Monthly Archives: December 2014

Calabria, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Calabria, Emilia Romagna elections boost Renzi government

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In the wake of regional elections last month, Italian and international commentators have been quick to anoint Matteo Salvini, the right-wing leader of Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League) the new star of Italy’s right.  calabriaItaly Flag Iconemilia-romagna

The most important takeaway, however, from both the Emilia-Romagna and Calabria elections on, is that Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi remains, by far, the most potent political force in the country. Renzi’s center-left Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) won by double-digit margins in both elections. Though worrisome trends for Renzi certainly lurk behind the headline numbers, the overwhelming narrative in Italy is that the Democrats, under Renzi, are quickly becoming Italy’s hegemonic political force, much like the Christian Democrats from the 1950s to the 1990s and the various iterations of the Silvio Berlusconi-led centrodestra (center-right) since 1994.

In both elections, voters were replacing scandal-tainted regional presidents who resigned earlier in the year.

Calabria, in Italy’s south (the ‘toe’ that nearly touches the island region of Sicily), with just 1.98 million residents, is among the poorest regions in Europe, let alone Italy, plagued by the ‛Ndrangheta, the local organized crime operation, and fewer economic opportunities than the more storied (and well touristed) northern regions. The Democrats easily won the regional presidency, however, under the candidacy of Mario Oliverio, the decade-long president of Consenza province, who won 61.4% to just 23.6% for Wanda Ferro, the candidate of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.  The victory means that southern Italy, generally a conservative region, has almost exclusively center-left regional presidents (with the exception of Campania), two of whom — Puglia’s Nichi Vendola and Sicily’s Rosario Crocetti — are openly gay leftists.

Emilia-Romagna, a region of nearly 4.5 million people in central Italy just north of Tuscany, is the beating heart of the Italian left and during the postwar period, its regional governments were reliably under the control of the old Italian Communist Party. So it’s no surprise that the Democratic Party, a few iterations removed from its Communist Party roots, would dominate the race. True to form, the PD’s candidate, Stefano Bonaccini (pictured above, right, with Renzi) easily won the regional elections by a margin of 49.05% to 29.85% for his nearest competitor, Alan Fabbri of the Northern League.

Despite the wide victories for Renzi and his Democratic Party candidates, it was something of a shock that the Northern League won so much support in Emilia-Romagna, both because of the region’s historical left-wing tilt and because the Northern League has focused its efforts north of the region, chiefly in the Veneto, Piedmont and Lombardy.

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That the Northern League is breaking out of northern Italy and into central Italy, with plans to attract national support, is due to the vision of its young new leader, Matteo Salvini (pictured above). Continue reading Calabria, Emilia Romagna elections boost Renzi government →

Germany, Thuringia

Germany’s Left Party comes of age with Ramelow victory

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After months of inter-party negotiations, the east-central German state of Thuringia will have a government led by Bodo Ramelow, the state leader of the democratic socialist Die Linke (Left Party).thuringiaGermany Flag Icon

On the surface, it means that Die Linke, partially the successor to  Socialist Unity Party (SED) that ruled the eastern German Democratic Republic, will control a state government for the first time since reunification, which has bred a significant amount of controversy:

Never before in a fully democratic Germany has a regional election triggered so much protest, with thousands demonstrating outside the parliament in Erfurt on Thursday evening ahead of the vote, declaring that the “perpetrators” were heading back into office.

Demonstrators included former East German dissidents, some of whom had spent time behind bars for their opposition views. They shouted “Stasi out!” in reference to East Germany’s repressive secret police, and “The Social Democrats have betrayed us”.

Even center-right chancellor Angela Merkel has used stark language to reject a Left-led government, arguing that Ramelow’s victory is equivalent to putting Karl Marx in charge of government.

But that’s a fairly oversimplified narrative.

Ramelow and the Left will govern in coalition with two far more moderate center-left parties, the Die Grünen (the Greens) and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party). The SPD, nationally, governs in a ‘grand coalition’ with chancellor Merkel’s conservative Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Union).

Moreover, the Left isn’t even the largest party in the Thuringia Landtag, the regional assembly:

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Far from bringing a police state or a socialist revolution to the tranquil streets of sleepy Erfurt, the Left will be governing in coalition with two far more moderate partners. With the support of the Greens and the SPD, Ramelow’s government will have a one-vote margin in the Landtag. So even if it wanted to introduce radical far-left measures, the Left wouldn’t get very far.

