Monthly Archives: January 2014

Thailand

How Yingluck’s rice subsidy backfired in Thailand

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The outcome of the parliamentary elections in Thailand’s February 2 vote is almost certain, with the opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์) boycotting the election, thereby handing an artificially inflated landslide victorythailand to prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her allies.

Anti-government protests, which began in November over a proposed amnesty bill, and which resulted in Yingluck’s decision in December to call snap elections, continue to rage on, and Yingluck’s government, having already called a state of emergency, has indicated it will start cleaning government buildings in Bangkok of occupying protesters on Monday, February 3.

Though the protests have long eclipsed their immediate cause, an amnesty bill that both Yingluck’s supporters and opponents jeered, the ensuing ignition of political tension (and political violence) between the pro-government ‘red shirts’ and the opposition ‘yellow shirts’ has threatened to endanger the fragile stability that Yingluck, the sister of former, now exiled, prime minister Thaksin Shinwatra, tried to establish since her initial election in 2011.

But lurking behind the protests and the tension is a parallel controversy over the most consequential policy decision of Yingluck’s government — a well-intentioned rice subsidy scheme designed to stabilize the price of the rice crop for Thai farmers not only ran out of money, leaving farmers dissatisfied and angry, but knocked Thailand from its perch as the world’s top rice exporter and now threatens to plunge Thai’s credit rating to junk status. Continue reading How Yingluck’s rice subsidy backfired in Thailand →

Costa Rica

Upstart leftist challenges Araya dominance in Costa Rican vote

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Villalta

Not so long ago, the Costa Rican presidency was Johnny Araya’s to lose.costa_rica_flag

But as Costa Rica holds a general election on February 2 to pick a new president and all 57 members of its Asamblea Legislativa (Legislative Assembly), Araya is on the defensive and may find himself in a runoff against an upstart progressive candidate, José María Villalta (pictured above).

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Araya (pictured above), the mayor of San José since 1998, the candidate of the relatively dominant center-left Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN, National Liberation Party) and the nephew of former president Luis Alberto Monge, led polls throughout 2013.

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There were always reasons to believe that lead was soft, in light of the massive unpopularity of outgoing president Laura Chinchilla (pictured above), who late last year has a 12% approval rating, making Chinchilla, according to pollster Mitofsky, the least popular leader in Latin America.  Elected in 2006 to great fanfare and high expectations as the country’s first female president, Chinchilla has struggled to contain Costa Rica’s exploding public debt, which grew from 30.7% of GDP in 2011 to 35.3% in 2012.  Fifteen ministers have resigned during her administration following corruption and other scandals, and Chinchilla last May hit rock-bottom when she accepted jet rides from a Colombian businessman with suspected drug trafficking links.  Furthermore, Araya’s two-decade record as mayor of Costa Rica’s capital, including ongoing investigations for corruption, provided his opponents with ample ammunition.  Araya has also struggled at times to respond to critics about how he could lead a government that commands the trust of the electorate.

Despite those headwinds, Araya had hope to believe that he would win the PLN’s third consecutive presidential term, given the near-complete collapse of Costa Rica’s traditional center-right party of the past three decades, the Partido de Unidad Socialcristiana (PUSC, Social Christian Unity Party).  Though it held the presidency three times between 1990 and 2006, its parliamentary caucus shrunk from 27 in 1998 to just six today, and its presidential candidates in 2006 and 2010 failed win more than 4% of the national vote.  When former presidents Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez were convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges stemming from PUSC’s time in power, it massively discredited the party.

But the PUSC’s troubles have only worsened in the campaign leading up to Sunday’s vote.  PUSC’s presidential candidate Rodolfo Hernández dropped out of the race, blasting his own party’s record on corruption along the way.  That Hernández dropped out on October 3, changed his mind two days later, and left the race again on October 9 only made the PUSC’s chances worse.  The PUSC hastily named Rodolfo Piza, the former head of Costa Rica’s social security system, who previously contested the PUSC primary for the presidential nomination in May 2013, as its nominee instead.

Support for three other candidates now threaten to deny Araya the 40% support he needs to win the election outright on Sunday, leading to a runoff between the top two candidates, likely on April 6.  It would be just the second time in Costa Rican history that the presidential race requires a runoff (the first was in 2002).

The strongest challenger is the 36-year-old Villalta, whose popularity surged dramatically last autumn.  He’s the candidate (and currently the sole parliamentary member) for the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a relatively new social democratic party that has figured minutely in Costa Rican politics — until now.

A brash, confident leftist, Villalta has embraced a campaign heavy on human rights for an agenda to  boost environmental regulations, enact same-sex marriage, and enact more progressive economic policies at odds with the broadly free-market policies that have dominated both PUSC and PLN administrations over the past three decades.  But his youth and his rapid rise in Costa Rican politics have kept some voters from fully embracing his candidacy.  Though he’s not a communist as his opponents have charged, words of solidarity with the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez have not helped convince voters that Villalta is moderate enough to govern Costa Rica effectively.  He received some ridicule in the final presidential debate for suggesting a tax on sodas and other junk food, including chifrijo, a Costa Rican bar food that combines rice, beans, chicharrón (pork) and chimichurri.

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The strongest candidate on the right is Otto Guevara (pictured above), who’s making his fourth consecutive presidential bid.  Guevara, an attorney, founded the conservative Movimiento Libertario (ML, Libertarian Movement), in 1994 as an anti-corruption party championing free-market liberalism and greater individual rights.  First elected as a legislator in 1998, Guevara has won increasing amounts of support in each election — 1.7% in 2002, 8.4% in 2006 and 20% in 2010.  Guevara has taken a strong social conservative stand in the current campaign, especially against abortion and same-sex marriage.  He’s benefitted from the collapse of the PUSC and, though he seems unlikely to make it into the second round, polls show that he could win the presidency in a runoff against either Araya or Villalta.

