucial to stabilizing the U.S. and global economy (noting that any Fed chair would respond to a financial crisis guns-a-blazin’).  Ezra Klein, at The Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, argues that we don’t know which candidate would be stronger on financial regulation, another key Fed role.  Paul Krugman argues that Yellen’s detractors are motivated by rampant sexism:

Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome.

In the grand scheme of things, both Yellen and Summers are likely to pursue similar policies.  Even though Yellen has been labeled an inflation ‘dove,’ there’s no indication that either Yellen or Summers will abandon Bernanke’s January 2012 decision to set an explicit 2% inflation rate target for the first time in Fed history.  But the next Fed chair will most certainly wind down the Fed’s extraordinary ‘quantitative easing’ actions of the past five years whereby the Fed has purchased assets, bonds and other securities at an unprecedented rate, thereby boosting liquidity in the global financial system.

The reason to appoint Yellen is not because she is a woman, because she’s an inflationary ‘dove,’ because we think she might be a stronger advocate of financial regulation or even because she has more experience within the Fed.  It’s because she will be seen to have more independence  at a time when central bank independence will be crucial to the Fed’s success — that makes Yellen the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair, and it’s the key reason why Yellen’s nomination should be a slam-dunk case for Obama. Continue reading Yellen is the ‘tan socks’ candidate for Fed chair — and that’s why Obama should pick her →

Egypt

Egyptian massacre, ‘state of emergency’ mocks Arab Spring with return to Mubarak-era tactics

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In slaughtering civilian protesters and declaring a one-month ‘state of emergency,’ the Egyptian military’s interim government is falling back on the methods of former president Hosni Mubarak’s three decades in power that amounted to one, long 30-year state of emergency.egypt_flag_new

If you did not harbor any doubts about the nature of the interim government before today’s massacre, you should now — even state officials agree that at least 149 people have been killed in today’s violence, but the Muslim Brotherhood believes up to 800 people have been killed, and anecdotes from journalists also suggest more fatalities than the official count.  Egypt’s liberal interim vice president, Mohamed ElBaradei resigned earlier today in the aftermath of what can only be described as a systemic nationwide assault against the supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi.

Even by the interim government’s standards, the violence perpetuated today far exceeds the two most violent days of the post-Morsi era — on July 8, when the army fired on Morsi supporters in Cairo, and on July 27, when the army killed 80 Morsi supporters.

At each juncture, as the military has escalated the violence against the Brotherhood, it has only narrowed the path toward a political settlement.

But Morsi didn’t kill hundreds of protesters, despite his vast shortcomings, and the surest way to engender solidarity between Egypt’s liberals and Morsi’s supporters (which barely seemed thinkable six weeks ago) is for the Egyptian military to start massacring innocent civilians.  The wiser course would have been to get on with the business of repairing Egypt’s economic infrastructure and preparing the country for yet another round of elections while ignoring what were certain to become dwindling protests in favor of a president who long ago lost the confidence of the vast majority of Egyptians — an imperfect course, but one that envisions a speedy return to ‘normal’ politics.

Today’s bloodshed has pushed that return to ‘normal’ politics far off into the distance, giving Egypt a regime that’s, in substance, the second coming of the Mubarak era, ‘states of emergency’ and all.

U.S. secretary of state John Kerry must certainly regret his words earlier this month when he remarked that the military government was ‘restoring democracy’ in the post-Morsi era.  In the United States, president Barack Obama has strongly criticized the violence, but it’s worth wondering just what influence the Obama administration has had in failing to rein in the Egyptian military’s excess today.  Egyptian army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel have talked often since July 3 when Egyptian military forces detained Morsi and declared an interim government, even as most of official Washington spent the past six weeks wringing its hands over the peripheral question of whether the U.S. government should label Morsi’s ouster a coup.  Though the result of designation El-Sisi’s coup a ‘coup’ for U.S. legal purposes would be to strip the Egyptian military of U.S. aid, it should be a blinding glimpse of the obvious by now that the aid Egypt’s military receives from other Gulf nations now outweighs U.S. aid, and U.S. support is clearly not sufficient to bend the Egyptian government’s actions to American will.

But in a familiar pattern, the interim government is becoming more isolated, much like the Morsi administration and the Mubarak regime before it.  The interim government long ago lost the hesitant support of the conservative Salafist movement, an even more pro-sharia group than the Brotherhood.  It has now lost ElBaradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the most prominent of several liberal leaders within the National Salvation Front (جبهة الإنقاذ الوطني‎), and one of the most respected Egyptian voices abroad.

