I normally enjoy Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment for his often brilliant insights into the Middle East. But today, he’s frothing in an over-the-top attack on the Iranian government for the Guardian Council’s rejection of Hashemi Rafsanjani (pictured above) as a potential presidential candidate in the June 14 election.  His comments seem anything but informed:

Their exclusion is a further step toward authoritarianism and perhaps totalitarianism in Iran…

A major challenge for the remaining 8 presidential candidates will to get anyone to care about an election conducted on a vary narrow basis, which might well be fixed anyway.

OK, let’s deconstruct this.

Anyone with a passing familiarity with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism will realize that the current Iranian government falls pretty far from the two traditional examples of 20th century totalitarianism — Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.  To throw around the term ‘totalitarianism’ this way only serves to disrespect the memory of those who suffered under the truly horrific Nazi and Stalinist regimes and to amplify the heated rhetoric over Iran.

No one disputes that the rejection of Rafsanjani’s candidacy is pretty far afield from what we’d expect from a free and fair democratic election.  It’s obviously, as far as most observers can tell, a reaction from the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to reject a potential president who might challenge his primacy as the Supreme Leader.  That’s an institutional fight that Khamenei has been waging for some time — it’s in many ways not so dissimilar to the ways that the American system spent its first decades settling.  

There was no authority under the Articles of Confederation to chuck out the existing constitution for a new constitutional regime.  There’s no constitutional authority for John Marshall to assert the power of the U.S. Supreme Court to conduct judicial review in Marbury v. Madison and subsequent cases in the early 19th century.  There was certain insufficient constitutional authority to guide the lines between the federal and state governments, and that led fully to civil war.  In a system like that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where institutions are just barely 30 years old, it stands to reason that the relevant stakeholders will jockey to determine their places within the overall system.

Does that excuse Khamenei’s obvious power grab? No. But neither does it make Khamenei a totalitarian.

But as I noted a couple of days ago, it’s perfectly within the realm of possibility that Khamenei will ultimately ask the Guardian Council to reconsider Rafsanjani’s rejection, especially if Rafsanjani prevails upon Khamenei.  Khamenei interjected in 2005 to allow two previously rejected reformist candidates to run in that election.  So I’m not convinced this has entirely played out yet — most especially because I’ve not seen any comments yet from Rafsanjani himself, who remains an incredibly powerful politician and a critically important member of the founding generation of the Iranian revolution.

Moreover, as I noted in my overview of the eight remaining approved candidates, one of the remaining is the reformist Mohammad Reza Aref, a former vice president of Mohammed Khatami (a supporter of the ‘Green movement’ that supported Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 election and thereafter contested the results), and another is the moderate Hassan Rowhani, Iran’s former nuclear energy negotiation who’s incredibly close to Rafsanjani.

Would a totalitarian state approve those two candidacies? Of course not.

Whatever the illiberal and authoritarian tendencies of the Iranian regime from time to time, it’s not totalitarian.  In a world where U.S. opinion about Iran remains very much a matter of life and death, and top U.S. and Israeli officials haven’t ruled out a military attack on Iran over its nuclear energy program, it’s simply irresponsible to throw that term around.

Cole adds this tidbit:

Some observers believe that Khamenei intends to abolish the presidency and go to a parliamentary system, with a prime minister.

I’ve not seen this in any media reports from Iran or otherwise, so I’d be curious to know Cole’s sources.

But in the Islamic Republic’s hierarchy, Khamenei has consistently waged fights — against the moderate Rafsanjani from 1989 to 1997, against the reformist Khatami from 1997 to 2005, and against the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since 2005 — to maintain the primacy of the Supreme Leader vis-a-vis the presidency.

In many ways, the president is already like a prime minister, because he’s the head of government, while the Supreme Leader is the head of state.  That’s one of the reasons that the position of prime minister was discontinued after the 1980s — and many of the roles of the prime minister were subsequently assumed by the president.

I’m sure Cole knows all of this, which makes his troubling hyperbole all the more baffling.

Last week, even before all of the votes had been counted, when it was clear that Nawaz Sharif would be Pakistan’s next prime minister, he named his designee for finance minister — Ishaq Dar (pictured above).

Dar served as Sharif’s finance minister from 1998 until Sharif’s overthrow by army chief of staff Pervez Musharraf, and he spent much of his previous time as finance minister negotiating a loan package from the International Monetary Fund and dealing with the repercussions of economic sanctions imposed by the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton on both India and Pakistan in retaliation for developing their nuclear arms programs.

Currently a member of Pakistan’s senate, Dar briefly joined a unity government as finance minister in 2008, though Dar and other Sharif allies quickly resigned over a constitutional dispute over Pakistan’s judiciary.  The key point is that even across political boundaries, Dar is recognized as one of the most capable economics officials in Pakistan.

It was enough to send the Karachi Stock Exchange to a new high, and the KSE has continued to climb in subsequent days, marking a steady rally from around 13,360 last June to nearly 21,460 today.  Investors are generally happy with the election result for three reasons:

1. First, it marks a change from the incumbent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP, پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی‎), a party that has essentially drifted aimlessly in government for much of the past five years mired in fights with Pakistan’s supreme court and corruption scandals that affect Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari in lieu of a concerted effort to improve Pakistan’s economy.
2. Second, the election results will allow for a strong government dominated by Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N) (PML-N, اکستان مسلم لیگ ن) instead of a weak and unstable coalition government.
3. Finally, Sharif’s party is viewed as pro-business and Sharif himself, more than any other party leader during the campaign, emphasized that fixing the economy would be his top priority.  Sharif, who served as prime minister from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1997 to 1999, is already well-known for his attempts to reform Pakistan’s economy in his first term.

Sharif will need as much goodwill as he can, because the grim reality is that Pakistan is in trouble — and more than just its crumbling train infrastructure (though if you haven’t read it, Declan Walsh’s tour de force in The New York Times last weekend is a must-read journey by train through Pakistan and its economic woes).  The past four years have marked sluggish GDP growth — between 3.0% and 3.7% — that’s hardly consistent with an expanding developing economy.  In contrast, Pakistani officials estimate that the economy needs more like sustained 7% growth in order to deliver the kind of rise in living standards or a reduction in poverty or unemployment that could transform Pakistan into a higher-income nation.  Already this year, Pakistan’s growth forecast has been cut from 4.2% to 3.5%.

The official unemployment rate is around 6%, but it’s clearly a much bigger problem, especially among youth — Pakistan’s median age is about 21 years old.  That makes its population younger than the United States (median age of 37), the People’s Republic of China (35) or even Egypt (24), where restive youth propelled the 2011 demonstrations in Tahrir Square.

Although Pakistan’s poverty rates are lower than those in India and Bangladesh, they’re nothing to brag about — as of 2008, according to the World Bank, about 21% of Pakistan’s 176 million people lived on less than $1.25 per day, and fully 60% lived on less than $2 per day.

Though it has dropped considerably from its double-digit levels of the past few years (see below), inflation remains in excess of 5%, thereby wiping out much of the gains of the country’s anemic growth:

Pakistan is undeniably the ‘sick man’ of south Asia.  India, even facing its own slump, has long since outpaced Pakistan over the past 20 years, and increasingly over the past decade, Bangladesh has consistently notched higher growth:

To make matters worse, Pakistan has a growing fiscal problem – although its public debt is lower than it used to be, it’s still over 60% of GDP, and a number of problems have led to debt-financed budgets in the past, including a 6.6% deficit in 2012.

That sets up a classic austerity-vs-growth conundrum for the Sharif government.

