What to make of Cameron’s night of the long knives

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It wasn’t a surprise that British prime minister David Cameron sacked Kenneth Clarke, the one-time self-proclaimed ‘big beast’ of the Conservative Party from government. United Kingdom Flag Icon

At age 74, the pro-Europe former chancellor, who began his ministerial career in Edward Heath’s government of the early 1970s, had already been demoted once from justice secretary, his progressive ideas for penal reform and lighter sentencing guidelines  thwarted by the Tory right two years ago.

But it was something of a surprise that Cameron sacked so many other high-profile members of his cabinet last night.

Foreign secretary William Hague (pictured above with Queen Elizabeth II), one of the most high-profile Tories inside or outside government will now become the Commons leader. Hague, once a strident eurosceptic, was elected leader of the Conservative Party in the aftermath of Tony Blair’s massive victory in 1997. He stepped down in 2001 after his failed campaign to return the Tories to power. Though just 53 years old, Hague also announced he would also leave office at the 2015 elections, cutting short what’s been a solid career, if not one that might have elevated Hague to the premiership under different conditions.

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His replacement is defence secretary Philip Hammond, another Conservative firebrand, who has ably worked with chancellor George Osborne to reign in spending while the United Kingdom has reduced its role in the US-led occupation in Afghanistan. Hammond, who served as Osborne’s deputy in opposition, comes from the right wing of the party, however, having opposed Cameron’s push to legalize same-sex marriage last year. He’s not known as a particularly charismatic figure, and he’ll have a hard time shaking the notion that he’s No. 11’s man at the foreign office. 

Having argued that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union without significant, additional British carve-outs, Hammond will now be tasked with salvaging the UK-EU relationship.

But the knives went longer and deeper still — David Willetts, the minister for universities and science, nicknamed ‘Two Brains’ and deemed one of the cabinet’s most thoughtful members; David Gove, the combatively conservative and stridently eurosceptic education minister; Dominic Grieve, the attorney general; Owen Patterson, the environmental secretary.

The semi-official word is that Cameron’s reshuffle represents an effort to put his cabinet and his government on footing to wage next May’s general elections, with a particular focus on elevating the number of women and younger Tories to higher positions.

To borrow a phrase from former US president Bill Clinton, a ‘cabinet that looks like Britain.’

Continue reading What to make of Cameron’s night of the long knives

Photo of the day: Xi meets Modi

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In Brazil for a meeting of the BRICS, India’s new prime minister Narendra Modi met Chinese leader Xi Jinping earlier today in advance of the BRICS summit with officials from Brazil, Russia and South Africa.India Flag IconChina Flag Icon

Of course, India and China have a long and complicated history. But it’s not exactly surprising that it took barely over a month for the leaders of the world’s two most populous countries to meet.

Will Kerry’s deal with Afghanistan’s presidential contenders work?

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Over the weekend, US secretary of state John Kerry brokered a promising deal between the two candidates in Afghanistan’s botched, contested June 14 presidential runoff between former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and former finance minister Ashram Ghani Ahmadzai, both of whom have alleged fraud in the runoff. afghanistan flag

It’s not an incredibly bad deal, and if it sticks, it will provide Afghanistan with a strong government, acceptable to supporters of both Ghani and Abdullah, that brings to power the largest and, historically dominant, ethnic group, the Pashtun, with a significant role for the second-largest group, the Tajiks, which dominate northern Afghanistan and form the plurality in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Under the terms agreed among Kerry, Ghani and Abdullah, every single runoff vote will be audited centrally in Kabul by international observers, with representatives of both the Ghani and Abdullah campaigns present. The winner will thereupon form a national unity government that, presumably, will include supporters of both campaigns.

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RELATED: Is Ghani’s Afghan preliminary electoral victory a fraud?

RELATED
: Afghanistan hopes for calm as key presidential election approaches

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Abdullah won the first round on April 5, by a wide margin of 45.00% to just 31.56% for Ghani, on the basis of 6.6 million voters. In the second round, preliminary results show that Ghani won 56.44% to just 43.56% for Abdullah, on the basis of 7.9 million votes — a significant increase in turnout.

It marks an astounding turn of events for Ghani. It’s especially astounding in light of the endorsement of the first round’s third-placed candidate, Zalmai Rassoul, a former foreign minister who is close to outgoing president Hamid Karzai, and who endorsed Abdullah before even all the votes of the first round had been counted. Rassoul’s support was meant to bring along key Pashtun tribal leaders, close to Karzai and Rassoul, in the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

But the deal doesn’t tell us exactly what the auditing process will  entail, and whether the Independent Election Commission, whose director resigned in the wake of the second round after Abdullah lodged credible, serious complaints, will play a significant role in the audit. It doesn’t obligate the eventual winner to including the failed candidate in the eventual ‘unity’ government, nor does it detail what happens if, after six months, the unity government unravels.

More fundamentally, the audit may still not tell us which candidate actually won the second round of the election.  Continue reading Will Kerry’s deal with Afghanistan’s presidential contenders work?

How Miro Cerar rose to the top of Slovenian politics in four weeks

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Slovenians on Sunday turned over their country’s government to Miro Cerar, a political neophyte that barely anyone outside (or even inside) Slovenia had ever heard of a year ago.slovenia

Cerar (pictured above), an attorney and law professor, and the son of an Olympic gymnast, formed the Stranka Mira Cerarja (SMC, Miro Cerar’s Party), barely a month ago. But that didn’t matter to Slovenians, and the SMC easily won the July 13 snap elections by a margin of 34.6% to 20.7% against the center-right center-right Slovenska demokratska stranka (SDS, Slovenian Democratic Party), whose leader, two-time prime minister Janez Janša, has been sentenced to two years in prison in relation to corruption charges. Cerar’s victory represents the strongest victory of any party in a Slovenian election since the return of Slovenian sovereignty in 1990.

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Sunday’s snap parliamentary elections follow the resignation two months ago of Alenka Bratušek, Slovenia’s first female prime minister, after just over a year in office. Bratušek’s center-left coalition government is the second government since Slovenia’s last elections in December 2011.

