Yearly Archives: 2014

Poland

Who is Radek Sikorski?

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sikorski

In the latest fallout from an increasingly disruptive series of leaked audio conversations in Poland, its foreign minister Radosław Sikorski apparently called his country’s ties with the United States ‘worthless,’ and otherwise disparaged the bilateral Polish-US relationship: Poland_Flag_Icon

Mr Sikorski called Poland’s stance towards the US “downright harmful because it creates a false sense of security”, according to the new leak. He has not denied using such language.

According to the excerpts, Mr Sikorski told former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski that “the Polish-US alliance isn’t worth anything”.

Using vulgar language, he compared Polish subservience to the US to giving oral sex. He also warned that such a stance would cause “conflict with the Germans, Russians”.

At one point, Sikorski used the Polish word murzynskosc — meaning ‘slavery’ — to describe the bilateral relationship in a conversation with former finance minister Jacek Rostowski. 

So who is Sikorski — and why do his comments matter so much? Continue reading Who is Radek Sikorski? →

Qatar

2022 World Cup scrutiny poses major test for Sheikh Tamim

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Even as a global audience cheers on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, things are looking increasingly dicey for Qatar, which is struggling to hold onto its successful bid four years ago to host the 2022 World Cup.qatar

Amid complaints about everything from soaring Gulf temperatures to its LGBT laws to the abuses of Qatar’s kafala system, the resource-wealthy emirate now faces losing the 2022 World Cup altogether following allegations that Qatari businessmen bribed members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

Needless to say, it’s not been an incredibly smooth first year for Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who assumed power as the eighth emir of Qatar when his father, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, abdicated in June 2013 at the age of 61. Though the British-educated Tamim had been the Qatari heir apparent for a decade, at age 34, he is the world’s youngest monarch. Though Shiekh Hamad and other members of the Al Thani family (most notably Tamim’s mother, Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned) continue to wield significant influence, Sheikh Tamim’s rise to power reflects a more seamless transition for Qatar. Sheikh Hamad kicked his own father, Khalifa, out of power in a bloodless coup in 1995.

Though he wasn’t Qatar’s emir at the time, the controversy surrounding the decision to award the World Cup to Qatar has become a major leadership test for Sheikh Tamim (pictured above), who led the Qatari committee that made the bid for the 2022 World Cup. Arguably, Tamim’s most important role before assuming the emirship last year was his influence in building Qatar’s growing sponsorship of regional and global sports events. 

Facing a humiliating retreat with respect to Qatar’s regional political agenda, and facing enhanced global scrutiny on all fronts due to the World Cup bid, losing the 2022 tournament would be a massive setback for Qatar’s two-decade push to become an influential regional and global actor.    Continue reading 2022 World Cup scrutiny poses major test for Sheikh Tamim →

India

So far, so good? A look at Modi’s first weeks as India’s PM

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It’s been just over a month since the historic election that vaulted Narendra Modi to the top of India’s government, and he took office on May 26, nearly four weeks ago.India Flag Icon

So how has his tenure as India’s prime minister gone so far?

Fairly smoothly, though of course it’s still far too soon to tell just whether Modi (pictured above with Bhutanese prime minister Tshering Tobgay), ushering in a new government with the slogan of ‘minimum government, maximum governance,’ can achieve the transformational economic and other policy achievements.

With his first day in office, Modi made global headlines by inviting Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif to attend his swearing-in ceremony, which saw the two regional leaders hold closed-door discussions on Modi’s second day in office.

On June 1, his government marked the relative seamless creation of the new state of Telangana, out of what was formerly a much larger Andhra Pradesh, and the rise of its first chief minister Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao (known as ‘KCR’), though KCR is already making headlines for his blunt approach to press freedom.

Modi has already started to outline his economic policy priorities, which will kick off with a concerted effort to lower inflation. His government will unveil its first federal budget in July, but for now, Modi has signalled that he’s willing to deliver tough policy to improve fiscal discipline that will almost certain including cuts to fuel subsidies and further liberalization of India’s economy, especially with respect to foreign investment. That was clear enough from Indian president Pranab Mukherjee’s address to the Indian parliament earlier this week.

Modi has also appointed a strong, streamlined cabinet that was met with approval among both domestic and global observers: Continue reading So far, so good? A look at Modi’s first weeks as India’s PM →

Jamaica

Jamaican government targets legalizing ganja by September

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jamaica ganja

It may seem natural that Jamaica should have relatively lax rules on marijuana use, given the association among the country, Rastafarians and smoking ganja.jamaica

Nevertheless, cannabis has been illegal on the island since 1913, when it was still a British colony, and under the Dangerous Drugs Act, possession, sale and cultivation of cannabis is illegal.