On the one hand, the familiar austerity hawks will argue that Sharif should focus on a reform program to lower Pakistan’s unsustainable deficits as a top priority.  If, as expected, Sharif obtains a deal with the IMF for up to $5 million in additional financing to prevent a debt crisis later in 2013, the IMF could force Pakistan into a more aggressive debt reduction program than Sharif might otherwise prefer.

On the other hand, given the number of problems Pakistan faces, growth advocates will argue that Pakistan should focus on more pressing priorities and save budget-cutting for later.  After all, with rolling blackouts plaguing the country, no one will invest in Pakistan regardless of the size of its debt.  It’s also important to remember that Pakistan is not Europe — it’s an emerging economy with a young and growing population that could easily grow its way out of its debt problems in a way that seems impossible for a country like Italy or Greece.

So how exactly will Sharif and Dar attempt to fix Pakistan’s economy?  Here are eight policies that Sharif’s government is either likely to implement — or should be implementing: 

Get the lights back on.  Power blackouts have plagued Pakistan for nearly a decade at this point, and despite a long list of economic woes, nothing has done more to slow Pakistan’s international competitiveness, productivity and output than a flickering power sector.  There’s not one magic-bullet solution to the crisis, and in many ways, it’s a touchstone for all of the problems that Pakistan faces today.  Sharif and his government shouldn’t be worried about spending whatever it takes to get Pakistan’s electricity working as a national matter in terms of public investment.  They should also be willing to look into public-private partnerships and work with regional energy exporters, including Central Asian nations and Iran, if necessary.  IMF analysts cluck about the waste of public funds on energy in Pakistan, and they’re right — government agencies routinely fail to pay for their electricity use, and subsidies have artificially raised demand for electricity and gasoline.  Sharif should phase out those subsidies, informal and formal, for government and consumers alike.  That revenue would be better spent on investments that can improve the reliability of Pakistan’s power grid.

Peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban.  Neither the civilian government nor the military and security services in Pakistan can control parts of Pakistan’s remote northwestern frontier, and its control will remain weak so long as the region remains a hotbed of radical activity.  When a government cannot meet its most basic of obligations to provide for personal safety, there’s little reason to believe that it is capable of securing other key ingredients for a stable economy, like property or contracts.  Sharif has already signaled that he’s willing to negotiate with the Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan (i.e., Pakistani Taliban), and he’s already called for open talks with them, and that’s already an incredibly promising sign.  While the Pakistani Taliban targeted the PPP and its allies throughout the campaign, it’s more open to Sharif, who in turn has always been more sympathetic to Islamists.  Sharif alone can’t singlehandedly secure Pakistan’s frontier, and he’ll need some help from the United States, which is set to withdraw from Afghanistan later this year.  Sharif should use his immediate political capital with the United States to achieve a moratorium on its repeated drone strikes while he conducts talks with the Pakistani Taliban, which in turn could lead to an even wider deal with the Taliban in post-occupation Afghanistan.

Work toward normalized trade relations with India.  Despite the fact that it neighbors a market of over a billion consumers, Pakistan’s largest trade partners are the United States, China, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates.  Pakistan sends nearly five times as many exports to Afghanistan (7% of total exports) than to India (1.3%).  So greater foreign trade with India should be low-hanging fruit for Pakistan’s next government.  Sharif has already indicated he’s willing to work toward warmer relations with India after decades of tension with foundations in the original 1947 Partition.  Sharif, who was prime minister in the late 1990s when both India and Pakistan became nuclear-armed countries, is well-suited for this task, though many military leaders will remain anxious over Sharif’s peace overtures.  As with his turn to the Pakistani Taliban, Sharif’s already made a solid first step by inviting Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh to his swearing-in.  Sharif is likely to extend ‘most favored nation’ status to India, and although Pakistan’s agricultural and textile industries fear a sudden rush of competition, free trade could reduce the price of many everyday items for Pakistani consumers and allow for more technology imports to enhance Pakistan’s economic productivity.

Take real steps to end corruption.  Sharif, already one of Pakistan’s richest businessmen, is unlikely to become as tangled in corruption as Zardari and the previous PPP government.  But corruption has crippled the economy, and with more revenues now going to Pakistan’s provinces, there’s ever more opportunity for local officials to engage in skimming, bribery and other shenanigans.  Although Sharif’s indicated he will try to reduce tax avoidance (see below), that’s just part of a wider problem.  Pakistan’s courts have been particularly aggressive since the end of the Musharraf era — Pakistan’s supreme court has directly confronted Zardari and his government.  Sharif should encourage judicial activism as well as greater transparency at all levels of government and tougher penalties for bribery.

Develop a cutting-edge mechanism for dealing with natural disasters.  One of the most devastating drivers of Pakistani poverty over the past five years has been the 2010 and 2011 flooding that left nearly 20% of the country underwater.  Although the world responded with massive relief aid, it wasn’t nearly sufficient.  Corruption and incompetence meant that aid didn’t end up where it was most desperately needed.  One of the highlights of Sharif’s first stint in power in the 1990s was massive spending on infrastructure, and it’s likely that he’ll be aggressive in his next term in power to boost Pakistan’s infrastructure, even beyond its power grid.  He should spare no expense in developing a national agency tasked with dealing with natural disasters that can identify how to implement efficient relief programs to mitigate the human and economic trauma that result from floods and other shocks.

Focus on the entire country, not just Punjab.  One of the most stinging criticisms of Sharif’s first two terms in government is that he focused on the improvement of his native Punjab province, where he derives much of his political support, at the expense of other provinces, including Sindh province, the PPP’s heartland.  So while Sharif likes to brag that his previous government built Pakistan’s first superhighway, it’s a road that links Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city, to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.  Both cities are located in Punjab, and one of the fears of a Sharif government is that he’ll govern Pakistan from a Punjab-first mentality.  Moreover, in his first term as prime minister, his ‘National Economic Reconstruction Programme’ aggressively privatized industries that had been nationalized under in the 1970s.  Though the nationalization and the liberalization policies helped boost GDP growth in the early 1990s, Sharif faced criticism that the process for selling off state-owned assets wasn’t incredibly competitive.  Sharif needs to transcend those mistakes this time around — he can’t be a truly successful prime minister by diverting national largesse solely to Punjab and incidental benefits to Punjabi elites.

Collect more revenues.  As noted above, Pakistan’s revenues amount to less than 10% of GDP, and tax collection rates are low, especially within agriculture, which represents over one-fifth of Pakistan’s economy.  Dar, in particular, is keen on changing that.  Last year, he and the PML-N backed a proposal to implement a tax on the agricultural sector, a position that would put Sharif at odds with many of his top supporters in Punjab.  A carrots-and-sticks campaign to reduce tax avoidance would also help boost revenues.  It’s a good first test for Sharif’s government because it will show that Sharif is serious about fiscal discipline, reducing corruption and, above all, governing in the best interests of Pakistan (and not just the best interests of Punjab).

Education, education, education.  One of every two Pakistanis is under age 20.  That means that Pakistan’s government needs to be serious about developing the skills of what could turn out to be the country’s most valuable resource of all — its labor force.  Again, given a choice between widespread spending (even debt-financed spending) on jobs skills and training or more rapid budget consolidation, this seems like a no-brainer, especially in light of how little Pakistan currently spends on education.  Pakistan’s literacy rate hovers at just around 55%, which is too low, both in absolute terms and in relative terms (it’s much lower than India’s rate of around 73%, for example).  Despite real gains in education policy, no investment could yield more long-term dividends than to ensure that Pakistan’s wave generation has the skills sufficient to compete in a global economy.  Even though unemployment remains a problem, a well-trained workforce is one of several factors that could lure back foreign investment to Pakistan.  It’s the human-capital counterpart in delivering the kind of infrastructure that global companies want — and have recently found in greater abundance in India and Bangladesh.