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If Villalta had the momentum through the end of 2013, yet another center-left candidate seems to have captured that momentum as the campaign ends — Luis Guillermo Solís, an academic, diplomat and one-time adviser to former president Óscar Arias on the Esquipulas Peace Agreement that helped bring an end to the ideology-based civil wars that plagued much of Central America in the 1980s.  Ariás, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his efforts, has served twice as Costa Rica’s president, from 1986 to 1990 and again from 2006 to 2010, and he remains one of the region’s most respected statesmen.  Solís (pictured above) left the PLN in 2005, however, and he’s running on a solidly center-left platform to improve the country’s health care and pension system and reduce corruption.  Solís has sharply criticized both Chinchilla and Araya throughout the campaign and, as a more moderate center-left alternative to Araya, Solís may be winning voters who are having second thoughts about catapulting the more radical (and younger) Villalta to the presidency.

Solís represents the Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC, Citizen’s Action Party), another social democratic party founded in 2000 by Ottón Solís (no relation) that emerged as an anti-corruption alternative to the PLN that, like the Broad Front, is more skeptical of the PLN/PUSC adherence to neoliberal policies.  The PAC, for example, opposed Costa Rica’s membership in the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement. Ottón Solís ran for president in the previous three elections, and he nearly defeated the seemingly unstoppable Arias in the 2006 election.

The final CID-Gallup poll released January 28 showed Araya holding onto a 35.6% lead, followed by Villalta with 21.0%, Guevara with 17.6%, Solís with 15.6% and Piza at just 6.5%, with other candidates winning just 3.6%.  Those numbers represent a narrow drop for both Araya and Guevara, but it’s a bit of a sharper drop for Villalta, who was pollign in the mid-20s and high-20s earlier this month and in December.  Villalta’s loss has been Solís’s gain.   Continue reading Upstart leftist challenges Araya dominance in Costa Rican vote →

El Salvador

Three-way Salvadoran presidential election focuses on security

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CentralAmerica
Map credit to cartographer Daniel Feher. You can find more of his work here: http://www.freeworldmaps.net/centralamerica/political.html.

In the same week that conservative Juan Orlando Hernández was inaugurated as Honduras’s new president, both neighboring El Salvador and Costa Rica will vote for new presidents on Sunday, February 2, capping a whirlwind of electoral action that will continue with expected runoffs in both countries throughout the spring and the May Panamanian presidential election.el salvador

El Salvador, which lies chiefly along the Pacific coast of Central America, has less than 20% of the area of its neighbor Honduras, but it has 6.3 million residents, nearly 80% of Honduras’s population.  That makes El Salvador the densest country, population-wise, on the Latin American mainland, and that’s not counting between 1.65 million and 2 million Salvadoran Americans, many of whom emigrated north during the Salvadoran civil war and whose remittances back to El Salvador account for 28.2% of El Salvador’s gross domestic product.  Salvadorans abroad, for the first time in Salvadoran political history, will be able to vote in Sunday’s election and the widely expected runoff between the top two finishers on March 9.

Like Honduras (and Costa Rica and Panamá), the Salvadoran president is constitutionally limited to one term in office, which means that the center-left incumbent, Mauricio Funes, is ineligible to run for reelection.

It’s fairly difficult to understand Salvadoran politics without understanding that it’s still in many ways recovering from the brutal civil war from 1979 to 1992  between the US-backed Salvadoran government and the left-wing guerrilla group, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) that killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people.

The conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA, Nationalist Republican Alliance) formed in 1981 in direct opposition to the FMLN, and it held power in El Salvador in the early 1980s and again from 1989 until 2009.  Under the administration of Alfredo Cristiani, El Salvador finalized the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ending the civil war.  His successor Armando Calderón Sol worked to restore a sense of normalcy to the country through the end of the 1990s and to spearhead a series of reforms to privatize and liberalize the Salvadoran economy.  Francisco Flores, who led El Salvador from 1999 to 2004, continued ARENA’s broad center-right agenda, strongly pushed for the US-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in alliance with US president George W. Bush and oversaw the dollarization of El Salvador’s economy, a policy that remains controversial even today among Salvadoran economists.  Flores, however, is under investigation for misuse of public funds and, earlier this week, skipped a congressional hearing on the investigation and is accused of trying to flee the country on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the FMLN strived throughout the 1990s and 2000s to shed its radical leftist past and is now El Salvador’s chief center-left political party with an orientation that’s more social democratic today than Marxist.  Funes’s narrow election victory (with 51.3% of the vote) in March 2009 represented the first non-ARENA government in El Salvador’s post-civil war history.  Funes, a former journalist, campaigned on a moderate agenda that largely accepted much of the neoliberal architecture of the Salvadoran economy, including dollarization.  But as president, Funes has expanded social welfare benefits — abolishing public health care fees, combatting illiteracy, providing food and clothing to schoolchildren, granting title to disputed land claims, introducing monthly stipends and job training for the poorest Salvadorans, and signing legislation to protect women, sexual minorities and indigenous communities.  He’s also oriented El Salvador closer to the Venezuela-led Alianza Bolivariana (ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance) while retaining strong ties with the United States.

Funes, however, has not been so successful in reducing the violent gang-driven crime and drug trafficking that has also afflicted Honduras, Guatemala and México in recent years.  Since a truce between the two top Salvadoran gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (M13) and Barrio 18, fell through in 2013, Salvador homicides have been on the rise.

The 2014 election pits three candidates against each other, and it’s expected that none will win the absolute majority required to avoid a March runoff.  Though polls vary, a January 13 Mitofsky poll shows the ARENA’s candidate, former San Salvador mayor Norman Quijano leads with 35.5%, FMLN’s candidate, vice president Salvador Sánchez Cerén trails narrowly with 31.8% and former president  Elías Antonio ‘Tony’ Saca in third place with 16.0%.  Other polls in the past two months have shown Sánchez Cerén with as much as a 14% lead, and other polls have shown Saca with up to 27% support, though the trend seems to indicate that Saca’s supporters are partly flocking to Quijano, thereby making the race between Quijano and Sánchez Cerén much tighter. 