So tragic as today’s massacre has been, it’s no surprise that Egypt looks today more like one of the repressive Gulf states, like Bahrain, and less like a liberal democracy.  Morsi remains in detention, and former prime minister Hesham Qandil and other top Brotherhood leaders remain in prison.  Transitional president Adly Mansour still has not set a timetable for new elections, and it is hard to know just how free and fair any elections can be when one power base within Egypt has declared a state of emergency to hunt out, disperse and kill supporters of another power base within Egypt.  Certainly the lesson that Islamists in Egypt have taken from the Morsi episode is to mistrust democracy as a legitimate tool of governance — it’s not the end of political Islam, in Egypt or elsewhere in the Arab world, but it remains to be seen just how much Muslim Brotherhood supporters should trust promises of free elections in Egypt’s near future.

Despite today’s horrific violence, it is still too early to throw around louche analogies to Algeria 1991 and fret that Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, will slip into a civil war.  More likely, the Egyptian military will continue to assert control, obviously though violent and repressive means as necessary and, elections or not, Egypt 2013 will come to look more like Egypt 1993 than anything else.  The best-case scenario now seems to be a kind of neo-Kemalist system where Egypt’s military returns to elections, but takes a strong hand in ‘guaranteeing’ democracy by knocking down Islamist governments that become too aggressive.  Continue reading Egyptian massacre, ‘state of emergency’ mocks Arab Spring with return to Mubarak-era tactics →

United Kingdom, United States

Clarke’s British reform failures a lesson as Holder pushes for historic turn on U.S. crime

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As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder makes a serious push for prison and justice reform in the United States, he would do well to look at a similar push across the Atlantic — Kenneth Clarke’s attempt to reverse decades of tough criminal law policies in the United Kingdom provides a cautionary tale.USflagUnited Kingdom Flag Icon

Holder announced yesterday in a speech to the American Bar Association that the U.S. justice department will seek to avoid mandatory sentences for non-violent, low-level drug-related offenses, and justice reform advocates largely cheered a welcome pivot from the ‘tough-on-crime’ approach to justice that’s marked U.S. policy for the past four decades throughout much of the ‘War on Drugs’ — drug-related offenses have largely fueled the explosion in the U.S. prison population.  Holder will instruct prosecutors in federal cases not to list the amount of drugs in indictments for such non-violent drug offenses, thereby evading the mandatory sentences judges would otherwise be forced to administer under federal sentencing guidelines.  That’s only a small number of prisoners because 86% of the U.S. prison population is incarcerated by state government and not by the federal government.

Holder called for ‘sweeping, systemic changes’ to the American justice system yesterday and attacked mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent offenders, which he said caused ‘too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no good law enforcement reason.’

That approach has left the United States with a prison population of nearly 2.5 million people (though the absolute number has declined slightly after peaking in 2008) and the world’s highest incarceration rate of 716 prisoners per 100,000 .  That’s more than Russia (484), Brazil (274) the People’s Republic of China (170) or England and Wales (148) and as Holder noted yesterday, the United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Particularly damning to the United States is that 39.4% of all U.S. inmates are black and 20.6% are Latino, despite the fact that black Americans comprise just 13% of the U.S. population and Latinos comprise just 16%.  Holder yesterday cited a report showing that black convicts receive prison sentences that are around 20% longer than white convicts who commit the same crime.  Holder denounced mandatory minimums as ‘draconian,’ and made an eloquent case that U.S. enforcement priorities have had ‘a destabilizing effect on particular communities, largely poor and of color,’ that have been counterproductive in many cases.  Holder also made that case that in an era of budget cuts, America’s incarceration rate is a financial burden of up to $80 billion a year, and that reducing the U.S. prisoner population could shore up the country’s finances as well.

But Holder — and prison reform advocates that have emerged on both the American left and right — face a heavy task in reversing nearly a half-century of crime legislation that has largely ratcheted up, not down.

Just ask Kenneth Clarke, who until last September was the justice minister in UK prime minister David Cameron’s coalition government, who as one of the longest-serving and most effective Tories in government for the past four decades, faced a tough road in enacting prison reform in England and Wales.

Though its prison population and incarceration rate pales in comparison to that of the United States, the British justice system imprisons more offenders than many other countries in the European Union, such as France (101 prisoners per 100,000) or Germany (80).