While chavismo seems like it’s falling apart two months after the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, many of his acolytes throughout South America continue to flourish.

That’s true in Ecuador, where Rafael Correa cruised to a third consecutive term in February 2013, and it’s looking increasingly true in Bolivia, where president Evo Morales now seems clear to run for a third term following a new law confirming that he can run for a new term, which follows a constitutional court ruling that Morales could run for reelection.

Under Bolivia’s constitution, the president may serve only two consecutive terms.  Although Morales was first elected in December 2005, he cut his first term short after implementing a new constitution in 2009 and standing for a new election in December 2009.  Morales and his allies claim that, under the new constitution, Morales is serving his first term, which is technically true.  Bolivia’s constitutional court certainly ruled in his favor, and the law this week makes it all but certain that Morales will run, though he has yet to announce his reelection campaign for a general election expected in December 2014.  The governing Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement for Socialism) has already indicated its support for Morales.

That’s a long way off, but Morales starts off as the favorite.

In a highly indigenous country, Morales remains a powerful symbol as the first indigenous president of Bolivia, and he’s been a champion of indigenous rights.  When he took office in 2006, he was well-known as a leading indigenous politician with roots in the labor movement and, in particular, roots in the cocalero trade union in Brazil as a former coca-grower and a champion of campesinos — farm laborers.  In office, he was one of the world’s most outspoken critics of U.S. efforts to eradicate coca in its own ‘war on drugs,’ and it’s a view that’s gained currency in subsequent years in Latin America and beyond.

As a leftist president, his economic program has been based widely on nationalization of Bolivian industry, especially the mining industry, and using state resources to improve the lives of impoverished workers.  Despite an unconventional economic policy that involved price controls, Morales reduced the country’s inflation and brought about some measure of economic stability to one of South America’s poorest countries.

Moreover, Bolivian GDP growth remains strong at around 5% last year and in 2011, with even higher GDP forecasts for 2013.  Bolivia’s future is a little brighter in light of its burgeoning lithium industry, given that its Uyuni salt flats boast the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a mineral used in smartphones and other electric devices.

But lithium development, which requires additional water from more fertile parts of the country, has conflicted with the indigenous communities that form the backbone of Morales’s political coalition, and he’s faced protests in 2010 over cuts in government subsidies for gasoline and protests in 2011 by indigenous groups in opposition to a planned highway through the Amazon basin.

Altogether, a largely fragmented opposition will still have a tough time challenging Morales.  

Businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who won just 8% in the 2009 election, is planning another run.  Doria Medina leads the Frente de Unidad Nacional (National Unity Front), an alternative party in Bolivia.

It remains unclear whether he’ll also merit the support of the larger opposition coalition, the Plan Progreso para Bolivia–Convergencia Nacional (PPB-CN), a coalition between the two center-right groups, ‘Plan Progress for Bolivia’ and ‘National Convergence.’  It’s even unclear whether the PPB-CN will itself remain together before the 2014 elections, however, given that its leader and 2009 presidential candidate Manfred Reyes Villa remains in exile in the United States after fleeing corruption charges in Bolivia.

Juan del Granado, the mayor of La Paz from 2000 to 2010, is another possibility, though he’s generally more progressive than Doria Medina.  He leads the leftist Movimiento Sin Miedo (MSM, Movement without Fear), which formerly supported Morales in 2005 and in 2009, but split with Morales over the question of his 2014 reelection. 

Another possibility is Rubén Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz, the largest of Bolivia’s nine departments, though the local political party that he leads is largely confined to Santa Cruz.  He’s called in recent weeks for the opposition to unite behind a single candidate, however, and he could be a key player in brining opposition forces together to propose a single candidacy.

There’s no runoff in Bolivia’s presidential election, so the lack of the kind of opposition unity in, for example, Venezuela (where a pan-ideological opposition has widely coalesced over the past two years behind Henrique Capriles) means that an already favored Morales would be virtually unstoppable for a third term.

Provided that the Guardian Council’s decision stands and former president Hashemi Rafsanjani is not permitted to run for president in the June 14 election, who are the eight remaining candidates from which Iranian voters will choose? 

Despite the rejection of the candidacies of both Rafsanjani, the current chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, chief of staff to incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Guardian Council approved eight candidates that include both conservatives and liberals, including two figures who were part of the administration of reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

So if Rafsanjani and his supporters ultimately accept the outcome, the race won’t necessarily lack for drama or intensity.  With eight candidates in the race, at least initially, the election could well go to a runoff on June 21 if no candidate wins over 50% of the vote, though there’s reason to believe some of the candidates will fall aside as conservatives in particular unite around one or two candidates.

Without further ado, here’s a look at each of the eight approved candidates and their chances to become Iran’s next president.

The Reformists / Moderates

To be sure, Rafsanjani’s disqualification makes the chances of the election of a moderate president more unlikely.  In light of the fact that Khatami himself declined to register as a presidential candidate, it means that Iran’s former moderate president and Iran’s former reformist president will both be sitting on the sidelines of the election.  The three remaining candidates in the race lack the popularity or political profile that either Rafsanjani or Khatami would have brought to the race, though if  both the moderate and liberal camps unite behind one candidate, that candidate could pose a serious challenge.

Mohammad Reza Aref (right).  The most pro-reform candidate of the eight, Aref served as vice president during Khatami’s second term after serving as Khatami’s communications minister.  An electrical engineer by training and a professor prior to his entry into politics, he was the chancellor of the University of Tehran from 1994 to 1997.  Today, he’s currently a member of the Expediency Discernment Council, the 34-member body of officials chaired by Rafsanjani that works to align the Iranian parliament and the Guardian Council.  He doesn’t rate as highly as Khatami in terms of charisma, but then again, neither did Mir-Hossain Mousavi in the 2009 presidential election despite the passionate support he engendered in the 2009 election.

With Rafsanjani out of the race, Aref’s chances of becoming president are much higher, but it’s not clear that reformists will necessarily unite around him.  Even if Khatami supports him, he may well split the moderate vote with Hassan Rowhani.

Hassan Rowhani (left).  The director of the Strategic Research Center of the Expediency Discernment Council and a member of the Assembly of Experts, Rowhani is the closest Rafsanjani intimate in the race, and Rafsanjani could well back him for the presidency.  He was Rafsanjani’s deputy in the Iranian parliament, the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles), during the 1980s and from 1992 to 2000, Rowhani served as the parliament’s deputy speaker.

From 1989 to 2005, he was the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, a position now held by his more conservative rival for the presidency, Saeed Jalili.  From 2003 to 2005, he was Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator with the United Kingdom, Germany and France, and under his lead, Iran agreed to a short-lived deal to suspend its uranium enrichment.  Although he’s far from a ‘Green movement’ partisan, he’s been a critic of Ahmadinejad in the past, especially with respect to the Ahmadinejad administration’s handling of the Iranian economy.

Although all candidates in the presidential election are likely to champion Iran’s nuclear energy program, Rowhani (like Rafsanjani) would likely try to improve relations with the United States and Europe as president.  A centrist more than a reformist, he’s close enough to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Supreme Leader’s allies that liberal reformers may be less than enthusiastic to back Rowhani.

Mohammad Gharazi (right).  The least well-known of the moderate candidates for the presidency, Gharazi served as Iran’s oil minister from 1981 to 1985 and later as communications minister from 1985 to 1997.

He’s likely to play a minor role in the campaign, however, with Rowhani and Aref poised to take the lion’s share of former Rafsanjani supporters.  At age 71, he’s the oldest candidate in the race, but still two years younger than Khamenei and seven years younger than Rafsanjani.