So how would each of the three candidates govern El Salvador?  Continue reading Three-way Salvadoran presidential election focuses on security →

Argentina, Venezuela

Will Venezuela or Argentina be the first to crumble into economic crisis?

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kirchnermaduro

I write tomorrow for The National Interest about the dual economic crises in Venezuela and Argentina.argentinaVenezuela Flag Icon

The similarities between the two economic crises are uncanny — inflation, capital controls, dollar shortages, overvalued currencies, shortages, etc.

But the similarities don’t stop there.  Both countries currently fee political limitations to force policy changes to avert crisis — and that limit the political capital of the leaders of both countries, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to enact reforms:

Accordingly, normal political channels seem blocked through at least the end of 2015, despite the fact that both countries should be considering massive economic policy u-turns that will require significant amounts of political goodwill neither Maduro nor Fernández de Kirchner possess. But there’s an even greater inertia lurking beyond even the routine political impasse—a kind of political dead-hand control in both countries, on both a short-term and long-term basis.

First, both Venezuela and Argentina remain tethered to the political ideologies of chavismoand kirchnerismo, even though their proponents, Chávez and Néstor Kirchner, are now dead. Those policies may have worked over the last decade to achieve certain goals, including greater social welfare and poverty reduction in Venezuela and a rapid return to economic growth and competitive exports for Argentina. But it should be clear by now that chavismoand kirchnerismo are unable to provide answers to their respective countries’ economic woes today.

Even more broadly, I argue that beyond the shortcomings of chavismo and kirchnerismo, Venezuela faces a long-term resources curse and Argentina faces the long-term legacy of protectionism and statism of peronismo, which in each case underlie the current economic crises.  What’s more, the IMF-sponsored reforms in 1989 that led to the massive Caracazo riots in Venezuela and the IMF-approved lending tied to Argentina’s 1990s ‘convertibility’ crisis that led to the 1999-2001 peso crisis have undermined orthodox economic policymaking:

What’s more, ill-conceived attempts to rupture those dominant paradigms through orthodox ‘Washington consensus’ reform processes led to economic and political disaster. In both countries, leaders experimented with neoliberalism, facilitated by the misguided zeal of the International Monetary Fund, without enacting any corresponding safety nets or shock absorbers. The resulting crises led both countries to double down on their prevailing ideologies, thereby, ironically, making economic reform today even more difficult.

In both cases, the political, historical and economic legacies have prevented the broadly moderate, business-friendly, social democratic middle courses that much of the rest of South America has embraced to wide success, including Colombia, Peru, Chile, Brazil.

Thailand, Ukraine

What protesters in Ukraine and Thailand are getting wrong

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thaiprotest ukraineprotest

The political crises in both Ukraine and Thailand took a turn for the severe last week, as government police forces clashed with protesters with even greater violence.  But what do the protesters want in each country — and can the protests, even if successful, bring stability?  Ukraine Flag Iconthailand

Amnesty: the root cause of the Thai protests

In Thailand, a country of 66.8 million people, anti-government protesters took to the streets in November (pictured above, top) after Thai president Yingluck Shinawatra tried to introduce an amnesty bill that would absolve both her supporters and opposition leaders from the worst charges, including murder, that spring from the political violence that’s engulfed Thailand sporadically throughout the last decade.  The bill died in the Ratthasapha (National Assembly of Thailand, รัฐสภา) after all sides turned against it.  Yingluck’s party, the dominant Pheu Thai Party (PTP, ‘For Thais’ Party, พรรคเพื่อไทย), the third iteration of the party Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, founded in 2001 when he came to power, didn’t want to absolve the sins of their adversaries.  The opposition Phak Prachathipat (Democrat Party, พรรคประชาธิปัตย์) opposed the amnesty bill because they feared it would mean the return of Thaksin from seven years in self-exile.

Though Yingluck won the July 2011 parliamentary elections on a promise to de-escalate tensions in Thailand, the amnesty has brought the country back to the familiar standoff between the pro-Thaksin ‘red shirts’ and the anti-Thaksin ‘yellow shirts.’ 

EU relations: the root cause of the Ukrainian ‘Euromaidan’ protests

In Ukraine, a country of 45.5 million people, pro-European protesters also took their grievances to the streets in late November (pictured above, bottom) after president Viktor Yanukovych pulled out of an association agreement that would have engendered closer cooperation between the European Union and Ukraine.  Initially, the protests, centered on Maidan Square in the capital city of Kiev, assumed the form of the familiar political struggle between the Europe-oriented, Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russia-oriented, Russian-speaking east, which featured prominently in the 2004 ‘orange revolution’ against fraudulent elections that powered Viktor Yushchenko to power.

Yushchenko ended his presidential term massively unpopular, with his pro-Western allies fracturing into various camps, and in the February 2010 presidential race, the pendulum swung back to the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who defeated the EU-friendly former prime minister Yuila Tymoshenko (by 2010, a Yushchenko ally-turned-foe).  For much, much more background, here’s Max Fisher’s explainer today at The Washington Post.

In both cases, the protests have transcended their original rationales, and they now threaten to topple governments in both Kiev and Bangkok. What’s more, Yingluck and Yanukovych haven’t responded incredibly well to the protests. Continue reading What protesters in Ukraine and Thailand are getting wrong →

Serbia

Serbian government pushes forward with early elections

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nikolic-dacic

As Serbia takes another step closer to joining the European Union, its government is headed to snap elections on March 16, with the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS, Српска напредна странка) of president Tomislav Nikolić hoping to replace prime minister Ivica Dačić with its own leader, Aleksandar Vučić, after just 18 months since Dačić took office. Serbia_Flag_Icon

Dačić and his Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS, Социјалистичка партија Србије) emerged in the May 2012 parliamentary elections as the surprisingly strong third-place winners.  That gave Dačić and the SPS the power to determine whether the new government would comprise an alliance with Nikolić’s center-right Progressives or the center-left Democratic Party (DS, Демократска странка) of former president Boris Tadić.  Nikolić, on his fifth attempt to win the presidency, edged out Tadić in the May 2012 presidential runoff, bringing Tadić’s eight-year tenure to an end.

