Monthly Archives: January 2014

Uganda

A treasury of comments about Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill

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How much do Ugandans hate gays and lesbians?uganda

A lot, as it turns out.  My post from last week, which recounted the final enactment of Nigeria’s anti-gay law and the decision by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni to veto the anti-gay bill passed in December 2013 by the Ugandan parliament, attracted more attention than nearly any post I’ve written since I started Suffragio in early 2012.

So I thought it was worth sharing some of the reactions — and they’ve been jarring.

In the past month alone, I’ve argued that the United States is engendering sympathy for al-Qaeda forces in Yemen, that the US Senate would commit policy malpractice by enacting a new Iran sanctions bill and that the late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s most enduring legacy is empowering Hezbollah.  Just yesterday, I entertained the notion that the United States and Canada should merge into a superstate.  These aren’t easy issues, and others won’t always share my  interpretations and conclusions.

But nothing has caused quite as much blowback as a relatively straightforward piece examining Museveni’s veto in the context of a rapidly worsening climate for LGBT rights throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

The (unintentionally hilarious) Anel Tunes, who’s from Kampala, shared my post on Facebook — with the following preamble:

All homosexuals need to be shot dead on site. We don’t need to spend tax payers money by taking such beasts to court. We just need to slay their throats without a question.

He’s not alone — the comments on both my blog and on Facebook run very heavily anti-gay.  I’d expect that because Uganda’s culture is relatively conservative.  There are plenty of good people in the United States who oppose same-sex marriage and believe, for religious or other reasons, that same-sex relationships are wrong, and the battle for wider acceptance of sexual minorities (including, for the record, transsexual and transgender individuals) can’t be legislated or enacted by judicial fiat.  I can understand that.

What I can’t understand is the desire to kill fellow citizens.  The virulence of hatred is staggering.  I’m used to a hostile or critical comment (or dozen) from time to time, but these comments are extraordinarily hateful.

Rogers Mover M adds simply:

We HATE HOMOSEXUALITY

From Ssebbaale Henry Wise:

rubbish !!!! it doent matter whether he voted other wise, remember this is africa, we act as we please, we will contiue to kill the Gays until when they are totally finished

From Tonny Bulletslinger Tomeeo Lazyeye:

Homo??? you even have time to debate on that??? we have machetes

Jjemba Mathew disapproves of the Ugandan parliament’s decision to reduce the penalty from ‘death’ to merely life imprisonment:

Life imprisonment can not end gay habits.They need Gun fire in the stadium.

Black Panther argues that Ugandan gays should be fed to the crocodiles:

 This is abusing our President.Its such a shameful act that it shldnt hv even been discussed in our Parliament.They shld hv just rounded up all homosexuals at night and thrown them into River Nile for our more honourable and profitable crocodiles to feast on as they are more useful at least they attract tourists and earn the country the much needed foreign currency.

Continue reading A treasury of comments about Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill →

Comparative Politics

Would ‘lottocracy’ be a better form of government than democracy?

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Winston Churchill is attributed with the quote, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.’

But it’s William F. Buckley who said, ‘I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.’

Alex Guerrero, assistant professor of philosophy, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania (and also a law school classmate of mine), thinks Buckley may have been on to something, and he makes the case for selecting representatives not by elections, but through a lottery system in Aeon today:

First, rather than having a single, generalist legislature such as the United States Congress, the legislative function would be fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures (each one focusing on, for example, just agriculture or health care). There might be 20 or 25 of these single-issue legislatures, perhaps borrowing existing divisions in legislative committees or administrative agencies: agriculture, commerce and consumer protection, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, immigration, labour, transportation, etc.

These single-issue legislatures would be chosen by lottery from the political jurisdiction, with each single-issue legislature consisting of 300 people. Each person chosen would serve for a three-year term. Terms would be staggered so that each year 100 new people begin, and 100 people finish. All adult citizens in the political jurisdiction would be eligible to be selected. People would not be required to serve if selected, but the financial incentive would be significant, efforts would be made to accommodate family and work schedules, and the civic culture might need to be developed so that serving is seen as a significant civic duty and honour.

At first read, it sounds like a nightmare out of an Arthur Miller play.  Three hundred random US citizens would congregate to tackle a discrete issue like climate change, health care reform, or immigration reform.

What’s so bad about democracy? 

Before you dismiss the idea outright, it’s important to bear in mind the long, long list of problems with elections, in their current form in the United States and in other mature democracies — and that’s saying nothing about the question of free and fair elections in countries where democratic institutions are less robust.  The business of policymaking of a typical 21st century government is typically too complex for direct democracy to thrive in most jurisdictions. The need to become informed about the nuances of even major policy decisions would quickly overwhelm all of us.  Experiments with direct democracy, through the proliferation of ballot initiatives to decide key issues, have worked better in some places (Switzerland) than in others (California).  The limitations of direct democracy have meant that, outside the classical era of Athenian democracy and a few referendum-driven jurisdictions, ‘democracy’ for most people today means representative democracy.  Voters elect legislators and executives on the basis of a plethora of policy positions.

Of course, by gaining efficiency, indirect democracies lose precision — voters will choose one candidate over another for many reasons, and no voter’s policy priorities may line up entirely with any candidate.

Moreover, we can see the other problems of representative democracy in modern US politics.  Marketing and advertising, since at least the onset of the television era, can now be more important than policy positions.  Accordingly, representatives spend more time today raising money from donors than tending to the business of lawmaking, undermining the one-person-one-vote principle that undergirds representative democracy.  As Alex notes, the current process is subject to all sorts of problems.  The influence of money and lobbyists can lead to agency and electoral capture.  Collective action problems are rife — interest groups who care deeply about an issue can skew policies to their favor, even at the expense of the widely dispersed gains that might otherwise accrue to the rest of the population.  Protectionism, tariffs and free trade is a classic example.

Gerrymandering, barriers to entry and the advantages of incumbency massively reduce competition within the political marketplace.  It’s left us with a system where, as Alex writes, ’44 per cent of US Congresspersons have a net worth of more than $1 million; 82 per cent are male; 86 per cent are white, and more than half are lawyers or bankers.’ It’s a system where Congressional reelection rates in the United States routinely exceed 90% — even in a massive ‘wave’ election like the 2010 midterms that saw a Republican wave, the reelection rate was still 85%.  Part of that you can blame on gerrymandering, but more so on the natural preferences and geopolitical distribution of urban and rural voters — and perhaps even more so on the US electoral system (i.e., single-member plurality districts instead of proportional representation).  