The 2+1 Principlist Coalition

Prior to the registration period, three potential candidates — Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former parliamentary speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel and top Supreme Leader adviser Ali Akbar Velayati — formed the ’2+1 Principlist’ coalition.  Generally speaking, however, all five of the conservatives in the race could be said to be ‘principlists,’ in that they would all defer to Khamenei’s ultimate authority as Supreme Leader.  The idea behind the ’2+1′ coalition is that the three candidates will eventually band together in support of one candidate.  Although that candidate would likely be one of the three members of the 2+1 Principlist coalition, Velayati himself suggested on Sunday that all three could eventually drop out in favor of yet another conservative, nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.  Either way, expect at least two of the following candidates to withdraw between now and June 14.  For now, however, the three candidates will go forward.

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf (right).  Qalibaf was elected mayor of Tehran in 2005, following six years as head of the national police forces.  A former presidential candidate in 2005, he finished in fourth place with nearly 14% of the vote, behind Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad and reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi.  He was seen as a potential challenger to Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election and, though he decided not to run in 2009, he’s among the more well-known and popular of the eight candidates.  Despite his rivalry with Ahmadinejad, he’s still very conservative.  A member of the Revolutionary Guard in the 1980s during the war with Iraq, Qalibaf has played a key role in suppressing the student protests in 1999 and in 2003.  As the head of the national police forces, however, he initiated several reforms, including the development of the equivalent of a ’911′ emergency number system for Iran (the ’110′ number).

He has achieved recognition for his stewardship of Tehran, and he was named the world’s eighth-best mayor in 2008 for his ‘modernisation of the capital’s infrastructure and public services,’ though the world’s enthusiasm receded after he played a key role in suppressing the post-election demonstrations in 2009.  A longtime rival to Ahmadinejad, he has successfully fought to dominate Ahmadinejad’s rivals in the Tehran city council.

Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel (left).  Iran’s parliament speaker from 2004 to 2008 and the current chair of its culture committee, though he lost the race for speaker following the 2012 elections to Ali Larijani.

Haddad-Adel’s daughter is married to Khamenei’s son Motjaba Khamenei, and he’s perhaps one of the two closest Khamenei confidants in the race.  It’s especially relevant given Motjaba Khamenei’s own designs to follow in the footsteps of his father as Supreme Leader one day, despite the fact that he has even fewer religious credentials than his father.

Haddad-Adel is also a member of the Expediency Discernment Council.

Ali Akbar Velayati (right).  A top advisor to the Supreme Leader on international affairs and Iran’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997 during both Khamenei’s presidency and Rafsanjani’s presidency, Velayati is a key behind-the-scenes player in Iran’s foreign affairs and diplomacy.  He supports the current hardline stance against the West, generally, and the United States, in particular, and he has sometimes served as an envoy of the Supreme Leader abroad, undermining the foreign policy of the Ahmadinejad administration.

Also a member of the Expediency Discernment Council, Velayati was Khamenei’s original choice for the office of prime minister in 1981, though the Iranian parliament blocked his appointment, paving the way for Mousavi to become prime minister.  Velayati, as noted above, has implied as recently as Sunday that he’ll eventually endorse Jalili.

The Remaining Conservatives

The two remaining candidates in the race, Saeed Jalili and Mohsen Rezai, are not part of the formal ’2+1 Principlist’ coalition as such, but they remain principlists nonetheless.  What’s striking is that Mashaei’s rejection leaves no Ahmadinejad supporters left in the presidential race, though Jalili is perhaps the closest of the eight conservatives to the Ahmadinejad camp.  That means that not only will Ahmadinejad find himself without a champion during the campaign, but he’ll find himself increasingly sidelined during the campaign and isolated when his term ends.

Saeed Jalili (right).  The man who seems mostly likely to emerge as the likeliest champion of Iranian conservatives is Jalili, who’s been the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council since 2007 and, more importantly, the current chief negotiator on Iran’s nuclear energy program with the six major powers – the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.  That means he has the backing of the Supreme Leader on the most complex foreign policy issue facing Iran today.

Jalili, though a conservative, served as a deputy foreign minister in charge of European and U.S. relations during Khatami’s second term in the early 2000s.  Born in 1965, he’s 47 years old, making him the youngest of the eight candidates as well.  Like Qalibaf, he came of age during the horrific war with Iraq, and as a member of the Revolutionary Guard, Jalili lost part of his right leg and saw some of the heaviest fighting of the 1980s.  That experience is said to be at the heart of his current worldview by international observers who have negotiated with him in the past.

A rising star during the Ahmadinejad administration, he’s seen as a candidate who could restore unity between Ahmadinejad’s conservative backers and the dominant principlists that have supported Khamenei in the Supreme Leader’s power struggles against Ahmadinejad.  No one knows whether the incumbent will try to insert himself into the narrative of the race with an endorsement or other antics, but Jalili would likely welcome Ahmadinejad’s quiet endorsement.  On Monday alone, the president’s brother (and one of the president’s harshest critics) Davood Ahmadinejad, and former health minister Bagheri Lankarani both dropped out of the presidential race in favor of Jalili.

Mohsen Rezai (left).  Rezai is the secretary-general of the Expediency Discernment Council and the former chief of the Revolutionary Guard from 1981 to 1997.  He ran for president in 2005, though he eventually withdrew, and he challenged Ahmadinejad from the conservative right in 2009, though he won just 1.73% of the vote.

He’s somewhat of a conservative reformist, in many ways, and he may well receive solid support from the military and security forces within Iran, though that’s hardly enough of a base to win the presidency, and he’s a longshot to win.

Though he’s hardly a ‘Green movement’ partisan, but he initially joined Mousavi and Karroubi in questioning the final results.

Top photo credit to Roshan Norouzi/ZUMA Press.

Iran’s Guardian Council has spoken — it has announced a list of eight presidential candidates for the June 14 election.

As expected, the list doesn’t include Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a key advisor and chief of staff to incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But the list also doesn’t include Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the original leaders of post-revolution Iran and himself a former president from 1989 to 2007, chair of the Expediency Discernment Council, and a former presidential candidate in 2005 as well.  Rafsanjani’s rejection wasn’t exactly unexpected, but it  has the potential to make the 2013 presidential election already as politically explosive as the 2009 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad won a victory that supporters of his opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former Iranian prime minister in the 1980s, who ran as a reformist candidate with the support of former reformist president Mohammad Khatami.

The Guardian Council is a 12-member council that vets presidential and parliamentary candidates and otherwise serves as Iran’s final constitutional interpretative body.  Its decisions are widely seen as a means of extending the interests of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei (pictured above), given that half of its members are appointed by the Supreme Leader and the other half are appointed by the Iranian parliament, which is dominated by Khamenei’s conservative (or ‘principlist’) supporters.

While Rafsanjani himself wasn’t part of the ‘Green movement’ that challenged the election results, Rafsanjani gently chided Iran’s regime for its harsh and sometimes lethal crackdown, which included jailing many activists and journalists, curtailing freedom of assembly, speech and the press, and resulted in the house arrest of both Mousavi and another reformist presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi.  Although Rafsanjani lost the chairmanship in 2011 of the Assembly of Experts, he remained the chair of the Expediency Council.*

Rafsanjani, a sometimes-ally and sometimes-rival to Khamenei, dominated Iranian politics in the 1980s alongside Khamenei.  Rafsanjani was the speaker of Iran’s parliament when Khamenei was president.  When Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989, the Assembly of Experts chose Khamenei to succeed him, but Rafsanjani quickly won the first of two terms as president, therefore extending their dual dominance of Iranian politics through the end of the 1990s.  Given that Rafsanjani is the most powerful politician in Iran after Khamenei, he would have had the credibility and legitimacy as Iran’s president to challenge the principle authority of the Supreme Leader.

There are essentially three potential outcomes from here:

Rafsanjani accepts the decision, reformists back another candidate.