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RELATED: Bratušek, Slovenia’s first female prime minister, resigns

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Cerar will now likely command 36 seats in the 90-member, unicameral Državni zbor (National Assembly), forcing him to form a coalition government with any of a number of allies in a National Assembly that remains fragmented, despite the strength of Cerar’s  mandate.

Cerar’s success is in large part due to his novelty. He’s not tainted by the past six years of austerity or the past two decades of corruption that characterizes much of Slovenia’s political elite. He lies somewhat in the center or center-left of Slovenian politics, leaning right on the need for economic reform, but leaning left on the need for reconsidering some austerity-era policies that Cerar believes have harmed Slovenian growth. For example, he’s called into question several recent plans for privatizations, including the national telecommunications company and the corporation that run’s the national airport. Continue reading How Miro Cerar rose to the top of Slovenian politics in four weeks

South Africa remembers Nadine Gordimer

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Barely months after South Africa bid farewell to its iconic post-apartheid president Nelson Mandela, South Africans today are remembering the indispensable Nadine Gordimer, who might well be Mandela’s literary analogue. south africa flag

That’s high praise, considering that Gordimer is in strong company alongside the late Alan Paton, 74-year-old J.M. Coetzee and other literary stars who produced a particularly compelling body of work in late 20th century South Africa.

There’s a case that you should start with Gordimer for the best sense of life in apartheid-era South Africa, and that includes both fiction and non-fiction.

Gordimer died in Johannesburg today at age 90, over two decades after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work that examines the effects and realities of apartheid-era South Africa.

For example, Burger’s Daughter (1979) is the slightly fictionalized account of the story of Bram Fischer, a wealthy Afrikaner and attorney who supported the cause of ending apartheid, defending Mandela at the Rivonia trial and otherwise working to protect the legal rights of other African National Congress activists until he, himself was imprisoned in 1964 for 11 years, released just two weeks before his own death. Gordimer’s novel examines the story of Rosa Burger, the daughter of a martyred anti-apartheid activist, much like Fischer, and how she navigated life in South Africa in the shadow of her upbringing.

The Conservationist (1974), for which Gordimer won a Booker Prize, tells the story of a wealthy, if bumbling and well-meaning white South African who buys a farm on a whim. Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that the protagonist isn’t a particularly material factor within the life of the farm, sustained by a community of black Africans. You can read the novel as a metaphor for the role of privileged white South Africans within the entirety of black-majority South Africa.

Gordimer’s writing style is more challenging than either Paton’s or Coetzee’s. It’s fragmentary, non-linear, more Joyce than Hemingway. But it’s powerful, and well worth the effort for understanding life in South Africa between 1948 and 1994.

South Africa, and the world, has lost a powerful voice, and her’s is a voice well worth remembering for its skillful grace no less than its role in changing the course of South African and world politics.

Shevardnadze’s legacy to Russia, to Georgia and to the world

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Depending on your age, your nationality and your perspective, you’ll remember Eduard Shevardnadze, who died three days ago, as either a progressive reformer who, as the Soviet Union’s last foreign minister, helped usher in the period of glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev that ultimately ended the Cold War, or a regressive autocrat who drove Georgia into the ground, left unresolved its internal conflicts, and ultimately found himself tossed out,  unloved, by the Georgian people after trying to rig a fraudulent election in a country was so corrupt by his ouster that the capital city, Tbilisi, suffered endemic power outages.Georgia Flag IconGSSR

Both are essentially correct, which made Shevardnadze (pictured above) one of the most fascinating among the final generation of Soviet leadership. It’s not just a ‘mixed‘ legacy, as The Moscow Times writes, but a downright schizophrenic legacy.

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His 2006 memoirs, ‘Thoughts about the Past and the Future,’ have been sitting on my bookshelf for a few months — I ordered the book from a Ukrainian bookstore, and I hoped to find a Georgian language scholar to help translate them. I would still like to read an English translation someday, because I wonder if his own words might offer clues on how to reconcile Shevardnadze-as-visionary and Shevardnadze-as-tyrant.

Gorbachev and Russian president Vladimir Putin had stronger praise for Shevardnadze than many of his native Georgians:

Gorbachev, who called Shevardnadze his friend, said Monday that he had made “an important contribution to the foreign policy of perestroika and was an ardent supporter of new thinking in world affairs,” Interfax reported. The former Soviet leader also underlined Shevardnadze’s role in putting an end to the Cold War nuclear arms race.

President Vladimir Putin expressed his “deep condolences to [Shevardnadze’s] relatives and loved ones, and to all the people of Georgia,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Russia’s Foreign Ministry also issued a statement on Shevardnadze’s passing, saying the former Georgian leader had been “directly involved in social and historical processes on a global scale.”

Even Mikheil Saakashvili, who came to power after Georgians ousted Shevardnadze in 2003’s so-called ‘Rose Revolution’ had somewhat generous, if begrudging, words for the former leader: Continue reading Shevardnadze’s legacy to Russia, to Georgia and to the world

What Jokowi’s apparent victory in Indonesia means

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His Javanese fans call him the ‘Barack Obama of Indonesia.’Indonesia Flag

At age 53, the reformist Jakarta governor, Joko Widodo – or ‘Jokowi’ (pictured above)– is very likely to become Indonesia’s next president, with reliable ‘quick counts’ giving him a margin of around 52% to 48% for his rival, former Suharto-era general Prabowo Subianto in the country’s fiercely contested presidential election.

Though the final vote won’t be announced until July 22, leaving Indonesia in a two-week state of semi-uncertainty, the ‘quick count’ results from a half-dozen reputable institutions are generally consistent, they were reliable indicators of the final vote results in Indonesia’s April legislative elections, and they have been reliable indicators in past national elections. Oxford University’s Kevin Fogg, an expert on Indonesia, writes that Jokowi’s ‘quick count’ margin places him safely beyond the realm of ‘dirty tricks, challenges, or underhanded moves,’ despite Prabowo’s alternative declaration of victory, on the basis of less reputable counts from Prabowo-friendly media.

