How the Obama administration is failing Honduras — and Central America

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TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – The June 2009 coup that ousted Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya from office was the first 3 a.m. call of U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration. USflaghonduras flag icon

While Obama and Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. secretary of state, condemned the coup and the interim government’s refusal to reinstate Zelaya, the United States returned to business as usual with the election of Porfirio Lobo Sosa later that year, and U.S.-Honduran cooperation, especially militarily, has been on the rise during the Lobo Sosa administration.  As Juan Orlando Hernández prepares to assume the Honduran presidency — like Lobo Sosa, he comes from the conservative Partido Nacional (PN, National Party), it also likely means continuity in US policy toward Honduras, specifically, and Central America, generally.

But should it?

Though the votes aren’t even fully counted, and there are real questions about the November 24 election’s fairness, it’s hard to believe that U.S. policymakers are too upset about the apparent defeat of Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the former president, and the leader of the newly formed LIBRE, which would have pulled Honduras in a more leftist direction – and toward closer contact with Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, each of whom have challenged U.S. influence in Latin America.

There’s another risk that the Obama administration’s Central American policy could be causing more harm than good by ‘feeding the beast’ of corruption among police officers and impunity among drug traffickers, the very things that U.S. aid to Honduras is ostensibly designed to combat.

With three more upcoming elections in Central America over the next six months, it’s a particularly relevant opportunity for the Obama administration to review its policy in the region.  Guatemala’s conservative president Otto Pérez Molina came to power early last year, promptly declared the ‘war on drugs’ a failure, and issued a powerful call to legalize drug use.  Even Felipe Calderón, who militarized the Mexican fight against drug traffickers in the late 2000s, has argued that legalization might be the most effective policy weapon in combatting drug-related violence in Latin America.

Even as some libertarian Republicans in the United States increasingly believe that the four-decade ‘war on drugs’ is a failure at home, it’s easy to underestimate the damage that war has wrought in Latin America, with North American demand fueling an illicit drug supply, together with subsequent US-sponsored military efforts throughout the region, that have destabilized entire countries – Colombia in the 1990s, Mexico in the 2000s and Honduras today.  Research from Horace Bartilow and Kihong Eom, professors of political science at the University of Kentucky, finds that U.S. drug policies have caused greater levels of drug violence in Latin America.  Even when countries are ‘successful’ in their supply-side fights against drug traffickers, demand dictates that the suppliers find new countries, establishing a vicious ‘bubble problem’ – success in one country means that a new chapter opens elsewhere as traffickers search out new bases for drug operations, a tragic game of ‘whack-a-mole’ on a hemispheric level.

It’s Central America’s turn, which now sources the vast majority of known cocaine shipments to the United States.  In particular, traffickers found Honduras a particularly attractive target, in part due to the breakdown in the rule of law that resulted from the 2009 coup.  Sadly, Honduras now boasts the world’s highest homicide rate, and has a thriving arms trafficking trade to match the drug trade. Continue reading How the Obama administration is failing Honduras — and Central America

How Nelson Mandela’s death provides South Africa a challenge and an opportunity

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No one could have filled the shoes of Nelson Mandela, the first president of post-apartheid South Africa — not that either of his successors in recent years tried particularly hard to do so. south africa flag

Thabo Mbeki (pictured above, right, with Mandela), who served as Mandela’s competent executive during Mandela’s term as South African president between 1994 and 1999, became known during his own decade in office as the world leader who refused to admit the connection between HIV and AIDS long after the scientific community established that the human immunodeficiency virus is the proximate cause of AIDS.

Jacob Zuma (pictured above, left, with Mandela), who followed Mbeki into the presidency after the 2009 general election, came to power virtually synonymous with illegality after surviving criminal charges for rape and for corruption in the mid-2000s.  Mbeki himself was forced to resign in September 2008 as president because of allegations that he interfered in the judicial process on behalf of Zuma.

With a general election due in spring 2014, however, Mandela’s death presents both an opportunity and a challenge to South African politics.  Mandela’s absence means that the space is once again open for a South African leader to inspire the entire nation without facing the inevitable comparison to one of the world’s most beloved figures.  But it also marks the end of post-apartheid South Africa’s honeymoon, and so Mandela’s passing also represents a challenge to the new generation of political leadership — to dare to bring the same level of audacious change to South Africa that Mandela did.  Nothing less will be required of South Africa’s leaders to keep the country united and prosperous in the decades to come — to ensure that South Africa continues to be, as Mandela memorably stated in his 1994 inaugural address, ‘a rainbow nation, at peace with itself and the world.’