Tradition, financial and political infrastructure, a first-past-the-post electoral system and path dependence mean that, in the United States, two political parties reign supreme.  When those two parties agree on policy preferences, it means there’s effectively no competition within the political marketplace on many key issues — in the past three decades, this has included drug legislation, foreign policy, national security, military affairs, gun regulation, financial regulation, home ownership policy and other matters.  In many cases, the bipartisan consensus has turned out to be wrong.

Electoral competition, too, is rife with short-term thinking.  In a world where public servants are focused on reelection in two years (the US House of Representatives), four years (the US president) or six years (the US Senate), there will always be a temptation to focus on short-term benefits at the expense of long-term costs.  Say what you want about the People’s Republic of China, but the governing Chinese Communist Party has to contemplate long-term effects of its policies, because there’s no alternative party to blame.  In the US system, Democrats and Republicans can rotate in and out of office and blame each other for perpetuity.  Not so in China — the CCP has to own its policy decisions or face a massive popular revolt.

That all assumes, too, that voters make well-informed, rational decisions.  As Bryan Caplan argues in The Myth of the Rational Voter: How Democracies Choose Bad Policies, borrowing from the insights of economic theory, ‘democracy’ fails primarily due to irrational and ill-informed voters:

In the naive public-interest view, democracy works because it does what voters want.  In the view of most democracy skeptics, it fails because it does not do what voters want.  In my view, democracy fails because it does what voters want.  In economic jargon, democracy has a built-in externality.  An irrational voter does not hurt only himself.  He also hurts everyone who is, as a result of his irrationality, more likely to live under misguided policies.  Since most of the cost of voter irrationality is external — paid for by other people, why not indulge?  If enough voters think this way, socially injurious policies win by popular demand.

It’s also worth asking how truly ‘democratic’ elections have become.  Since the 20th century, government has become so complex that many policy decisions are two steps removed from the ballot box, with legislators ceding control to specialized regulators.  In the United States, the wide-ranging administrative and regulatory state nearly amounts to a fourth, unelected branch of government.  Critics of the European Union have long pointed to a ‘democratic deficit’ within the growing EU institutions.  Despite a growing role for the elected European Parliament and perhaps a more representative era in selecting the European Commission, the key decisions of European integration (including the creation of the single market and monetary union) were made more by treaty than at the ballot box. 

 

So should we, therefore, turn to policymaking-by-lottocracy?  Continue reading Would ‘lottocracy’ be a better form of government than democracy? →

Egypt

Mubarakization watch: Egypt referendum results

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For the record, the results of last week’s constitutional referendum are in — voters approved Egypt’s new constitution by a margin of 98.13% to 1.87%, though on a turnout of just 38.6%. egypt_flag_new

With the opponents of the new constitution boycotting the vote, including the supporters of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the lopsided margin makes some sense.  The turnout was higher than the 32.9% recorded for the December 2012 constitutional referendum hastily organized to approve the Islamist-friendly constitution promulgated by former president Mohammed Morsi, and it’s only a little lower than the 41.9% turnout in the March 2011 constitutional referendum when optimism ran highest after the collapse of the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak.

But it’s not a great sign for Egyptian democracy that such wide majorities endorsed two very contradictory visions for Egypt’s constitution within the same 13-month period.  It’s also not a great sign that the ‘July 3’ regime, the military government that ousted Morsi last summer and headed by interim president Adly Mansour and defense minister and armed forces chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, dispersed and harassed opponents of the new constitution in the days leading up to the vote.  By most accounts, the current government hasn’t been as heavy-handed as the Mubarak regime in the 2005 and 2010 votes, which amounted to show elections, but that’s setting the standard for Mansour and El-Sisi fairly low.

Amnesty International on Wednesday harshly condemned the military regime’s use of force and the infringement of human rights since taking power seven months ago.  The interim government has repeatedly used lethal force to break up protests, largely in support of the Morsi regime.  In a world where the government continues to refuse to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to compete freely and fairly, though, a cloud of doubt will hang over not only the constitutional referendum, but the next two sets of elections.

It’s worth noting that the new constitution marks an improvement in some areas over the 2012 constitution that Morsi pushed through (after initially trying to take dictatorial powers in November 2012) — it theoretically holds Egypt to the standard of international treaties on human rights, takes a zero-tolerance approach to torture, reduces the role of Islam in governance, and improves women’s rights and the rights of religious minorities.

So what comes next?   Continue reading Mubarakization watch: Egypt referendum results →

Canada, United States

Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger?

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I spent an impromptu weekend in Ottawa and Montréal, which marked my first visit to Canada’s capital city — and its fourth-most populous (after Toronto, Montréal and Calgary).USflagCanada Flag Icon

Though Ottawa is a bilingual city that sits on the Ontario-Québec borders, there’s no doubting that this was a city founded by English Canadians (and, in fact, New Englanders founded the first colonial-era settlement) — which may explain why it’s impossible to find a decent meal other than poutine on a Sunday night after 10 p.m.).  But the trip gave me good reason to read the new book from National Post columnist Diane Francis, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. 

OK, so let that sink in for a moment.  Merging the United States and Canada into one mega-country.  Impossible, right?  A national political space with room for both Jacques Parizeau and Haley Barbour? Come on.

But it’s not an unhinged read — it’s a page-turner, and Francis has a command of the data that motivates her argument.  It also meets the ‘learn something on every page’ test.  Did you know that Canada’s First Nations residents also have US citizenship?  Or that the US defense department, if it were a nation, would have an economy the size of Turkey’s?

The political hurdles are immense 

Let’s start with the obvious — in a world where the US Congress can’t even agree for three weeks on whether to fund the government, the appetite for a merger with Canada is probably less than zero, and Francis certainly knows this.  The politics of a US-Canada merger are impossibly difficult, and the weakest part of the book is that Francis glides over the political hurdles — the Québec question and the issue of Southern intransigence in the United States are dealt with in just over three pages.  I like to think that’s because Francis knows the political obstacles are insurmountable and prefers to spend more time making her very able case for the economic synergies that a merger would bring.