Cameron faced a delicate task in finding a role for Clarke in his government back in mid-2010.  Clarke, a self-proclaimed ‘big beast’ of Tory politics got his start under ‘one nation Tory’ prime minister Edward Heath and found his stride under Heath’s successor, Margaret Thatcher.  He became John Major’s chancellor of the exchequer, guiding No. 11 from the dark days of the 1992 ‘Black Wednesday’ sterling crisis to a more robust financial position.  When Labour swept to power in May 1997 under Tony Blair, Clarke immediately became the most popular Conservative in the country, even though the significantly more right-wing and increasingly euroskpetic party thrice denied the pro-Europe Clarke its leadership.  While Clarke may have passed his glory days in government, his appointment as justice minister reflected that Clarke could still be useful in government.

Clarke’s biggest target as justice minister?  Reducing the number of offenders in English prisons and attacking what Clarke memorably called the ‘Victorian bang-’em-up prison culture’ in a landmark June 2010 speech: Continue reading Clarke’s British reform failures a lesson as Holder pushes for historic turn on U.S. crime →

Peru

Democracy, participation, and discontent: a crisis of governance for Peru?

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Guest post by Jacob Bathanti

July 28 marked Peru’s day of national independence, the centerpiece of a series of celebrations collectively known as Fiestas Patrias.  U.S. readers might imagine this extended holiday as a combination July 4, Thanksgiving, and Decoration Day (in its most tragic and most triumphant senses).Peru Flag Icon

It’s also the occasion for the sitting president to deliver a major policy address, more or less equivalent to the State of the Union.  In this year’s speech, Peru’s president, Ollanta Humala, laid out an agenda which hit some nice notes, with the president focusing his attention on major themes of anti-corruption and social inclusion, with the latter to come both through social programs and through market-oriented growth.

There were few real details, and accordingly some commentators castigated the president for failing to concretely attend to major issues, such as citizen security, which are on many Peruvians’ minds.  Still, Humala is on message: in none of his vagueness did he depart from the key pieces of his overarching double-barreled agenda: pursuing economic growth while ensuring that no one is left behind. Not a bit of what he said in his address was unexpected.

This all sounds innocuous enough, but the political context is more fraught than all that.  Dealmaking among administration insiders and poorly handled attempts to rationalize the state bureaucracy have recently drawn very visible protests from young people, state employees, and the urban professional classes. And so it was that the most interesting part of Humala’s speech, as Rosario Yori has noted, came at the very end of the discourse.  That’s when Humala implicitly conceded that not everyone is happy with his administration, or his plans for transforming Peru; when he acknowledged, however obliquely, that the road toward “La gran transformacion” will not be without twists and turns; when he conceded that he is aware that his program runs the risk of being derailed by its supposed beneficiaries:

…in seeming recognition of the crowds gathered in protest outside of Congress, Humala ended his speech with a message to Peruvians. “I urge you to maintain your vigilance and capacity for indignation to prevent corruption, injustice and discrimination. My promise is to work with you and listen to your demands.”

It is a move not uncharacteristic of a president who has rhetorically embraced themes of popular participation without delivering concrete measures to drive forward a participatory agenda.  Even as Peru has seen an upsurge in in largely peaceful public demonstration, the Humala administration has asked demonstrators to ‘go home’; and even as municipalities have taken steps to push forward institutions of participatory democracy at the local level, the national administration stands accused of ignoring a pro-participation agenda at best, and of actively moving to neuter participatory institutions at worst.

This is problematic not merely from the standpoint of democracy theory. Peru’s conventional institutional framework is troubled, with weak and fragmented political parties, an unpopular Congress, and one of the least-trusted judiciaries in Latin America. I n this situation, Peru’s framework of participatory institutions – various arrangements that invite citizens to actively engage with political processes in a realm beyond simply voting and returning home to await the next electoral cycle – offers the best hope for a revitalization of the political scene.  But the Peruvian government has shown itself unprepared to take participatory institutions seriously.  This is a shame, because an injection of participatory democracy offers a chance to avert a crisis of governance, by fostering active citizenship to channel popular participation, and burgeoning discontent, in productive directions.

Below, I briefly lay out an institutional landscape in which local officials struggle with the implications of participatory democracy, and a landscape of contention in which protest movements are proliferating.  I then offer some suggestions for deepening Peru’s participatory institutions, expanding the substantive exercise of citizenship in ways that move beyond protest. Continue reading Democracy, participation, and discontent: a crisis of governance for Peru? →