South Africa today remains the jewel of sub-Saharan Africa, in both humanitarian and economic terms.  Mandela’s release from prison and the largely peaceful negotiation of the end of apartheid in Africa alongside F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s president from 1989 to 1994, rank among the most memorable events of the 20th century.  The constitution that Mandela helped to enact in 1996 is one of the world’s most progressive in terms of human rights — it purports to grant every South African the right to human dignity, to health care and water, to work, to a basic education, to housing.  Even if the rights promulgated in the South African constitution today remain more aspirational than functional, the constitution was pathbreaking in it breadth.  It’s notable that in 2006, South Africa became the fifth country in the world to allow same-sex marriage.

With an economy of $579 billion (on a PPP basis, as of 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund), South Africa has the largest economy on the entire African continent, despite the fact that its population of 53 million is dwarfed by the populations of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (67.5 million), Ethiopia (86.6 million) and Nigeria (a staggering 173.6 million).

Its GDP per capita of $11,281 (again on a PPP basis and as determined by the IMF as of 2012) is exceeded in sub-Saharan Africa only by oil-rich Gabon ($18,501) and tourism hotspot Botswana ($15,706), and it far outpaces the fourth-ranked Namibia ($7,500) and the fifth-ranked Angola ($6,092), another petrostrate.  Even that understates South Africa’s economic dominance, because both the Botswanan and Namibian economies have flourished in large part due to trade with the South African economy.

But that doesn’t mean all is perfectly well.  Nigeria seems likely to outpace South Africa to become the largest sub-Saharan African economy soon, if it hasn’t already.  Despite its status as Africa’s economic powerhouse, South Africa suffered its first post-apartheid recession in 2009, and the recovery hasn’t been particularly strong.  South African GDP grew just 2.2% last year and growth remained sluggish this year, too. Unemployment is creeping downward, but it’s still a whopping 24.7% as of the third quarter of 2013.  Different studies make it difficult to know whether poverty is rising or declining, but wealth among South African whites is massively higher than wealth among South African blacks, and income inequality is rising sharply in South Africa (as in much of the rest of the world).

Clashes between miners and South African police during last summer’s Marikana strike left 34 people dead, shocking both South Africa and the world with the kind of violent images that hadn’t been seen in South Africa since the apartheid era.

With an estimated HIV/AIDS rate of 17.5%, South Africa has the world’s fourth-highest HIV prevalence after neighboring Swaziland, Lesotho and Botswana.  Though we now recognize Mandela as one of the world’s most prodigious activists in the campaign against HIV/AIDS, the issue wasn’t at the top of his agenda as president, a failing that Mandela acknowledged after leaving office.  In retirement, however, Mandela took up the cause with vigor (especially after his own son Makgatho died from AIDS complications in 2005).  His forceful push at the 2000 AIDS conference in Durban muted the criticisms of the Mbeki government and paved the way for greater treatment options for all Africans, including South Africans.  But the much-delayed fight against HIV/AIDS represents one of the starkest failures of post-apartheid South Africa. Continue reading How Nelson Mandela’s death provides South Africa a challenge and an opportunity

Remembering Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Guest post by Andrew J. Novak

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Nelson Mandela, who achieved nearly mythical status as the first post-apartheid president of South Africa, received the name ‘Nelson’ from his teacher Miss Mdingane on his first day of primary school in a small village in the Eastern Cape, as part of a custom at the time of providing African children with Christian names. south africa flag

Before that he was known by his birth name Rolihlahla, ‘troublemaker’ in colloquial isiXhosa, which appears now in retrospect both endearing and prescient. Formal isiXhosa uses clan name as an honorific, referring to a family’s ancestor; Mandela’s was Madiba, the name of a chief who ruled in Transkei in the 18th century.  When he completed his traditional initiation rites of manhood at age sixteen, Mandela was given the name Dalibhunga, ‘convener of the dialogue,’ another name that seems strangely appropriate decades later.  Later in life, he would be known as Tata (father) and Khulu (grandfather) by many South Africans regardless of their own age, as patriarch of a new multiracial democracy.  He was Papa to his third wife Graça Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique, whose life, like his, bore the rugged scars of a nation struggling for independence.