Indonesia, with nearly 247 million citizens, is the world’s fourth-most populous country, the world’s third-largest democracy, Asia’s fifth-largest economy, and it’s an important strategic and trading partner for China, the United States and Australia.

Jokowi’s apparent victory will be welcomed in Washington, Brussels and Canberra because it gives Indonesia a modern leader whose principles are firmly rooted in Indonesian democracy, not Suharto-era authoritarianism. It will also be welcomed among investors in New York, London, Shanghai and Jakarta, who feared that his rival Prabowo’s protectionist and nationalist rhetoric could endanger foreign capital, Indonesia’s rule of law and the steady political, legal and economic gains of the past decade under outgoing president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

A victory for Indonesia’s democratic institutions

Prabowo, Suharto’s former son-in-law, spent parts of the campaign disparaging the idea of ‘one person, one vote,’ and called into question whether ‘Western-style’ democracy was an incredibly good fit with Indonesian values. He waxed about restoring Indonesia’s 1945 constitution, which would have rolled back direct presidential elections and would more easily allow the president to suspend Indonesia’s legislature on the basis of ‘emergency rule.’ Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who covered the East Timorese struggle against Indonesian rule, published excerpts from a 2001 interview with Prabowo in which the former general argued that Indonesia wasn’t ready for democracy because it still had ‘cannibals’ and ‘violent mobs.’ Though Prabowo ultimately tried to assure voters of his respect for the democratic process in the 2014 campaign, and though he was Megawati’s running mate in her failed 2009 presidential campaign, Prabowo consistently deployed rhetoric reminiscent of Indonesia’s first two authoritarian leaders, the communist Sukarno and the anti-communist Suharto. Continue reading What Jokowi’s apparent victory in Indonesia means

In Depth: Indonesia

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On July 9, voters in the world’s fourth-most populous country, the world’s third largest democracy and the world’s largest Muslim country will directly elect its president for just the third time in its history.Indonesia Flag

From independence to Sukarno to Suharto to SBY

Indonesia’s initial post-independence period was dominated by two authoritarian leaders, the first of whom was the Soviet-backed Sukarno, who led Indonesia from the end of the Dutch colonial era and World War II in 1945 (and formal Dutch recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in 1949) until 1967.

The left-leaning Sukarno developed the principles that would cumulatively be come to known as pancasila, the dominant state ideology for the next four decades, which even today influences the nature of Indonesian governance and politics. Pancasila is comprised of five principles — in brief: belief in God, just and civilized humanity, Indonesian unity, ‘guided democracy,’ and social justice.

Under Sukarno, those principles sometimes took a hard edge — ‘guided democracy’ hardly meant any kind of cognizable participatory voting at all, while ‘Indonesian unity’ served to motivate a brutal and relentless campaign in West Papua in the early 1960s, a process that ended in 1969 with the incorporation of Irian Jaya province.

Following a military coup in 1965 that severely limited Sukarno’s power, which saw an unprecedented amount of political and social upheaval amid a state transforming into a staunchly anti-communist country (the famous ‘year of living dangerously’). Military general Suharto became Indonesia’s president in 1967, finalizing the country’s turn to his ‘New Order,’ a new Western-oriented regime.

Suharto ruled with even tighter control, and Indonesia doubled down on its West Papua approach with a three-decade campaign to subdue the formerly Portuguese colony of East Timor, beginning in 1975. At the same time, Suharto furthered the attempts to bring more unity to an archipelago of thousands of islands dominated by the most populous island, Java, which today contains 56% of Indonesia’s 247 million citizens.

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Despite a diverse array of languages, cultures, traditions and ethnicities, Java had long been the center of the Dutch East Indies in the colonial period as well as the Majapahit empire that extended control over much of the empire between 1293 and 1500.

Though the concept of a pan-Indonesian language began with efforts in 1928, well before independence, the invented language of Bahasa Indonesian, which draws heavily on Malay, became an official language after 1945. Today, Bahasa Indonesian is the lingua franca of the entire country, one of its most unifying elements.

After three decades in power Suharto’s end came to an end in May 1998. In a post-Cold War era, without US economic and military support, Suharto’s elites found themselves unable to withstand the Asian financial crisis, which began with a Thai currency crisis in April 1997 and that extended from South Korea to Indonesia. The fall in the Indonesian rupiah‘s value and the resulting economic recession proved too much for Suharto’s regime, all while facing down growing criticism from pro-democracy activists in Jakarta to pro-independence guerrillas in East Timor.

Out of the ashes of Suharto’s ouster came a period of reformasi, during which the framework of Indonesia’s current democracy came into relief. Indonesian officials, under caretaker president B. J. Habibie, significantly amended Indonesia’s 1945 constitution to introduce new measures for greater democracy, additional freedoms and check and balances on presidential power.

Indonesia’s legislature elected its first post-Suharto president, Islamist leader Abdurrahman Wahid (known as ‘Gus Dur’) in 1999, who was succeeded after his impeachment in 2001 by the more secular Megawati Sukarnoputri — the daughter of Indonesia’s first president.

Megawati, however, lost her bid for the presidency in the country’s first direct elections in 2004. Instead, she lost to her former minister of security, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (known as ‘SBY’), who has governed Indonesia for the past decade, decisively defeating Megawati in a landslide in their 2009 rematch.

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Though Yudhoyono (pictured above, right, with Australian prime minister Tony Abbott) has been criticized for doing too little in his decade in power, he’ll transfer to the next president an investment-grade Indonesia with robust democratic and legal institutions. That doesn’t mean there’s not room for reforming Indonesia’s still-too-inefficient economy nor does it mean that Indonesia is corruption-free.

But Yudhoyono has a handful of praiseworthy achievements:

  • he largely accepted that Indonesia’s military forces were to blame for human rights atrocities in the Suharto era;
  • SBY continued to recognize the newly independent Timor-Leste;
  • he adroitly handled the aftermath and international efforts at recovery from the December 2004 tsunami that killed over 200,000 Indonesians;
  • SBY signed a peace deal with pro-independence rebels in the western Aceh province in 2005;
  • he kept fundamentalist Islamic terrorist attacks at bay without resorting to Suharto-style authoritarian means (if not eliminating them completely); and
  • he largerly presided over an era of strong economic growth. Indonesia’s GDP skyrocketed during the SBY years from $256.8 billion in 2004 to $878 billion in 2012. Between 2004 and 2012, Indonesia notched an average GDP growth rate of 5.78%. Impressive, if not quite the same economic magic that China and other economies have harnessed over the last decade.