Rafsanjani could simply accept the Guardian Council’s decision, call on his supporters to back another candidate, and the election will proceed without Rafsanjani.  Given his relatively cautious and conciliatory past, this may well be the most likely outcome, especially if Rafsanjani, Khatami, Mousavi and others rally around one of the remaining candidates approved by the Guardian Council, not all of whom are necessarily conservatives.  Although five of the eight candidates are ‘principlist’ conservatives who are clearly loyal to the Supreme Leader and unlikely to challenge Khamenei’s imperative, the Guardian Council approved Rafsanjani’s former communication minister, Mohammad Gharazi, as well as the chief nuclear negotiator during the Khatami administration, Hassan Rowhani.  The Guardian Council also approved Khatami’s former vice president, Mohammad Reza Aref, who will be the most pro-reform candidate of the eight.

Rafsanjani appeals for Khamenei’s intervention.

Rafsanjani could initially challenge the Guardian Council’s decision and call upon Khamenei to step in to allow his candidacy.  That’s not unprecedented — in 2005, Khamenei intervened to request the Guardian Council approve two reformist candidates that it had previously rejected.  If Rafsanjani does go to  Khamenei, and Khamenei ultimately assents to the request, it would allow Rafsanjani to run while also demonstrating in a very public way Khamenei’s dominance.  If the presidential drama plays out this way, it wouldn’t be surprising at all — Rafsanjani remains a candidate, but he’ll owe his candidacy to the goodwill of the Supreme Leader.

Rafsanjani’s supporters boycott the election — or take to the streets.

If Rafsanjani or his supporters don’t accept his rejection, however, it could become very difficult very quickly for Khamenei.  If reformers and moderates boycott the election, it would be a significant setback to a regime that hopes to turn the page from the 2009 election, its violent aftermath and the antics of the Ahmadinejad administration.  If Rafsanjani’s supporters take to the streets in a way that’s even vaguely reminiscent of the 2009 ‘Green movement,’ it would be difficult for Khamenei to effect another election-related crackdown, especially against Rafsanjani, who was one of the leading figures of the revolution’s first generation.  Khamenei lost credibility both in Iran and abroad with the 2009 crackdown, but to take on Rafsanjani would amount to nothing less than a street war between Iran’s two top revolutionary figures at a time when Iran’s economy and its position in the world hang precariously in the balance. 

The power struggle between Iran’s Supreme Leader and its president has caused tensions under each of the three presidencies of the Khamenei era.  It’s that issue which has led to Ahmadinejad’s political isolation, even though Khamenei openly supported Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election.  Ahmadinejad has pushed the boundaries of the presidency even more than Rafsanjani and Khatami did, and it was his insistence on nominating Mashaei to the vice presidency in 2009 that started the current rift between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.  The final turn came in advance of last year’s parliamentary elections, which saw the ‘principlist’ supporters of Khamenei defeat Ahmadinejad’s rival conservative candidates.

Mashaei, who has been called a deviant, attacked for his errant views on Shia Islam, attacked for being too dovish on Israel, and accused of ‘bewitching’ Ahmadinejad, was seen as a wide longshot to be approved for the presidency, especially after Ahmadinejad personally joined him when he showed up to register for the presidential election, which is arguably an election violation.

*  The Assembly of Experts is a body of 86 elected Islamic judges and scholars (all vetted by the Guardian Council, of course) that appoints the Supreme Leader and, in theory, could dismiss the Supreme Leader as well.  The Expediency Discernment Council is an unelected body of 34 scholars and judges that serves as a go-between for both the Guardian Council and Iran’s parliament and as a constitutional advisory body to the Supreme Leader.

In a static world, it’s easy to believe that UK prime minister David Cameron’s call in January 2013 for a referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued membership in the European Union will never come to pass — it depends upon the reelection of a Conservative-led in the 2015 general election, Cameron’s continued Tory leadership and a lengthy process of negotiation thereafter with EU leaders. 

So when Cameron agreed with Scottish first minister Alex Salmond two months later to hold a referendum on Scottish independence in September 2014, he had every reason to believe that he had bought enough time to keep the European issue relatively calm.  After all, poll after poll shows the pro-independence vote lagging far behind the anti-independence vote and, despite a relatively large number of undecided Scottish voters, many polls throughout 2012 and early 2013 showed the ‘no’ vote with over 50% support.  One Ipsos poll earlier this month showed that 59% support union and just 31% support independence.

But what’s increasingly clear is that the two referenda are becoming inseparable — Scotland’s future role in the United Kingdom depends on the United Kingdom’s future role in Europe.  With Westminster now increasingly turning to its toxic obsession with its union with Europe, a group of largely English parliamentarians may well be endangering the more longstanding three-century union with Scotland.

It’s easy to follow Cameron’s arithmetic here:  Allow the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the more euroskeptic members of his own party their opportunity for an anti-Europe outlet in the May 2014 European Parliament elections.  Then sail through the September 2014 Scottish referendum with both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democratic Party united against Scottish independence, maybe even by promising ‘devomax,’ a form of further devolution of tax and spending powers to the Scottish parliament that came into existence in 1999.  Cameron could therefore put the specter of Scottish independence behind him before looking to the next general election and, if successfully reelected, the EU negotiations that would precede the long-promised EU referendum.

What Cameron didn’t count on was the growing chorus of euroskeptic rage from within his own party, which seems destined to repeat the Tory infighting of the 1990s that so destabilized former prime minister John Major’s government  Education minister Michael Gove’s insisted last week, for example, that he would support leaving the European Union if a vote were held immediately.  Over 100 Tory backbenchers are calling for a law to guarantee a referendum later this decade or even for a referendum before 2015, and one Tory MP is even arguing for a full joint Tory/UKIP electoral coalition in 2015.  Some Tories are even trying to look beyond Cameron to a more Euroskeptic leader, perhaps even Gove.  It comes at a time when UK voters insist in poll after poll that they would overwhelmingly vote to leave the European Union in a referendum.

UKIP’s rise hasn’t helped, and Nigel Farage’s insistence at contesting a Scottish by-election led to the somewhat humorous result of his being chased out of a pub in Edinburgh last week (pictured above).  Though it’s a safe bet that Farage and UKIP won’t make many inroads in Scotland, it’s hard to see how his active presence in Scotland could do anything but make things worse for unionist supporters.  His party is currently polling as much as 20% in national polls, outpacing the Liberal Democrats and, in some cases, pulling to within single digits of the Conservatives (giving Labour a sizable lead).  Even if Labour wins in 2015, if UKIP wins the support of one out of every five UK voters, it will pull not only the Tories, but probably even Labour, further toward euroskepticism and eventual rupture with Europe. 

It’s stunning that in a thoughtful (if opaque) editorial last week in The Telegraph outlining reasons for and against leaving the European Union, Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson didn’t even mention Scotland:

More generally, there is a risk that leaving the EU will be globally interpreted as a narrow, xenophobic, backward-looking thing to do…. There may be other good reasons for staying in, but I can’t think of them now.

It’s not surprising that right-wing euroskepticism is playing incredibly poorly in Scotland.  Scotland has been consistently further left than England in the past half-century, tilting ever more toward the Nordic social welfare model than to the free-market Anglo-American model.  That alone, however, might not be enough for voters to rupture over three centuries of union with England that, together, created a colonial empire that dominated the 19th century.  But despite its strong regional pride, Scotland has always been more pro-European than England – in a world where Scottish voters feel like they’re choosing between an isolated and insular England and being at the heart of Europe, it’s not so clear why they would choose England over Europe.