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It’s tempting to believe that Canada’s relatively more statist and socially and economically liberal population would give the US Democratic Party an almost immediate lock on elections for the foreseeable future (and Francis hints as much), but that’s not necessarily the case.  It’s Canada that has a three-term Conservative prime minister in Stephen Harper and the United States that has a two-term Democratic president in Barack Obama (pictured above with Harper).  As John Ibbiston and Darrell Bricker argue in their own big-think volume from last year, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, And Culture And What It Means For Our Future, there’s a growing majoritarian coalition of immigrants, Westerners and Ontario suburbanites that could make Harper’s Tories the natural party of government in Canada in the 21st century — just as much as the Liberal Party of Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien dominated the 20th.

It’s hard to imagine that Québec premier Pauline Marois and Texas governor Rick Perry would have much in common.  Still, there are common trends in the politics of the left and right on both sides of the border, and Toronto mayor Rob Ford proves that Canada has as many colorful characters in politics as the United States.

On the right, the rise of the ‘tea party’ movement on the US political right matches the rise of a new fiscal and social conservatism captured by the rise of Alberta’s new Wildrose Party (as an alternative to the long-dominant Progressive Conservative Party).  Harper’s own rise, and the merger of the western-based Canadian Alliance with the dwindling eastern-based Progressive Conservatives, is the story of the rise of a more anti-government, pro-Christian, social and economic conservatism in Canada.  That mirrors the rightward shift of US conservatism under the influence of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and others.

On the left, the late Jack Layton led the New Democratic Party to a historic breakthrough in the 2011 federal election in a way that mirrors the new progressive coalition of minorities, moderates and young voters that powered Obama in 2008 — first to win the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, then to win the presidency.  The difference between the pragmatic, business-friendly Liberals and the social democratic NDP in Canada is the difference between, say, US senator Chuck Schumer of New York and US senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Nonetheless, with all due respect to Paul Cellucci, the former US ambassador to Canada, the difference between Québec and Alberta is not the same as the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi (despite the heritage of French Americans from Maine to Louisiana).  The cultural gulf between the United States and Canada is the gulf between revolution and evolution, fixed in place by 200 years of path dependence.

If I were Canadian, I would worry that the best aspects of Canadian culture and politics would be totally subsumed by US culture and politics — it was Trudeau, after all, who said that having the United States for a neighbor was like being a mouse sleeping next to an elephant.  For all the valid criticisms of the US military-industrial complex, it’s hard to believe that the Canadian influence would slow the militarism of US policy (though, frankly, deploying US troops to patrol the Arctic north or to fortify and develop new northern settlements seems a more productive endeavor than invading Iraq).  

As the United States has increasingly retreated behind a wall of homeland security in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Canada has increasingly opened its borders to immigrants.  One out of every two residents of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is foreign-born, and nearly seven million of Canada’s 35 million people are foreign-born.  In the 21st century, Canada is becoming the melting-pot society that the United States once was in the 20th century.  That would be endangered if Canada became merely the northern-most region within a greater North American superstate.

Francis also betrays a protectionist edge that view Chinese, Russian and Arab malevolence at every turn.  If I were Canadian, I’d be happy to know that China, Russia and other countries are willing to compete with US and Canadian investors to most efficiently develop the resources of Canada’s far north.  It seems to me that the kind of knee-jerk nationalism that led to the 2006 Dubai Ports World kerfuffle in the United States is something that’s more dangerous to democratic and economic institutions in North America than an investment here or there by China.

But when you get to the heart of Francis’s argument about the reasons for and benefits from a US-Canadian merger, it’s as thoughtful, radical and brilliant as you’ll find in any of the top books published last year.

Even the most outlandish ideas should win points for creative thinking.  A payout of $492,529 to each Canadian citizen at a total cost of around $17 trillion to the US treasury?  A bifurcated health care system that would include greater rights and freedoms for Canadians?  The concept that the US deep south, which chose segregation over industrialization and economic modernization for nearly a century, would sign up to a merger because it might mean more Canadians would migrate to the Sun Belt?  That Quebeckers would willingly give up what amounts to a veto on national policymaking for  irrelevance in a super-country whose First Amendment freedoms would make most of the province’s language regulations unconstitutional on Day One?  That the staid Bay Street approach to banking regulation would easily graft itself onto the creatively destructive mentality of Wall Street? None of these are politically feasible.

How to capture the benefits of greater cooperation

The good news is that the United States and Canada don’t actually have to become one nation-state in order to effect a lot of the benefits that Francis outlines, which is where her book really shines.  That’s especially true in a globalized world where national borders are conceivably less important than at any time in the post-Westphalia era.  A handful of efforts could bring much of Francis’s dream to reality without a supranational acquis communautaire or admitting Canada’s provinces and territories as the next 13 American states:

Continue reading Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger? →

Italy

Renzi, Berlusconi team up for electoral law pact

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Italian politics just got a lot more complicated.Italy Flag Icon

Over the weekend, former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the leader of Italy’s largest center-right party, Forza Italia, and Matteo Renzi, the leader of Italy’s largest center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), joined forces (pictured above) to introduce the blueprint for a new electoral law.

Notably, the deal didn’t include input from prime minister Enrico Letta, a moderate who leads a fragile ‘grand coalition’ government that includes not just his own Democratic Party, but centrists close to former technocratic prime minister Mario Monti and one of Italy’s two main center-right blocs, the Nuovo Centrodestra (NCD, the ‘New Center-Right’), led by deputy prime minister and interior minister Angelino Alfano.  The Alfano bloc split two months ago from Berlusconi’s newly rechristened Forza Italia, which pulled its support from the Letta government at the same time.

The deal is a political masterstroke by Renzi because it makes him appear to have stolen the initiative from Italy’s prime minister.  Letta formed a government in May 2013 with the two priority goals of passing a new election law and deeper economic reforms.  Despite a ruling in December 2013 that Italy’s current elections law is unconstitutional, Letta’s government has not yet put forward an alternative acceptable to the three main groups in the coalition.  So the Renzi-Berlusconi deal is now the only concrete proposal — it backs up the talk that Renzi, the 39-year-old Florence mayor, will be a man of action in Italian politics.  Renzi won the party’s leadership in a contest in November 2013 over token opposition.  Renzi is neither a minister in Letta’s cabinet nor a member of the Italian parliament, and he’s been more of a critic of the current government than a supporter of a prime minister who until recently was the deputy leader of Renzi’s own party.