The race to succeed Yudhoyono pits two very different candidates against one another in what’s become the closest race since the transition to direct presidential elections began.

Joko Widodo — the young reformer

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Jakarta governor Joko Widodo (known as ‘Jokowi’), age 53, served as mayor of Sukarna (or Solo) between 2005 and 2012. Elected in an upset victory in Jakarta’s gubernatorial election in September 2012, Jokowi became the rising rock-star of Indonesian politics, winning comparisons to US president Barack Obama — a popular figure in Java, in part because he spent four years of his adolescence in Jakarta.

A man of humble means, unique in Indonesian politics, Jokowi is known for a hands-on administrative style in the tradition of blusukan, impromptu visits throughout Solo and Jakarta to check in with everyday constituents and to check in on the performance of his governments. In less than two years as Jakarta governor, he introduced additional spending for education, raised the minimum wage and rolled out a universal halt care program almost immediately after his election.

That common touch, along with a corruption-free record, earned him a reputation as a reformist who could deepen Indonesia’s path to a modern economy and a developed democracy. But with no experience at the national level, and with no real way to deploy the principles of blusukan across thousands of islands, Jokowi’s rivals have attacked him boldly for being too inexperienced and for advancing only the vaguest of campaign policy platforms.

Whispering campaigns suggest that Jokowi is a Christian (a slur for a country that’s 87% Muslim) and that he’s Chinese (he’s actually Javanese, but anti-Chinese sentiment was a common instrument of displacement during the Suharto era). When the official campaign ended on July 5, Jokowi left the country for two days in the middle of the Muslim month of Ramadan to make the hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, emphasizing his Muslim credentials.

He represents the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P, Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan), the party of Indonesia’s first president and of former president Megawati. Today a slightly center-left party, it’s been in opposition under Megawati for a decade, and there’s a general impression that Megawati (and not Jokowi) holds the true behind-the-scenes power within the PDI-P and, accordingly, would hold considerable influence in a Jokowi administration.

His running mate, Jusuf Kalla, served as vice president to Yudhoyono between 2004 and 2009, before pursuing his own presidential bid five years ago. A native of south Sulawesi (Sulawesi, with 18.5 million residents, is Indonesia’s third-most populous island after Java and Sumatra), Kalla also served at the time as the leader of Golkar (Partai Golongan Karya, Party of the Functional Groups), the dominant party of the Suharto era and today a mildly center-right party. At times during Yudhoyono’s first term, Golkar’s dominance in the Indonesian legislature made Kalla a more influential force on domestic policy than anyone else in the country, Yudhoyono included. But he brings to the ticket experience that Jokowi lacks — at least at the national political level.

Though Golkar’s current leadership isn’t supporting Jokowi, a handful of other parties have lined up behind him, including:

  • Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB, National Awakening Party), one of Indonesia’s most longstanding Islamist political parties, is closely connected with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), a Sunni Islam group founded in 1926 that operated int he Sukarno era as the only legal Islamist party.
  • Nasdem (Partai Nasdem), a small, secular party.
  • Hanura (Partai Hati Nurani Rakyat, The People’s Conscience Party), a 2008 spinoff of Golkar founded by Golkar’s 2004 presidential candidate and controversial former military leader, Wiranto.

Prabowo Subianto — the strongman

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His opponent is Prabowo Subianto, a former military commander who left Golkar in 2008 to form Gerindra (Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya, the Great Indonesia Movement Party) when it became clear that Golkar’s leaders had no intentions of nominating him for the presidency in 2009. Instead, he wound up running as Megawati’s vice presidential candidate on a ticket with the PDI-P.

This time around, Prabowo gained traction slowly over the past year with a populist message of economic nationalism, the kind that led Indonesian lawmakers to pass a recent law limiting the export of raw mineral ore. That’s led investors to regard Prabowo warily, with expectations that, far from liberalizing the Indonesian economy, he might introduce new taxes or foreign restrictions, all while creating new debt-financed projects in the state capitalist tradition.

But if it’s economic nationalism that led Gerinda to a third-place finish in the April legislative elections, it’s outright political nationalism that’s brought Prabowo into an essentially tied race in July. After trailing Jokowi by between 20 and 30 percentage points as recently as two months ago, Prabowo has effectively narrowed the gap. He’s done so with a generally sharper campaign, shrewder alliances and with much of Indonesia’s television media supporting a Prabowo candidacy.

Opening his campaign in a military-style rally on horseback, he’s billed himself as a candidate who will be a ‘strong’ president capable of ‘firm’ leadership. He’s called into question the need for Western-style democracy during the election, and critics worry that he will drag Indonesia further away from political reform and closer to the ‘New Order’ era of Suharto. Prabowo, after all, was once Suharto’s son-in-law, and though he divorced in 2001, he’s close to his ex-wife, Siti Hediati Hariyadi (known as  ‘Titiek’).

As a top military general in the Suharto era and the leader of Indonesia’s special forces, Prabowo headed the 1978 campaign that killed Timorese national hero, Nicolau dos Reis Lobato. He’s also been accused of responsibility a 1983 massacre in the East Timorese village of Kraras, and he lost his military command in 1998 when he was implicated in the kidnapping and torture of 23 pro-democracy activists, charges that Prabowo denies.

After a stint in Jordan, Prabowo turned to business. Descended from Javan royalty, his brother is one of the wealthiest members of the global Indonesian elite. But he soon turned to politics, and he’s now on the threshold of winning the most important office in Indonesia.

His running mate, Hatta Rajasa, is the leader of the Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN, National Mandate Party), one of Indonesia’s mildly Islamist parties. But Hatta is also one of the most high-profile economic policymakers of the Yudhoyono administration. Hatta served as transportation minister from 2004 to 2007, was promoted to state secretary from 2007 to 2009 and, until his vice presidential nomination in May, served as Indonesia’s coordinating minister for economics in Yudhoyono’s second term.