A new Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times and Real Radio Scotland shows that unionist sentiment may be dropping amid the growing chances that the United Kingdom could leave the European Union — 36% would support independence, 44% would oppose independence and 20% are uncertain.  When asked how they would vote if the United Kingdom did actually leave the European Union, both sides would receive 44% support, with just 12% undecided.  That’s about the best poll I’ve seen in two years for Scottish nationalists.  Meanwhile, Salmond leads a popular majority government in Scotland, and remains popular and, by far, the Scottish National Party leads Labour and the Liberal Democrats in polls for both future regional and UK elections.

Europe was always going to be at the heart of the Scottish case for independence.  It’s the presence of a robust supranational governance structure that, in large part, makes Scottish independence possible.  Although Scotland’s nationalists have pinned their hopes on North Sea oil revenue, it certainly helps that Scotland would remain part of a larger legal, economic, trade and migration union.  Though Scotland may require some negotiations upon independence to ‘rejoin’ the European Union, it would already have implemented the entirety of the acquis communautaire required for entry, so the negotiations would likely be fast-tracked or even folded into the process of separating from England.

Photo credit to SWNS.

In less than 24 hours, Iranians will know who will be clear to run in next month’s presidential election, the first since the June 2009 race that led to the ‘Green Movement’ that attracted global attention.

That’s because within Iranian democracy, the Guardian Council, a 12-member body of clerics and attorneys that advises the Supreme Leader on constitutional matters, also functions as a gatekeeper for presidential and parliamentary candidates in Iran.  In theory, the Guardian Council approves only those candidates who meet the criteria to run for the presidency.  In reality, it means that minor, independent, secular, liberal, and/or female candidates, or anyone who appears too radical a threat to the current system or simply deemed unacceptable by the Supreme Leader, can be excluded from the race.  It also means that the Guardian Council can shape the contours of the race by determining the number of relative conservatives and reformists.

As such, although 686 presidential candidates — including 30 women — have registered to run in the June 14 presidential race, just a handful are expected to be confirmed to run.  In the 2009 election, for example, the Guardian Council approved just four candidates out of 476 initial hopefuls; in the 2005 election, the Guardian Council approved just six candidates from among 1,014.

But the question on everyone’s mind is whether the Guardian Council will approve Hashemi Rafsanjani (pictured above), widely seen as the most powerful politician in Iran after the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.  Rafsanjani, who served previously as Iran’s president from 1989 to 1997, is as the current chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, a 34-member body that mediates between the elected Iranian parliament and the Guardian Council.  He placed first in the first round of the 2005 presidential election, but ultimately lost widely in the runoff to the more conservative and populist Tehran mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  As Khamenei’s contemporary, Rafsanjani was a political rival in the 1980s when Khamenei was Iran’s president (before his 1989 elevation as Supreme Leader), and that makes him a potential president with the profile and support base to potentially challenge Khamenei as Supreme Leader.  On the other hand, Rafsanjani is someone Khamenei knows well, even if they’re not best friends, is somewhat of a consensus-builder, and would be unlikely to unleash the kind of erratic leadership that Ahmadinejad has embraced.

In light of the controversial aftermath of the 2009 election, during which ‘Green movement’ supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi took to the streets in opposition to the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s reelection, the regime’s crackdown left many reformists, journalists and others killed or in jail (Mousavi and others remain under house arrest even today).  As a result, many of the movement’s backers have settled upon Rafsanjani as their preferred candidate.  That includes former president Mohammad Khatami, who served as president from 1997 to 2005 as a strong advocate for liberalization in both domestic and foreign affairs, though he wasn’t necessarily effective at enacting reform.

Rafsanjani himself didn’t openly support the ‘Green movement’ in the wake of the 2009 election, but he made some remarks indicating, ever so gently, his preference for the right to open speech, free assembly, and greater press freedom, and his opposition to the harshness of the crackdown.  Though he’s certainly not as reformist as Mousavi and Khatami, he’s never been a full-throated conservative either, which makes him in many ways a great compromise choice in light of the post-2009 battles.  At age 78, he was Iran’s president at the end of the war with Iraq in the 1980s, so he’s far from the kind of fresh face who would push for rapid change.  But for all the reasons above, he’d start the race with the support of Iran’s reform movement and he has the personal platform to push through reforms that Khatami could not a decade ago.

But Rafsanjani’s disqualification, given his status as a former president, would be unprecedented in Iranian politics, and could well lead to the kind of widespread protests that followed the 2009 election. His opponents in the Guardian Council may well be looking to Rafsanjani’s advanced age as an excuse to disqualify him, according to Iranian new reports today:

Iran’s Guardian Council Spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei says the body may consider the physical condition of presidential hopefuls in its approval process. If an individual, who is supposed to carry out a macro executive task, can work for only a few hours a day, he cannot be approved, Kadkhodaei said in an interview with Iran’s Arabic-language al-Alam news network. The Guardian Council may take physical condition into consideration in its vetting of presidential hopefuls but no discussion has been held yet regarding the issue, he added.

Given that Khamenei is just five years younger than Rafsanjani, I’m not sure that’s such an incredibly useful precedent, and I’m not sure that it will ultimately be the reason for his disqualification, if it happens.

So what happens if Rafsanjani isn’t permitted to run?

Most immediately, I would expect Khamenei to intervene to override the Guardian Council’s decision, as he’s done in the past.  It would be a useful way to assert the Supreme Leader’s ultimately higher authority over the presidency in the event that Rafsanjani wins.

It’s hard to see who reformist supporters would even support out of the remaining frontrunners.

Mohammad Reza Aref, a member of the Expediency Discernment Council and Khatami’s vice president from 2001 to 2005, is also running for president.  A professor and electrical engineer by training, he served as Iran’s energy minister in Khatami’s first term.  If he’s approved by the Guardian Council, he could well emerge as a replacement for Rafsanjani’s supporters.  Otherwise, however, the pickings are slim for Iranian liberals.

The other candidates likeliest to emerge with the Guardian Council’s assent include a handful of relative conservatives:

• Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, former chief of the Iranian national police forces and mayor of Tehran since 2005;
• Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, Iran’s parliament speaker from 2004 to 2008, whose daughter is married to Khamenei’s son Motjaba;
• Mohsen Rezai, secretary-general of the Expediency Discernment Council, former chief of the Revolutionary Guards;
• Saeed Jalili, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s chief negotiator on nuclear energy, and a former deputy foreign minister for US and European affairs; and
• Ali Akbar Velayati, a top advisor to the Supreme Leader and Iran’s foreign minister from 1981 to 1997.

One candidate who is expected to be rejected is Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a top Ahmadinejad ally who has served as chief of staff to Ahmadinejad since 2009.  He was Ahmadinejad’s original choice for vice president in 2009, and Ahmadinejad was so insistent about Mashaei’s appointment that the Supreme Leader was forced to reject Mashaei as a formal matter.  The Mashaei matter was one of several incidents that’s led to a rift among conservatives in Iran, those in Ahmadinejad’s inner circle and Khamenei’s supporters (‘principlists’) who reject Ahmadinejad’s activist view of the Iranian presidency.  Khamenei has emerged relatively stronger, with Ahmadinejad’s supporters losing seats to the principlist bloc in last year’s Iranian parliamentary elections.  That means that Ahmadinejad, who is limited to two consecutive terms in office and therefore ineligible to run, will likely remain sidelined throughout the upcoming presidential election.

There’s no city with more people in Canada than Toronto, and in all of North America, there are just three cities that are more populous — México City, New York and Los Angeles.

Their mayors include Miguel Ángel Mancera, the latest in a line of Mexican center-left leaders in a position that’s seen as a stepping stone to the Mexican presidency; Antonio Villaraigosa, a former speaker of the California State Assembly; and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent.  Even the fifth-most populous city in North America, Chicago, has a mayor in Rahm Emanuel who was a previous U.S. congressman and White House chief of staff.