Perhaps the name that most defined his life’s eventual course was a fake one: David Motsamayi, a name he assumed to secretly leave South Africa in 1962 to travel across the continent raising the international profile of the African National Congress (ANC).  He received military training in Morocco and Ethiopia and raised money from the political leaders of several North and West African countries before traveling to London where he met with anti-apartheid activists and reporters.  Upon his return to South Africa, he was arrested at a police roadblock and placed on trial for inciting workers’ strikes and leaving the country illegally.  He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison in Pretoria before the police uncovered evidence of his role in the founding of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Spear of the Nation.

In the famous Rivonia trial, he was convicted of four counts of sabotage and conspiracy to violently overthrow the government and sentenced to life imprisonment.  For the next eighteen years of his life, he lived in a small cell on Robben Island until a journalist’s slogan ‘Free Mandela’ started an international campaign that culminated in a UN Security Council resolution and his eventual transfer to the relative comfort of two mainland prisons.  On the brink of a low-intensity civil war for the next ten years, the South Africa outside Mandela’s cell had changed, and, on February 11, 1990, he was released from prison on live television.

Despite his early legal training and the 1952 establishment of Mandela & Tambo, the country’s first black-African owned law firm, Mandela did not receive his law degree until he completed his correspondence courses in his last months in prison.  Nonetheless, Mandela the lawyer contributed more to development of the rule of law in South Africa than any other person in modern times.  In negotiations at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa from 1991 to 1992, he and South African President F.W. de Klerk succeeded in drafting an interim constitution with the strong separation of powers and a bill of rights.  They also established a timetable for multiracial elections and agreed on the structure of a government of national unity, a process that jointly won them the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993.  The new constitution of South Africa, one of the most progressive in the world, entered into force in May 1996.

Though his successor, Thabo Mbeki, was a more experienced administrator, Mandela provided the moral leadership that South Africa needed in its democratic transition during his five-year term as president.  Mandela the reconciler oversaw the establishment of a truth commission with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as chair to investigate crimes committed under apartheid by both sides.  He tackled the huge disparity in wealth, ending discrimination in social services and helping build national infrastructure: by 1999, housing for three million people had been constructed; three million people were connected to telephone lines and clean water, and two million to the electricity grid; 1.5 million children were enrolled in the education system for the first time; and 500 health clinics were upgraded.

In retirement, Mandela devoted himself to HIV/AIDS activism through his foundation, supporting the protests to provide free anti-retroviral drugs to poor South Africans and allow the government to purchase generics produced in Brazil, India, and Thailand.  In the years that followed, he spoke out against the war in Iraq and Mugabe’s continued rule in Zimbabwe, and in favor of South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid.  He had largely retreated from public life by 2004, but his international statute did not diminish.

He died as he had lived, a fateful mix of youthful troublemaker and eminent patriarch.

Andrew Novak is the adjunct professor of African law at American University, Washington College of Law

Why more protests won’t solve Ukraine’s political crisis (and why the Orange Revolution didn’t, either)

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Despite what you may believe from the example of Egypt and from the various ‘color’ revolutions of the past decade, power isn’t transferred by popular revolt, at least not in mature democracies.Ukraine Flag Icon

That’s important to bear in mind as much of the US and international media keeps its attention focused on Kiev, where protesters continue to demand the resignation of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who is largely seen as favoring closer ties to Russia than to the European Union and the West.  Despite last weekend’s protests of up to 250,000 Ukrainians, which featured violent clashes with the police (the Ukrainian government has since apologized), Yanukovych has so far survived the blowback from his decision last month to reject an association agreement that would have brought Ukraine into closer alliance with the European Union.  While the most conspiratorial commentators believe that Yanukovych rejected the agreement at the insistence of Russian president Vladimir Putin, a more plausible explanation is that Yanukovych hopes to avoid the kind of short-term disruption to Ukrainian industry that could result from opening Ukraine’s markets to European-wide competition just months before he hopes to win reelection in February 2015.  Theres also plenty of blame for the European Union itself, which didn’t go out of its way to make the path for Ukraine incredibly easy, in light of Ukraine’s longstanding relationship with Russia.

But too much of the international media’s coverage attempts to frame the Ukrainian protests as some kind of ‘Orange Revolution’ redux, with Western media almost gleefully urging Yanukovych’s overthrow by mob acclamation.