In addition to Gerindra (which is currently in opposition), Prabowo enjoys the support of nearly all of the current governing parties:

  • Golkar, under the leadership of Aburizal Bakrie, has endorsed Prabowo, though it’s not certain if all of Golkar’s voters will follow that lead, considering that Kalla is running as Jokowi’s running mate.
  • In addition to Hatta’s PAN, Prabowo has won the support of two more of the four main Islamist parties, the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS, Prosperous Justice Party) and the Partai Persatuan Pembangunan (PPP, United Development Party).
  • In the last week of the campaign, Yudhoyono’s own party, the Partai Demokrat (Democratic Party) endorsed Prabowo too.

State of the race

The final Australia-based Roy Morgan poll, conducted in late June, found Jokowi with 52% support and Prabowo with 48% support, a too-close-to-call lead for the young Jakarta governor.

Jokowi had a slightly higher lead in the most populous island of Java, by a margin of 53.5% to 47.5%, while Prabowo had a wider margin on Sumatra, the second-most populous island, by a margin of 60% to 40%. Jokowi led on the remaining islands, in Sulawesi by a margin of 60.5% to 39.5%.

Female voters preferred Jokowi by a margin of 55% to 45%, while male voters preferred Prabowo by a 51% to 49% margin.

Younger voters slightly favored the elder candidate, Prabowo, by a slight margin, while older groups increasingly supported Jokowi.

What the April legislative elections tell us

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In April, Indonesians voted for all 560 members of the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR, People’s Representative Council) and the additional 132 members of the non-partisan Dewan Perwakilan Daerah (DPD, the Regional Representative Council), a second legislative body formed in 2004 with relatively more limited powers than the DPR. Both bodies have fixed five-year terms.

Under Indonesia’s somewhat arcane process, a party (or a coalition of parties) must win either 25% of the national vote in the April parliamentary elections or hold 20% of the seats in the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR, People’s Representative Council) in order to nominate a presidential candidate. That forced, throughout May and early June, intense behind-the-scenes discussions to form coalitions and nominate vice-presidential running mates.

It’s a somewhat peculiar system, and it’s one that will change with the 2019 election, when Indonesians will vote simultaneously for a legislature and a president. It’s a system that, ironically, would have almost certainly resulted in a Jokowi win, had both elections been held in April. Instead, Jokowi finds himself in a tight race against Prabowo.

There were signs, however, that Jokowi’s strength was less than might have been expected.

In the April elections, though the PDI-P indeed won the largest share of the votes, it was far less than the party expected, having timed their announcement of Jokowi as its presidential candidate just days before the voting. As it turns out, the PDI-P only narrowly edged out Golkar. Moreover, Indonesia’s four Islamist parties together won nearly 30% of the vote, demonstrating their continued viability among conservative Muslim voters.

Gerindra, though it placed third, marked its best-ever performance, while the fourth-place finish of SBY’s Democrats foreshadowed the relatively minor role they would play in vice-presidential and coalition talks.

All told, it means that Jokowi will be hard-pressed to push through an agenda as president without winning over support from other parties.

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Here’s the full list of Suffragio‘s 2014 coverage of the Indonesian presidential and legislative elections:

Indonesia post-mortem: why young cosmopolitan voters chose Prabowo
July 28, 2014

It’s official: Jokowi was Indonesian presidential election
July 22, 2014

What Jokowi’s apparent victory in Indonesia means
July 9, 2014

Jokowi declares victory on basis of ‘quick count’ Indonesia election results
July 9, 2014

What Indonesia’s election means for Timor-Leste
July 7, 2014

Indonesia’s Prabowo all but declares he’ll become Suharto 2.0 if elected
July 1, 2014

Ruling Democrats in Indonesia endorse Prabowo
June 30, 2014

Will Prabowo Subianto become Indonesia’s next president?
June 28, 2014

In Indonesia, it’s Jokowi-Kalla against Prabowo-Hatta
May 20, 2014

Veepstakes, Indonesia style — will Kalla return as vice president?
May 12, 2014

Jokowi effect falls flat for PDI-P in Indonesia election results
April 9, 2014

Four key points to watch as Indonesia elects a new parliament
April 5, 2014

Who is Joko Widodo?
April 3, 2014

Top photo credits to Bernard Anthony Burrola — Indonesian capital by Jakarta by night and Prambanan, the iconic 9th century Hindu temple in central Java.

As Italy assumes EU rotating presidency, Mogherini shines

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I spoke to the London bureau of Voice of Russia earlier today to share some thoughts about Federica Mogherini (pictured above with Russian president Vladimir Putin), Italy’s still-new foreign minister, and her role in shaping EU foreign policy:Italy Flag Icon

He says that her appointment did surprise some because of her youth and the fact that she has no real top-level ministerial experience. However, “Within Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party, she’s established quite a reputation as a rising star, particularly with regard to foreign policy. Beyond Renzi’s efforts of shaking up Italian policy paralysis, it was making quite a statement to appoint a 41-year-old woman as the new foreign minister”…

I argued that Mogherini and Renzi, who has now eclipsed French president François Hollande as the leading figure of the European left, are aiming for a more assertive Italian foreign policy voice. Mogherini has held forth on African migration to the European Union, Iran’s nuclear program, and the ongoing troubles in the Middle East, problems that have a significant diplomatic role for Russia as well as Europe and the United States.

I noted that though Mogherini, who is in Ukraine and Russia this week for talks with officials, is slightly more hawkish with respect to EU sanctions against Russia than perhaps former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi or former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, her top priority is maintaining a united EU foreign policy, especially nine days into Italy’s assumption of the EU six-month rotating presidency.

Italy has grown closer to Russia over the past two decades, and Putin and Berlusconi enjoyed a strong personal relationship that bolstered ties between the two countries. In many ways, that makes Mogherini, like German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is a great EU conduit to Russia:

“I think it’s better to say that she’s likely to take a unified line, depending on where other leaders in the EU stand. In many ways, I think Mogherini is a great conduit to help smooth EU talks with [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov and other Russian officials.”