By way of background (those familiar can skip the following three paragraphs):

Italy has gone through a few different electoral systems, but most of them have featured either closed-list or only partially open-list proportional representation.  Reforms in 1991 and 1993 transformed the previous system in what’s informally been called Italy’s first republic, which spanned the postwar period until the collapse of the dominant Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democracy) in a series of bribery and corruption scandals collectively known as Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’).  But the current system dates to 2005, when Berlusconi ushered in a new law that everyone (including Roberto Calderoli, who introduced the 2005 legislation) now agrees is awful and which Italy’s Corte costituzionale has now invalidated.

The current law, which governed Italy’s elections in 2006, 2008 and 2013, provides for a national proportional representation system to determine the 630 members of the lower house, the Camera die Deputati (Chamber of Deputies).  The party (or coalition) that wins the greatest number of votes nationwide wins a ‘bonus’ that gives it control of 55% of the lower house’s seats, not unlike the Greek electoral system.  But the 315 members of the upper house, the Senato (Senate), are determined on a regional PR basis — the top party/coalition in each of Italy’s 20 regions wins 55% of the region’s seats.  That means, however, that one party/coalition can hold a majority in the lower house, but wield much less than a majority in the upper house.

That’s the exact situation in which Italy found itself after the February 2013 elections, when the Democratic Party and its allies in the centrosinistra (center-left) coalition narrowly edged out Berlusconi’s centrodestra (center-right) coalition.  Beppe Grillo’s protest Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five Star Movement) followed closely behind in third place.  It meant that while the Italian left controlled the Chamber of Deputies, it couldn’t muster a majority in the Senate.  After a three-month political crisis that ended with the inability to elect a new Italian president (Italy’s parliament ultimately decided to reelect the 88-year-old Giorgio Napolitano to an unprecedented second seven-year term), the Democratic Party’s leader Pier Luigi Bersani resigned, and Napolitano invited Letta to form Italy’s current government.

The Renzi-Berlusconi deal sketches out an electoral reform on roughly the following lines:

  • The Chamber of Deputies would become, by far, the predominant chamber of Italian lawmaking.  The Senate would hold fewer powers as a region-based chamber.  Italy’s national government would also consolidate more powers away from Italy’s regions.
  • Deputies would be elected, as they are now, on the basis of national, closed-list proportional representation, which concentrates power in the hands of party leaders and elites (as opposed to open-list, which would allow voters to choose the members that represent them in parliament).  An alternative might be something akin to the proportional aspect of the Spanish electoral system — in Italy, it would mean a proportional system divided into 118 constituencies, each of which elects four or five deputies.
  • If a party/coalition wins over 35% of the vote, it will still yield a ‘majority bonus’ of either 53% or 54% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies.  If no party/coalition wins over 35%,  the top two parties/coalitions will hold a runoff to determine who wins the majority bonus.
  • Italy would introduce a threshold for parties in order to reduce the fragmentation of Italy’s politics — a party running outside a coalition would need to win 8% of the vote and a party running inside a coalition would need to win 4% or 5% of the vote running outside a coalition (though the thresholds would be much lower in a multi-district ‘semi-Spanish’ system).
  • The deal would not replicate the French system, which elects legislators to single-member districts in a two-round election, and which has been discussed often as an alternative for Italy.

The details are not so important at this stage, because they could change as the Renzi-Berlusconi deal begins the long process of turning into legislation.  But if Renzi can pull the majority of the Democratic Party along, and if Berlusconi’s Forza Italia supports the deal, the two groups could steamroll Italy’s smaller parties, even in the Senate.  If Alfano and his bloc joins, the deal would be unstoppable.  Renzi has already won a majority of the party’s executive committee (a promising first sign), and Alfano has indicated that he’s open to the reform (though less excited about closed lists).

But there are all sorts of fallout effects — politically, legally and electorally — to contemplate over the coming days and weeks. Continue reading Renzi, Berlusconi team up for electoral law pact →

France

Hollande’s economic restart falls flat amid domestic drama

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Nothing screams ‘sexy’ more than… a payroll tax cut.France Flag Icon

With the French press salivating over French president François Hollande’s surprisingly sordid love life, Hollande tried to refocus his administration’s agenda last week at a press conference to announce a planned cut in France’s payroll taxes and other measures to boost France’s competitiveness.  It’s a bid to win back some control over his unravelling public image.  Hollande suffers from massively low approval ratings —  just 22% of French voters support Hollande (somewhat of an improvement over polls in November that gave him just 15% approval).  There’s even talk that his administration could augur the collapse of France’s Fifth Republic.

But Hollande’s policy revamp has been lost in the furor over Hollande’s alleged dalliance with actress Julie Gayet.  Tabloids showed photos of the French president sneaking off to meet Gayet on his scooter (pictured above), and the news seems to have sent his current partner, Valérie Trierweiler, to a Paris hospital for over a week.  Elected on the premise that he would bring decorum and normalité to the Élysée after the ‘bling-bling’ presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande’s love life began overshadowing his presidency within days of his inauguration.

Trierweiler tweeted in support of Olivier Falroni, a dissident parliamentary candidate in June 2012, who was running against Ségolène Royal, Hollande’s former partner and the 2007 presidential candidate of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party).  Royal lost that race, despite Hollande’s support.  A reporter for Paris Match, Trierweiler fulfills the role of France’s first lady, complete with budget and staff, notwithstanding that she and Hollande never married.  Hollande and Royal also never officially married during their nearly 30-year relationship, which produced four children.

Trierweiler left the hospital after more than a week on Saturday afternoon, but the discord between France’s first couple continues to dominate headlines, with Le Journal de Dimanche reporting that presidential advisers are calling the relationship ‘finished.’  So much for Mr. Normality.  Though Sarkozy and his two predecessors, Jacques Chirac and François Mitterand, were both known for active love lives, the nature of media has changed since the French press kept Mitterand’s longtime mistress a secret from the public in the 1980s.

At a policy level, none of Hollande’s domestic troubles should matter.  But they come at exactly the wrong time, overshadowing Hollande’s push to make France’s economy more competitive.  At the center of Hollande’s proposal is a €30 billion payroll tax cut for French businesses, continue pushing forward with plans for €15 billion in budget cuts this year, with €50 billion more to follow over the next three years.  Though Hollande hopes that will make France’s businesses more willing to hire French workers, it seems unlikely to erase the mistrust Hollande has engendered by pushing a top income tax rate of 75% on incomes over €1 million, a troubled policy that seems set to take effect after facing legal problems in France’s top constitutional court.  Hollande and his leftist parliamentary majority pushed through a labor market reform in January 2013, but it was a relatively minor first step that merely streamlined the process for conducting layoffs.