It’s true that Yanukovych is relatively pro-Russian and many of his opponents are relatively pro-Western, and it’s very true that Yanukovych’s record is littered with authoritarianism and corruption.  But that interpretation both overstates the differences among the Ukrainian political elite (when hasn’t Ukraine been relatively corrupt?) and it understates the massive economic, demographic and social problems that Ukraine has faced since the end of the Cold War.  The much-hyped Orange Revolution didn’t settle the question of Ukraine’s relative identity vis-à-vis Russia and the West, and the current round of protests won’t likely settle the question either.

Here’s a look at the map of the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election results, which pitted Yanukovych against the relatively pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who is now jailed on what many agree to be politically motivated charges:

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Here’s a look at last October’s parliamentary election results — blue represents Yanukovych’s governing party, the Party of Regions (Партія регіонів), and pink represents Tymoshenko’s party, the center-right ‘All Ukrainian Union — Fatherland’ party (Всеукраїнське об’єднання “Батьківщина), which emerged as the largest opposition party:

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Now here’s a map of Ukraine’s regions that shows the percentage of the regional population that speaks Ukrainian (rather than Russian):

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Notice any similarities?

You should — the lesson here is that Ukraine is split between a western Ukrainian-speaking population and an eastern Russian-speaking population that’s divided not only by language, but by cultural, political and economic differences.

Here’s a look at average salary by region, for example, which shows that the Russian-speaking east, where many of Ukraine’s major cities are located, is economically stronger than the Ukrainian-speaking west, except the region surrounding Ukraine’s capital Kiev (and, to a lesser degree, the region surrounding Odessa on the Black Sea coast, where tourism boosts the local economy):

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It’s difficult to overstate the differences between the ‘two Ukraines.’ Continue reading Why more protests won’t solve Ukraine’s political crisis (and why the Orange Revolution didn’t, either)

Photo of the day: A photo op that Xiomara Castro couldn’t have pulled off

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Today, Honduras’s president-elect Juan Orlando Hernández met with the presidents of three Central American neighbors — Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panamá (two of whom will be replaced in elections that are scheduled to be held within the next five months).honduras flag iconNicaragua

But the photo that most stands out is the one above, with Hernández, the conservative leader of Honduras’s Partido Nacional (National Party) gripping and grinning with Nicaragua’s president Daniel Ortega.

Trade between the two countries is increasingly important, and the two counties still have strained relations over a border dispute in 2000-01. Honduras shares nearly all of its southern border with Nicaragua and, as drug trafficking becomes an increasingly insoluble problem for Honduran security, there are fears that Nicaragua (with a homicide rate that’s equal to just one-fourth of Honduras’s) could destabilize as well.  So it’s obviously important for Ortega and Hernández to have a strong working relationship.

But Ortega, as the leader of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN, Sandinista Front of National Liberation) is a stridently left-wing president with little respect for democratic institutions.  Though he’s transformed from guerrilla-style revolution in the 1980s into more run-of-the-mill corruption today, he remains the most anti-American (pro-Venezuelan) socialist leader in Central America.

It’s been just a few days since Hernández was determined to be the winner of Honduras’s November 24 election.  That result continues to be challenged, but it seems increasingly likely that Hernández will indeed be Honduras’s next president.

But consider a parallel universe where Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, leading the campaign of the firmly leftist Partido Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE, Party of Liberty and Refoundation), had posed with Ortega days after winning the election.  You’d have half of Honduras and much of the US policymaking apparatus up in arms about Honduras’s sudden left turn, and it may well have obscured Castro de Zelaya’s first week as president-elect by causing a domestic or international brouhaha.

It’s not a particular commentary on either Castro de Zelaya or on Hernández, but just a point about how critically perception matters in international affairs.  What for one candidate is a run-of-the-mill meeting with the leader of a neighboring country would have taken on a much more ominous tone for another candidate.

Who is Raheel Sharif? A look at Pakistan’s new army chief of staff

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There’s a new Sharif in town.Pakistan Flag Icon

Ending months of speculation, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif announced late last week that Raheel Sharif (pictured above) is his choice to succeed Ashfaq Kayani as Pakistan’s new army chief of staff last week, just hours before Kayani’s resignation went into effect.

Though the two men share the same surname, it’s an open question as to which Sharif will be the more powerful person in Pakistani government over the years to come.  The army chief of staff will significantly influence issues of security and foreign policy, including long-term prospects for more peaceful Indian-Pakistani ties, patrolling Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan (all the more relevant given that the US military pullout is likely to occur in 2014), dealing with the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban), and the bilateral relationship with the United States, including the difficult issues of sovereignty and civilian deaths resulting from US drone strikes in northwestern Pakistan.

While Raheel Sharif may not exactly be able to set Pakistan’s policy on these issues, he can certainly complicate the civilian government’s policy decisions on security and foreign policy if he believes that they aren’t in the Pakistani military’s best interests.

What’s most interesting about the decision is that the last time Nawaz Sharif selected a new army chief of staff, as Pakistan’s prime minister in 1998, his choice was Pervez Musharraf, the third-most-senior officer at the time, who Sharif hoped would chart a more harmonious course in line with Sharif’s security policy than Jehangir Karamat, who Sharif dismissed earlier in 1998.  Within a year, however, Musharraf had ousted Sharif in a military coup, ushering in yet another era of military government in Pakistan that would last nearly a decade, and which coincided with intense cooperation between the United States and Pakistan with respect to Afghanistan and, more generally, US military efforts against radical Islamic terror across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa.

Given the ominous precedent, it was important for Sharif to choose very wisely this time around — and so far, there’s every indication that the new army chief of staff, though somewhat of a surprise pick, is unlikely to pursue a radically different path from Kayani, who has worked hard to keep the Pakistani military’s policymaking role behind the scenes since his appointment in 2007.  Kayani is credited, in part, with providing the backdrop of security and stability that allowed for the first government in Pakistani history to serve out its full five-year term, and his commitment to stable, civilian-led government is perhaps his chief legacy.

In choosing Raheel Sharif, Nawaz Sharif decided against Haroon Aslam, the most senior military officer, who was viewed as the frontrunner, and against Rashad Mehmood, who served as Kayani’s principal staff officer and has also served in the Inter-Services Intelligence, the top Pakistani spy agency.

Raheel Sharif was born in 1956 in Quetta, which is located in the relatively remote province of Balochistan in Pakistan’s southwest, and he comes from a family with a long military tradition — his brother was killed in the 1971 war with India and was awarded Pakistan’s highest military honor, the Nishan-i-Haider.  Though just third in line in terms of military seniority, he has developed new training doctrines under Kayani’s leadership in transitioning the Pakistani army away from its traditional focus on India and toward a role based in counterinsurgency strategy.  He has ties to both top army officials and the political elite and, in particular, is close to lieutenant-general and tribal affairs minister Abdul Qadir Baloch, who’s a key confidante to the prime minister.

 

Five years after returning to Pakistan and five years after the transition back to civilian rule, Nawaz Sharif returned to power after May’s parliamentary elections, which saw Sharif’s Punjab-based, center-right Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) win a landslide victory against both the Sindh-based, center-left Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎) of Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s former president and widower of assassinated prime minster Benazir Bhutto, and the anti-corruption, populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice or PTI, پاکستان تحريک) of Imran Khan.

Upon becoming Pakistan’s prime minister for a third time, Sharif championed a politically negotiated settlement with the TTP and also better economic and security ties with India.  In both cases, the Pakistani military has undermined his goals behind closed doors.   Continue reading Who is Raheel Sharif? A look at Pakistan’s new army chief of staff

Rise of new Italian political leadership eclipses Berlusconi’s expulsion from the Senate

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There’s not much to say about the decision of Italy’s upper house of parliament, the Senato (Senate), to expel former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi last week.Italy Flag Icon

Berlusconi, convicted on a tax fraud charge related to his media company, faces a year of community service and future legal troubles, most notably over charges of soliciting sex from underage prostitutes.

But the fallout from Berlusconi’s most recent political fall dropped long before his expulsion, as a new generation of Italian political leadership has increasingly taken center-stage in Italian politics.

The first sign was the decision among the center-right ministers in the current ‘grand coalition’ government headed by center-left prime minister Enrico Letta to push back against Berlusconi’s September attempt to bring down the government through a vote of no confidence.  Ostensibly, Berlusconi was registering disapproval over the rise of Italy’s VAT from 21% to 22%, but he certainly must have hoped that he could marshal the center-right’s unity to bring down the Letta government, thereby bringing about new elections before the Senate even had a chance to expel him.  Despite initially supporting Berlusconi (who has never served as a minister in the Letta government), deputy prime minister Angelino Alfano and the other ministers gradually pulled away from Berlusconi’s position.  By the time that the Italian parliament voted, Berlusconi himself had resigned to supporting Letta’s government.

