Yearly Archives: 2014

Cameroon

The country behind the hair: contemporary Cameroon

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As soon as she stepped off the airplane, she became the instant, unexpected hit of the White House’s summit of African leaders in Washington, D.C.cameroon

No, it’s not Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, who cancelled plans to visit Washington in the wake of the devastating Ebola outbreak in west Africa.

Africa’s only other female head of state, Catherine Samba-Panza, who is struggling as interim president of the Central African Republic to pacify what’s now been a year of civil war, wasn’t even invited to the summit. (Under the African Union’s rules, no CAR leader was eligible to attend until the country holds new, democratic elections.)

Instead, it’s Chantal Biya, whose flamboyant hairstyle has grabbed headlines from New York to Los Angeles. The Washington Post‘s hard-hitting coverage noted when Chantal Biya ‘and her hair’ touched down in Washington, DC. It’s disappointing that the US media, given so many governance crises across sub-Saharan Africa, has emphasized style over substance during this week’s summit.

Chantal Biya’s husband, Paul Biya, has served as president of Cameroon, a west-central African country that shares a long border with Nigeria, since 1982 — the second year of the Reagan administration in the United States. His 32-year record isn’t exactly admirable. It’s a country that has a GDP per capita of less than $1,300, according to the International Monetary Fund, and it would be even less if not for oil production. For a first lady who confesses a weakness for Dior and Chanel, her husband presides over a country of nearly 22 million people where nearly 40% live at or below the poverty level.  Continue reading The country behind the hair: contemporary Cameroon →

Australia

How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon trading scheme

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In the end, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott didn’t have to call a special, massive ‘double dissolution’ election to roll back Australia’s carbon pricing scheme, the signature policy accomplishment of the six-year Labor government that preceded him.australia new

All it took was some deft maneuvering to cobble together a working majority in the 76-member Senate, where Abbott’s Liberal/National Party holds 33 seats, just short of a majority.

Nevertheless, Abbott (pictured above) won a narrow 39 to 32 victory last month in the upper house of Australia’s parliament, on the strength of six additional non-Coalition votes to repeal the carbon trading market. Having been one of the first countries to adopt a carbon trading market, Australia on July 17 became the first country to repeal a carbon trading market.

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That included the support of a mercurial former mining magnate named Clive Palmer (pictured above), whose maverick conservative Palmer United Party (PUP) became the swing vote in determining whether Abbott’s repeal push would succeed or fail.

The Labor Party’s new leader, Bill Shorten, led an unsuccessful push in alliance with the Australian Green Party, to oppose the repeal. Labor holds 25 seats in the Senate, while the Greens hold another 10. 

Abbott’s resulting victory is primarily a triumphant tactical and policy victory for the Australian right, giving Abbott an easy talking point on reducing the price of electricity for the average Australian voter (though the real long-term impact of the repeal of a carbon scheme that had reduced emissions by less than 10 percent nationally is yet to be determined).

It’s also a narrative about the fragmentation of the country’s two-party system, as far as Australian senatorial elections go, with voters placing increasingly greater power in the hands of independent third-party candidates.

On the global scale, it marks a symbolic victory for opponents of similar climate change legislation worldwide, though the battle over carbon emissions was never going to be won or lost in Australia, a country of less than 23 million. Arguably, China’s decision in June, for the first time, to limit carbon emissions at the national level, will have a much wider impact on global climate change policy.

While British prime minister David Cameron continues to promote a progressive stand on climate change as an issue to pull his Conservative Party to the middle in the United Kingdom, there’s no indication that the UK is set to introduce any major climate change legislation on the scale of Australia’s experiment with carbon pricing beyond the EU’s own carbon trading scheme. Though there was a brief window in 2008 and 2009 when a carbon-based exchange system might have been enacted in the United States with bipartisan support, those days seem long gone. Nevertheless, the administration of US president Barack Obama and the US Environmental Protection Agency, however, introduced executive actions this summer that aim to reduce US carbon emissions by 30% by the year 2030.