Enter Rob Ford, who was elected mayor of Toronto in October 2010, a former city councillor who’s often taken pride in his anti-urban views over the years.  Canada (and much of North America) has been in a frenzy since Thursday night, when Gawker published a report stating that its reporter had been to Toronto, talked to a man who purportedly filmed Ford smoking crack cocaine and is looking to sell the footage to a news outlet.  Gawker is now trying to raise $200,000 to buy the video and publish it online.  A photo accompanying the Gawker report purports to show Ford in the process of buying and smoking crack cocaine.

As a resident of Washington, DC, it seems doubly insane to me that a major big-city mayor in North America would take such a reckless risk in light of the sensational conviction of our own former mayor Marion Barry for crack cocaine possession in 1990 (for the record, Barry had no advice for his beleaguered Toronto counterpart).  It’s not the first time that Ford’s made headlines, though, since his victory in the October 2010 municipal election — here’s a list of 42 highlights (or lowlights) of the Ford era from The Toronto Star.  It’s not the first time that Ford’s made headlines for substance abuse, and he admitted during the mayoral campaign to having a 1999 conviction for DUI and marijuana possession despite earlier denials.

Josh Barro at Bloomberg View has a great summary of how exactly such a relatively conservative and anti-urban was elected mayor of Canada’s biggest (and decidedly left-of-center) city, and much of it has to do with the 1998 amalgamation of the wider Toronto metropolitan area, including not just what was the older City of Toronto, but the six surrounding municipalities as well.  Barro quotes Canadian political consultant Jim Ross on the reasons Ford won:

From 2003 to 2010 Toronto was governed by a green-left former councillor named David Miller, and a lot of his initiatives were perceived by suburban Torontonians as favouring downtown over suburbs, and specifically favouring bikes over cars. There was also a well justified perception of wasteful spending and personal overindulgence by downtown councillors, a very expensive retirement party for one of them was often cited. Rob Ford was elected as a reaction by the suburbs against what was perceived as a city hall hostile to their lifestyles and careless with their tax dollars.

But the urban-suburban divide is becoming an even more pronounced part of Toronto city politics, and 15 years on, the Ford scandal highlights whether amalgamation is working at all and, more fundamentally, whether Torontonians are empowered to choose a representative municipal government.  It’s made Toronto a case study on the political geography of urban elections and city governance.

The 1998 amalgamation brought together the former core of urban Toronto with five additional surrounding municipalities — East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and York.  It was directed not by Toronto but by Ontario’s provincial government, then headed by Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris as a cost-cutting exercise, and it was always unpopular among Toronto residents, who widely opposed it in a February 1997 referendum.

Harris’s government nonetheless pushed forward, and the first mayoral election in November 1997 for the amalgamated Toronto pitted the more conservative incumbent mayor of North York, Mel Lastman, against the incumbent progressive New Democratic Party (NDP) mayor of the former, smaller city of Toronto, Barbara Hall.  Lastman defeated Hall by a decisive margin, due to his support in the more suburban municipalities outside the urban core, where Hall won.  Though Lastman was reelected virtually unopposed in 2000, the same dynamic repeated in November 2003, when Miller defeated conservative John Tory, based again on support that came largely from the downtown Toronto core.

But the urban/suburban divide reemerged in November 2010, when Ford faced a less-than-stellar candidate in George Smitherman, a member of the Ontario provincial government under Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty.  Ford ultimately defeated Smitherman by 47.1% to 35.6%, assisted in part by the fact that Miller’s deputy mayor Joe Pantalone won nearly 12% of the vote, splitting the ‘anti-Ford’ vote, but a ward-by-ward election map shows just how divided downtown Toronto remains from the rest of the greater Toronto municipality:

Even more than in 1997 and in 2003, the 2010 election played out along geographic lines — the boundary between Smitherman territory and the boundary between Ford territory largely parallels the boundary of the old pre-1998 City of Toronto.

Toronto’s politics are especially interesting because it is a rapidly growing city with a largely immigrant face, given that nearly one out of every two residents in Toronto was born outside Canada.  What’s more is that the immigration wave includes all sorts of ethnicities — while South Asians and Chinese predominate, the Toronto immigration wave certainly also includes Africans, other Asians, Latin Americans and Arabs as well, many of whom have come to Toronto since 1997 and live both within and outside the borders of the pre-1998 city.  In many ways, Toronto is a model city that’s attracted immigrants in a way that points to the future of Canada and even, perhaps, the United States and Europe as well.

The immigration-fueled growth of the city is one reason why, perhaps, Richard Florida has argued that Toronto should not revert to its pre-amalgamation borders, but try to build a better Toronto.  Florida argues that the lack of economic opportunity, not old boundaries, is what continues to separate the city, with high-skill ‘creative-class’ professions propelling growth in the downtown core and a depressed, formerly blue-collar middle-class economy struggling elsewhere:

The same forces of globalization that have powered Toronto’s rise are also behind the class divide that increasingly defines this city. Maps developed by my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute show that Toronto’s professional, knowledge and creative workers tend to live in the core and radiate out along transit lines. Lower-income and low-skill service workers get pushed farther afield. Traditional mixed-income neighbourhoods, once the norm, have become narrow buffer zones between a wealthy downtown and impoverished inner suburbs.

His prescription is, in part, to give even more power to the mayor’s office:

First is the fact of a weak, dare I say, powerless mayor’s office. As I’ve argued in this paper and elsewhere, Canada’s federal and provincial governments have downloaded many costs onto its cities, but left them with too little power to control their own destinies. As Alan Broadbent has pointed out, Toronto needs to become more like a province – with real power and the ability to raise real revenue to solve its problems and build its economy.

That’s a great policy idea, but it’s one that will take time, cooperation and purposeful engagement from the Toronto, Ontario and federal governments.  In the meanwhile, Toronto seems destined to remain divided along the lines of its new economic reality and its old geography all the same.  With an election approaching in 2014, the divisions seem likely to continue, especially if Ford runs for reelection or his brother, councillor Doug Ford, runs in his place.

Although Monday’s midterm elections are a clear victory for ‘Team PNoy,’ the electoral coalition of the widely popular president, Benigno ‘NoyNoy’ Aquino III,  they aren’t necessarily a defeat for vice president Jejomar ‘Jojo’ Binay, the most visible member of the opposition coalition, and he’ll turn toward the  Philippine presidential election in 2016 in as good a position as any other potential contender.

Aquino, who handily defeated former president Joseph Estrada in the May 2010 presidential election, chose senator Mar Roxas as his running mate when he abandoned his own presidential campaign to support Aquino for president.  But because Philippines vote separately on the president and the vice president, they elected Binay, and not Roxas, to the vice presidency.  Imagine a world where U.S. president Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, but instead of Democratic vice president Joe Biden, was forced to accept Republican Paul Ryan as vice president.

Although they head opposing political movements, Aquino and Binay have worked harmoniously together in office for the most part — it helps that they are presiding over one of the world’s booming economies, with 6.6% GDP growth in 2012 alone.  That factor, which brought so much success for ‘Team PNoy’ in the 2013 parliamentary elections, is likely to help favor Binay in the 2016 presidential contest.  Aquino won’t be able to run for reelection under the Philippine constitution, so Binay will be the senior incumbent running in 2016, and his advisers are already crowing that, notwithstanding the 2013 midterm elections, Binay is the man to beat in 2016. 