The second sign was the formal rupture in mid-November of the party formerly known as Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Freedom).  When Berlusconi tried to rechristen the party under the name of his initial 1994 party, Forza Italia, Alfano and the other moderates within the party pulled out of Forza Italia to form their own bloc, the Nuovo Centrodestra (New Center-Right).  The split meant that Alfano and his allies would continue to support the coalition government and that Berlusconi and his shrinking core of allies would pull their support from the coalition government — it’s a mutually convenient arrangement for both Berlusconi and Alfano, who remain united over their opposition to Berlusconi’s eviction last week and who would still run together under the same broad centrodestra (center-right) umbrella in the event of a new election.  Alfano can play the role of a statesman, and Berlusconi, free from the burdens of government (if not free from the demands of criminal liability) will be able to attack Letta and the center-left without abandon.

For his part, Letta will call a new no-confidence vote on December 11 in the wake of the center-right split, asserting control over his government in the post-Berlusconi era, giving Letta a new chance to deliver on the two major issues that his coalition was designed to address — fiscal reforms to make the Italian economy more competitive and election reforms to fix a helter-skelter system that’s partly responsible for the inertia of Italian government.

Compared to those two efforts, the formal vote to kick Berlusconi out of the Senate was a relatively minor affair.

Berlusconi supplanted Alfano, a former minister of justice and Berlusconi’s one-time protégé, to lead the center-right in the election campaign earlier this year.  Berlusconi’s shrewd success showcased his residual appeal to Italian voters — Berlusconi powered the centrodestra from a huge deficit to coming within 0.4% of defeating the centrosinistra (center-left) coalition.  It’s now a cliché to say that it’s never wise to count Berlusconi out, due not just to Berlusconi’s two decades at the center of Italian politics and power, but also to his wealth and ability to shape opinion through the ownership of much of Italy’s private media.

Polls showed an uptick in Berlusconi’s popularity in the wake of the Senate’s decision, and a December 2 Tecnè poll found that his new Forza Italia still wins about 22% of Italian voters — that’s just around 1% less than Beppe Grillo’s protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) and around 4% less than Italy’s main center-left party, the Partido Democratico (PD, Democratic Party).  While Alfano’s New Center-Right wins just 6.9% of the vote, the centrodestra would win around 36% of the vote if an election were held tomorrow to just 31% for the centrosinistra.

‘Aha!,’ say Berlusconi watchers — even at his weakest point, he’s still driving Italian politics.

But it seems more likely today than ever that Berlusconi will never again be Italy’s prime minister.  Continue reading Rise of new Italian political leadership eclipses Berlusconi’s expulsion from the Senate

Nepalese Maoists election loss means centrist parties likely to agree new constitution

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Nepal, a Hindu Himalayan state of nearly 27 million people isn’t generally on the radar screens of international policymakers. nepal

But it should be  — the country is nestled between the world’s two most populous countries (and increasingly, economic powers), China and India.

Over the course of the last week, it’s become increasingly clear that the once-dominant Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (UCPN-M, एकीकृत नेपाल कम्युनिष्ट पार्टी (माओवादी)) suffered a huge setback in the November 19 elections to the constituent assembly, leaving a once revolutionary rebel group smarting and alleging fraud in the initial shock of defeat, despite no real evidence of electoral malfeasance.

By way of background, Nepal’s elections followed a very rough transition from over two centuries of monarchy to an imperfect democracy.  Despite reforms over the monarchies of King Mahendra and King Birendra in the last half of the 20th century, democratic reformers continually pushed for larger openings.  Nepal’s precarious situation took a turn for the worst in 1996, when the UPCN-M launched a war against the monarchy for the purpose of abolishing it and replacing it with a people’s republic, under the leadership of Pushpa Kamal Dahal (pictured above), commonly known as ‘Prachanda.’  The massacre of the entire royal family in 2001 and the subsequent failure of Gyanendra, Birendra’s brother and his successor, to stabilize Nepal, led to the end of the monarchy in 2008.

It also led to a set of elections in April 2008 for a constituent assembly, a 601-member body of representatives designed as a temporary government that would write a new constitution and govern for two years.  The UCPN-M won those elections, and Prachanda became prime minister.

But within months, Prachanda resigned over a conflict with Nepal’s president over the firing of Nepal’s military chief, leading to a series of four prime ministers over the next four years, months-long stretches without a government and increasing dysfunction.  Five years later, Nepal has no new constitution and after multiple delays, last month’s elections (originally scheduled for November 2012) were designed to elect a constituent assembly with a renewed mission. Continue reading Nepalese Maoists election loss means centrist parties likely to agree new constitution