Australia’s carbon scheme has its origins as one of the major promises of former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s widely successful 2007 campaign that brought the Labor Party back to government after more than a decade in opposition. It was, in part, Rudd’s decision to back away from climate change legislation that caused his Labor colleagues to dump him in 2010 in favor of then-deputy prime minister Julia Gillard.

After Gillard won a narrow reelection campaign of her own later that year, she enacted a comprehensive climate change bill in 2012, as well as a broader tax on mining profits (that hasn’t raised nearly as much revenue as expected). 

The problem, both in Australia and beyond, is that the global financial crisis of 2008-09 left many national electorates wary of climate change legislation that, almost overnight, suddenly seemed much too costly to introduce at a time when so many developed countries were struggling with the highest unemployment and lowest GDP growth in decades.

That made Abbott’s pledge to repeal what’s popularly become known in Australia as the ‘carbon tax’ one of the most popular aspects of his agenda, which won wide support the parliamentary elections last September that brought Abbott’s Coalition into government. His recent victory in winning Senate support to repeal the carbon scheme will almost certainly rank among the chief legislative successes of his first year as prime minister. Continue reading How Tony Abbott killed Australia’s carbon trading scheme →

Brazil

Rousseff holds weak lead as reelection challenge looms in Brazil

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It’s still Lula’s Brazil. And it’s perhaps easier to think that Brazil’s October election is less a referendum on president Dilma Rousseff’s reelection, and more the challenge of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers Party) to win a fourth term in the presidential palace at Planalto.brazil

If Rousseff, as polls currently predict, wins a second term, the Workers Party will have governed Brazil from 2003 until at least 2019 — nearly half of the period since the fall of Brazil’s last military regime in 1985.

But polls can be also misleading, and they can easily change over the course the next 65 days until Brazilians vote.

Just ask Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, who watched a wide double-digit lead evaporate between March and May, when he narrowly lost the first round of Colombia’s presidential election to the more conservative candidate, former finance minister Óscar Iván Zuluaga. Though Santos ultimately defeated Zuluaga in the runoff two weeks later on June 14, it was an incredible scare for the incumbent — and it could have tanked the Colombian government’s historic peace accords with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

The stakes of Brazil’s general election on October 5 (and runoff, if necessary, on October 26, in the presidential and gubernatorial elections) are no less vital. In addition to the presidency, Brazilian voters will elect all 513 members of the Câmara dos Deputados (Chamber of Deputies), 54 of the 81 Brazilian senators, and the governors of all 26 states and the Distrito Federal.

Brazil remains the largest economy in Latin America, with promising offshore oil exploration, a rising middle class and a dynamic political marketplace. Just two decades ago, the country was rising out of military dictatorship, marked inequality, hyperinflation and economic misery. Rio de Janeiro, the country’s second-most populous city, is set to host the Summer Olympics in 2016, the first South American city to do so.

Nevertheless, Rousseff’s lead is every bit as precarious as Santos’s was in Colombia. In the October 2010 election, Rousseff was forced into a runoff by her more conservative rival José Serra, a former senator and former São Paulo mayor and governor. Though Rousseff ultimately defeated Serra in the second round by a margin of 56.05% to 43.95%, many Brazilians were surprised that Rousseff didn’t win the first-round election outright, as her predecessor, Lula  (pictured above with Rousseff), did in 2006.

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This time around, she’ll face Aécio Neves (pictured above), the candidate of Serra’s center-right Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, Brazilian Social Democracy Party). Continue reading Rousseff holds weak lead as reelection challenge looms in Brazil →

France, St. Pierre et Miquelon

Photo essay: What is Saint Pierre et Miquelon and why does it still exist?

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SAINT-PIERRE — Just off the coast of Newfoundland lies an archipelago of eight attractive if forlorn islands where after a few hours it becomes hard to remember that you’re still in North America. France Flag IconFlag of Saint Pierre and Miquelon

In Saint Pierre and Miquelon, it’s easier to believe that you’ve stepped back in time to the 1970s, perhaps to a sleepy seaside town in northern France. It’s the France that you might remember from your introductory French textbook in grade school (‘Nous sommes à la discothèque de la ville‘)*, but that exists in mainland France, if it ever did, only in the early films of François Truffaut.

For a growing number of tourists to the islands, that’s exactly the point. Continue reading Photo essay: What is Saint Pierre et Miquelon and why does it still exist? →

Argentina

Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default

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It ultimately took an American hedge fund to unite the Argentine people behind the increasingly unpopular presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.argentina

Now, after a prolonged fight that has its roots in Argentina’s last debt default over a decade ago, a fight that has weaved its way through the corridors of power in Buenos Aires, via the banks of New York and London, into the highest court of the United States, and with consequences that will reverberate from Brasília to Caracas, Argentina is now defaulting, once again, on its debt obligations.

How did Argentina end up in this situation? And what will happen if Argentina, which technically entered default at midnight earlier today, doesn’t arrive at a deal with its creditors?

Here’s a primer on everything you need to know about the Argentine default — and why it’s such an odd, twisting and ultimately fascinating story about Latin American politics, global finance, US constitutional law and the ‘north-south’ dynamic of international relations. Continue reading Everything you need to know about Argentina’s impending default →

Turkey

Can Erdogan be stopped in first direct Turkish presidential election?

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You’ve probably never seen Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan like this before. Turkey

In his bid to win Turkey’s first-ever direct presidential election, he donned bright orange athletic gear (pictured above) and took to the football field at a new stadium in Istanbul earlier this week, scoring a hat trick against token opposition.

Though that may replicate Erdoğan’s seemingly unstoppable rise, leading his governing Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, the Justice and Development Party) to victory three consecutive times — in  2002, 2007 and 2011 — his latest electoral quest may prove more difficult.

Turkish voters will elect a president in voting scheduled for August 10 among Erdoğan and two challengers, Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu and Selahattin Demirtaş. If none of the candidates win more than 50% of the vote, the top two candidate will advance to an August 24 runoff.

Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu

The Cairo-born İhsanoğlu (pictured above), who served as the secretary-general of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation between 2004 and January 2014, is an academic with a background in, of all things, the history of science.

An independent by party and a conservative by temperament, İhsanoğlu was nominated for the presidency by an alliance of two very different opposition groups pushed together by a mutual opposition to Erdoğan: the center-left Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP, the Republican People’s Party), most associated with Kemalism in the pre-Erdoğan era, and the ultranationalist, conservative Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP, Nationalist Movement Party).

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Demirtaş (pictured above), a 41-year old rising star popular among Turkish leftists, is the candidate of the Kurdish-interest Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (BDP, Peace and Democracy Party), though he hopes to win support from among the CHP’s more liberal supporters.

Defying decades of repressive precedent, Erdoğan has tried to pacify relations between the central government and Turkey’s Kurdish minority, and he’s increasingly made Turkey an improbable ally of the de facto independent Iraqi Kurdistan. That’s won Erdoğan genuine respect among Kurdish voters, though many will undoubtedly support Demirtaş in the election’s first round. It will nonetheless be something of a curiosity if Erdoğan is forced into a runoff, but makes it over the top on the basis of Kurdish votes.

Today, most observers give Erdoğan the edge, but the prime minister has become such a polarizing figure, and his project to place the Turkish power firmly in the presidency such a controversial idea, that it could be much closer than anticipated. If Erdoğan fails to clear 50% and thereupon faces a direct challenge from İhsanoğlu later in August, the runoff will become a referendum on whether  Turkey will essentially become not an Islamist or democratic or Kemalist state, but an ‘Erdoğan state.’

If İhsanoğlu wins, he will become, like many of his predecessors, a figurehead with ceremonial powers and little else.

If Erdoğan wins, in either round, he will almost certainly transform the Turkish presidency into a much more powerful office. Formerly, the president was appointed to a single, seven-year term by the Turkish parliament. Under the new system, the president is elected to a five-year term with possible reelection.  Continue reading Can Erdogan be stopped in first direct Turkish presidential election? →

Ukraine

Is Yatsenyuk’s resignation good or bad news for Poroshenko?

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Another week, another crisis in Ukraine.Ukraine Flag Icon

Just days after the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, Ukraine’s prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk offered to resign after two parties left the five-month ruling coalition that formed in the wake of Viktor Yanukovych’s flight from office back in February.

Those five months have witnessed an incredible amount of activity in Ukraine: Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the rise of Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine, the May election of Petro Poroshenko as the country’s new president, and the crash of Flight MH17.

Those two parties, the right-wing nationalist All-Ukrainian Union “Svoboda” (Всеукраїнське об’єднання «Свобода») and the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR, Український демократичний альянс за реформи) of newly elected Kiev mayor and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitaliy Klychko, ostensibly left the government over the onerous conditions that Yatsenyuk was trying to enact into law pursuant to the $17 billion loan package provided by the International Monetary Fund, which contemplates that Ukraine will bring its budgets closer into balance. It’s understandable that lawmakers aren’t keen to introduce austerity measures with an ongoing insurgency in eastern Ukraine and with the economy still in shambles — it could contract by as much as 6.5% this year, and the Ukrainian hryvnia has lost nearly 30% of its value so far in 2014.

But Svoboda and UDAR, which joined the pro-Western government alongside Yatsenyuk’s own  ‘All Ukrainian Union — Fatherland’ party (Batkivshchyna, Всеукраїнське об’єднання “Батьківщина), knew the strings attached to the IMF loan from the outset.

Why now?  Continue reading Is Yatsenyuk’s resignation good or bad news for Poroshenko? →

Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone

West Africa’s Ebola epidemic is as much a crisis of governance as health

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It’s a fluke of random nature that the fearsome Ebola virus is endemic to some of the poorest and least governable countries in the world. sierra leone flagliberiaguinea

But unlike in central Africa, where previous outbreaks were controlled through limited mobility of local populations, the current outbreak, centered in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, is afflicting a corner of the world that features far greater travel.

So while central African countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo are hardly equipped to deal with modern epidemics, the epidemiological limitations of prior Ebola outbreaks haven’t always required the kind of national mobilization that’s now necessary to bring the west African outbreak under control. Though all three west African countries have worked to build governing institutions, they are all barely a decade removed from some of the most fearsome civil wars in recent African history. That’s left all three countries with populations loathe to trust public health officials, making the Ebola outbreak west Africa’s most difficult governance  crisis since the end of its civil wars in the early 2000s.

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Though the three countries in the middle of the current crisis are relatively small, the news that Ebola has now travelled to Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, via a US citizen no less, has raised concerns that Ebola could also spread even farther. Though the Nigerian government’s rapid response in quarantining and monitoring those exposed to Ebola was impressive, there are already worries that Ebola has crossed the border into Mali, where the government is still battling to unite the country after a disabling civil war with northern Tuareg separatists (and an influx of international Islamist jihadists).

The outbreak is already, by far, the deadliest in history, infecting 1,201 and killing 672, as of July 25, according to the World Health Organization. in the three countries since the first case was reported in Guinea in February.

So what exactly are the political and historical backgrounds of the three countries in the maelstrom of the current Ebola outbreak? And how equipped are they to handle a full-blown epidemic?

Continue reading West Africa’s Ebola epidemic is as much a crisis of governance as health →

Honduras, United States

Hernández selectively blames US for child migrant crisis

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When you talk to Hondurans on the streets of San Pedro Sula, they’ll tell you they are more afraid of the police than of drug traffickers or gang members.USflaghonduras flag icon

In a county where drug traffickers offer far higher payoffs than the salaries constrained by stretched national and local budgets, today’s hero is tomorrow’s villain, and the line between good guys and bad guys has become impossible to draw. Corruption runs high and impunity runs even higher in a country where the judicial system is incapable of prosecuting a shockingly high number of violent  incidents.

Yet when Honduras’s new president Juan Orlando Hernández (pictured above at the US Capitol) came to the United States last week to meet with US president Barack Obama, he pointed fingers at US policymakers for the sudden wave of child migrants from Central America to the US border seeking asylum — 57,000 this year and counting, more than 25,000 alone from Honduras.

With nearly 8.5 million people, Honduras is the second-most populous country in Central America (after Guatemala with 14.4 million) and in the current crisis, many more child migrants have arrived at the US border from Honduras than from either Guatemala or El Salvador. For example, more children have arrived from San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s northern industrial hub than from all of Guatemala. Though Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, isn’t exactly the world’s safest city, it’s a tranquil oasis compared to San Pedro Sula and the northern coast, which is plagued with the worst of the drug-related violence that has given Honduras the world’s highest murder rate — 79.7 homicides per 100,000, amounting to around 18.5 homicides a day.

That’s one reason why the Obama administration is allegedly considering the unusual step of allowing refugees to seek asylum directly within Honduras, modeled after former programs developed for war-torn Vietnam and ravaged Haiti, a tacit acknowledgment that the human rights situation has reached dire levels.

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RELATED: Unaccompanied minors? Blame a century of US Central American policy.

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When Hernández came to the United States last week, he was quick to blame coyotes for turning their predatory sights to Central America, and he was quick to blame the US immigration reform debate for creating ‘ambiguity’ about US policy. But above all, Hernández noted that US demand for illegal drugs fuels the trafficking that so afflicts Honduras today: Continue reading Hernández selectively blames US for child migrant crisis →

Burundi

Burundi sets presidential election for June 26, 2015

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The troubled east African country of Burundi has set its parliamentary and presidential election dates, establishing the timeline by which Burundi’s fragile government could fall into political (or even ethnic) conflict.burundi

Burundi will hold parliamentary elections on May 26, 2015 with its presidential election to take place exactly one month later on June 26.

Isolated as the poorest and the only French-speaking country within the mostly English-speaking East African Community (EAC), Burundi has increasingly assumed an atmosphere of fear and repression as the 2015 elections approach. It’s widely believed that Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza is planning to seek a third term in office, despite constitution restrictions to the contrary.

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RELATED: As world remembers Rwanda genocide,
Burundi tilts into political crisis

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That’s left the Burundian opposition increasingly soured on participating the upcoming vote, and it could well boycott the 2015 elections, much as it did the 2010 elections.

Even if Nkurunziza declines to run, pulling back from the brink of a political crisis, his governing Conseil National Pour la Défense de la Démocratie–Forces pour la Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD-FDD, National Council for the Defense of Democracy–Forces for the Defense of Democracy) will almost certainly try to keep a tight grip on power. With the increasing stranglehold that Nkurunziza has taken over the country in the past decade, however, that shouldn’t prove difficult.  Continue reading Burundi sets presidential election for June 26, 2015 →

Hungary

Orbán designs to transform Hungary into ‘illiberal’ state

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It sounds like a headline from the European version of The Onion, but Viktor Orbán, just months out from winning a landslide reelection in April, has announced his intentions to turn Hungary into an ‘illiberal state,’ modeled after China or Russia:Hungary Flag Icon

The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad,Romania.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

It’s hard to know just how seriously to take Orbán’s latest comments.

If his first government, over a decade ago, was traditionally liberal conservative, Orbán’s most recent term was marked by more nationalist, illiberal and authoritarian tendencies. It’s not hard to believe that, with a two-thirds majority behind him, Orbán could turn fully away from liberal democracy and toward illiberal authoritarianism in his third term.

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RELATED: Hungarian election results : A historic win for Orbán

RELATED: Lessons from Hungary’s election —
and challenges for its future

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Other Hungarian commentators argue that Orbán’s emphasis was on the liberal market system and its failures during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. In that sense, Orbán may have been calling merely for a shift from a European social welfare state to a more state capitalist model. Though Orbán came to power as a liberal market proponent, his 2010-14 government engaged in healthy spending on public works programs,  nationalized Hungary’s private pensions system and introduced the highest VAT rate in the European Union (27%) in a bid to end Hungary’s  €20 billion post-crisis loan program with the International Monetary Fund. Nonetheless, even significant moves in that direction could spook global markets, send the Hungarian forint plummeting or dampen growth and investment.

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Orbán’s weekend speech came as he, like Russian president Vladimir Putin (pictured above, right, with Orbán), has called for restrictions on international NGOs throughout the country. Though Hungarians revolted in 1956 against Soviet rule and in favor of freedom and democracy in one of the most dramatic Iron Curtain revolutions of the Cold War, Hungarian relations with Russia today are arguably better than Hungary’s relations with leading EU member-states. Orbán, who burst onto Hungary’s political scene a quarter-century ago as an anti-communist activist, signed a $14 billion lending deal with Russia in January in pursuit of greater nuclear energy.

If Orbán goes through with plans to eliminate liberal democracy in Hungary, which has been a member of the European Union for a decade, it would cause an immediate crisis for the incoming European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.  Continue reading Orbán designs to transform Hungary into ‘illiberal’ state →

Indonesia

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

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Last Thursday, the United States-Indonesia Society and the International Republican Institute held a briefing of data from R. R. William Liddle, a professor emeritus of political science at The Ohio State University and one of the leading US experts on Indonesian politics, government and culture. Indonesia Flag

Dr. Liddle brought with him a compelling set of exit polling data conducted by Saiful Mujani, a Jakarta-based research and consulting firm.

The data provided the strongest narrative details yet for how Jakarta governor Joko Wododo (‘Jokowi’) effectively outpaced former general Prabowo Subianto in what was Indonesia’s most fiercely and closely contested election since the introduction of direct voting for the presidency in 2004.

For example, it may be counterintuitive, but younger, urban voters appeared to prefer, by a slight margin, Prabowo to Jokowi. After all the talk of Jokowi as the younger candidate of hope and of reform, the ‘Barack Obama’ of Indonesia after his meteoric rise from Solo mayor to Jakarta governor to, now, president-elect, it isn’t necessarily intuitive that Jokowi edged his way to the Indonesian presidency on the support of relatively poorer, rural and older voters.

Voters by age

Voters under 21 years old supported Jokowi by a margin of just 53% to 47%, but voters over 55 supported Prabowo by a margin of 59% to 41%. Though you might expect younger voters to be most enthusiastic for a relatively young, modern president, they opted for Prabowo, nine years Jokowi’s senior.

One possibility is that younger voters don’t entirely remember Indonesia’s authoritarian age, but older voters remember only too well the human rights abuses of Suharto’s three-decade reign and, most especially, the economic pain of the financial crisis of 1997-99 that brought down Suharto’s ‘New Order.’ Given Prabowo’s ties to the regime — he was a top Suharto-era general and he used to be married to Suharto’s daughter — older voters might have been warier about supporting the former general, given his checkered past.

Rural and urban voters and voters by class

Rural voters preferred Jokowi by a margin of 56% to 44%, but Prabowo narrowly won urban voters by a margin of 51% to 49%. The data also showed that ‘white-collar’ voters supported Prabowo by 55% to 45%, while ‘blue-collar’ voters backed Jokowi by 54% to 46%.

Again, it’s a fascinating turn, considering Prabowo’s emphasis on economic nationalism that, in most countries, finds a greater audience among the least economically powerful. Wall Street bankers and investment attorneys in the United States, for example, are much less likely to support protectionist policies than, say, blue-collar ironworkers or manufacturers who acutely feel the sting of global competition.

As Liddle noted, there might be several reasons for Prabowo’s apparent strength among educated, successful, cosmopolitan Indonesians. One of them is the way that Jokowi framed himself as a ‘common man’ candidate — not a president who, like Prabowo, comes from the Indonesian elite, educated in international schools and has exquisite English-language skills. Prabowo, throughout the campaign, effectively demonstrated that his much greater exposure to the United States and the wider world, and many cosmopolitan voters found that quality reassuring.

Voters by religion

Islamic voters narrowly favored Prabowo by a margin of 51% to 49%, while non-Islamic voters overwhelmingly backed Jokowi by an 80% to 20% margin. That’s not surprising, given that three of the four major Islamist parties backed Prabowo and that his running mate, Hatta Rajasa, former coordinating minister for economics, is the leader of the Islamist Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN, National Mandate Party). It’s also not surprising in light of the whispering campaign that Jokowi is secretly Christian. The predominantly Hindu island of Bali, for example, has always been a stronghold for Jokowi’s party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P, Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan), and Jokowi did particularly well in predominantly Christian areas, such as Papua. It also explains why Prabowo won Indonesia’s most populous province, West Java, home to some of Indonesia’s most conservative Muslims — with 46.3 million people, West Java contains nearly 19% of the country’s population.