That may change soon, with the government of prime minister Portia Simpson-Miller preparing to loosen Jamaica’s drug laws.

Last week, the Jamaican government introduced a proposal that would, to a significant degree, decriminalize cannabis use on the island. Notably, the reforms would decriminalize possession of up to two ounces of cannabis (though users would still be subject to ticketing and a fine if caught) and use for all religious, medical and scientific purposes. Though just between 1% and 10% of Jamaica’s 2.9 million people are Rastafarians, they believe the use of ganja in religious ceremonies is sacred.

The Rastafari movement arose in the 1930s, and it worships the late emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, as a central sacred figure (before he became emperor, he was born Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael, hence the reference to Ras ‘prince’ Tafari). It was popularized in the late 20th century largely through the influence of reggae music, most particularly by Jamaican songwriter Bob Marley, an adherent of Rastafarianism.

Simpson-Miller’s center-left People’s National Party (PNP) controls a two-thirds majority (42 out of 63 seats) in the Jamaican House of Representatives, and a nearly two-thirds majority (13 of 20 seats) in the Jamaican Senate, so the proposals are very likely to be enacted as law in a vote that the government hopes will take place in September.

As in many Latin American countries, Jamaica has resisted liberalizing its drug laws out of fear of US retribution, including the withdrawal of aid and other support. A former Jamaican commission on ganja recommended decriminalization years ago, but no Jamaican government wanted to risk the wrath of the United States.

Today, however, two US states — Washington and Colorado — have decriminalized the personal use of marijuana after ballot initiatives in November 2012 and the US justice department under president Barack Obama and US attorney general Eric Holder are largely allowing, and even encouraging, the state-level experimentation.

Like many Caribbean countries since the 2008-09 financial crisis, Jamaica is suffering from lower tourist revenues and stagnant economic growth, as well as extremely high debt loads — in Jamaica’s case, public debt of nearly 140%. Jamaica also suffers fromextremely high crime level, with the sixth-highest homicide rate in the world, and the highest of any Caribbean island country, according to a new UN report.  Continue reading Jamaican government targets legalizing ganja by September →

Burundi

As world remembers Rwanda genocide, Burundi tilts into political crisis

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I write for The National Interest on Thursday that as the world continues remembering the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which resulted in the deaths of 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans in three harrowing months in 1994, the world is largely ignoring Rwanda’s southern neighbor, Burundi, as it slips further into a political crisis that could drag Burundi back into ethnic violence that marked its own civil war in the 1990s:burundi

As the 2015 election approaches, however, [president Pierre] Nkurunziza (pictured above) has steamrolled the post-Arusha constitutional consensus by pushing through an election law that could allow him to run for reelection, despite growing opposition. Last year, Nkurunziza introduced a tough new law restricting press freedom amid a wider crackdown on journalists. This year has brought even more restrictions on political assembly and casual gatherings, and the imprisonment of regime opponents after a clash between protesters and the police in the capital, Bujumbura. The leading opposition figure, Alexis Sinduhije, a Tutsi and former journalist who heads the cross-ethnic Movement for Solidarity and Development coalition, was arrested earlier this spring in Belgium after fleeing Burundi, though Belgian officials subsequently released him. The government has also persecuted members of the National Forces of Liberation (FNL), the last major Hutu rebel group to sign the Arusha accords (in 2008). Numerous reports that the CNDD-FDD is arming its youth militia, the Imbonerakure, were sufficient to cause significant concern within Burundi’s UN peacekeeping force earlier this year. That’s especially chilling in light of the role that similar Hutu youth militias, known as the Interahamwe, played in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

I add that the international community could play a role in boosting Burundi’s fortunes through greater investment:

That doesn’t mean there aren’t promising areas of development. Incredibly, Burundians have known since the 1970s that their tiny country holds at least 6 percent of the world’s nickel reserves. So far, however, those mineral deposits have gone unexploited. Investment to develop Burundi’s industrial capacity and its ability to process nickel ore would be a game-changer. So would investment to improve Burundi’s road and rail infrastructure, allowing nickel (as well as coffee, bananas and other agricultural products) to more easily reach a major port, like Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Moreover, for a country that’s still 90 percent rural, more efficient agricultural technologies could liberate a significant part of the population for more rigorous education and, ultimately, a more broad-based, services-heavy economy. With a median age of seventeen, Burundi is one of the ten ‘youngest’ countries in the world. Therefore, improvements in education could greatly benefit its youthful population and the country’s developmental future.

But none of this can happen under the penumbra of increasing political violence or the threat of further civil war, whether it’s Hutu-against-Tutsi or Hutu-against-Hutu. Though a surge of development might ameliorate some of the worst of Burundi’s political tensions, greater political stability is a prerequisite for attracting the investment that Burundi needs to fuel that growth. As in many of Africa’s struggling states, Burundi is trapped in a tragic “catch-22.”

European Union

It won’t necessarily take much to block Juncker in Council vote

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David Cameron and Angela Merkel

One fact that’s becoming increasingly clear in the current tussle over electing a new president of the European Commission is that the eventual candidate must win a qualified majority on the European Council, as well as an absolute majority in the European Parliament. European_Union

Though the rules for qualified majority voting on the Council are greatly simplified under the Treaty of Lisbon, it’s worth noting that those rules don’t take effect until November 2014.

That means that the old rules, under the Treaty of Nice, will be in effect during the current fight this summer over whether former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the candidate of the European People’s Party (EPP), can become the next Commission president.

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RELATED: Here come the Spitzenkandidaten! But does anybody care?

RELATED: The mother-of-all-battles over
European integration has begun

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With the current president of the Council, Herman Van Rompuy, currently taking the lead on the process, the Council will submit a formal proposal for Commission president during its next official summit on June 26 and 27.

That explains why the focus of the fight over Juncker has moved from the Parliament to a fight between German chancellor Angela Merkel and British prime minister David Cameron (pictured above, last week, left, with Swedish prime minister Frederik Reinfeldt and Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte).

Under the Lisbon rules, qualified majority voting means that a proposal under consideration by the Council must meet three requirements:

  • a majority of countries within the European Union (15 out of 28 countries);
  • a supermajority (74%) of countries according to a formula of voting weights; and
  • a supermajority of countries representing  at least 62% of the EU-wide population.

The trickiest hurdle is meeting the 74% hurdle. The system assigns weights, roughly corresponding to population, to each country, with a maximum of 29 for each of Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy, and a minimum of three for the smallest member, Malta. With a total of 352 weighted votes after Croatia’s July 2013 EU accession, that means Juncker must win at least 260 weighted votes. Conversely, it means that a minority consisting of 93 weighted votes can block Juncker.

Cameron is committed to opposing Juncker.

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who belongs to the EPP, has also opposed Juncker in retribution for Luxembourg’s outspoken role on the Commission in the past five years attacking Orbán’s questionable respect for democratic norms and press freedom in Hungary.

Reinfeldt, the Swedish prime minister, has also voiced doubts about Juncker’s candidacy, even though he also belongs to the EPP. If Juncker fails to pass muster in the Council, Reinfeldt himself has been mentioned as a compromise candidate, given the likelihood that his center-right Moderata samlingspartiet (Moderate Party) is expected to lose national elections in September.

Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, has joined Reinfeldt in his hesitation over Juncker. Rutte, like Cameron and Reinfeldt, is generally a Merkel ally on European economic policy and the need for trimming national budgets, but he belongs to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (ALDE), the third-largest European parliamentary bloc.

If Sweden (10 weighted votes) and The Netherlands (13 votes) join Hungary (12 votes) and the United Kingdom (29 votes), Cameron will have 64 votes to block Juncker — and he’ll need just 29 more votes to do so.

Those votes could come from Italy, where prime minister Matteo Renzi has demanded a more flexible interpretation of EU budget rules and a greater emphasis on economic growth stimulation (instead of austerity) in exchange for backing Juncker. A deal seemed imminent earlier this week, though Renzi hasn’t yet declared either support or opposition for Juncker.

Right now, the momentum seems to be with Merkel and Juncker, and flowing away from Cameron. Either Rutte or Reinfeldt could back down from their criticisms. Furthermore, Renzi might be wary of alienating Merkel just four months into his premiership and days before Italy assumes the six-month rotating Council presidency. But Cameron, who has suggested Denmark’s social democratic prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt as an alternative Commission president, might yet persuade Renzi to join him for at least one shot at obtaining a more reformist Commission president than Juncker.

It’s worth noting that French president François Hollande, like Renzi, would like to see a greater emphasis on growth at the European level, and he hasn’t firmly indicated that he’ll support Juncker, either.

Continue reading It won’t necessarily take much to block Juncker in Council vote →

Lebanon

Suleiman is gone, and Lebanon still has no president

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suleiman

Lebanon’s president Michel Suleiman left office on May 25, but even as the country struggles to contain the chaos — political, humanitarian and otherwise — that’s spilled over from Syria’s four-year civil war. Lebanon

Earlier today, Nabih Berri, the speaker of Lebanon’s national assembly (مجلس النواب), scheduled the seventh vote since April 23, to elect Suleiman’s successor.

Like the last six ballots, there wasn’t even be a quorum for the vote. Berri has scheduled the eighth attempt for July 2.

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RELATED: Lebanon’s parliament considers
presidential choice tomorrow

RELATED: In first ballot, Lebanon’s parliament fails
to elect new president

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Given that it took ten months for prime minister Tammam Salam to form a new government in February, and that Salam’s unity government came together almost solely for the rationale of getting Lebanon through the presidential election and through a new electoral law and fresh parliamentary elections, there’s no telling how long the standoff could last — perhaps months or even well into 2015.

After former president Émile Lahoud left office in November 2007, it took another six month — until May 25, 2008 — to elect his successor, Suleiman (pictured above).

Though the Lebanese presidency is largely ceremonial, it’s a vital component of the fragile balancing of confessional interests in a country with 18 officially recognized ‘confessions’ — or religious groups. Lebanon’s president must be a Maronite Christian, while its prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) must be a Shiite Muslim. Of the 128 members of the National Assembly, 64 must be Muslim and 64 must be Christian.

In the meanwhile, Christian parties have said that they will boycott the national assembly’s sessions until a new president is chosen, arguing that the priority for Lebanon should be electing a new president, not routine legislation. That, in turn, makes it less likely that the Salam government can accomplish much of anything until Lebanon has a new president — and there’s no assurance that a new president will be in place in time for parliamentary elections scheduled (for now) to take place in November.

The problem is that Lebanon isn’t Belgium — on balance, it’s not great news for Lebanese governance that it has a caretaker government, with no hope of electing a president and no hope of holding parliamentary elections, which last took place in April 2009. That’s true in ‘normal’ times, but it’s especially true as Lebanon’s government works to hold off further violent spillover from the Syrian civil war, which has ignited sectarian tension in Beirut, Tripoli and elsewhere in Lebanon. The government is also struggling to accommodate over one million Syrian refugees currently living in Lebanon — that’s a staggering amount for a country that only had around 4.5 million people to begin with.

So why can’t Lebanon elect a new president?

Continue reading Suleiman is gone, and Lebanon still has no president →

Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda elects new government, PM

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Though Antigua and Barbuda’s elections were postponed from an originally planned date in March, the result was perhaps worth the wait, bring an end to Baldwin Spencer’s decade-long rule as prime minister.antigua and barbuda

On June 12, Antiguans and Barbudans instead turned to Gaston Browne, the leader of the Antigua Labour Party (ALP), which won 14 out of 17 seats in the House of Representatives, leaving Spencer’s United Progressive Party (UPP) with just three seats.

Browne (pictured above) campaigned on turning around the country’s struggling economy, unemployment and high crime. At 47, he’ll become the country’s youngest prime minister. Almost immediately after taking office, Browne signed a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese investment firm for a $2 billion project to develop greater tourism infrastructure.

The ALP has long been the dominant party in the country’s political history, even before independence. Its founder, Vere Bird, served as chief minister, then premier, for all but five years between 1960 and 1981, then as Antigua and Barbuda’s first post-independence prime minister from 1981 to 1994. His son, Lester Bird, served as prime minister from 1994 to 2004, when Spencer led the first non-Labour government in nearly 30 years after rallying against corruption from the Bird/ALP era. Continue reading Antigua and Barbuda elects new government, PM →

Finland

Katainen hopes to trade Finland’s premiership for EU presidency

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jyrki

Just three years after taking power as Finland’s prime minister, Jykri Katainen is set to step down both as leader of Finland’s center-right Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) and as prime minister later this month, following the Saturday leadership election of Alexander Stubb as the party’s new leader. finland flag

Though Katainen (pictured above) is just 42 years old, he’s been at the helm of the National Coalition Party for a decade. Katainen stunned Finland in April when he announced he was resigning, with an eye toward pursuing a top job in the European Union. At the time, everyone assumed he was angling to become Finland’s next commissioner within the European Union, replacing Olli Rehn, the influential vice president of the Commission and, since 2010, the commissioner for economic and monetary affairs.