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RELATED: Thuringia and Brandenburg results: Left & AfD on the rise

RELATED: Left hopes to make eastern breakthrough
in German state elections

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It’s not clear, however, that it wants to do so. Thuringia provides the party with the opportunity that it can govern responsibly, even with a different ideological perspective than Merkel’s prevailing CDU or the moderate SPD. While the Left is relatively pro-Russia, plenty of former chancellors, from Gerhard Schröder to Helmut Kohl, have struck more lenient views toward Russia than most European figures. While the Left is also anti-NATO, that’s because it’s on the more ultra-pacifist side of a political culture that for decades has been incredibly pacifist.

Ramelow, a Lutheran union leader born in West Germany, is hardly a flamethrower, and he’s an advocate of pro-growth, anti-austerity policies. He’s called for wider investment in education and wants to provide a free year of kindergarten to every child in the state.

Continue reading Germany’s Left Party comes of age with Ramelow victory →

Zimbabwe

At age 90, Mugabe launches ZANU-PF purge in Zimbabwe

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mugabe2015Photo credit to New Zimbabwe.

After 34 years in power, and having controlled the government of Zimbabwe since virtually the moment of its independence in 1980, following the collapse of the white minority rule of what was previously Rhodesia, you’d think that president Robert Mugabe would be focused more on anointing a successor than causing more upheaval. zimbabwe new icon

If so, you’d be wrong.

For a leader who emerged as the darling of Western governments in his fight for black majority rule, then became an international pariah as Zimbabwe became synonymous with one-party rule, land confiscation, oppression of the few white residents who didn’t leave in 1980 and, more recently, hyperinflation, cholera epidemics and rigged elections, it should come to no surprise that Mugabe (pictured above) still wants to call the shots, two months short of his 91st birthday.

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RELATED: Post-election, what comes
next for Zimbabwe? [August 2013]

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The most recent upheaval involves Joice Mujuru, vice president of Zimbabwe since 2004 and the vice president of the ruling ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front).

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At age 59, she came of age during the struggle against Rhodesian white minority rule, earning the nickname ‘Spill Blood’ as a teenager in the fight for Zimbabwe’s freedom. Mujuru (pictured above) has literally spent her entire adult life working under Mugabe’s command. She’s been in government consecutively since 1980, when she was first appointed as a minister of community development and women’s affairs. Her husband, Solomon Mujuru, was until his 2011 death, the highly feared head of Zimbabwe’s military. Among the radical cadre of leaders within the ZANU-PF, Mujuru is widely viewed as a moderate voice who could have pulled Zimbabwe from its Mugabe-era isoltion into a more normal relationship with the rest of the world.  Continue reading At age 90, Mugabe launches ZANU-PF purge in Zimbabwe →

Sweden

Löfven not to blame for (probable) early Swedish elections

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If you lose a budget vote three years into your mandate, the problem’s probably with you.Sweden

If you lose a budget vote on the two-month anniversary of taking office, and less than three months after winning a general election, the problem’s probably not.

So it goes in Sweden, where voters will head to the polls on March 22 after the government lost a tough budget vote.

It wasn’t entirely unpredictable that prime minister Stefan Löfven (pictured above with Hillary Clinton) would fail to pass his first budget because of the odd dynamics of Swedish politics after September’s general election, which broke the Riksdag, Sweden’s unicameral parliament, into three blocs: Continue reading Löfven not to blame for (probable) early Swedish elections →

Israel

Netanyahu sacks Lapid, Livni, seeks snap 2015 elections

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After weeks of tension, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sacked justice minister Tzipi Livni and finance minister Yair Lapid on Tuesday, accusing them of trying to lead a ‘putsch’ against him, and the Knesset (הכנסת), Israel’s unicameral parliament, has now voted to dissolve itself in advance of snap elections in early 2015.ISrel Flag Icon

Just two years and two months after Israel’s last parliamentary election, Israel is set to go to the polls on March 17, two years sooner than the current parliamentary term ends. Despite Netanyahu’s bravado in triggering early elections, neither he nor Lapid nor Livni are assured of increasing their share of the vote.