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The Javanese-Sundanese split

The data indicate that Jokowi triumphed among the Javanese by a margin of 56% to 44%, while Prabowo won the Sundanese by a margin of 80% to 20%. That explains why, despite Prabowo’s West Java breakthrough, with a heavy Sunda population, Jokowi narrowly won Jakarta (9.6 million) and East Java (37.5 million), and he racked up an even more solid victory in Yogyakarta (3.5 million) and Central Java (32.4 million), the traditional Javanese homeland. Among non-Javanese and non-Sundanese voters, Jokowi won by a margin of 53% to 47%. While Prabowo generally won more provinces in Sumatra, for example, Jokowi won the most populous province, North Sumatra (13 million), and Jokowi’s running mate Jusuf Kalla may have helped Jokowi win much of the island of Sulawesi.

The most interesting finding of the survey, though? Continue reading Indonesia post-mortem: why young, cosmopolitan voters chose Prabowo →

El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, United States

Unaccompanied minors? Blame a century of US Central American policy.

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At a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Center with three Central American  foreign ministers, moderator Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, began the hourlong talk with a simple question about the rise of unaccompanied minors to the United States:  USflaghonduras flag iconel salvadorguatemala flag icon

Who is to blame?

Speaking to an overflow crowd in Washington, DC yesterday, the three foreign ministers — Honduras’s Mireya Agüero, Guatemala’s Fernando Carrera and El Salvador’s Hugo Martínez — shared a half-dozen or more credible reasons for the phenomenon, which has resulted in a wave of 57,000 minors from the three countries coming to the United States since the beginning of 2014.

Borders that remain too porous and governments unwilling or unable to devote more funds to secure them.

The fearsome sway of street gangs that recruit young kids into a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and illegality, leaving the three Central American countries with some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Coyotes that, unable to persuade Mexicans to cross the border, have now turned their sights to Central Americans.

Governments that lack the resources to provide the kind of health care, education and legal institutions that could form the backbone of viable middle-class prosperity, leaving growing numbers of Central Americans looking to the United States for a better life.

Lectures from US presidents and policymakers that go unmatched with the kind of financial assistance to build truly pluralistic democratic societies.

Today, with US president Barack Obama holding an unprecedented four-way meeting with the presidents of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, US policy in Central America is making more headlines than at any time since perhaps the Cold War, and it’s the latest round in a polarizing debate over immigration to the United States, with the Obama administration now seeking $3.7 billion in funds from the US Congress to help stem the illegal flow of Central Americans across the border, often at great risk, especially among women and children.

Obviously, like any social phenomenon, the reasons for the influx of unaccompanied minors are complex, and they involve the economics of drug trafficking, the social dynamics of poverty and urban gang violence, and a lack of opportunities for growing populations aspiring to middle-class prosperity. It’s not an impossible dream because countries like Belize, Panamá and Costa Rica are largely achieving it throughout Central America.

Even more complex are the underlying conditions in the three countries that form the background to the current migration crisis, and the roots of those conditions go back decades, with plenty of US interference in the region.

Conservatives rail against Obama’s steps to provide a smoother path to citizenship for the children of migrants who have lived virtually their whole lives in the United States, and even Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández yesterday blamed the ‘ambiguity’ of the US immigration reform debate for the surge in child migration. Texas governor Rick Perry last month blamed the Obama administration’s ‘failure of diplomacy,’ and has made a show of sending 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texan border. Liberals, meanwhile, argue that former US president George W. Bush failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform when he had the ability to do so a decade ago.

Certainly, there’s plenty of blame among both Republican and Democratic governments in the past two decades.