Hollande would have engendered much more goodwill if he’d announced a retreat from the iconic 75% rate or announced a much bolder labor market legislation.  But that carries with it the risk of a full-scale revolt on the French left.  Continue reading Hollande’s economic restart falls flat amid domestic drama →

Nigeria, Uganda

Museveni vetoes Ugandan anti-gay bill after Nigeria law takes effect

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London, 11th July 2012. London Summit on Family Planning

You know it’s been a bad week for LGBT rights in sub-Saharan Africa when the best news came from a leader who referred to gays and lesbians as ‘abnormal persons,’ with an illness to be treated.nigeria_flag_iconuganda

But considering that Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan signed into law on Monday the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which criminalizes not only ‘amorous’ same-sex relationships, but also registration, operation or participation in gay clubs, societies or organizations (including, potentially, US and other Western human rights organizations active in Nigeria), Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s decision to veto an anti-gay bill on Friday was somewhat of a triumph, even if the veto was shrouded in a bizarre — and still virulently anti-gay — message:

The President said a homosexual is somebody who is abnormal because the normal person was created to be attracted to the opposite sex in order to procreate and perpetuate the human race. He said, nature goes wrong in a minority of cases.  While in the Bill passed by Parliament there is no provision for killing homosexuals; the President said, “The question at the core of the debate of homosexuality is; what do we do with an abnormal person? Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her? Or we do contain him/her?”

While the President said homosexuality is an abnormal condition that can be cured, he disagreed with the position of Western countries that homosexuality is an “alternative sexual orientation”. “You cannot call an abnormality an alternative orientation. It could be that the Western societies, on account of random breeding, have generated many abnormal people,” he said, adding that his acid test for rejecting Western position is that nature is purposeful.

Uganda and Nigeria are at the heart of an increasingly widening debate within sub-Saharan Africa over homosexuality, and Uganda’s proposed anti-gay laws have been widely covered in the international media.

The current bill, passed in December 2013 by Uganda’s parliament, which is dominated by the National Resistance Movement that’s controlled Uganda since Museveni (pictured above) came to power in 1986, would criminalize same-sex sexual intercourse, with penalties of life imprisonment for Ugandans convicted of ‘homosexuality.’  The bill also creates obligations for Ugandan citizens to report suspected gay and lesbian individuals to the police, and it criminalizes providing advisory services to gay and lesbian individuals.  The latter provision could endanger all sorts of public health initiatives in Uganda, especially with respect to HIV/AIDS.

Earlier versions of the bill mandated the death penalty for gays and lesbians, which number an estimated 500,000 people among Uganda’s population of over 36 million. Continue reading Museveni vetoes Ugandan anti-gay bill after Nigeria law takes effect →

United States

A few quick thoughts on Obama’s NSA reform speech

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NSA

US president Barack Obama outlined several reform proposals for the National Security Administration’s intelligence-gathering earlier today at a speech at the Justice Department.USflag

The reforms aren’t exactly breathtaking, but Brian Fong at Wonkblog has a great primer on what they entail:

  • The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will have to sign off to NSA requests to ‘query’ the phone metadata database.
  • When the NSA is authorized to query the database, they can only examine data for the express number and any number connected to the express number — ‘two hops,’ as opposed to the ‘three-hops’ approach that is currently the NSA standard.
  • The actually database may be entrusted in the hands of a third-party, non-governmental watchdog, though the details are far from clear.
  • The US government will stop spying on ‘dozens’ of foreign leaders.
  • John Podesta, a longtime figure in Democratic administrations, will lead a comprehensive review of big data and privacy.

It’s fairly easy to poke holes in these reforms — to the extent that they are even fully carried out.  As of June 2013, the FISC has rejected just 11 out of 33,900 surveillance requests since its creation in 1979.  That’s a 99.97% success rate for the government, which hardly constitutes a meaningful check.  Moreover, as this interactive feature from The Guardian shows, cutting back from the ‘three-hop’ approach to the ‘two-hop’ approach is meaningful, but with such a compliant judicial check, there’s nothing stopping an NSA employee from going back to the FISC for further authority. (By the way, when did US intelligence policy start taking its cues from a marginal 1990s Kevin Bacon film?)

It’s even more skeptical whether the NSA database will be transferred to a truly independent third party.  Of course, the US government will certainly continue to spy on world leaders, even if it backs away from spying on the leaders of its top allies.  Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff, co-chair of the Obama transition team and chair of the Center for American Progress, a top progressive think tank in Washington DC, seems unlikely to rock the boat.

Moreover, the Obama administration has a relatively small well of goodwill on the issue.  It’s been eight months since Obama, in another major speech on drone strikes, promised to limit drone strikes and to minimize casualties, pledging also greater transparency.  But the drone strikes policy remains shrouded in mystery today, and it’s unclear where the ‘covert’ operations of the Central Intelligence Agency end and the ‘clandestine’ operations of the US military, especially the Joint Special Operations Command begin.  Just before Christmas, the US government killed 15 civilians in an attack on what turned out to be a Yemeni wedding party, drawing massive rebuke both inside Yemen and beyond.  There’s not a whole lot of evidence that the Obama administration has seriously reformed its drone strikes policies. 

So while a fancy speech on NSA reform is great, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Obama administration really takes intelligence reform seriously.  Though Obama’s speech was couched in the same constitutional-professor-in-chief tone as the drone speech, he blamed virtually everyone except his own administration for having to address the NSA mission creep that’s occurred on his watch: Continue reading A few quick thoughts on Obama’s NSA reform speech →

Iran, United States

Ten reasons why the Iran sanctions Senate bill is policy malpractice

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Iran nuclear talks: Kerry and Zarif meet at the UN

Iran is quickly moving to the front of the ever-shifting foreign policy agenda in Washington at the end of this week, with 59 members of the US Senate, including 15 Democratic senators and the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, supporting the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013.Iran Flag IconUSflag

The bill would impose additional sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran in the event that the current round of talks fail between Iran and the ‘P5+1,’ the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia), plus Germany.  US president Barack Obama met with the entire Democratic caucus in the US Senate Wednesday night to implore his party’s senators not to support the bill.  Senate majority leader Harry Reid opposes the bill, and he hasn’t scheduled a vote for the new Iran sanctions — and even some of its supporters may be backing off as the temporary six-month deal proceeds.