While Netanyahu remains the favorite to return as prime minister as the head of his center-right Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎), he will be vying to win a fourth term leading government after two of the toughest years of his political career. Though the election is likely to focus, increasingly, on domestic issues, it follows this summer’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ against Hamas in the occupied Gaza strip that lessened global support for Israel. It also follows Arab-Jewish violence in Jerusalem in recent weeks, and after Sweden formally recognized Palestine’s sovereignty in October (as the French parliament voted on the issue earlier this week).

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RELATED: Twelve lessons to draw from Netanyahu’s new Israeli cabinet government [March 2013]

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Nevertheless, unless terrorism or religious violence increases, the Palestinian question will invariably fade from the agenda of the country’s leading politicians — for at least the next four months.

Accordingly, the election will be a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership over the past two years, including the management of his coalition, the struggle of Israel’s middle class, and global matters like his handling of the Gaza war and testy relations with the United States and the Obama administration. Critics from both the left and right will target Netanyahu during the 2015 campaign. Moreover, if Netanyahu falls short next March, his position within Likud is even more tenuous after he wasted precious political capital attempting (and failing) to block former Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin’s presidential candidacy.

With allies like these, who needs enemies?

The unwieldy coalition Netanyahu formed in 2013 has been increasingly unstable since the end of the military action in Gaza earlier this year. The causes lie not only among moderate critics to Netanyahu’s left like Livni and Lapid, but among conservative critics to his right, including his one-time chief of staff, economy minister Naftali Bennett and his nationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. During the Gaza conflict, Netanyahu nearly fired Bennett after his strident criticism that Israel’s military action wasn’t going far enough. Continue reading Netanyahu sacks Lapid, Livni, seeks snap 2015 elections →

United States

Ashton Carter will be Obama’s fourth defense secretary

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Just a week after US president Barack Obama in essence fired his defense secretary, former Republican senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, he has apparently found a successor — Ashton Carter.USflag

Carter served as deputy secretary of defense between October 2011 and December 2013 under both Hagel and Hagel’s predecessor, Leon Panetta, a longtime Democratic operative, former budget chief, Clinton administration chief of staff and California congressman.

Carter, who graduated from Yale University with majors in medieval history and physics, has an extensive background as under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. He is a Rhodes scholar with a doctoral degree in physics as well.

As a defense secretary, he will be more like Panetta or Robert Gates, a master of the Pentagon and its bureaucracy and budget. He isn’t expected to be a visionary, like former Bush-era defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which is just as well, given that so much national defense policymaking is centered in the White House, not at the Pentagon. Nevertheless, The Atlantic‘s editor-at-large, Steve Clemons noted earlier on Tuesday on Twitter that Carter is hawkish with respect to Iran, which could nudge administration policy, a week after stalled negotiations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program were extended until July 2015.

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RELATED: Hagel’s exit symbolizes Obama policy shift

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Unlike Hagel (or even Panetta), Carter is not a politician, but rather a career technocrat and policy wonk.  As an assistant secretary of defense under US president Bill Clinton, Carter was responsible for international security policy, and he has written extensively on the topic of nuclear non-proliferation.

When Obama was looking to replace Panetta two years ago, Carter was on the short list as well, and there were indications that Hagel and Carter didn’t always see eye-to-eye at the Pentagon, one reason why Carter may have stepped down as deputy secretary late last year.

His background from the immediate post-Cold War period makes Carter especially cognizant of many issues in the former Soviet Union, perhaps an especially relevant qualification as Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine (and perhaps the Baltic states and Georgia) increases.

Carter is easily expected to win confirmation by the US Senate, which will be Republican-controlled as of early January, following Republican gains in both houses of the US Congress in November’s midterm congressional elections.

Guerrero, Mexico

Two years in, Iguala massacre threatens Peña Nieto presidency

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Guest post by Christopher Skutnik
EPNguerreroPhoto credit to NTX.

When he was elected in July 2012 in a relative landslide, Enrique Peña Nieto thought his administration would be defined by good governance and economic, tax and energy reforms.Mexico Flag Icon

Above all, everyone thought that Peña Nieto would be eager to demonstrate the new look of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party), which controlled Mexico’s presidency between 1929 and 2000, with the rise of a younger generation of technocratic cabinet members, including Luis Videgaray, EPN’s finance minister.