But so much of the current debate in the United States overlooks the background of how Central America — and especially Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — came to be countries of such violence, corruption, insecurity and relative poverty. It also overlooks a significant US role in the region that’s often been marked by dishonorable intentions that has its roots in early 20th century American imperialism, the brutality of zero-sum Cold War realpolitik, and the insanity of a ‘drug war’ policy that almost every major US policymaker agrees has been a failure and that, to this day, incorporates a significant US military presence. Continue reading Unaccompanied minors? Blame a century of US Central American policy. →

Spain

New PSOE leader Sánchez faces uphill struggle to unite Spanish left

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He’s a disarmingly handsome economics professor, and he’s the first major Spanish party leader who grew up chiefly in the post-Franco era and in the era of Spanish democracy.Spain_Flag_Icon

But Pedro Sánchez, who leapfrogged the more well-known Eduardo Madina to become the leader of Spain’s Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) earlier this month, and who will assume the leadership later this week, will have his work cut out for him before elections that will take place within the next 17 months, with the party’s traditional voting base increasingly supporting both new and established alternatives on the Spanish left. 

Sánchez (pictured above), just 42 years old, has only been a member of the Congreso de los Diputados (Congress of Deputies), the lower house of the Spanish parliament, the Cortes Generales, from 2009 to 2011 and  since January 2013, representing Madrid, where he served as a city councillor for the preceding five years.

Sánchez won the PSOE’s first direct contest to elect the party’s general secretary in a three-way race, with 48.7% of all votes against just 36.1% for Madina and 15.1% for the more left-wing José Antonio Pérez Tapias.

Though Madina, at age 38, is even younger than Sánchez, he’s been a member of the Congress of Deputies since 2004 and the secretary-general of the PSOE’s congressional caucus since 2009. A Basque federalist, he was perceived as the frontrunner in the race, especially after taking a republican stand in the aftermath of Juan Carlos I’s abdication from the throne. But the favorite to lead the PSOE, Andalusia’s 39-year-old regional president, Susana Díaz, endorsed Sánchez instead, as did many former officials from the administration of former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, including former public works and transportation minister José Blanco.

That effectively lifted the more unknown Sánchez, who holds a doctorate in economics, above Madina, who once lost part of his left leg in a Basque nationalist bomb blast.

On his election, Sánchez declared the ‘beginning of the end of Rajoy,’  challenging the unpopular center-right government of prime minister Mariano Rajoy, which has presided over the worst of Spain’s recent economic crisis.

Not so fast.  Continue reading New PSOE leader Sánchez faces uphill struggle to unite Spanish left →

Indonesia

It’s official: Jokowi wins Indonesian presidential election

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The two-week gap between the July 9 Indonesian election and today’s announcement of final results could have been a tense showdown between the two candidates, one a political neophyte, the other a stalwart of the Suharto-era military, who contested Indonesia’s closest-ever direct presidential election. Indonesia Flag

As it turns out, what could have been a constitutional crisis in Indonesia was an example of orderly democratic transition.

Joko Widodo (known as ‘Jokowi’), governor of Jakarta since late 2012, has won the Indonesian presidency with 53.15% of the vote. His rival, former general Prabowo Subianto, won just 46.85%. The gap of more than 6% is actually larger than many ‘quick counts’ reported in the vote’s aftermath.

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Prabowo (pictured above, left, meeting with Jokowi last week), who refused to concede defeat, despite signs of a narrow Jokowi win, worked with Jokowi and outgoing president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (known by his initials, ‘SBY’) to keep tensions relatively low, and Prabowo’s campaign staff over the weekend all but conceded the Indonesian presidency to Jokowi. Prabowo’s team, which had indicated it might file a lawsuit to contest alleged fraud, has now said it won’t file a case in Indonesia’s constitutional court.

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RELATED: What Jokowi’s apparent victory in Indonesia means

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That’s worth a sigh of relief, given the nationalist themes that Prabowo struck in his presidential campaign. At one point, the former Suharto son-in-law, whose human rights record in the Indonesian special forces came under significant scrutiny during the election, argued that democracy wasn’t right for Indonesia and that he might return to the country’s more authoritarian 1945 constitution.

Jokowi’s victory, above all, cements the foundations of Indonesian democracy.

So what happens next?

Jokowi will be inaugurated no later than October 20. In the meanwhile, expect a significant amount of churn within Indonesia’s politics. Continue reading It’s official: Jokowi wins Indonesian presidential election →