Roxas is likely to run in 2016 as the candidate of Aquino’s Partido Liberal ng Pilipinas (LP, Liberal Party of the Philippines), and with Aquino’s endorsement as the best candidate to further the reforms and prosperity of Aquino’s administration.  But as the incumbent vice president, Binay will be able to run on the country’s rising economic growth.  Having defeated Roxas for the vice presidency in 2010, Binay is seen as somewhat of a favorite against Roxas in a potential 2016 rematch for the presidency.  Roxas isn’t necessarily a lock for the Liberal Party’s nomination, and he could always pull out of the race in favor of Joseph ‘Jun’ Abaya, the secretary of transportation and communications.  Binay may also face Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr., who would like to run as the candidate of the Partido Nacionalista (NP, Nacionalista Party), and the surprise top vote-winner in the 2013 senatorial elections, independent Grace Poe Llamanzares, who’s part of the Team PNoy coalition and daughter of the late presidential candidate Fernando Poe, Jr., is now being mentioned as a potential 2016 contender as well.

Despite the fact that Binay’s own Nagkakaisang Alyansang Makabansa (UNA, United National Alliance) won just three senatorial seats to nine for Team PNoy in Monday’s election, only one of the ‘Team PNoy’ senators is actually a member of the Liberal Party itself — two senators, including Poe, are independents and three senators are Nacionalistas, with three additional senators belonging to smaller parties in the ‘Team PNoy’ coalition.  Furthermore, while the ‘Team PNoy’ senatorial victories mean that the UNA’s Juan Ponce Enrile is likely to lose the Senate presidency after five years, that’s not necessarily bad news for Binay personally, who will be able to take credit for any popular legislation that the Aquino administration passes.

Binay got his start, initially, as an ally of Aquino’s mother.  In the aftermath of the Marcos era, former president Corazon Aquino in 1986 appointed Binay mayor of Makati, one of the cities that comprise the wider metropolitan Manila area, and the financial heart of the Philippines.  Except for a brief period from 1998 to 2001 when his wife held the post, he was elected and reelected as mayor until 2010.  He served as the governor of greater Manila at the end of the first Aquino administration and he thereupon served as governor of the chairman of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority from 1998 to 2001 under former president Joseph Estrada.  Estrada himself made a sweeping comeback in winning the tightly contested Manila mayoral race, which gives the UNA another key position in advance of the 2016 election.

Furthermore, because Aquino’s nephew, Paolo ‘Bam’ Aquino IV, and Binay’s daughter, Nancy Binay, were both running in the senatorial election, it was seen as somewhat of a proxy race between Aquino and Binay.  Under the structure of Philippine senatorial elections, candidates campaign nationally and the top 12 vote-winners are elected to the Senate.  With unofficial results in, Binay has placed fifth on the list with around 1.35 million votes more than Aquino, who placed seventh.  That’s a fairly imperfect proxy for the 2016 presidential race, of course, but it gives Binay’s father some amount of momentum and it adds to the Binay family’s growing role in national politics.  Jojo Binay’s other daughter, Abigail Binay, is a member of the House of Representatives, and his son, Jejomar Binay, Jr., is the current mayor of Makati, and both were reelected on Monday with wide margins.

Election results are still being tallied in the Philippines (painfully slowly), but it’s been clear since Monday that the results would be good news for the incumbent president, Benigno ‘NoyNoy’ Aquino III.

It’s a result that was wholly expected for the Aquino administration, which is riding a crest of popularity over the fastest-growing economy in Asia (short of the Chinese economy) and over its efforts to reduce corruption in the Philippines, including a zealous effort to prosecute Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Aquino’s predecessor as president.

But there’s another more fundamental lesson from the elections that’s hiding in plain sight — namely, the vast extent to which Philippine political power remains in the hands of the same set of elite families that have held power for decades, the ‘political dynasties’ that some Philippines claim contribute to high levels of corruption within the country:

[T]he country’s political landscape “is getting worse,” Bobby Tuazon, director for policy studies at the Centre for People Empowerment in Governance, told Al Jazeera.  Tuazon projected that when all votes are counted, 21 of the 24 Senate seats will fall under the control of political families…. In the House of Representatives, about 80 percent of the 229 seats will also be dominated by dynasties….

“A dynasty, is a dynasty, is a dynasty,” Raymond Palatino, a youth sector representative in Congress, told Al Jazeera. “I refuse to believe that out of a population of 92 million, only a few families have this monopoly of intellect, passion and intention to serve our people.”

It’s a phenomenon that finds its genesis in Spanish colonial times, with mestizo (illustrado) families holding a disproportionate share of power that continued through American occupation and, after 1946, Philippine independence.  Some international election monitors have even recommended an anti-dynasty law.

That new generations of the same political dynasties have been elected to office isn’t necessarily an indication of anything untoward — Canada’s new Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau is the son of a former prime minister and U.S. president George W. Bush was himself the son of a former president.  But politics in the Philippines features an above-average level of political dynasty in a part of the world where strong political families are common, such as the Bhutto family’s role in Pakistani politics or the Gandhi-Nehru family role in Indian politics.

For all the credit given to Aquino’s administration over the past three years, it’s inescapable that the current president is himself part of a dominant political dynasty in Philippine politics, though his election and popularity owes much to the special role that his father, Benigno Aquino Jr., played as a critical opposition voice during the Marcos era (including his assassination in 1983 upon his return to Manila to lead the call for change), and the role of his mother, Corazon Aquino, in assuming the post-Marcos presidency.  But one of the 12 candidates who has been elected to the 24-member Philippine Senate is Paolo “Bam” Aquino IV, the 36-year-old nephew of the president, bringing yet another generation of the Aquino family into power.

Philippines chose one-half of the Senate and the entire House of Representatives in Monday’s midterm elections.  Though the members of the lower house are elected directly in single-member constituencies, the 12 members of the Senate are elected nationally — the top 12 vote-winners nationwide are ultimately elected, and though Bam Aquino is the only member of the ruling Partido Liberal ng Pilipinas (LP, Liberal Party of the Philippines) to be elected to the Senate, nine of the 12 are part of the ‘Team PNoy’ coalition that Aquino heads, which includes not only the Liberal Party, but also its traditional rival, the Partido Nacionalista (NP, Nacionalista Party).  Just three senators have been elected from the opposition coalition, the Nagkakaisang Alyansang Makabansa (UNA, United National Alliance).

Now more than 25 years after her husband’s fall from power, Imelda Marcos won reelection to the House of Representatives, as widely predicted, capping somewhat of a comeback for the Marcos family in recent years – her daughter, Imee Marcos, is the governor of the Philippine province of Ilocos Norte, and her son, Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, Jr., was elected to his first term in the Senate in 2010 and is considering a presidential campaign in 2016. 

Arroyo herself was also reelected to the House from Pampanga, despite the fact that she has been under ‘hospital arrest’ since October 2012.

Former president Joseph Estrada (pictured below), who was actually removed from office in 2001 and convicted for corruption in 2007, even made his own comeback — he was elected mayor of Manila in a close race against  Alfredo Lim, a former senator and Manila’s mayor from 1992 to 1998, one of the few bright spots for the opposition UNA on Monday.  His son, Joseph Victor Ejercito, is one of the three UNA senators elected this week.

When you look down the list of the remaining top 12 vote-winners who are likely be elected to the Senate according to unofficial results, Ejercito and Bam Aquino joins a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the political elite.

The top national vote-winner, Grace Poe Llamanzares, an independent candidate running under the ‘Team PNoy’ banner, is the daughter of Fernando Poe, Jr., the runner-up in the 2004 Philippine presidential election.

Nancy Binay, the fifth-place winner and the most popular UNA senatorial candidate, is the daughter of the vice president, Jejomar ‘Jojo’ Binay; her sister is a representative in the House, and her brother is the mayor of Makati, the financial heart of greater Manila.  Four additional senators are sons of former or sitting senators or representatives, and Cynthia Aguilar Villar, whose victory has not yet been confirmed, is the wife of a sitting senator.