On the second anniversary of his inauguration, however, Peña Nieto (pictured above visiting Guerrero in 2013) faces the risk of losing the narrative of his presidency with four years left in office — following the September killings of 43 university students, reminiscent of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre that is widely seen as one of the lowest points of the PRI’s 20th century rule.

So what happened in Iguala?

guerreroPhoto credit to BBC.

It’s no understatement to say that Mexicans everywhere have been touched by the incredible display of violence and governmental corruption that took place on September 26, when 43 students were abducted and, allegedly, assassinated in the town of Cocula, near Iguala, the third-largest city in Guerrero state.

The office of Mexican attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam has determined that Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca ordered local police to confront the students, since he was worried that they would disrupt an important political event at which his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, was scheduled to speak.

With what appears to the approval of Iguala police chief Felipe Flores Velásquez, local officers apparently ambushed the students, (killing 6 outright), and abducted 43 more. A further 14 students successfully escaped, and were later located safely.

According to officials, Cocula’s police chief, Cesar Nava Gonzalez, ordered police to transfer the 43 captives to a local gang called Guerreros Unidos, to which Nava Gonzalez apparently belonged. The gang members then allegedly transported the students to a landfill, murdered them, burned their bodies, and dumped their remains in a local river.

The sad tale, however, becomes even more ridiculous upon further review. Los Angeles Pineda, the mayor’s wife, is allegedly known as ‘Lady Iguala’ and, along with her two brothers (both of whom were assassinated by rival gangs) was tightly connected to the Guerreros Unidos gang. Circumstantially, it appears that she used her position to leverage a considerable amount of wealth, as well as intervene on behalf of her gang. Continue reading Two years in, Iguala massacre threatens Peña Nieto presidency →

Uruguay

Uruguay election results: Vazquez easily wins runoff

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It wasn’t unexpected, but former president Tabaré Vázquez easily won Uruguay’s presidential runoff late Sunday, extending control by the the leftist Frente Amplio (Broad Front) for at least another five years.uruguay

Vázquez, who made national history by leading his party to victory in the 2004 election, was succeeded by José Mujica (pictured above, right, with Vázquez, left), who has become in five years one the world’s most beloved presidents — for his extremely simple, austere personal style, for his honesty and folksiness, and sometimes even for his policies, which have included social reforms like liberalizing Uruguay’s abortion laws, enacting same-sex marriage equality and legalizing marijuana use.

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Those reforms, in addition to a plan to host a handful of prisoners from the US prison facility at Guantánamo Bay, will be secure under Vázquez’s second term.

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RELATED: Vázquez charges into second round of Uruguayan vote

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Both Vázquez and Mujica have benefited from an incredibly strong economy, which has propelled Uruguayan GDP per capita higher than in any other South American country, and that was an obvious factor in Vázquez’s victory against Luis Lacalle Pou, the attractive, young candidate of the more conservative Partido Nacional (National Party), or the ‘blancos,’ one of the two traditional Uruguayan parties.

So what to expect from the next five years? Vázquez, now firmly in legacy-moulding terrain, will hope to consolidate the gains of the past decade, including the economic and social reforms of both his prior administration and the Mujica government.

That also entails working to keep the Uruguayan economy strong, notwithstanding a Brazilian slowdown and increasing economic chaos in neighboring Argentina, which will choose a successor to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner later in 2015. It also means keeping the Frente Amplio brand strong for the inevitable day when it will lose an election, which means maintaining Uruguay’s relatively corruption-free reputation. Also expect Vázquez to move slightly more to the center than Mujica, who was always more popular personally than many of his signature policies, including the marijuana reform.

Mujica, after all, will still play an important role in Uruguayan politics as one of his party’s senators in the Cámara de Senadores (Chamber of Senators).

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RELATED: Meet José Mujica, the Uruguayan president who’s on the path to legalizing marijuana

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But there was always a sense that while Mujica’s charisma far outshone Vázquez’s charms, it was Vázquez who was the better executive, and in his first term, he expanding spending on health care and poverty and restructured the tax code, balancing the social welfare concerns of his leftist base and the interests of the country’s business community. Continue reading Uruguay election results: Vazquez easily wins runoff →