As the kingmaker for Serbia’s next government, Dačić (pictured above, right, with Nikolić, left) decided to crown himself king — and Dačić became prime minister, though his Socialists, with 44 seats in Serbia’s 250-member National Assembly (Народна скупштина), were technically the junior partner in coalition with the Progressives, which hold 73 seats. (The Democrats currently hold 67, and three more minor parties each hold between 16 and 21 seats).

The Dačić-led government oversaw an economic recovery — a 1.7% contraction in 2012 transformed into an estimated 2.4% expansion in 2013.  In any event, there’s no doubt that the Serbian economy has marked a definite improvement.  Though unemployment remains high at around 20%, it’s fallen from a high of around 25.5% in early 2012.

Moreover, Serbia achieved significant progress on EU membership, with negotiations opening earlier this month and ongoing EU-brokered negotiations on the fragile relationship over the future status of Kosovo, despite concerns in 2012 that Nikolić and the Progressives have historically been closer to Russia than to western Europe and wary of EU accession.  The EU talks will rank among the top issues in the election campaign, including the reform program that Brussels requires as a prelude to membership, which could significantly boost the Serbian economy.

But a year and a half into government, Nikolić and the Progressives believe the time has come for Vučić to assume the premiership — and polls show that Serbians agree.  With a fresh mandate, Vučić will push forward with the EU negotiations, and there’s a chance that a new Progressive-led administration work with the IMF for a package of guarantees to reduce lending costs.

A Faktor poll last week showed that 42.1% of Serbia’s electorate support the Progressives, while just 13.9% support the Democrats and 10.5% support Dačić’s Socialists.  Two other parties achieve significant support: the eurosceptic, conservative Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS, Демократска странка Србије), led by Vojislav Koštunica, Serbia’s president from 2000 to 2003 and prime minister from 2004 and 2008, would win 6.8%; and the free-market liberal, centrist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP, Либерално-демократска партија), led by Čedomir Jovanović and several former Democratic Party members, would win 5%.

Vučić, who became the leader of the Progressive Party in May 2012, serves as the first deputy prime minister, and from July 2012 to August 2013, he also served as Serbia’s defense minister.  As the head of the largest party in government, however, he holds more de facto power that Dačić.  As the Progressive Party leader, he’s taken a strong stance against corruption, and he has played a central role in negotiations with respect to Serbia’s accession to the European Union.  As a member of the once-dominant Serbian Radical Party, Vučić served as minister of information in the late 1990s, when at the young age of age 28, he was responsible for assessing fines against journalists who criticised the government and Serbian president Slobodan Milošević — a stance he has recanted today. Continue reading Serbian government pushes forward with early elections →

New Zealand

Will New Zealand get a new flag later this year?

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New Zealand prime minister John Key opened the door to a national referendum later this year on changing the country’s flag, which would end a longstanding debate over whether it too closely resembles Australia’s flag.new zealand icon

That’s not a joke.

Key (pictured above, hoisting the Australian flag) suggested the referendum might be held at the same time as parliamentary elections in the island country of 4.4 million, and it’s an idea that proves relatively popular among Kiwis:

The idea has gained support from former Governor-General Dame Catherine Tizzard.  “Our flag and the Australian flag is so often confused for one another and the symbolism of our flag is a bit out-dated,” she says.

While Phoenix and All Whites Footballer Ben Sigmund agrees the trans-Tasman flags are too alike.  “Our flag is too much like the Australian flag so John Key I think you should change it mate.”

Here’s the Australian flag:

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Here’s the current New Zealand flag:

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Critics may have a point.  Canadian officials made a famous protocol faux pas in 1984 when former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke was met New Zealand flag instead of the Australian.

Both share in common the Union Jack in the upper left quadrant, a nod to their status as former British colonies, members of the Commonwealth and countries that have retained the British monarch — Queen Elizabeth II is the queen of Australia and the queen of New Zealand, too, though both countries have a governor-general that acts as the head of state when the British monarch isn’t in town.  Both share a blue ensign (Pantone 280C for color nerds) as the background to their flags.

Both flags also reference the four main stars in the Southern Cross constellation visible in the southern hemisphere, though the Australian version includes a fifth star that shines less brightly and a sixth star below the Union Jack, the seven-pointed ‘Commonwealth’ star — six points represent Australia’s six states and the last point represents the territories.

The current New Zealand flag replaced the British Union Jack in 1902.

As anticipated by Key, any referendum would present a choice between the current flag and another alternative put forward by the government.  One option that Key has mooted is the ‘silver fern’ flag — the silver fern, an unofficial symbol of New Zealand that dates back to the country’s military insignia during the South African War, adorns the one-dollar coin and the coat of arms:

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A new flag might also reference the Māori, the indigenous Polynesian people in New Zealand, a group that today represents 14.6% of the country’s population and has mobilized to develop increasing political power.  Hone Harawira, the leader of the Māori Party, would support a new flag, but would prefer that it include the motif of the current Māori flag:

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Taken together, the desire to differentiate New Zealand’s flag from Australia’s, the inclusion of the silver fern, the push to remove the Union Jack, and the push for Māori representation on the flag opens an unlimited number of potential choices:

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Proponents of the current flag point to tradition and to the country’s common cause with the United Kingdom:

John Banks, leader of New Zealand’s ACT party said: “No. Men fought under that flag and sacrificed their lives in many war campaigns.  “I’m a bit old-fashioned, I don’t want the name of the country changed, or the flag, or God Save the Queen.”