Though Mogherini could be mentioned as a candidate to succeed Catherine Ashton as the EU high representative later this year, I noted that Mogherini’s performance, strong as it may be, will be one factor in a set of discussions among the 28 EU member-state leaders that will also consider which states get which portfolios within the European Commission and that will consider the new president of the European Council. But with one of the frontrunners, Poland’s hawkish foreign minister Radek Sikorski, in some trouble for impolitic comments about his country’s bilateral relationship with the United States, Mogherini could emerge as a more conciliatory and diplomatic choice.

Photo credit to RIA Novosti.

Jokowi declares victory on basis of ‘quick count’ Indonesia election results

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Jakarta governor Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’) appears to have won the Indonesian presidency today by a steady, if narrow, margin. Indonesia Flag

Both he and former military leader Prabowo Subianto have declared victory, but Jokowi’s claim to Indonesia’s presidency is far more credible. Final results, however, won’t be announced by Indonesia’s elections commission until July 22, creating a window of uncertainty for the next 13 days.

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RELATED: In Depth — Indonesia’s elections

RELATED: Who is Joko Widodo?

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Why, ultimately, should we be relatively confident in Jokowi’s actual win? In Indonesia, there’s a handful of private companies that conduct ‘quick counts’ of the votes. These ‘quick counts’ are generally reliable, and they’re based on exhaustive counting of the real votes. These aren’t exit polls, these aren’t samples, these are full counts. 

All of the most reputable companies showed a narrow lead for Jokowi. The Center for Strategic and International Studies gives Jokowi a 52% to 48% margin, while Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting determined Jokowi won with 52.8% to just 47.2% from Prabowo. Kompas‘s quick count gave Jokowi a 52.34% edge against 47.66% for Prabowo.

Though this year marks the first closely contested race since Indonesia turned to direct presidential elections in 2004, the ‘quick counts’ were generally very reliable during Indonesia’s April legislative elections, which delivered a narrow victory for Jokowi’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P, Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan).

Jokowi, in a gracious victory speech, cautioned against fraud and tampering with the final vote, while Prabowo delivered a less assured address to supporters urging caution:

“I want to assert, that this victory is not the victory of Jokowi-JK [Jusuf Kalla], not the parties’ victory, nor the victory of the success team. This is the victory of the entire Indonesian people. Once again dear all, this is the victory of the whole Indonesian population!” he said. “Now our obligation is to guard today’s election outcome until it becomes the official result of the KPU. We must guard it and make sure that vote counting at the KPU proceeds properly, cleanly and without any intervention from any party. I call on all parties not to try to tarnish the sincere aspiration of the people of Indonesia in today’s ballot.”

Several hours after Jokowi’s speech, rival Prabowo Subianto took the stage inside the ballroom of the Bidakara building in South Jakarta to deliver a fiery speech in which he instructed his supporters not to believe quick counts that were not financed by his team. “It is not over. We should respect the KPU [General Elections Commission]. The battle is not over. We should ensure that the KPU is not influenced by circulating quick counts that are misleading,” said Prabowo.

Only one public quick count showed a Prabowo lead, TV One, which Out of six major Quick Counts seen by The Australian, only one attributed victory to Prabowo, TV One, which projected a 51% to 49% margin in favor of the former general. That’s a problematic count, however, because the partisan TV One is owned by Aburizal Bakrie, the leader of Golkar (Partai Golongan Karya, Party of the Functional Groups), the second-largest party in Indonesia’s legislature, which supports Prabowo in the current race.

In Depth: Indonesia

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On July 9, voters in the world’s fourth-most populous country, the world’s third largest democracy and the world’s largest Muslim country will directly elect its president for just the third time in its history.Indonesia Flag

From independence to Sukarno to Suharto to SBY

Indonesia’s initial post-independence period was dominated by two authoritarian leaders, the first of whom was the Soviet-backed Sukarno, who led Indonesia from the end of the Dutch colonial era and World War II in 1945 (and formal Dutch recognition of Indonesian sovereignty in 1949) until 1967.

The left-leaning Sukarno developed the principles that would cumulatively be come to known as pancasila, the dominant state ideology for the next four decades, which even today influences the nature of Indonesian governance and politics. Pancasila is comprised of five principles — in brief: belief in God, just and civilized humanity, Indonesian unity, ‘guided democracy,’ and social justice.

Under Sukarno, those principles sometimes took a hard edge — ‘guided democracy’ hardly meant any kind of cognizable participatory voting at all, while ‘Indonesian unity’ served to motivate a brutal and relentless campaign in West Papua in the early 1960s, a process that ended in 1969 with the incorporation of Irian Jaya province.

Following a military coup in 1965 that severely limited Sukarno’s power, which saw an unprecedented amount of political and social upheaval amid a state transforming into a staunchly anti-communist country (the famous ‘year of living dangerously’). Military general Suharto became Indonesia’s president in 1967, finalizing the country’s turn to his ‘New Order,’ a new Western-oriented regime.

Suharto ruled with even tighter control, and Indonesia doubled down on its West Papua approach with a three-decade campaign to subdue the formerly Portuguese colony of East Timor, beginning in 1975. At the same time, Suharto furthered the attempts to bring more unity to an archipelago of thousands of islands dominated by the most populous island, Java, which today contains 56% of Indonesia’s 247 million citizens.

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Despite a diverse array of languages, cultures, traditions and ethnicities, Java had long been the center of the Dutch East Indies in the colonial period as well as the Majapahit empire that extended control over much of the empire between 1293 and 1500. Continue reading In Depth: Indonesia

What Indonesia’s election means for Timor-Leste

Capoeira Practice on Dili Beach

No matter who wins Indonesia’s presidential election on July 9, one of the most central foreign policy issues for its winner, will be relations with tiny Timor-Leste, the state that occupies the eastern half of the island of Timor and that broke from Indonesia formally in 2002 after three decades of unrest.Indonesia FlagEast Timor

Timor-Leste is just 12 years out from its hard-won independence from Jakarta, following centuries of benign Portuguese colonial neglect, a three-year not-so-benign Japanese interregnum during World War II and 27 years of terror perpetuated largely by the Indonesia military, some of the worst in the immediate aftermath of the United Nations-administered August 1999 independence referendum.