But with 59 co-sponsors, the bill is just one vote shy of passing the Senate, and it would almost certainly pass in the US House of Representatives, where the Republican Party holds a majority.  In the event that the Congress passes a bill, Obama could veto it, but the Senate is already precariously close to the two-thirds majority it would need to override Obama’s veto.

The Obama administration argues that the bill is nothing short of warmongering, while the bill’s supporters argue that the sanctions will reinforce the Obama administration’s hand in negotiations.  Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister (pictured above with US secretary of state John Kerry), has warned that the bill would destroy any chances of reaching a permanent deal, and it’s hard to blame him.  Under the current deal, reached in November, the P5+1 agreed to lift up to $8 billion in economic sanctions in exchange for Iran’s decision to freeze its nuclear program for six months while the parties work through a longer-term deal.  The deal further provides that Iran will dilute its 20% enriched uranium down to just 5% enriched uranium, and the P5+1 have agreed to release a portion of Iran’s frozen assets abroad and partially unblock Iran’s oil exports.

So what should you make of the decision of 59 US senators to hold up a negotiation process that not only the Obama administration supports, but counts the support of its British, German and French allies?

Not much.

And here are ten reasons why the bill represents nothing short of policy malpractice.   Continue reading Ten reasons why the Iran sanctions Senate bill is policy malpractice →

Italy

In dismissing Fassina, Italy’s Renzi marks his ‘Sister Souljah’ moment

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In US politics, the ‘Sister Souljah’ moment dates from the 1992 presidential campaign when Bill Clinton, then the young governor of Arkansas, repudiated the words of a prominent hip-hop emcee and activist (Sister Souljah) by comparing her words to those of prominent white supremacist David Duke.  In scolding her, Clinton distanced himself from African-American civil rights activist and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, thereby signaling his willingness to stand up to Jackson and the various interest groups that then dominated the Democratic Party.  Italy Flag Icon

Since 1992 the moniker has been applied to any situation where a politician rebukes extreme statements or views most associated with that politician’s own political party or identity.

So it was in Italy last week when the new leader of Italy’s center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party), Florence mayor Matteo Renzi caused a rift on the Italian left that precipitated the resignation of deputy finance minister Stefano Fassina from Italy’s beleaguered coalition government.

Fassina resigned after Renzi dismissed his calls for a cabinet reshuffle.  When asked about Fassina’s proposal by the press, a swaggering Renzi responded with a simple, ‘Chi?’ (Who?).  It was a stark reminder that Renzi intends to drag Italy’s main leftist party to more centrist ground in the same way that Clinton pulled the Democrats to the middle in the 1990s and that Tony Blair pulled the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.

It’s a calculated bet, not without some risk, that Renzi can slap down his leftist flank (presumably expanding his appeal to moderate voters) without alienating the left so much that he causes the Democratic Party to crumble.

Fassina represents the socialist-left wing of the Democratic Party that Renzi now leads, after winning the leadership contest in December 2013 against token opposition with 68% of the vote.  Renzi’s coronation, however, obscures the real fissures within the Democratic Party.  In the contest to determine the prime ministerial candidate of the Italian centrosinistra (center-left) in November 2012, former PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani bested Renzi in December 2012 by a whopping margin of 61.1% to 38.8%.

Fassina, as a member of the current grand coalition government headed by prime minster Enrico Letta,  has been incredibly skeptical of spending cuts and other forms of budget austerity.  Fassina is the most well-known of a small group of rising leftists known as the Giovani Turchi (‘Young Turks’) within the party that want to pull it further to the social democratic left, a group that also includes Matteo Orfini and environmental minister Andrea Orlando.  That’s not necessarily a bad space to occupy in Italian politics — it’s a tradition that pulls both from the humanism of the historical Italian left and the Catholic social teaching of the historical Italian right.

But the Young Turks are just one of many factions that comprise the Democratic Party, which itself represents a two-decade struggle to redefine the Italian left — the party is now comprised of over a dozen fiefdoms, including the so-called ‘renziani‘ who support the Florence mayor.   Continue reading In dismissing Fassina, Italy’s Renzi marks his ‘Sister Souljah’ moment →

Latvia

Who is Laimdota Straujuma? Latvia’s likely first female prime minister.

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Portreti

On January 1, when Latvia celebrated its accession to the eurozone as the 18th member to embrace the single currency, it should have been a moment for Latvian prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis to celebrate shepherding his country into the core of Europe just barely two decades after its independence from the Soviet Union.latvia

Instead, Dombrovskis was counting the last days of his truncated tenure after the collapse of a supermarket roof in a suburb of Riga, the Latvian capital, killed 54 people.  Dombrovskis, the 42-year-old wunderkind economist, resigned as prime minister shortly after the tragedy, calling for an independent commission to investigate the incident and arguing that Latvia needed a new government in the wake of the accident.

Though it may have been an act of political integrity, Dombrovskis’s resignation came at a nadir for his shaky minority.  His party, the center-right Vienotība (Unity), placed third in local elections in June 2013, and disapproval was running high for his government, a coalition that also includes the more stridently right-wing Nacionālā apvienība (National Alliance) and the center-right Reformu partija (Reform Party).

Unity’s decision to nominate Laimdota Straujuma, the current agriculture minister, as its designate for prime minister is designed in part to boost the party’s chances at winning elections expected in October of this year.

The three parties that supported the Dombrovskis have indicated they will back Straujuma, and a fourth, Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība (ZZS, Union of Greens and Farmers), a union of Latvia’s green party and its agrarian party, will join them, along with three additional independent lawmakers.  That support will give Straujuma an immediate boost — while the previous coalition controlled just 50 seats in the 100-member Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, Straujuma’s government will command a 16-seat majority:

saeima

That means that when Latvian president Andris Bērziņš formally nominated Straujuma as prime minister, it all but assured that she will command a majority to become the country’s first female prime minister.

So who is Straujuma? And what challenges does she face in the months ahead?

Dombrovskis came to power in 2009 facing a contraction that amounted to 18% of Latvia’s GDP, and he’s presided over Latvia’s resurgence.  Latvia has achieved some of the highest GDP growth in Europe — 5.6% in 2012 and an estimated 4% in 2013.  That growth has come even while Dombrovskis implemented budget cuts to bring Latvia’s debt to one of the lowest levels in all of Europe and forced upon Latvia a sharp internal devaluation — the kinds of wage cuts that have allowed Latvia to become more competitive.  Even his push to join the eurozone was controversial, with nearly half the country opposing the move as recently as a month ago, notwithstanding the fact that the previous currency, the lats, was already tied to the euro.