Rehn previously served from 2004 to 2010 as commissioner for enlargement, and he was recently elected to the European Parliament as a member of Finland’s liberal Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party).

But as the wrangling continues among Europe’s leaders over whether former Luxembourgish prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker should become the next president of the Commission, Katainen has tried to position himself as an attractive alternative.

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RELATED: The mother-of-all-battles over European integration has begun

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Juncker seems likely to command an absolute majority of the European Parliament, but there’s no sure bet that he’ll win the qualified majority within the European Council that he’ll need to win the Commission presidency. Juncker, led the pan-European campaign of the European People’s Party (EPP) in the May parliamentary elections, which won the largest number of seats in the 751-member legislature.

Enter Katainen, who’s guided a tenuous six-party (now five-party) coalition in Finland for the past three years, pushing through tough budget cuts, like so many other European governments over the last half-decade, in the face of economic recession. Before his National Coalition Party won the April 2011 national elections, Katainen previously served as finance minister and deputy prime minister, so he would bring to the job — or to any other top EU position — the experiences from governing through the eurozone sovereign debt crisis.  Continue reading Katainen hopes to trade Finland’s premiership for EU presidency →

Iraq

Don’t blame Obama for Iraq turmoil — blame Maliki

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A week ago, the biggest story in Iraq was the prospect of seemingly endless post-election coalition talks among Iraq’s secular political elite, negotiations that seemed destined to restore Nouri al-Maliki to the premiership for a third consecutive term.iraq flag icon

But the sweeping offensive last week by 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 burst out of Iraq’s western al-Anbar province, has now overshadowed Iraq’s April elections, bringing into serious existential question the concept of Iraqi nationhood altogether. ISIS previously took control of Fallujah and Ramadi in January, where it joined forced with Sunni tribal leaders and others angry with Maliki’s increasingly authoritarian rule. But with a force of just 700 insurgents, ISIS easily took Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, last week. It followed up by taking Tikrit, another Sunni-majority northern city and the hometown of former president Saddam Hussein. ISIS also briefly took control of oil refining center of Baiji, though government forces have now wrested control back. That leaves much of western and, now, northwestern Iraq, in the hands of ISIS and allied Sunni militias.

Sensing an opportunity, the Kurdish peshmerga quickly moved into Kirkuk, another oil-rich town historically claimed by Iraqi Kurdistan as its capital but controversially left outside of the formal borders of the Kurdish autonomous region in post-Saddam Iraq. Though it’s an embarrassment for the Maliki government to have ‘lost’ Kirkuk to the Kurds, it’s the least of his worries. Kirkuk is probably much better off under Kurdish control than under what ISIS hopes will become a jihadist caliphate that extends from northern and western Iraq through eastern Syria. It’s difficult to believe that the central Iraqi government will have enough power anytime soon to force the Kurds to relinquish Kirkuk (or its rich oil reserves).

The end result is something of an asymmetrical tripartite Iraq.  Continue reading Don’t blame Obama for Iraq turmoil — blame Maliki →

Colombia

Santos win is very good news for Colombia’s peace accords

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After a first-round scare, Juan Manuel Santos won reelection to a second four-year term as Colombia’s president Sunday, delivering a narrow defeat to Óscar Iván Zuluaga and, perhaps more significantly, Santos’s one-time mentor and now opponent, former president Álvaro Uribe.Colombia Flag Icon

Though Santos (pictured above) served as Uribe’s defense minister, and won election as president in 2010 with Uribe’s blessing, the former president broke with Santos by opening negotiations with the leftist guerrilla group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Uribe won support throughout the 2000s from a wide swath of Colombian voters for his aggressive stand against FARC, other guerrilla groups and drug cartels.

Zuluaga, who won the first round of the presidential election over a divided field, indicated that, if elected, he would impose incredibly harsher conditions on the FARC talks — so harsh that they would almost certainly halt the progress of that FARC and the Santos administration have made.

On Sunday, Santos narrowly defeated Zuluaga by a margin of 50.94% to 45.01%. Santos has the support of a coalition of major parties, including the Partido Liberal Colombiano (Colombian Liberal Party) and the Partido Social de Unidad Nacional (Social Party of National Unity, ‘Party of the U’) that once supported Uribe. Zuluaga was supported by Uribe’s newly formed party, Centro Democrático (Democratic Center) and significant segments of the Partido Conservador Colombiano (Colombian Conservative Party), which had backed Uribe and Santos in the past.

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RELATED: Five reasons why Zuluaga is beating Santos in Colombia’s election

RELATED: It’s the economy (not FARC), stupid

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Make no mistake — Santos’s reelection is good news for Colombia, good news for the entire region and good news for the United States, which has devoted significant resources to stabilizing Colombia in the past three decades. If there’s any lesson to be learned from the chaos in Iraq over the past week, it’s that insurgencies ultimately require political, not just military, solutions. Military force can subdue and repress internal dissent, but ending a domestic insurgency demands some form of political engagement.

Santos, throughout the campaign, demonstrated that he understands that in a way Uribe and Zuluaga don’t. Though Santos made his fair share of errors as a first-term president, his victory is cause for optimism that the Colombian government will ultimately reach a political settlement with FARC (even on the same day that Colombian security forces launched a successful operation against FARC on election day).

In the final days of the campaign, there was a sense that Zuluaga might, after all, back down from his hardline stance on the FARC talks, which began in late 2012 — 48 years after FARC’s creation.

But you don’t necessarily have to disavow the sometimes controversial aspects of uribismo to acknowledge that the FARC negotiations are a necessary next step. The Colombian military, first under the Uribe administration, and then under the Santos administration, was vital in bringing FARC to the negotiating table, and the current peace talks are, in many ways, the natural progression of Uribe’s successful efforts to marginalize FARC.

From the outset, the FARC talks were never a repudiation of Uribe’s presidency, but an indicator of Uribe’s success. Nonetheless, it was all too easy to imagine Colombia taking a decade-sized step backward under Zuluaga. For that reason, Santos’s reelection is worth savoring. Continue reading Santos win is very good news for Colombia’s peace accords →

Canada, Ontario

Wynne lifts Ontario Liberals to majority government, 4th term

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wynnewins

Heading into Thursday’s provincial elections, polls showed that both the center-left Liberal Party of Ontario and the center-right Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario (PC) both had a chance of winning at least a minority government.Canada Flag Iconontario

Late-breaking polls on Tuesday and Wednesday, however, showed the Liberal vote creeping up, matched by a decline in support for the progressive alternative, the New Democratic Party of Ontario (NDP).

As it turns out, those late polls were spot on, and Ontario’s new premier Kathleen Wynne, who inherited a minority government from her predecessor Dalton McGuinty just 16 months ago, reinvigorated Ontario’s Liberals and won a majority government in her first campaign leading the party.

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RELATED: Meet Kathleen Wynne, Ontario’s premier and the 180-degree opposite of Rob Ford

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The Ontario Liberals won 59 seats in the 107-member Legislative Assembly with nearly 39% of the vote, while the Ontario PC won just 27 seats with just over 31% of the vote, a nearly disastrous result that found the Tories losing ground in what was shaping up as a PC landslide a year ago:

ontario14 ontarioLA

It’s an unexpected trajectory for a party to go from two terms of majority government to one term of minority government and, then, back to a majority government. Part of the reason is that Ontario’s voters simply never warmed to PC leader Tim Hudak.   Continue reading Wynne lifts Ontario Liberals to majority government, 4th term →

Colombia

In Colombia’s election, it’s the economy (not FARC), stupid

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debat

The second round of Colombia’s presidential election has been billed as a momentous decision between war and peace.Colombia Flag Icon

Juan Manuel Santos, the incumbent, has staked his presidency on the ongoing negotiations with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a left-wing group founded in 1964 out of the political turmoil that stretches back to the assassination of liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 and ‘La Violencia’ that followed for the next decade. Over the last half-century, FARC has been an impediment to a truly peaceful Colombia, even as the worst days of the drug-fueled violence of outfits like the Calí and Medellin carters have long receded. 

His opponent, Óscar Iván Zuluaga (pictured above, right, with Santos, left), is the protégé of former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who broke with Santos over the FARC talks. Santos served as defense minister under Uribe, he won the presidency in 2010 with Uribe’s full support, and he had been expected to continue the same militaristic push against FARC that Uribe had deployed.

When FARC offered up the possibility of peace talks, Santos surprisingly met the offer, and official talks kicked off in October 2012. The talks were designed to reach agreement on five key points — agrarian land reform and agricultural development, political participation for former FARC militants, the mechanics of ceasefire and ending the conflict, staunching the drug trade and creating a truth commission and compensation for the victims of abuses at the hands of government-backed paramilitary groups.

Those talks have reached accords on three of the five areas, most recently on ending drug trafficking — more than two decades after the death of Pablo Escobar and the demise of Colombia’s major cartels, FARC has become a leading conduit for cocaine and other drugs from Colombia and elsewhere in South America northward.

Zuluaga hasn’t exactly said that he’ll end the talks if he’s elected president. But he has indicated he’ll impose conditions as president that FARC leaders seem unlikely to accept, all but ending the best chance in a half-century to negotiate a political solution to the leftist insurgency, which follows a relatively successful Uribe-Santos military effort that has significantly weakened, if not eliminated, FARC. Moreover, Colombians say in polls that they have no sympathy for FARC, and they generally support the talks, in principle at least.

So the election is truly momentous, and the result will almost certainly determine whether the FARC talks will continue.

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RELATED: Zuluaga edges out Santos in first round

RELATED: Five reasons why Zuluaga is beating Santos
in Colombia’s election

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That’s not the reason, however, that Santos appears to be losing the election, after trailing Zuluaga in the first round on May 25.

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Mary O’Grady, writing for The Wall Street Journal, serves up an analysis of the Colombian election that misses entirely the reason why Santos is in such trouble headed into the June 15 runoff:

A year ago Mr. Santos—part economic liberal, part old-fashioned populist—seemed certain to keep his job. Real gross domestic product expanded by an average annual 4.7% from 2010-13, and in 2011 Colombian debt won investment-grade status from all three major U.S. credit-rating firms.

Had Mr. Santos run on this record he might have won in the first round. Most voters don’t see much difference on economic policy between him and Mr. Zuluaga—the former CEO of a Colombian steel fabricator. But he made the FARC talks the centerpiece of his re-election campaign, which opened his weakest flank.

According to O’Grady (and, to be fair, other commentators), Santos would be winning this election if only he had merely rebuffed FARC’s negotiation entreaties. Most beguiling is the notion that Santos’s chief strength is Colombia’s economy.

It’s not. That’s actually the issue that’s most jeopardized his reelection. He could lose on June 15, not because of the FARC talks, but because he hasn’t offered any solutions to the everyday Colombians who feel like they have lost out in what otherwise looks like a stellar economy.

If Santos loses on Sunday, it will be less because he spent so much time negotiating with Iván Marquéz, the lead FARC negotiator, but because he didn’t take Cesar Pachón, a leading agrarian protester, seriously enough.  Continue reading In Colombia’s election, it’s the economy (not FARC), stupid →

Israel

How Netanyahu lost the Israeli presidential election

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Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t running for Israel’s largely ceremonial presidency on Tuesday, but he’s emerged as the clearest loser after waging an unsuccessful campaign against the man who ultimately won, Reuven Rivlin, and he may have hastened his own political demise in the process.ISrel Flag Icon

In some ways, Rivlin has been the frontrunner for the  presidency for the past seven years, in light of his finish as runner-up to Shimon Peres in the 2007 election. Israeli presidents are elected by the Knesset (הַכְּנֶסֶת), Israel’s 120-member unicameral parliament.

Rivlin defeated Meir Sheetrit, a former Likud MK who now belongs to Hatnuah (The Movement, הַתְּנוּעָה), the party founded in November 2012 by the centrist former foreign minister Tzipi Livni. On the final ballot, Rivlin won 63 votes against 53 for Sheetrit, who emerged from among four challengers as the chief ‘anti-Rivlin’ vote, attracting support from centrist and left-leaning MKs.

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

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Like Netanyahu, Rivlin is a member of the right-wing Likud (הַלִּיכּוּד), and he served as the Knesset’s speaker from 2003 to 2006 and again from 2009 to 2013. In that role, however, Rivlin often stood in the way of Netanyahu’s wishes in the name of defending parliamentary democracy:

The Netanyahu-Rivlin rift goes back to 2009, when the freshly victorious Netanyahu had Rivlin elected once again as Speaker of the Knesset. Rivlin, a tradionalist if there ever was one, soon proved to be much more loyal to parliament and to the letter of the law than to his own party. He stalled nearly every piece of anti-democratic legislation that came his way, deferring votes, sending bills to die in committees and even setting up committees especially to kill those bills he felt impinged on democratic rights. Along the way, he protected MK Hanin Zoabi when the Knesset tried to sanction her for taking part in the Gaza flotilla; elevated MK Ahmed Tibi, the Palestinian Israelis most love to hate, to deputy-speaker; acknowledged the “great suffering and real trauma” endured by Palestinians in 1948; and called for the establishment of one state in all of historical Israel-Palestine, where Palestinians would also have the vote.

The final straw came after RIvlin made a joke about Netanyahu’s wife and her behind-the-scenes influence (oddly enough, that’s one of the reasons that Netanyahu is said to have fallen out with his one-time chief of staff Naftali Bennett, who is now the leader of a rival right-wing party). After the most recent January 2013 national elections, Netanyahu unceremoniously dumped Rivlin as Knesset speaker and started casting about for an alternative to represent Likud in the presidential election.   Continue reading How Netanyahu lost the Israeli presidential election →

United States

What Eric Cantor’s stunning primary defeat means for world politics

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Israel's PM Netanyahu walks next to House Majority Leader Cantor before pre-bipartisan meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington

The eyes of the entire political elite were on the 7th congressional district Thursday night, as the majority leader of the US House of Representatives, Eric Cantor, lost a primary election to challenger Dave Brat, an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College by margin of 55.5% to 45.5% among mostly Republican voters in a sprawling exurban district that includes Richmond’s northern hinterland and the faintest southwestern hinterland of the DC metro area.USflag

The most immediate response from pundits is that Cantor’s loss all but dooms the chances for immigration reform between now and 2016:

Coming off President Barack Obama’s re-election, immigration reform was seen as an issue both parties could deal with quickly. Democrats wanted to deliver on promises made to their Latino backers and Republicans wanted to get the issue off the table to avoid reliving the electoral demographic nightmare of 2012.

But House GOP leaders have long said they wouldn’t bring up the Gang of Eight bill the Senate passed last year, and Cantor’s embrace of even piecemeal proposals was derided by opponent Dave Brat and tea party activists as “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.

That’s probably right.

While there were almost certainly several reasons for Cantor’s loss to Brat, a conservative insurgent supported by Tea Party enthusiasts and several top conservative radio talk show hosts, the perception that Cantor’s muddled position on supporting at least a tepid version of immigration reform will almost certainly scare House Republicans from supporting any version of reform between now and the 2016 election. Political writers were already calling Cantor’s shocking loss  a harbinger of difficulty for the presidential hopes of former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who’s weighing a run, and who has called illegal immigration to the United States an ‘act of love.’ 

That, of course, has obvious implications for US foreign policy in Latin America, where immigration reform is one of the top regional issues, alongside enhancing trade, drug policy and promoting economic and political development.

It’s the first time since 1899 that a House majority leader, second in rank only to the speaker of the US House, currently John Boehner of Ohio, has lost an election, and it’s a political earthquake reminiscent of Democratic speaker Tom Foley’s 1994 loss in his own House district in Washington state or of the Democratic US Senate minority leader Tom Daschle’s loss in 2004. 

But both of those upsets were not entirely unexpected, and they came at the hands of surging Republican candidates in November general elections, not to underfunded Tea Party renegades in a primary election. 

There will, no doubt,  be plenty of commentary on Cantor’s loss in the hours and days ahead. Most immediately, Cantor’s defeat creates a looming hole in the House Republican leadership — Cantor’s position as House majority leader was so secure that he was thought to be the favorite to succeed Boehner as House speaker. 

But what, if anything, will Cantor’s loss mean for foreign affairs?

It’s worth noting that Cantor was not merely the only Jewish Republican in the House caucus (one among 233 lawmakers), he was the highest ranking Jewish member of the US Congress in American history. Though there’s no shortage of support on Capitol Hill for Israel, especially among Republicans, Cantor (pictured above with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu) held a special role for Jewish conservatives in the United States. When Netanyahu visited the United States four years ago, he met privately with Cantor before an official visit with Hillary Clinton, then the US secretary of state at the time, and he told Netanyahu that House Republicans would act as a ‘check’ on the administration of US president Barack Obama. 

Although there’s no love lost for Cantor among Jewish Democrats, who largely noted they wouldn’t be sorry to see his exit from Congress and from the House leadership, his loss is a blow to big-tent Republicans who desire as broad and diverse a leadership as possible. 

Nonetheless, Cantor was a top Netanyahu ally among the House Republican leadership ranks. Just earlier this week, as US diplomats softened their opposition to the new unity Palestinian government between the competing Fatah and Hamas factions, Cantor reiterated his call to suspend US aid to the Palestinian Authority.

But Cantor’s loss isn’t just a defeat for Netanyahu.

As Timothy B. Lee at Vox also notes, Cantor’s loss is also bad news for the National Security Agency: Continue reading What Eric Cantor’s stunning primary defeat means for world politics →