No matter who wins tomorrow’s presidential election in Indonesia, relations with Dili, the East Timorese capital, will undoubtedly be just as important for Indonesia’s next president as they were for outgoing president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (‘SBY’), who has largely improved the relationship between the two countries.

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RELATED: Will Prabowo Subianto become Indonesia’s next president?

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Megawati Sukarnoputri, when she was president between 2001 and 2004, traveled to Dili to mark both Timorese independence and the swearing-in of its first national president.

But it’s been under Yudhoyono’s watch that Indonesia truly turned the chapter from post-colonial occupier to economic partner and increasingly, friendly neighbor. Yudhoyono went to Dili for the first time within six months of taking office, laying a wreath to commemorate the deaths in the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, and he attended a 2012 celebration marking the 10th anniversary of Timorese independence. Under SBY, Indonesia has become, by far, Timor-Leste’s largest trading partner.

For the first time, in 2012, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard hosted trilateral talks alongside Yudhoyono and Xanana Gusmão, a former resistance leader, Timor-Leste’s first post-independence president and its prime minister since 2007.

With Gusmão planning to step down later this year after seven years leading Timor-Leste’s government, it will be especially important for the next Timorese prime minister and the next Indonesian president to develop the same diplomatic relationship that Yudhoyono and Gusmão share today.

That may prove difficult if Indonesians elect Prabowo Subianto, the leader of the nationalist Gerindra (Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya, the Great Indonesia Movement Party), a former Suharto-era general and former leader of Indonesia’s special forces. Dismissed in 1998 upon Suharto’s ouster and self-exiled to Jordan, Prabowo returned as a businessman and now, as a politician, and he’s climbed back from a double-digit deficit, with essentially even odds to defeat Jakarta governor Joko Widodo (‘Jokowi’) in tomorrow’s election.

Yudhoyono also came to democratic politics from the Indonesian military, where he developed a reputation as a particularly thoughtful general. Like Prabowo, Yudhoyono has been sullied by his leadership role in the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI, formerly ABRI) and its misconduct in East Timor from the 1970s through the 1990s. But Prabowo has been tied to specific abuses in East Timor, including a troubling 1983 massacre in a village called Kraras:

But in recent months allegations of human rights violations involving Prabowo have intensified. Jemma Purdey voiced the opinion that as an soldier Prabowo had four tours to East Timor and led units that were “involved in some very extreme instances of violence”. Many believe that Prabowo also played a role in the 1983 massacre in Kraras, known as the village of widows, which killed many East Timorese. Prabowo protested in the strongest terms and refuted the scurrilous allegations in a letter to the editor of The Jakarta Post on Dec. 27, 2013.

Despite Prabowo’s protestations of innocence, those questions will continue to haunt any Prabowo administration, as will more well-documented accusations of human rights abuses in 1998, when Prabowo is said to have kidnapped and possibly tortured pro-democracy activists, are among the reasons the United States denied him a tourist visa in 2000. Continue reading What Indonesia’s election means for Timor-Leste

Is Ghani’s Afghan preliminary electoral victory a fraud?

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Afghanistan’s election officials have announced the results of the country’s June 14 presidential election, and the surprising winner seems to be former finance minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, who trailed widely after the results of the April 5 first roundafghanistan flag

The provisional result gives Ghani (pictured above) 56.44% of the vote, while rival Abdullah Abdullah won 43.56%.

It’s actually not so incredibly surprising in light of Abdullah’s denunciation over the past weeks of the vote-counting process, a sure sign that Abdullah realized he was in danger of losing the race.

On June 18, just four days after the election, Abdullah called for a suspension in the vote count by the Independent Election Commission, arguing that votes were counted in areas where voting hadn’t even taken place due to security problems.

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RELATED: Afghanistan hopes for calm as
key presidential election approaches

RELATED: Why there’s reason for optimism
about the Afghan troop drawdown

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Five days later, on June 23, Zia ul-Haq Amarkhail, the secretary-general of the IEC, resigned, an implicit admission that there’s at least some substantive basis to the fraud charges. The IEC delayed the original announcement of preliminary results, due on July 2, for five more days to investigate further the charges of voter fraud. As the BBC reports, votes are being re-checked at more than 7,000 polling stations, amounting to nearly one-third of all voting stations, and the commission will check nearly 4 million votes in an election that drew just 6.6 million voters in the first round:

Chief election commissioner Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani stressed that the results were not final and acknowledged that there had been “some mistakes in the overall process”.

“It is only initial results,” he told a news conference in Kabul. “There is a chance of change in the overall figure…. The announcement of preliminary results does not mean that the leading candidate is the winner.

“We announced preliminary results today and it is now the complaints commission’s duty to inspect this case.”

The next hurdle comes on July 22, when final results are due to be announced. In the next 15 days, supporters of both candidates are likely to amplify their calls of fraud and other recriminations in a country that’s still facing a Taliban insurgency that, even in the most optimistic scenario, will present a challenging obstacle to Afghanistan’s next government when most US forces leave at the end of this year. US officials largely believe that either Ghani or Abdullah would be acceptable successors to outgoing president Hamid Karzai, who has become increasingly disenchanted with the administration of US president Barack Obama. Both Ghani and Abdullah, for example, have pledged to enact a status-of-forces agreement with the United States that envisions a security presence beyond 2014.

So what’s going on in Afghanistan? After the first round of voting in the spring appeared largely to avoid the mistakes of the disastrous 2009 presidential election, the country now faces a protracted battle between Ghani’s chiefly Pashtun supporters and Abdullah’s chiefly Tajik supporters.

Continue reading Is Ghani’s Afghan preliminary electoral victory a fraud?

Amid Iraqi turmoil, Kurdistan settles new regional government

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The conventional wisdom is that with the growing crisis in the rest of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan has never been better.iraq flag iconkurdistan

‘Better’ is a relative term, of course.

