Domestic Politics Archive

TOKYO, Japan — While legislatures around the world wind down their sessions ahead of the New Year, the government in Japan announced earlier this month it was extending its parliamentary session in an effort to resolve a debate that has for the last couple of months brought the legislative process here largely to a halt. On Dec.15, the administration of Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announced that the Diet session would be extended for another month, the first time in 14 years that a session has been extended into the new year. The decision was made to allow time to […]

Making predictions is a famously perilous pursuit. It doesn’t take a great deal of courage, however, to forecast which story will be the biggest of the coming year, the one that will dominate the news in 2008: the election of a new president of the United States. When the shopping stops after Christmas 2008 and Americans pause for a long weekend and the countdown to 2009, we will engage in the traditional collective look back at the year that was. It will be easy to spot the story that held our attention while watching television news, talking with friends, and […]

BANGKOK, Thailand — In the final days before an election that is supposed to herald the return of “democracy” to Thailand, protesters gate-crashed the national assembly in Bangkok. The protestors were angered by the unelected military-appointed national assembly’s last-minute passage of a slew of new laws before being dissolved — including a dubious and feared Internal Security Bill which would give the military highly questionable powers. The law, certain to be passed, enshrines the authority of the Internal Security Operations Command, a shadowy parallel military grouping with extensive powers under the prime minister. “It is unexcusable for the assembly to […]

EXPANDING FREE BORDERS — Last week the number of signatories of the EU’s Schengen Agreement jumped from 13 to 22, with the addition of nine more member states. This means that EU citizens are able to move freely, without checks, within an area expanded to 3.6 million square kilometers across Europe from France to the Baltic States (Britain is only a partial member of Schengen). In an age of world terrorism, it may seem like a risky development, but European officials maintain they have actually improved internal security within the European Union with the establishment of the Schengen Information System […]

Kenyans will elect a new president Dec. 27 in polls that are expected to be the most competitive since the East African country gained independence from Britain 44 years ago. More than 14 million voters, the highest number ever, will pick from nine contestants for Kenya’s top seat and from about 2,600 candidates for the country’s 210 parliamentary seats. But the real presidential contest will be between friends-turned-foes Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent, and Raila Odinga, a maverick opposition leader. Kibaki, the country’s third president, fell out with Odinga after the former allegedly reneged on a power-sharing agreement sculpted by a […]

It’s not easy being a dictator any more. Once upon a time, you could just hop on a tank, line up some well-armed supporters, and fire a few shots at the presidential palace. The previous resident would move out, alive or otherwise, and voilá: You had yourself a country. All it took after that was a pledge of hatred for Washington or Moscow and automatically the un-hated superpower would start writing checks and sending arms. The country was yours until the next guy hopped on a tank. It’s not so easy any more. These days, the pesky idea of democracy […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — If there is any beneficiary of the recent breakdown of Hugo Chávez’s mediation for a Colombian hostage exchange, it may well be the Venezuelan president himself. He was able to use Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, the man who revoked his mediation mandate, as a foil for his populist rhetoric. Ever the able opportunist, Chávez thereby distracted from internal problems by manufacturing an external enemy — though he still could not win Venezuela’s recent constitutional reform referendum. In Colombia, however, the scenario resulting from this presidential spat is bleak: primarily for the hostages who look set to remain […]

THE PARTY´S OVER — It was planned as a grand celebration. The occasion: the 25th anniversary of the Spanish Socialist Party´s first election victory following the restoration of democracy in Spain after nearly four decades of Franco Fascism. The evening was all the more festive because the Socialists (PSOE) were back in power under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Even so, the hero of the evening was Felipé Gonzalez, architect of the first election victory in October 1982, but a rather forgotten man among the new generation of Socialists. With new elections scheduled for March, however, the party at the grandly […]

PRISTINA, Kosovo — “When I travel through Albanian areas, I use my Kosovo license plate and when I reach Serbia or I’m back in Strpce I change it [to the Serbian plate],” says Milorad, a small retail shop owner. “I need to take these precautions, I don’t want to endanger my family,” he says. Milorad is from Strpce, one of the most southern Serb enclaves in the majority Albanian province of Kosovo. Strpce can only be reached by passing through a Kosovo Police Service (KPS) checkpoint and another manned by Ukrainian troops that are part of NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR). […]

TOKYO — Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s visit to Singapore late last month for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) must have come as something of a relief to the challenges and confusion reigning at home. At the meeting, Fukuda had a chance to reconfirm the warming nature of the relationship between Japan and China, which had become strained under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, while ASEAN nations also made a point of praising the Fukuda Doctrine as outlined by his father and former prime minister, Takeo Fukuda, which emphasized mutual confidence-building between Japan and the […]

The victory of Putin’s party in Sunday’s elections for the Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, was widely expected, and the results did not disappoint. According to the preliminary tally, the governing United Russia Party, whose list of candidates was headed by Putin himself, received almost two-thirds of the vote. In alliance with the two other pro-Kremlin parties (the Liberal Democratic Party and the Just Russia Party) that gained sufficient shares of the vote (7 percent) to receive national representation, the pro-Putin bloc will control an overwhelming majority in the Duma. Only the Communists, which won 11-12 percent of […]

PARIS — Are the deaths of two youngsters that sparked several nights of rioting in France last week being exploited for political purposes? Consider only that one of the two lawyers representing the families of the boys happens to be none other than the personal attorney of Ségolène Royal: the Socialist Party (PS) candidate who was defeated by Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential election May 6. It will be recalled that just two days before the vote, in an interview with French radio station RTL, Royal warned ominously that Sarkozy’s candidacy was “dangerous” and that there would be “violence” […]