Though it’s hard to miss the resemblance to German chancellor Angela Merkel, Straujuma comes to power as a former civil servant, and there’s no way to know if she’ll last nine months as head of government, let alone nine years.  As agriculture minister, she participated often in negotiations at the EU level over the Common Agricultural Policy, which affects Latvian farmers, and she developed a reputation as a tough advocate for Latvia.  But she’ll lead a party that’s massively unpopular and a government that she says will follow roughly the same course:

… the new government must not destroy the state budget for this year, [Straujuma] told reporters last night, reports LETA.

The next government will have to ensure stability, stressed Straujuma. One of the key priorities, that is “of major importance for businessmen and society”, is preparing a program on absorption of European Union funds for Latvia. The European Commission should approve the program by mid-2014 so absorption of the funds could begin in the second half of the year, emphasized Straujuma.

Unity’s Andris Vilks is almost certain to continue as finance minister in the new government, and Reform’s Rihards Kozlovskis and Edgars Rinkēvičs will remains interior minister and foreign minister, respectively.  Jānis Dūklavs, a member of the Union of Greens and Farmers, will replace Straujuma as minister of agriculture, a role that he held between 2009 and 2011 in the first two Dombrovskis governments.  Raimonds Vējonis, a former environment minister, will become Straujuma’s new defense minister. Continue reading Who is Laimdota Straujuma? Latvia’s likely first female prime minister. →

Israel

Peres, last lion of Israel’s ’48 generation, weighs post-presidential role

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Even though Israel has now lost Ariel Sharon, the curtain hasn’t fallen completely on the generation of leadership forged by the 1948 war for independence.  Shimon Peres will leave the Israeli presidency in July with enough power and potential for one last attempt to secure a Palestinian peace, I argue tomorrow at The National Interest:ISrel Flag Icon

[P]eres, himself a former prime minister, is also part of that group, and it would be overhasty to omit his future potential. At age 90, Peres has already outlived Sharon by five years, and he has indicated that when he steps down in July after seven years as Israel’s president, he could take one last shot at the goal that’s eluded him over decades of public service: a Palestinian peace deal.

He’ll do so not as a stalwart of the Israeli left or as the longtime nemesis of current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 26 years his junior, but as the last lion of the ’48ers—a statesman whose mentor was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and who found common cause with rivals, including [Likud prime minister Yitzhak] Shamir, [his Labor Party rival and prime minister Yitzhak] Rabin and Sharon, in the hopes of achieving a more secure future for Israel.

I argue that if Peres were to return to active politics for one last push, it would be in the spirit of finishing what Sharon started, though the two politicians spent much of their careers on opposite sides of the political spectrum — Sharon, the ‘bulldozer,’ the hard-charging defense minister and champion of Israeli settlers; and Peres, the longtime Labor leader and the figure most associated with the ultimately failed 1993 Oslo peace accords:

[T]here’s a space in Israeli politics for a galvanizing figure to build an effective anti-Netanyahu coalition with the single goal of achieving a deal with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. There are already rumblings that Peres will start a new political party this summer, with the reported support of Mossad (foreign intelligence) chief Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin, the former head of Shin Bet (Israel’s security agency). In many ways, if he were to do so, Peres would be picking up in 2014 where Sharon left off in 2006.

Egypt

Egypt’s constitutional referendum enshrines re-Mubarakization

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10.69 million.egypt_flag_new

That’s the number of the Egyptians who voted to ratify Egypt’s new constitution in December 2012 — at 68.8% of the electorate, it constituted more than enough votes to enact it, thereby promulgating the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamist vision of constitution reform in the world’s largest Arab country a new constitution.

The turnout in the March 2011 constitutional referendum was even higher.  In that vote, 14.2 million Egyptians (77.3% of the electorate) approved changes to the previous constitution that were designed to launch a more democratic and representative government by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces that effectively took control after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

So as Egyptians vote today (and tomorrow), it will be the third such post-Mubarak constitutional referendum.

It’s the first vote since the July 2013 military coup that pushed Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first elected president, from power.  Its passage is all but assured, in light of the arrest or dispersion of many opponents of the new constitution:

“I am telling them, they will be faced with force, decisiveness and strength never seen before,” interior minister Mohammed Ibrahim said on state TV on Monday. “Everyone rest assured, we are watching your back”… State television showed Ibrahim on Monday inspecting some of the 350,000 police and army personnel, including special forces and paratroopers backed by armored vehicles and helicopters, currently being deployed to streets across the country to secure the polls and encourage a high turnout.

That’s not the most reassuring statement that the referendum will be an incredibly free and fair election.  Nonetheless, the referendum is seen as the first step in a series of elections that will mark Egypt’s ‘transition’ from military rule to a more lasting democracy.  The current atmosphere augurs poorly for future elections set to take place later this year.  Under the constitutional reforms, Egypt’s interim government will have three months from the date of the new constitution’s enactment to call either parliamentary or presidential elections, with the other elections to follow within six months from the date of enactment.  That means by the summer, Egypt should have both an elected president and an elected legislature.

Despite a genuinely robust marketplace of political actors in Egypt today, the constitutional process seems less like a real transition than a stitch-up for Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi to become Egypt’s next president.  El-Sisi (pictured above), who’s currently the minister defense and head of the armed forces, last week indicated he is edging ever closer to a formal run for the Egyptian presidency later this year.  While El-Sisi is a charismatic figure with genuine popularity throughout Egypt, it’s hard to believe that he represents much more than Mubarak 2.0 — a strongman willing to sustain a crackdown on Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

More troubling is that hardly anyone in the past three regimes — the initial post-Mubarak SCAF government, the Islamist Morsi government, or the current military government — have prioritized Egypt’s crumbling economy.  Poor employment options for a young populace and stagnant economic growth were factors in the initial 2011 protests, but the economic situation has worsened over the past three years as Egypt’s political crisis has deepened.