But for a region that also features severe corruption, intense political rivalries, a bloated and unaffordable public sector and fiscal dependence (for now, at least) on Baghdad, Iraqi Kurds have reason for optimism.

With Kurdish peshmerga forces in full control of Kirkuk, the Kurdish regional government can now lay claim to the entire historical region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, notorious for his crackdown against Kurdish identity and nationalism, encouraged Arabs to relocate to what Kurds (and Turkmen) consider their cultural capital.

Under Article 140 of Iraq’s newly promulgated 2005 constitution,  the national government is obligated to take certain steps to reverse the Saddam-era Arabization process and thereupon, permit a referendum to determine whether Kirkuk province’s residents wish to join the Kurdistan autonomous region. Like in many areas, from energy to electricity to education to employment, Iraq’s national government has made little progress on the Kirkuk issue. Kurdish leaders now say they will hold onto Kirkuk and its oil fields until a referendum can be arranged. Realistically, there’s little that Baghdad can do to reverse Kurdish gains.

That, in time, will give Iraqi Kurdistan the oil revenues that it needs for a self-sustaining economy, in tandem with growing Turkish economic ties that crested last year with the completion of a pipeline between Kurdistan and Turkey that allows the Kurdish regional government to ship crude oil out of Iraq without Baghdad’s approval.

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RELATED: Don’t blame Obama for Iraq’s turmoil — blame Maliki

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In that regard, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL, الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام, ad-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fi al-’Irāq wa-sh-Shām‎), which now controls much of northern and northeastern Iraq, including much of al-Anbar province and northern cities like Mosul and Tikrit, has been a boon for the cause of Kurdish nationalism.

ISIS, which has newly re-christened itself simply the ‘Islamic State’ (الدولة الإسلامية‎), has declared a 21st century caliphate over the territory it holds in Iraq and in eastern Syria, with ambitious, if unrealistic, designs on Baghdad and parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia:

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Sentiment is so heady these days that the Kurdish regional president, Massoud Barzani (pictured above), despite the hand-wringing of US and Turkish officials, has called for a referendum on Kurdish independence — in months, not years:

We will guard and defend all areas of the Kurdish region – Kurd, Arab, Turkmen, Assyrian, Chaldean, all will be protected. We will endeavor to redevelop and systematize all regions of Kurdistan. We will use our oil revenue to create better and more comfortable living conditions for our citizens. And until the achievement of an Independent Kurdish State, we will cooperate with all to try to find solutions to the current crisis in Iraq. With all our might, we will help our Shia and Sunni brothers in the fight against terrorism and for the betterment of conditions in Iraq – although this is not an easy task.

Amid that backdrop, the various political parties formed a new Kurdish regional government last week, two months after Iraqi national parliamentary elections in Iraq and fully nine months after Kurdish regional elections.

As the United States leans on the Iraqi parliament to form a new government quickly, in order to combat more effectively the ISIS threat in Sunni-dominated Iraq, the Kurdish example is instructive. If it took nine months to reconstitute the Kurdish regional government, is it plausible to expect Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to form a national government, under crisis conditions, in just two months?

Even under calmer conditions in 2010, it took Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki nine months of coalition talks to build Iraq’s previous government. Though Maliki’s Shiite-dominated State of Law Coalition (إئتلاف دولة القانون) won the greatest number of seats after the April parliamentary elections, many Iraqis fault his heavy-handed style for the sectarian crisis in which Iraq now finds itself.

In the first meeting of Iraq’s 325-member Council of Representatives (مجلس النواب العراقي‎) last week, Sunnis and Kurds alike walked out on Maliki, and there’s not much hope that a second session on Tuesday will result in additional progress.

Continue reading Amid Iraqi turmoil, Kurdistan settles new regional government

Don’t rule out Sarkozy just yet for 2017 comeback

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At the rate that the French political elite is going, Dominique Strauss-Kahn might be the last palatable option standing to challenge nationalist Marine Le Pen in the 2017 election.France Flag Icon

The decision by French prosecutors to open a formal investigation into former president Nicolas Sarkozy today, following his detention on Tuesday for questioning, is certain to rupture Sarkozy’s comeback plans to lead the French center-right in the April 2017 presidential election, leaving both major parties sullied by unpopular, unimaginative and possibly corrupt leadership.

But even as French and global analysts begin writing Sarkozy’s obituary, the current investigation, which involves Sarkozy’s alleged attempts to trade a job in plush Monaco to a judge in exchange for illegal information relating to another investigation, may not necessarily torpedo Sarkozy, even as the former president faces additional legal troubles in related corruption cases.

That will be especially true if Sarkozy is ultimately exonerated, given the aggressiveness with which French investigators have pursued Sarkozy. If he’s not found guilty, the investigations could actually strengthen Sarkozy, allowing him to play victim against an aggressive, out-of-control French judicial system. That’s a well-worn path that’s worked for other European leaders in the past, including former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Sarkozy has already compared the phone-tapping to East German Stasi tactics, and he appeared on French television Wednesday night to blast the ‘political exploitation’ of the legal system.

Nevertheless, Sarkozy will find it difficult to proceed with plans to retake the presidency of his center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) later this year. Sarkozy is believed to be keen on returning to the UMP presidency in light of former UMP president Jean-François Copé’s resignation in late May, related to accusations of falsifying 2007 campaign invoices to evade spending limits. 

The current scandal revolves around phone taps that revealed conversations between Sarkozy and his attorney, Thierry Herzog. Those taps, however, were originally designed to gather information about whether Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign was illegally financed with up to €50 million from former Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. 

The Herzog conversations, however, relate to yet another scandal, the  Bettencourt affair, in which L’Oréal heiress and socialite Liliane Bettencourt may have ferried illegal funding to Sarkozy’s reelection efforts. Though investigators ruled out charging Sarkozy in the Bettencourt matter, the case revolved around the admissibility of Sarkozy’s presidential diaries.

Sure, that’s a lot of scandal and a lot of circumstantial noise surrounding Sarkozy. But what happens if Sarkozy actually goes to jail?  Continue reading Don’t rule out Sarkozy just yet for 2017 comeback