A Hong Kong court ruled last week that the largest indebted property developer in the world, Evergrande, would be liquidated. The ruling opened up a slew of larger questions about the future of the Chinese economy, especially the relationships between the central government, local governments, the private sector and households.
Last week’s defeat of a controversial amnesty measure underscores the difficulties facing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Having deftly engineered an improbable return to office after last year’s elections, Sanchez now finds himself at the head of a coalition even more unruly than his previous complex, multiparty alliance.
The past three decades of Latin American history are full of presidents who stretched the constitutional limits of power and extended their mandate. Most, but not all, left their country worse than they found it. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele’s name can now be added to that list. His legacy depends on what happens in the coming five years.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel replaced the country’s economy minister, amid delays to planned price hikes for fuel and transportation that the government blamed on a cyberattack. The fate of the measures, which had been scheduled for Feb. 1, is now uncertain. But the economic crisis that made them necessary is exceedingly clear.
In April 2021, Cuba experienced a watershed moment when Miguel Diaz-Canel became the leader of the Cuban Communist Party, completing a political transition that began three years earlier when Diaz-Canel was inaugurated as president. Now, for the first time since the 1959 revolution, a Castro leads neither the country nor the party, making way for a new generation of leaders to chart the island nation’s path forward.
Is U.S. President Joe Biden too focused on defending democracy, as some observers have claimed recently? One can argue that the Biden administration is too maximalist in its aims, even to the point of trying to do too much. But is it truly due to a hyper-focus on the defense of democracy, both at home and abroad?
Djibouti has built its economic model around shipping services and maritime logistics, and among its most prominent partners is its landlocked neighbor, Ethiopia. To cater to Ethiopia’s needs, Djibouti has built a host of new infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, Ethiopia’s port deal with Somaliland has set off alarm bells in Djibouti.
One of the most important elections of the year, especially for the United States, will be in Mexico, where the next president will have to navigate not only the country’s internal problems, but also manage ties with Washington and deal with the increasingly negative attention the country receives north of the border.
When Nigerian President Bola Tinubu was elected chairperson of the ECOWAS last July, he underscored his commitment to defending democracy across the region, which had already seen a string of military coups. That could come back to haunt him, given recent developments in the region and ECOWAS’ performance under Tinubu’s leadership.