Key leads the center-right New Zealand National Party, and he must call elections before November 2014.  He’ll be looking to win a third consecutive term in office.  Since coming to power in 2008, Key’s administration has raised the goods and services tax, privatized some public sector assets, responded to a major earthquake in Christchurch (New Zealand’s second-most populous city), enacted the Wellington Agreement to provide greater defense cooperation with the United States and propelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership among the United States, several Asian countries and several Latin American countries.

Key doesn’t advocate New Zealand’s transition from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, unlike Russel Norman, the co-leader of the Green Party, which hold 14 seats in the 120-member House of Representatives.

Key’s party controls 59 seats, and his government commands the support of 64 members, including independent and small-party allies.  The opposition New Zealand Labour Party controls just 34 seats.  David Cunliffe, the former health and communications minister, won the party’s leadership last year, despite wider support among the parliamentary caucus for his opponent, Grant Robertson.

United States

LIVE BLOG: 2014 State of the Union Address

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SOTU2013

Though the traditional State of the Union address from the US president always focuses more on domestic policy than foreign policy, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have an impact on world politics.USflag

In some cases, domestic policy (like immigration, drug policy or cybersecurity) has a pronounced effect on other counties throughout the world.  In other cases, US presidents have used the State of the Union address to outline key decisions on foreign policy — in 2002, US president George W. Bush declared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the ‘axis of evil,’ and in 2013, US president Barack Obama declared that the US war in Afghanistan would come to a close by the end of 2014.  So the State of the Union can often be pivotal moments in US foreign policy as well.

Moreover, there’s no shortage of global hot spots that Obama may choose to address this year — Iran, Syria, the Arab world, Afghanistan, trans-Atlantic trade, trans-Pacific trade and so on.

Please join me at 9:00 ET for a Suffragio live blog that focuses on Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address — and what his speech means for world politics in the year ahead. Continue reading LIVE BLOG: 2014 State of the Union Address →

South Africa

DA announces Ramphele to lead South African campaign

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ramphele

In a move designed to maximize the opposition to South African president Jacob Zuma, Mamphela Ramphele will join the Democratic Alliance (DA) to contest the spring elections as its presidential candidate. south africa flag

That will pit Ramphele (pictured above), the widow of one of South Africa’s most well-known anti-apartheid fighters in the 1980s, directly against Zuma, who leads the ruling African National Congress (ANC).

Ramphele founded AgangSA, (‘Agang’ means ‘to build’ in the Northern Sotho language) in February 2013 as a center-left alternative to the ruling ANC.  Little did she know at the time that she would ultimately lead South Africa’s main opposition party into this spring’s parliamentary elections.  Voters, sometime in April or May, will elect the 400 members of the National Assembly, the lower house of the South African parliament, which will indirectly elect South Africa’s president.  Zuma’s ANC currently holds 264 seats, and it’s still expected to win the next elections, which means that Zuma — for now — remains an almost certainty for reelection.

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Ramphele’s decision to join forces with the Democratic Alliance is a strategic gain for the party, whose leader is Helen Zille (pictured above, yesterday, with Ramphele), the premier of Western Cape province and former mayor of Cape Town.  Under Zille’s leadership, the Democratic Alliance has made steady, if slow gains.  It won 16.66% and 67 seats in the April 2009 elections, its best-ever national result.  In the May 2011 municipal elections, it won 23.9% of the national vote and started to gain more notice in South Africa’s top urban areas.

Though Zille, a former anti-apartheid activist and journalist, already seemed set to improve on her 2009 and 2011 performances, her union with Ramphele gives South Africa’s opposition hope that it really might find a way to break open the ANC’s two-decade lock on power. Continue reading DA announces Ramphele to lead South African campaign →

Hungary

Hungarian left unites, but will it be enough to stop Orbán?

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mesterházy

As Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán hopes to consolidate his hold on Hungarian government in the country’s April 6 elections, the Hungarian center/left is uniting in a broad anti-Orbán coalition.Hungary Flag Icon

Under the banner of Osszefogas (‘Unity’), five of Hungary’s center-left parties will band together behind the prime ministerial candidacy of Attila Mesterházy (pictured above, center), the leader of Hungary’s largest opposition party, the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP, Hungarian Socialist Party).

The coalition brings together four relatively new groups:

  • Együtt 2014 (E14, Together 2014) is a new social democratic party founded in October 2012 by former prime minister Gordon Bajnai, a Socialist who governed Hungary s somewhat of a technocratic caretaker between April 2009 and May 2010, when which Orbán came to power with a supermajority.  Bajnai’s government tried to steer a course through crippling budget austerity and an economy that hit its nadir with a 6.8% contraction in 2009.  From the outset, Bajnai (pictured above, far left) has advocated a united anti-Orbán front for the 2014 elections.
  • Párbeszéd Magyarországért (PM, Dialogue for Hungary) is a green liberal party founded in February 2013 as a breakway faction of Lehet Más a Politika (LMP, Politics Can Be Different), another green party founded in 2009.  PM’s leaders are Timea Szabó and Benedek Jávor, the latter an environmental lawyer and botanist.  The party has, since March 2013, been allied with E14 in advance of this year’s elections.
  • Demokratikus Koalíció (DK, Democratic Coalition) is the party of Ferenc Gyurcsány, prime minister between 2004 and 2009, and it was founded in October 2011 when Gyurcsány (pictured above, center, behind Mesterházy) left the Socialists, taking with him 10 of the Socialists’ 59 seats in the National Assembly.  Gyurcsány’s decision to unite under Mesterházy is particularly helpful for the anti-Orbán opposition because Gyurcsány remains more well-known than Mesterházy.  Even though Mesterházy led the (disastrous) 2010 electoral effort, Gyurcsány has more governing experience and political canny.  Gyurcsány, who came to power at a time when Hungary’s budget deficit was spiraling out of control (even in pre-crisis days), resigned in 2009 after introducing ever harsher budget reforms in line with a 2008 financing agreement with the International Monetary Fund.  Gyurcsány’s budget reforms, and his attempt to modernize the Hungarian health-care system, alienated him from his own party. 
  • The Magyar Liberális Párt (Hungarian Liberal Party) was founded in April 2013 as a pro-European, liberal party by Gábor Fodor, a former education minister in the mid-1990s and an environmental minister in 2007-08.  Fodor (pictured above, far right) was the the final leader of the Alliance of Free Democrats/Liberal Party, a predecessor to the current party that divided in 2008, when the liberal coalition lost the last of its 20 seats in the National Assembly.

