Domestic Politics Archive

KATMANDU, Nepal — Despite high hopes for Nepal’s “historic” April 10 vote, the early campaign period has indicated that elections will not be free, will not be fair and certainly won’t be fast. Instead, expect ongoing violence between political parties, widespread voter intimidation and a result around, say, two months after election day. That’s not to say the months of planning and millions of dollars will be a complete waste, but the vote probably won’t herald the birth of a “New Nepal,” as so many have hoped for after 10 years of civil war and half a decade of dubious […]

SO WHO WILL LEAD IN RUSSIA? — The election of Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s new president, and the virtual certainty that departing President Vladimir Putin will take over as prime minister has produced a new power-sharing situation, and a new buzzword to describe it: diarchy. Coming up with the term was the easy part. The hard part is carving up the territory before the May changeover. Lyudmila Alexandrovna, a columnist for ITAR-TASS says Putin’s aide, Igor Shuvalov, has been instructed to “draw up a new structure of executive power . . . in which the office of future Prime Minister […]

The victory of Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou in Saturday’s presidential elections in Taiwan has been greeted with much behind-the-scenes rejoicing among Chinese and American policymakers. Chinese leaders likely worried that their harsh crackdown in Tibet could have sparked a backlash in Taiwan, decreasing support for Ma, who was seen as more open to cooperating with Beijing than his opponent, Frank Hsieh Chang-ting. Hsieh is a former prime minister who belongs to the same political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), as President Chen Shui-bian. Taiwan’s constitution had prohibited Chen from seeking a third consecutive four-year presidential term. Ma […]

TOKYO — With stock markets around the world in turmoil, a rapidly appreciating currency, millions of pension records lost and signs the Japanese economy is slowing, now hardly seems a propitious time to have a vacancy at the head of the central bank of the world’s second largest economy. Yet Japan’s main opposition Democratic Party of Japan apparently begs to differ. Last Wednesday, the opposition-dominated upper house of the Diet rejected the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s second nominee, Japan Bank of International Cooperation Gov. Koji Tanami, to replace outgoing Bank of Japan chief Toshihiko Fukui, whose term expired the same […]

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Since independence, Malaysia has been the kind of feeble democracy where elections have been held regularly, but where it is usually quite clear beforehand who will win — and win big. However, the latest vote, on March 8, surprised everyone, with the opposition gaining 37 percent of parliament’s 220 seats and winning control of five of the federation’s 13 states — namely Kelantan, Perak, Kedah, Penang and Selangor. After the previous election, held in 2004, the opposition controlled only Kelantan and had just 9 percent of the seats in parliament. Anwar Ibrahim, the de facto leader of […]

GOING FISHING IN MALTA AND SPAIN — This item must be prefaced with a reminder that in the 2004 U.S. presidential election 55.3 percent of Americans voted, and thatwas the highest voter turnout in a decade. In Europe, there were two general elections Sunday in which voter turnout was an issue. In Spain, the experts were predicting that the lower the turnout, the worse Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s chances of re-election would be. A low turnout was reckoned as anything below 70 percent. In the event, however, 74 percent of Spaniards did their civic duty, and Zapatero […]

After two months of post-election turmoil, which claimed up to 1,500 lives and displaced more than half a million people, Kenya is slowly recovering from civil strife. A power-sharing deal between erstwhile rivals President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga seems to have pulled the east African country from the brink of a civil war. The United States and other donors are sinking millions of dollars into the implementation of the deal, which will make Odinga an executive prime minister and give him two deputies. But the heart-on-the-sleeve moments that greeted the deal — especially from Odinga’s side — […]

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Although it has received much less attention than the violence in Belgrade following Kosovo’s declaration of independence last month, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia’s neighbor to the west, has also seen violence in the wake of the Kosovo declaration. In recent weeks, up to 10,000 protestors in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the majority-Serb Bosnian province of Republika Srpska, have stormed the streets and attacked the U.S. Consulate and other foreign diplomatic missions. The Banja Luka rioters demand that Republika Srpska (RS) be allowed to secede. Observers insist that the Banja Luka protestors are […]

TENSION IN THE ANDES — It was inevitable that the Organization of American States would express its strong disapproval of Colombia’s incursion into Ecuador to take out FARC leader Raúl Reyes. The South American continent is a patchwork of contiguous countries, and the idea of troops trespassing in and out of countries at will raises serious issues of sovereignty. Brazil, for example, borders no less than 10 other countries; Bolivia has five immediate neighbors, and virtually every other country has a minimum of three. There was, however, no question of going so far as condemning the Colombians, because everyone (with […]

The line of those waiting patiently for the demise of Fidel Castro was a long one. For nearly 50 years the queue included foreign exiles, eager businessmen, American politicians, and numerous Cuban dissidents. Yet when the moment finally arrived late last month, it wasn’t nearly the historic, providential occasion most had envisioned. Rather than go out with a bang — which very nearly happened at the height of the Cold War — Castro chose instead to slip quietly from view, the world’s most infamous, and recently bedridden, autocrat leaving his followers with nothing but the vague plea that he wished […]

BRUSSELS — NATO and European Union officials in Brussels met the landslide election victory of former Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev, with ambivalence this week. Officials of both bodies expressed little optimism that a change of leadership will bring any great change in the direction of Russia’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. Medvedev won more than 70 percent of the vote, defeating three candidates who had no chance to confront Medvedev in debates and had little realistic chance of victory after Putin named his successor. According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, 64 percent of eligible voters participated in […]

On March 1, the conflict over the disputed outcome of last month’s presidential elections in Armenia turned deadly when riot police and Interior Ministry troops clashed with armed opposition demonstrators in the capital city. Dozens of people were killed or injured in downtown Yerevan, where tens of thousands of Armenians had engaged in round-the-clock street protests and established a makeshift tent camp. The incident apparently started with a police tracer bullet accidentally ricocheted and killed a demonstrator, enraging the protesters to attack the police. The government responded to the melee by declaring a state of emergency in the capital and […]

TOKYO — Recent reports that Japanese lawmakers have been discussing the feasibility of constructing a 200-kilometer tunnel linking Japan with the Korean peninsula encapsulates as well as anything the current optimism over relations between the two countries. Last week, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda visited Seoul to attend the inauguration of incoming South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, with Fukuda taking the symbolic honor of being the first foreign leader to be received by the new president. At the summit, the two leaders agreed to restart the regular top level shuttle diplomacy that was agreed under former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro […]