Australia’s government changes law to punish anti-vaxxers

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He may be one of Australia’s most conservative prime ministers in recent history, but Tony Abbott isn’t above using government as a nudge to coerce better public policy outcomes.australia new

Earlier this week, Abbott announced that Australia’s national government is serious about compelling parents to vaccinate their children from diseases, such as measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough, that were largely eradicated in the post-vaccination era, and that are now returning as larger numbers of parents refuse to vaccinate their children out of fears of autism or other untoward health effects. Doctors overwhelmingly argue that there’s no link between vaccination and autism or other severe side effects.

The anti-vaccination movement has become an increasing problem throughout the world for many reasons, including both pious Muslims in northern Nigeria (who have resisted polio vaccinations) and health-conscious leftists in California (with fears over autism). The Abbott government’s step is one of the most aggressive steps that any government in the world has taken to coerce parents to accept vaccination.

Starting in January 2016, the government will no longer recognize an exemption for ‘conscientious objectors,’ which currently allows nearly 40,000 Australians to refuse vaccination for their children. That, in turn, has boosted the number of incidents of childhood diseases that had largely disappeared (and not only among children). The change means that Australian parents stand to lose funding of up to A$2100 (equivalent to US$1600) per child in tax credits and up to A$15,000 (equivalent to US$11,400) in additional government funding, including rebates for child care, if they continue to refuse to vaccinate.

With enough participation in a vaccination program, not every person needs to be vaccinated, because of the so-called ‘herd immunity’ that comes when a high percentage of a population has been protected. It provided protect to those who can’t tolerate the vaccine, including very young children or the immune-compromised. But it also creates a ‘free-rider’ problem, whereby any given individual has an incentive to opt out of vaccination due to the fear, real or imagined, of any risk that might come with receiving a particular vaccine.   Continue reading Australia’s government changes law to punish anti-vaxxers

Sudan’s Bashir set for expected reelection

SUDAN-POLITICS-OPPOSITION-BASHIRPhoto credit to Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images

Guest post by Kevin Buettner

In the span of just a couple weeks, Africa will experience both a historic democratic transfer of power in Nigeria and the stubborn clinging to power by a dictator in Sudan, as scheduled elections begin for the first time since the largely Christian South Sudan split from the rest of the chiefly Muslim country in 2011.sudan

Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has ruled over perhaps the most turbulent stretch of Sudan’s post-colonial existence. During the last quarter-century, Bashir watched as Sudan lost South Sudan after decades of conflict, a concurrent genocide in Darfur (for which Bashir was indicted by the International Criminal Court), and a escalating crisis in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan states in the south of the new, truncated Sudan.

The ruling National Congress Party (NCP, المؤتمر الوطني) has ensured its continued power and Bashir’s easy reelection by designating as ‘independent’ all persons running for office without the explicit consent of the NCP leadership. With strict NCP and government control over the Sudanese media, the NCP has created the perception that the opposition is disunited.

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RELATED: Who would win a South Sudanese civil war? Khartoum.

RELATED: Pressing pause — South Sudan at a crossroads

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Moreover, much of the Sudanese opposition is simply boycotting polls that are expected to fall well short of international standards for free and fair elections. No one expects Bashir to lose reelection, despite some of the most strident protests in recent memory in September 2013 when residents in Khartoum, the capital city, turned out to denounce price increases and the economic malaise of the 2010s, many calling on Bashir to resign. Several dissident NCP members denounced Bashir and in November 2013, Bashir dismissed his long-serving first vice president, Osman Taha, who was largely credited with working with South Sudan and the international community to enact the peace agreement that cleared the way for South Sudan’s 2011 independence referendum. Today, however, it seems clear that Bashir has widely survived the 2013 tumult.

Though Bashir rose to Sudan’s presidency for the first time in a 1989 military coup, he only truly consolidated power between 1996 and 1999, when he outmaneuvered Sudan’s behind-the-scenes leader, Islamist hardliner Hassan al-Turabi, in part due to rising US concern about Sudan’s ties to radical Islamic terrorism.

Today, Sudan’s electorate is hardly in the kind of shape to hold a robust election that meets any kind of norm of civil society. Continue reading Sudan’s Bashir set for expected reelection

Humala’s popularity sinks as Peru gets 7th PM in four years

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It’s become a political law of gravity in Peru in the past 15 years that the popularity of its elected presidents drops as each five-year term ends.Peru Flag Icon

That’s irrelevant for the current president, Ollanta Humala, since Peruvian presidents aren’t eligible for reelection to two consecutive terms. But a week after opposition parties in Peru’s Congreso de la República (Congress of the Republic) forced Humala’s prime minister Ana Jara to step down amid a internal spying scandal, Humala was obligated to appoint the seventh prime minister of his administration.

Although the Peruvian president functions both as head of state and head of government, the prime minister heads the executive cabinet, and the appointment of Pedro Cateriano launched yet another reshuffle in the Humala administration as voters seem to be souring on Humala in the fourth of his five-year term. The Congress voted on March 30 to censure Jara in relation to allegations that Peru’s intelligence agency, the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINI), was spying on opposition politicians, journalists and businessmen.

Despite fears during the 2011 election that Humala, a leftist and former army officer, would lead Peru in a populist direction in the manner of socialist governments in Ecuador, Cuba and Venezuela, Humala instead pursued the same liberal, pro-market economic policies of all Peruvian administrations since the 1990s. Nevertheless, as  commodities prices drop, GDP growth projections are falling in a country where gold, zinc and copper mining undergirded some of the fastest economic growth in the world throughout the 2000s. It’s the same problem that Chile, Peru’s Pacific neighbor to the south and also a prolific copper exporter, is facing. The difference is that GDP per capita is just over twice as high in Chile as in Peru, a country of just over 31 million that is still struggling to rise to the same level of development as Chile, Mexico and other leaders in Latin America. Nevertheless, Humala failed earlier this year to implement even a watered-down labor market reform designed to make it easier for young graduates to find work.

With growth forecasts slowing, however, it’s not enough that Humala has pursued continuity in economic policymaking. His failure to reform Peru’s economy, combined with an expected slowdown (if not an outright recession), will make it difficult for Humala’s allies to maintain power in 2016. In Peru, a country without firmly settled political parties, however, it’s a question whether Humala is still a man of the political left. Though liberal reformers believe Humala’s accomplishments are tepid, he’s now closer to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa than the traditional left. For example, Humala has struggled throughout his administration to respond to the economic, labor rights and environmental complaints of Peru’s mining workers.

Gana Perú (Peru Wins), the leftist electoral coalition that formed to support Humala’s candidacy in 2011, claims that it will still field a candidate in the upcoming 2016 vote. The party remains the largest bloc in the unicameral Congress, having won 47 out of 130 seats at the last election. That number, however, has fallen due to defections over the years. Humala’s wife, Nadine Heredia, was forced to disavow any presidential ambitions in the middle of her husband’s term, and any majestic hopes evaporated with fresh allegations in February of corruption and money laundering, a familiar refrain in a country where former president Alejandro Toledo is also under a cloud of suspicion for corruption and may yet face criminal charges. Humala’s popular former interior minister, Daniel Urresti, was forced to resign in February after his indictment for the murder of Hugo Bustios in 1988 when Urresti was involved in the fight against Senedero Luminoso (Shining Path).

That means that the leaders in the 2016 field, for now, are the runners-up to Humala from the 2011 field. Polls today show that Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, leads the field, followed in second place by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a liberal who served as a former prime minister and economy minister. Fujimori’s candidacy was controversial in 2011 because of fears that she would pardon her father, who remains in prison on human rights abuses, potentially undermining the rule of law and encouraging impunity in the future. Humala has consistently refused to release Fujimori from prison, and the former dictator’s health has declined so much that the pardon issue may lack the same relevance in 2016. Proving the rule of the lingering unpopularity of Peruvian presidents, both Toledo and former president Alan García poll far behind. Fujimori’s record is still controversial in Peru, where supporters believe his economic reforms put Peru on the path to stable inflation and GDP growth and opponents point to his disrespect for democracy, the rule of law and human rights. His daughter, Keiko Fujimori, seems more committed to democratic Peru, though her frontrunner status in 2016 means that Peruvians could spend more time hand-wringing about the past than envisioning the future.

One possibility is Luis Castañeda, who returned to the mayor’s office in Lima last October and who has already run for the Peruvian presidency twice. The pragmatism and pro-development agenda of his first two terms as mayor between 2003 and 2010, appealed to the Peruvian business community. So far, however, Castañeda has spent much of his third term seemingly engaged in settling scores with his immediate predecessor, the more leftist Susana Villarán, instead of establishing a platform for a third presidential campaign in 2016.

Four sentences that frame the Greek-EU brinksmanship conundrum

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If you don’t have time to read Suffragio‘s latest update on the chances of Greek elections, here’s an easy framework to think about the endgame for Greece and EU leaders:Greece Flag Icon

1. The central dilemma for Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his SYRIZA-led government is that the Greek electorate wants both (a) Tsipras to continue to engage in high-stakes brinkmanship with the European Union and Greece’s lenders to get a better deal on Greek debt and (b) to remain in the eurozone, and this is an untenable position for Greek voters to take, given the facts — even if you believe that the austerity measures taken pursuant to Greece’s two bailouts were unjust and injurious to the Greek economy.

2. The trickiest question now is when Greece and the Eurogroup will reach a ‘brink’ moment where there’s no going back, which could be triggered by any sort of financial, political or other factors.

3. If Tsipras calls fresh snap elections before the ‘brink’ moment, it could make a final deal on Greek debt even harder because Tsipras might easily win a stronger mandate from the Greek electorate, especially if Greek voters don’t fully realize the inconsistencies of point (1) above (and, by the way, Tspiras will have no political incentive to clarify them).

4. If the ‘brink’ moment comes before any fresh elections, Tsipras will have to choose between (a) making a deal with the Eurogroup, which will cause SYRIZA to crumble one way or another (though not necessarily Tsipras if he’s politically talented enough to emerge as the leader of whatever center-left entity emerges from the collateral damage) or (b) returning to the drachma, probably on an involuntary basis when Greece can’t meet its obligations.

Call option 4a the ‘Cyprus 2013’ option.

Call option 4b the ‘British Black Wednesday 1992’ option on steroids.

Both will be painful.

Economist Tyler Cowen, over at Marginal Revolution,  has taken to calling Greece’s new government the ‘Not Very Serious People,’ riffing off a term familiar to Paul Krugman’s readers. But put aside all the smoke over the personalities (of course Wolfgang Schäuble and Yanis Varoufakis hate one another) and the smokescreen over reparations and the possibility of a last-minute loan from Moscow (or Beijing), and what you’re left with is the conclusion that Tsipras and his government have some Very Serious decisions to make soon.

Blair role virtually non-existent as UK campaign heats up

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The most notable thing about former British prime minister Tony Blair’s sudden reappearance in the United Kingdom’s domestic politics, with just under a month to go until a general election, is that no one particularly noticed his absence from domestic political matters.United Kingdom Flag Icon

Unlike former US president Bill Clinton, who has balanced his financial and philanthropic activities with lingering, widespread popularity on the American political scene, Blair’s popularity diminished after he left 10 Downing Street. Still well-regarded abroad, Blair has offered his consulting services to leaders from Albania to Kazakhstan, and he’s become a wealthy man in the process, a much more controversial proposition for a former British prime minister than a former US president. Blair suffers further by contrast to his successor, Gordon Brown, who quietly receded from public view when he lost the premiership in 2010, resurfacing only to promote a dense policy book or to campaign full-heartedly against Scottish independence. There’s a sense that Brown hasn’t ‘cashed out’ the way that Blair did.

Though current prime minister David Cameron has attempted to blame both Blair and Brown for wasteful government spending as a prelude to his own government’s budget cuts, it is Blair’s role in the US-led invasion of Iraq that haunts his legacy. Blair only recently left his position as an envoy for the Middle East ‘quartet’ (the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia), where his impact in the region has been negligible at best. Despite high hopes when he assumed the role shortly after leaving office, Blair is unlikely to lead any grand gestures in the Middle East.

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RELATED: Analyzing the British leaders’ debate

RELATED: Scotland could easily hold the balance of power in Britain

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Blair rode to victory in May 1997 on a landslide wave proclaiming the arrival of his center-oriented ‘New Labour.’ Though he capitalized then on a popular, youthful image, he is largely reviled in Great Britain today, as Sarah Ellison wrote in a scathing Vanity Fair profile earlier this year:

A man with aspirations to global leadership—even to global moral leadership—is now regarded by many of his countrymen as a shill for big corporations and deep-pocketed and dubious regimes. In terms of personal wealth, Blair is said to be worth an estimated £100 million ($150 million), a figure he denies. Today, Blair rarely makes public appearances in London. In 2010, he canceled a book party to celebrate the publication of his memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, to avoid the inevitable protests. Blair wasn’t invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011. Last January, a London waiter attempted a citizen’s arrest of Blair for alleged war crimes arising from the invasion of Iraq.

Last month, two Labour candidates actually refused to accept £1000 donations from Blair, who had pledged £106,000 to candidates in marginal seats.

When Blair surfaced in domestic politics at all, it was usually to snipe at his successor as Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, whose leadership campaign narrowly defeated his brother, David Miliband, the more Blairite alternative. As recently as January, Blair was obliquely warning Miliband to run to the center in advance of the May 7 general election, via an interview with The Economist: Continue reading Blair role virtually non-existent as UK campaign heats up

What are the chances of snap elections (again) in Greece?

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It’s a sign that fiscal affairs in Greece are bad when the sensible Plan B to cover the Greek government’s looming shortfall involves loans from Moscow (despite protests to the contrary).Greece Flag Icon

Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has dismissed European sanctions against Russia, and he met Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier this week, signaling to the European Union that Greece is keeping its options open if ongoing debt talks fail. Though Tsipras didn’t seek any financial assistance from Putin, he failed to convince Putin to lift a ban on Greek agricultural exports.

The even more outlandish Plan B involves demanding reparations from Germany for World War II damages, amounting to €278.7 billion. Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s just a little more than the €240 billion in financing that Greece has received in the last half-decade under two bailout programs from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Today, Greece’s government, not even three months old, will repay a €460 million portion of its debt to the International Monetary Fund. But that doesn’t mean that all is well in Athens, where last year’s green shoots of economic recovery are now obscured by the uncertainty of a leftist administration that’s engaged in brinksmanship over Greece’s financing and, ultimately, over the wider question of national fiscal sovereignty in today’s eurozone.

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RELATED: EU should give Tsipras a chance to govern

RELATED: What a Eurogroup-brokered deal with Greece might look like

RELATED: Seven lessons from the Greek election results

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 Why Tsipras can’t (and won’t) make a deal on Berlin’s terms

Without a deal, Tsipras will go down in history as the prime minister who led Greece out of the eurozone, willingly or not. Politically, however, Tspiras can’t agree to any deal that the Eurogroup seems to be offering. That’s increasingly a recipe for Tsipras to call fresh elections early this summer, but there’s no guarantee the results will solve the Greek-EU political quagmire.

Tsipras and his anti-austerity SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς) were elected three months ago on a pledge to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s debt with its European lenders and end the harsh austerity measures that have exacerbated Greece’s contracting economy and growing unemployment. But the EU’s leaders, including Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, German chancellor Angela Merkel and, presumably, ECB president Mario Draghi, no longer fear the ‘contagion’ effect of a Greek eurozone exit.  Continue reading What are the chances of snap elections (again) in Greece?

Expect Paul campaign to launch genuine US foreign policy debate

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With the dream of uniting an unlikely coalition of socially liberal Millennials, fiscally conservative ‘tea party’ supporters and a swatch of economic liberals in both parties, US senator Rand Paul of Kentucky became the second major US figure to launch a 2016 presidential bid today.USflag

His chances of winning the White House aren’t, frankly, great. But they’re not non-existent, and if he wins the Republican nomination, he could potentially convince a much wider electorate to support him over the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former US secretary of state. If he fails, he’ll still have burnished his profile as a thoughtful foreign policy counterweight within the Republican Party — sort of a conservative version of the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin, Russ Feingold. More importantly, he will drive a necessary debate on controversial aspects of US foreign policy that are increasingly taken for granted.

As a deeply libertarian voice in the US Senate and an avowed non-interventionist when it comes to the Middle East, Paul will present the strongest challenge to mainstream US foreign policy that, despite recently squabbles over Iran, Israel and Russia, remains chiefly bipartisan in nature. He will make the case for a truly alternative US policy worldview that questions everything from a 14-year global approach to terrorism, Internet surveillance and civil liberties, the proliferation of unmanned ‘drone’ aircraft in the US effort to stop radical Islamism, the use of drones to target US nationals abroad, ongoing US military action in Afghanistan and escalating action in Syria and Iraq, and the Obama administration’s ongoing diplomatic initiatives with Cuba and Iran. He is also likely to question the US Congress’s decades-long supine position on foreign policy.

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RELATED: Six important points from Clinton’s foreign policy interview [August 2014]

RELATED: What would Jeb Bush’s foreign policy look like?
[December 2014]

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Paul will find many traditional allies on the right, who believe that the United States is at its best when its military adventurism is kept to a minimum, and he will find many traditional allies on the left, where even Obama supporters have grumbled for years that his administration features more continuity than rupture with many aspects of the foreign policy developed by his predecessor, George W. Bush. Initially, Paul will benefit from supporters who backed his father, Ron Paul, the US congressman from Texas, in his 2008 and 2012 presidential contests. Though Paul (the father) served as something like the crazy/wise uncle of the Republican contests in 2008 and 2012, there’s a sense that his son is both more polished and more pragmatic.

Paul will also benefit from the quiet support of Mitch McConnell, Paul’s Kentucky colleague in the Senate. Paul’s support crucially boosted McConnell, now the Senate majority leader, to primary and general election victories in the 2014 midterm elections. McConnell’s support and his access to national donors should give Paul the kind of ‘insider-outsider’ credentials to make him a serious threat for the nomination. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Paul has reached out to the 2012 nominee, former governor Mitt Romney, with whom Paul’s father developed a close relationship in the 2012 contest. Other young, libertarian-minded Republican officials might also support Paul.

Paul’s campaign means that the Republican nomination contest will feature the most robust debate since perhaps the 2008 nomination contest between Obama and Clinton on the role of the United States in the world. Already, Paul has demonstrated his willingness to break with Republican orthodoxy by cautiously welcoming the Obama administration’s relaxation of ties with Cuba. His reticence to engage US troops abroad will also bring him into conflict with much more hawkish Republican voices so long as Iran, Yemen and the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) top the list of US foreign policy headaches as the 2016 campaign season unfolds.

But Paul’s presence in the 2016 contest will most importantly highlight that there’s just not that much difference between Clinton, on the one hand, and the Republican foreign policy establishment that would likely take power if Republican frontrunners like former Florida governor Jeb Bush or Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.

Continue reading Expect Paul campaign to launch genuine US foreign policy debate

LIVE BLOG: British leaders debate

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9:57: Obviously, it’s hard to ‘keep score’ of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in a seven-way debate. Bennett seemed largely invisible and, aside from the dust-up over immigration, so was Farage, who tried to turn every other question into an opportunity to discuss the European Union and immigration.

Wood and Sturgeon had strong nights, and their attacks on Cameron often made the Labour case better than Miliband’s arguments. Sturgeon, in particular, will have benefited from airing Scottish grievances directly to a British prime minister for the first time in a leader’s debate.

Clegg tried, sometimes successfully, to position himself as a sensible moderate. He also successfully signaled that he could work with a Labour government as well as a Tory one.

Miliband was most successful, I thought, in his criticisms of Cameron’s EU policy and his plans for the NHS. But he didn’t have any clear moments where anyone could say, ‘Aha, there’s the next prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’ He came across as a thoughtful, earnest opposition leader.

Which brings us to Cameron. He’s a skillful debater, and he knew when to attack (against Miliband), when to hold back (against Clegg), and he quite cleverly triangulated Miliband against Farage. The format clearly helped to make Cameron look ‘more like a prime minister,’ even at the expense of having to stand mutely listening to a lecture from the Scottish first minister. Nevertheless, it’s not clear why Cameron is so scared of a direct face-off against Miliband. Continue reading LIVE BLOG: British leaders debate

Winners and losers in the Iran nuclear deal

lausanne15Photo credit to AFP / Getty Images.

Today’s announcement of a deal between Iran and the ‘P5+1’ countries, with a final June 30 deadline looming, is being met with cautious optimism today as the European Union’s chief foreign policy official Federica Mogherini, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif and US secretary of state John Kerry all make statements about the deal from Lausanne, Switzerland. USflagIran Flag Icon

The key to the deal? Iran will be permitted to enrich fuel for its civil nuclear energy program, including the use of centrifuges, though not to the level necessary to build a nuclear weapons program. Furthermore, Iran has agreed with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor and diligence all current and past nuclear operations to uncover the extent of any Iranian determination to build a nuclear weapons program.

It will certainly rank, if it’s finalized, as one of the top foreign policy accomplishments of US president Barack Obama.

From The New York Times:

According to European officials, roughly 5,000 centrifuges will remain spinning enriched uranium at the main nuclear site at Natanz, about half the number currently running. The giant underground enrichment site at Fordo – which Israeli and some American officials fear is impervious to bombing – will be partly converted to advanced nuclear research and the production of medical isotopes. Foreign scientist will be present. There will be no fissile material present that could be used to make a bomb.

The deal is sure to bring howls from its opponents, including many skeptics in the United States, including Congressional Republicans and many Democrats as well, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has said that any deal must preclude Iran from any enrichment. But as negotiators from the P5 + 1 — the five members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany — and Iran work through the details of the deal in the next three months, it seems more likely than not that the deal will be finalized, opening the way to lifting international sanctions against Iran imposed by the United Nations (if not exactly all the sanctions currently in place by the United States).

So who ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ in this deal? Here’s a look, starting with the winners:  Continue reading Winners and losers in the Iran nuclear deal

Togo delays vote as Gnassingbé seeks third term

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Guest post by Kevin Buettner

Even in the neglected word of African electoral politics, Togo isn’t necessarily a top story, especially coming so shortly after the blockbuster Nigerian election.togo

But  less than three weeks before Togo was scheduled to head to the polls to determine their next president, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) successfully petitioned the Togolese government to revise its voter registration lists. The subsequent delay stems from allegations by opposition parties that thousands of voter lists contained the names of citizens who were registered twice — and most of the names were considered persons loyal to the incumbent president Faure Gnassingbé.

This is not the first time the opposition has raised concerns relating to the upcoming elections. In late 2014, a coalition aptly named ‘Let’s Save Togo’ led street protests to highlight the unpopularity of the 2002 decision to suspend presidential term limits, which now allows Gnassingbé to run for a third term as Togo’s president. Thirteen years ago, however, the decision facilitated what would become the 38-year rule of Gnassingbé’s father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, a polarizing political figure in his own right. Continue reading Togo delays vote as Gnassingbé seeks third term