Though the green LMP hasn’t joined the coalition, the five-party front is demonstrating about as much unity as you could expect — and much more than the alternative, much feared a month ago, that Orbán would take advantage of the disunity to win an outsized supermajority in the National Assembly. 

In the current 386-member National Assembly, Orbán’s ruling conservative party, Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance) controls 226 seats.  Together with its ally, Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt (KdNp, Christian Democratic People’s Party), which today has become more a satellite of Fidesz than a truly independent party, Orbán controls 263 seats.  That’s a supermajority of just over two-thirds, and that’s permitted Orbán to introduce constitutional reforms and other laws that have strengthened his hold on power and undermined Hungary’s democratic institutions.

The Socialists control just 48 seats, and the far-right nationalist Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik) controls 43 seats.

Under new electoral rules, the National Assembly will be reduced from 386 seats to just 199 seats.  Unlike the prior system, where just over half of the seats were determined by proportional representation, the new system tilts slightly more toward plurality districts — 106 seats will be determined in single-member districts by first-past-the-post voting.  Another 93 seats will be determined by party-list proportional representation (with a 5% threshold for parties and a 10% threshold for coalitions).  In an election with five center-left parties competing against each other as much as against Orbán, Fidesz remained the overwhelming favorite to with the 106 plurality seats.  So the unification of the center-left opposition makes a nearly impossible race merely a tough race.

A January 15 IPSOS poll shows Fidesz with around 48% of the vote, the Hungarian Socialists with 27%, Jobbik with 11% (far below the troublingly high 17% it won in the April 2010 elections) and other parties in single digits.  But when you add the new Unity coalition totals together, Fidesz leads by a more narrow margin of 48% to 37% (DK and E14 each win 5% of the vote.

If the election were held tomorrow, Fidesz would still win, but the Unity coalition might together win seats that would otherwise fall to Fidesz.  In other words, Mesterházy and the united opposition would turn a landslide defeat into a robust defeat.

But is there a way to actually win the election against Orbán? Or does Fidesz have a lock on April’s elections?  Continue reading Hungarian left unites, but will it be enough to stop Orbán? →

Honduras

Hernández takes office with agenda already largely in place

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What’s most unusual about today’s inauguration of Juan Orlando Hernández as the next president of Honduras is that so much of his agenda is already in place.honduras flag icon

Upon taking office today, Hernández (pictured above) will face daunting security, economic and political challenges.

But on at least a few matters, he’ll take office with key elements of his agenda already in place, thanks to the efforts of the outgoing administration of Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the wide majority of the Partido Nacional (PN, National Party) in the outgoing Congreso Nacional (National Congress).  Hernández served as president of the National Congress from 2010 to 2014.  The transition from Lobo Sosa to Hernández marks the first time since the return of democracy to Honduras in 1981 that the conservative National Party will hold two consecutive presidential terms (Honduran presidents are constitutionally ineligible to run for reelection).

Hernández takes office today, but he does so after enacting several key security and fiscal policies in the final months and weeks of the Lobo Sosa administration, including a new, less controversial national police chief, a new military police force, landmark fiscal reforms (including a wide tax increase) and a plan to privatize Honduras’s public electricity company.  Last weekend, the new National Congress was sworn in, which means that the National Party will control just 48 seats in the 128-member unicameral parliament, a sharp reduction from the 75-seat bloc that Hernández commanded during the Lobo Sosa era.

From ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘the party is over’

Even before the election campaign reached full swing, Hernández last September pushed through legislation authorizing the creation of a new policia militar (‘military police’) that will deploy in full force early this year, and he campaigned on a slogan to do ‘whatever it takes’ (¡voy hacer lo que tenga que hacer!) to make Honduras safe.  The controversial legislation creates an elite militarized unit loyal to Hernández that (hopefully) won’t be corrupted by organized crime and drug traffickers, which have already infiltrated much of the Honduran police and military. Critics worry that the new military police could trample human rights in a country barely three decades removed from death squads.  Many Hondurans fear the police more than drug traffickers and criminal gangs.

Late in December 2013, Lobo Sosa fired the head of Honduras’s national police, Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as ‘El Tigre.’  Bonilla had become a controversial figure, given alleged ties to the death squads of the 1980s.  Since becoming the head of Honduras’s national police force in August 2012, Bonilla became linked to a trend of humanitarian violations at the hands of the national police, including beatings, illegal detentions and other harassment of gay and lesbian Hondurans, journalists and leftists in political opposition to the current administration.  Bonilla also seemed either unwilling or unable to crack down on rampant corruption within his ranks.  Given that police salaries are a pittance, however, reforming the national police force could prove just as difficult in the Hernández era as well.

Bonilla’s removal represents one less headache for Hernández, who would have continued to face ongoing skepticism  from both within and outside Honduras over Bonilla’s leadership.  But there’s no sign that the future will be any less corrupt or any more respectful of human rights — and no clear sign that Bonilla’s successor, Ramón Sabillón, previously the commander of the national police’s special investigations division, will do any better.

Stabilizing Honduras will be Hernández’s top challenge in the next four years, and he’s staked his presidency on doubling down with a military solution rather than a strategy of community-based policing.  Though the United Nations The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recorded a rate of 91.6 per 100,000 in 2011, but the Violence Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras estimated a rate of 85.5 in 2012 and just 80 per 100,000 in 2013.  While that’s a significant drop, it still means that Honduras has the world’s highest homicide rate.