El-Sisi’s closest competition — and perhaps the greatest hope for a civilian Egyptian government in 2014 — is Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist, nationalist, neo-Nasserite figure who rose to prominence in the 2012 presidential election.  Though Sabahi actually won the highest number of votes in Cairo, he very narrowly trailed the two frontrunners, Morsi and former air force commander Ahmed Shafiq, thereby missing the subsequent runoff.  Sabahi, who formed the Egyptian Popular Current (التيار الشعبي المصري) in 2012, has allied with the wider umbrella group of secular liberals, the National Salvation Front (جبهة الإنقاذ الوطني‎) that’s headed by Mohamed ElBaradei.  Sabahi firmly opposed Morsi and initially supported Morsi’s removal, but he’s also indicated that he believes El-Sisi should remain within the military.  Given El-Sisi’s rising popularity and control of the current government, it’s difficult to know if Sabahi (or anyone for that matter) has the political power to defeat the general if he progresses with a presidential bid.

Most immediately, the constitutional reforms expected to be promulgated in this week’s plebiscite are wide-ranging (here’s a piece by Bassem Sabry outlining 29 key provisions), and they’re not necessarily all for the worst: Continue reading Egypt’s constitutional referendum enshrines re-Mubarakization →

CAR (Centrafrique)

Does Djotodia’s resignation matter in Central African Republic?

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With the resignation of the Central African Republic’s president Michel Djotodia over the weekend, the country has its best chance to transcend the violence of the past month — though with grave questions about future Christian-Muslim relations and the CAR’s ability to move forward with any truly secure, representative government.centrafrique flag

When French troops arrived in Bangui, the country’s capital, in early December, their mission was immediately more difficult than the French mission earlier in 2013 in Mali to stabilize the interim government and rid northern Mali of foreign forces that controlled much of the northern two-thirds of Mali.  Instead, French troops were inserting themselves into an entirely homegrown fiasco — the country’s post-independence record on rule of law, security and democracy is one of the worst (and most tragic) in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Djotodia, as the leader of the Séléka coalition, pushed François Bozizé out of office in March 2013 — Bozizé himself came to power in 2003 in a putsch of his own, pushing Ange-Félix Patassé out of the centrafricaine presidency and organizing elections to ratify his position in 2005 and again in 2011.  Djotodia’s Séléka coalition, which attracted Muslims, but also many Patassé loyalists (Djotodia himself was a former civil servant in the Patassé regime) and a healthy majority of the country’s northern population.

Initially, Djotodia’s selection of Nicolas Tiangaye as prime minister was a strong sign that his new government would actually attempt to unite the country — Tiangaye, a human rights attorney with links to both Bozizé and the Séléka coalition, had a strong record as someone who could unite both rebel and government forces.

But Djotodia, the CAR’s first Muslim president, had a difficult time uniting the country that he spent years dividing, even after his formal inauguration as interim president in August 2013 and after officially disbanding the Séléka coalition in September 2013.  Dismantling  the Séléka rebels, in fact, may have cost him his sole substantial platform, and it left Djotodia’s forces staggering to fight off the newly formed ‘anti-balaka,’ largely Christian militia that opposed his rule.  As a Muslim president and a relatively lesser-known figure throughout the CAR, Djotodia didn’t bring with him any natural base to the presidency, except the Muslim population in the northeastern corner of the country, which amounts to just 10% of the population.  Each of the two main centrafricaine ethnic groups, the Banda of the east-central heartland of the country, and the Gbaya in the western third of the country, mistrusted Djotodia from the beginning.

What’s more, Djotodia and Tiangaye soon found themselves at odds over the country’s future, depriving the country of one of its most thoughtful and careful leaders (Tiangaye himself stepped down as prime minister on Friday as well).

CAR

Alexandre-Ferdinand Nguendet, previously a member of the National Council for Transition (NCT), will serve as acting president until the NCT selects a new president.  Nguendet recognized Djotodia’s presidency shortly after Séléka troops overran Bangui.  Nguendet was quick to call an end to the anarchy, imploring an end to fighting between Muslim and Christian groups, and it’s a strategy that just might work — French and African Union troops have worked for the past two months to keep the violence as minimal as possible.  That hasn’t stopped over 1,000 deaths in December alone and the internal displacement of nearly 500,000 people, but it has prevented the kind of genocide or massacre that the international community worries might otherwise have resulted.  The anti-balaka rebels listed Djotodia’s resignation among their chief demands, so there’s a solid chance that the CAR can retreat from the worst of last month’s fighting.

Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, and a proponent of liberal interventionism on humanitarian grounds, even made a trip to the Central African Republic on December 19 (pictured above), demonstrating how seriously the US government is taking the crisis.  Though the United States has ruled out sending troops to central Africa, they have pledged to assist the 1,600-strong French military force already there.  Notwithstanding Power’s humanitarian concerns, the United States has cause to worry that a militant Muslim minority could transform an anarchic CAR into a staging ground for terrorism — and to foment unrest throughout central Africa, west Africa and the Sahel.  Continue reading Does Djotodia’s resignation matter in Central African Republic? →

Uncategorized

Sharon’s most enduring legacy? Hezbollah

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As the world remembers former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who died today at age 85, I write this morning for The New Republic that his most enduring legacy is the emergence of Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese militia: LebanonISrel Flag Icon

By occupying southern Lebanon, a region that even today remains less economically developed than the rest of the country, Israel inadvertently pushed Lebanon’s Shiite population toward the radical leadership that Hezbollah embodied. Had Israel not done so, Nabih Berri, a relative moderate who’s served as the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament since 1992, might today be the dominant spokesman for the Shiite Lebanese population instead of Nasrallah, and Berri’s Amal Movement might be the dominant Shiite Lebanese political force, not Hezbollah. As Labor Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin succinctly put it in the years before his own assassination, Israel’s 1982 occupation “let the genie out of the bottle.” Israel’s invasion spawned an 18-year occupation that allowed Hezbollah to transcend its role representing the Shiite Lebanese community into a force fighting for the sovereignty of the Lebanese state, cheered by Israel’s enemies from Damascus to Tehran.

It’s not an argument that is necessarily pro-Sharon or anti-Sharon, though he was a polarizing figure in life and promises to continue to be so in death.  But I argue that Sharon, even in a coma, outlived most of the accomplishments of his premiership, and his military exploits (or crimes) will fade, leaving his decision in 1982 as Israel’s defense minister to invade Lebanon — and its direct influence on empowering Hezbollah — as the most significant, if unintentional, ‘accomplishment’ of his career.  After all, Hezbollah today remains a key player in regional politics — it is a vital actor in internal Lebanese affairs and the Syrian civil war, and it significantly affects  Palestinian relations with Israel and Iran-Israeli relations.

Photo credit to AP/Hussein Malla.