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In his inaugural address today, Hernández declared that for criminals, se le terminó la fiesta (‘the party is over), and he wasted no time in announcing a massive military operation, Operácion Morazán, named after Honduras’s founding father.  To that end, Hernández indulged a demonstration at his inauguration earlier today of Los Tigres, one unit of Honduras’s increasingly militarized network of squads and paramilitary police forces (pictured above).

Rigoberto Chang Castillo, a top Hernández ally, has become Honduras’s new interior and population minister, and rising National Party star Reinaldo Sánchez will become the minister of the presidency.

Bilateral relations with the United States and drug policy

One of the most surprising aspects to Hernández’s inaugural address, however, was a stern admonishment of US drug policy.  Declaring a double standard, Hernández spoke out against the United States for its role in Honduras’s state, noting that North American demand for drugs has fueled so much violence throughout Latin America, and that while drugs are merely a ‘health’ issue for US consumers, it’s a matter of life and death for Honduras, which fights traffickers with limited resources — and the blood of its own people: Continue reading Hernández takes office with agenda already largely in place →

France

Daft Punk wins best album, record at Grammys

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It was somewhat of a shock to see Daft Punk win so many awards at last night’s Grammys.  It’s a, well, French robot-headed electronic music duo, Guy-Manuel de Momem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter. They’ve been around for over two decades, and they’ve already won a place in the pantheon of French house music and electronic music worldwide.France Flag Icon

The duo won record of the year for ‘Get Lucky’ and album of the year for ‘Random Access Memories,’ which was something of an upset.  Perhaps a cultural boost for France, which is as much in the political doldrums as ever and on the day that French presient François Hollande announced that he is splitting up with ‘first lady’ Valerie Trierweiler.

Suffragio‘s favorite Daft Punk song? ‘Around the World,’ of course.  From the duo’s 1997 debut, Homework.

Honduras

Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration

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NOTE: This post originally appeared at Huffington Post’s Latino Voices blog.
For more of Suffragio‘s coverage and reporting on Honduras, click here. 

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Erick Martínez remembers exactly where he was when Erick Martínez was killed.honduras flag icon

Erick Vidal Martínez, today one of Honduras’s most high-profile LGBT activists, was supposed to meet Erick Martínez Avila at one in the afternoon on an otherwise temperate spring day in May 2012. Martínez Avila had been selected to be the representative of the LGBT community in the congressional primaries for Honduras’s new leftist political party, the Party of Liberty and Refoundation (known by its acronym, LIBRE, which is Spanish for “free”). But the LGBT community had planned to meet on May 6, 2012 to hold a full assembly in order to ensure that all voices, including transsexual and transgender members of the community, could provide input on the campaign ahead.

“The meeting was scheduled at 2:00 p.m., but we had talked about getting together beforehand.,” Martínez said. “Then 3 o’clock came around, then 3:30, and he didn’t show up. People started to believe that he didn’t want to become the candidate. So people said, ‘well, we’ll just have to find somebody else.'”

The next day, May 7, was Erick Vidal Martínez’s birthday. When the other Erick didn’t send so much as a text message to mark the occasion, the community’s brief annoyance deflated quickly into concern. Later that day, they learned the news — Erick Martínez Avila had been kidnapped off the streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras. His kidnappers ultimately strangled him to death and discarded his body in a ditch on the outskirts of town.

“My world completely changed that day, it was a 360-degree turn,” he said. “I didn’t have time to mourn him, I didn’t have time to cry.”

It was among the more high-profile of dozens of assassinations within Honduras’s struggling LGBT community — another top LGBT activist, Walter Tróchez, was shot while walking down the street in December 2009. Erick Vidal Martínez knew both of them well — as friends, as political allies, as part of his support network in a country where dissent of any stripe has become increasingly perilous. No one would have blamed him for packing his bags, filing an asylum application and catching the next flight to Ottawa. Or Brussels. Or London.

Instead, just days before Hondurans voted in a landmark general election, Erick met with me for coffee in downtown Tegucigalpa to explain why he’s picked up the fight where the other Erick, Walter and other murdered LGBT activists left off, and why he’s willing to risk his life to fight for greater rights for the diversity community in Honduras, a task that could become ever more treacherous in the years ahead, when Honduras’s new conservative president, Juan Orlando Hernández, will be inaugurated Monday, January 27.

“Everyone in Honduras has fear, but you can’t make decisions through fear and the past,” Martínez said. “I have to be smart. It would be foolish of me to expose myself. My advantage is my profile as a human rights activist. This is not a bulletproof vest, but it helps… After Erick’s murder, I gave up my social life; I gave up my private life.” Continue reading Honduran LGBT activists fear ongoing threat upon Hernández inauguration →

India

Is Priyanka Vadra the secret Gandhi family weapon for Congress?

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All eyes have been on Rahul Gandhi, the somewhat reluctant warrior who’s leading the campaign for the governing Indian National Congress (INC / Congress) that hopes to win a third consecutive term in power in this spring’s parliamentary elections.India Flag Icon

But it’s his sister, Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra, who is getting all the buzz recently with word that Priyanka will step out of the shadows to take a fuller role in the election campaign this year, mostly as an advisor and manager for Rahul’s campaign, but also taking an increasingly visible role as well.

As she steps closer to the heart of Congress’s campaign, it will be the third major Gandhi family member to figure prominently in the 2013 elections.  Their Italian-born mother, Sonia Gandhi, has been Congress’s party leader since 1998, though when Congress won the 2004 national elections, Sonia declined to become prime minister, instead handing the top job to Manmohan Singh, who will step down this spring after a decade in office.

Rahul is not technically the Congress’s prime ministerial candidate in 2013, but his role leading the campaign means that it’s more likely than not that he’ll become India’s next prime minister if the INC wins this spring.

That outcome seems increasingly less certain.  The latest CNN-IBN-Lokniti-CSDS poll shows that Congress and its allies, which together comprise the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) will win between 107 and 127 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha (लोक सभा), the lower house of the Indian parliament — a loss of over 100 seats.  Instead, the more conservative, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or भारतीय जनता पार्टी) would win, together with its own allies that form the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), between 211 and 231 seats, under the leadership of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.

Modi, the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, has waged an aggressive campaign against Congress, on the basis that he can bring Gujarat’s high-growth economic approach to the rest of India.  Modi, who is 20 years older than Rahul, routinely refers to his opponent as shehzada, or ‘prince,’ and there’s speculation that Congress’s leadership decided not to anoint Rahul as its official prime ministerial candidate to avoid a presidential-style showdown between the two leaders that Modi would almost certainly win, despite his flaws.

Priyanka has campaigned before on behalf of her mother and broher in their constituencies in Uttar Pradesh.  But neither she nor her brother, Rahul, have faced the rigors of leading a national campaign in the world’s largest democracy — especially against perhaps the most talented BJP politician in over a decade.  Modi’s not without flaws, though, especially given doubts over his role in 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat.

But there’s no disputing that Modi, if the elections were held today, has enough momentum to win.

So who is Priyanka and how can she help turn things around for Congress?  Continue reading Is Priyanka Vadra the secret Gandhi family weapon for Congress? →

Uncategorized

Tsunis nomination draws scorn from Norwegians

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Not only does George Tsunis not speak Norwegian, he’s never even set foot in Norway.USflagnorway

Yet, even as he stumbled through an embarrassingly poor performance at a hearing on Thursday before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tsunis is set to become the next US ambassador to Oslo.

As US senator John McCain asked Tsunis about the ‘anti-immigration’ Framskrittspartiet (Progress Party), which is the junior member in Norway’s center-right governing coalition, the future ambassador stumbled with his answer or, as Norway’s newspapers phrased it, tråkket i salaten (trampled through the salad bowl).  

“You get some fringe elements that have a microphone and spew their hatred,” he said in the pre-appointment hearing. “And I will tell you Norway has been very quick to denounce them.”
McCain interrupted him, pointing out that as part of the coalition, the party was hardly being denounced.
“I stand corrected,”  Tsunis said after a pause.  “I would like to leave my answer at… it’s a very,very open society and the overwhelming amount of Norwegians and the overwhelming amount of people in parliament don’t feel the same way.”

Good grief.  This came after Tsunis referred to Norway’s ‘president’ — of course, there’s no such office because Norway is a constitutional monarchy.  By way of background, Tsunis is an attorney and a businessman from Long Island.  He founded Chartwell Hotels, which operates properties for InterContinental Hotels and other hotel chains.  Though he supported McCain, a Republican, in the 2008 US presidential election, he bundled nearly $1 million in contributions for US president Barack Obama, a Democrat, in the subsequent 2012 presidential election, and he personally donated $267,244 to the Democratic Party in 2012 and $278,531 in 2010.  Tsunis is an active member of the Greek-American community and the Greek Orthodox Church, which begs why anyone in the Obama administration would send him… to Norway.

McCain, not thrilled with the response, thanked Tsunis and the ‘incredibly highly qualified group of nominees.’  But perhaps McCain should leave aside the snark himself — Norwegians might also take issue with his characterization of the Progress Party solely as an anti-immigration party.  In fact, the party has its genesis in the anti-tax movement of the 1970s.  It’s certainly in favor of tougher immigration restrictions, and it’s probably Norway’s most controversial major party.  But it’s not nearly as xenophobic as some of Europe’s other parties (e.g., Marine Le Pen’s Front national in France), and it represents something greater in Norway as a party of rupture.

Other mainstream center-left and center-right parties largely support Norway’s social welfare state, just as they support the relatively fiscal conservative steps to limit spending from Norway’s oil largesse.  The Progress Party wants to break away radically from the state-heavy welfare model, and it wants to spend more of Norway’s oil fund today.

That’s why Erna Solberg, the leader of Høyre (the ‘Right,’ or more commonly, the Conservative Party) is Norway’s prime minister today instead of Progress Party leader Siv Jensen.  Solberg pulled the Conservative Party toward a more moderate policy path that’s essentially the center-right analog to the long-governing Arbeiderpartiet (Labour Party), which lost the September 2013 elections after two terms in power under former prime minister Jens Stoltenberg.

It doesn’t seem like it would be so incredibly hard for the Obama administration to bring even someone woefully uniformed about Norway’s political, cultural and economic basics up to speed — even Tsunis!  That the Obama administration chose not to do so is perhaps the most egregious oversight of all. 

The previous ambassador to Norway, Barry White, who served from 2009 to 2013, had at least some basis in international affairs as the longtime managing partner of Foley Hoag LLP, and as the chair of Lex Mundi, a global association of international, independent law firms.  His predecessor, Benson Whitney, served from 2005 to 2009 under former president George W. Bush.  A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota, Whitney came from the US state with the greatest number of Norwegian-Americans by far.  As then-president of the Minnesota Venture Capital Association, he could argue that his experience in venture capital and investments would bode well to serve as a representative to the country with the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund.

It’s not just Tsunis. The Obama administration’s nominee to serve as the ambassador to Hungary, by the way? Colleen Bradley Bell, a television producer and — you guessed it — philanthropist and top Obama campaign donor.  At a time when Hungary faces some of the most troubling accusations of democratic backsliding within the European Union, and with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán set to win another majority under a new (troubling) electoral system in April, the United States is sending the producer of television daytime soap opera ‘The Bold and the Beautiful.’

 

I wrote last June that the nomination of James Costos, a Hollywood executive and Obama donor with no Spanish language skills and no apparent ties to Spain, to become the US ambassador of Spain was a prime example of why the current practice of sending wealthy donors (instead of career diplomats from the US state department) is so flawed: Continue reading Tsunis nomination draws scorn from Norwegians →