Domestic Politics Archive

This month, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk faced protests in the capital followed by the defection of a member of his governing party in parliament. In an email interview, Aleks Szczerbiak, professor of politics and contemporary European studies at the University of Sussex, explained the sources of Polish discontent and the implications for the stability of Tusk’s government. WPR: What is driving the dissatisfaction with Tusk’s government? Aleks Szczerbiak: The slump in support for Tusk’s government is due to a number of factors. Continued economic sluggishness has accompanied a growing perception that the government is drifting and has failed to […]

HASAKAH GOVERNORATE, Syria — The little Kurdish fighting position looks far more professional than what is usually seen in Syria. Instead of just a pile of sand for protection, it has proper fighting and communications trenches, sandbags and even a small tower at the far end for the machine gunner. Discipline is what distinguishes the People’s Protection Units (YPG) from the mainly Arab rebel groups the Kurdish militia is fighting in northeastern Syria. Traveling across Syria’s Kurdish-majority northeast, one is struck by the difference between the areas controlled by the YPG and its political master, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), […]

Parliamentary elections held Sept. 21 in the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq further cemented the undisputed leadership of the regional government’s president, Massoud Barzani. Reigning supreme in Iraqi Kurdistan, dominating the political scene in Iraq and enjoying his status as a major Western go-between in Syria, Barzani has become a key political figure to watch in the Middle East this year. The official results are not out, but early exit polls point to a sound victory for Barzani’s ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the voting. They also indicate that the KDP’s coalition partner, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), […]

The Afghan government and its international supporters have long viewed the estimated $1 trillion to $3 trillion worth of natural resources thought to lie beneath Afghanistan’s rugged landscape as being among the country’s best prospects for economic independence. But hopes of developing Afghanistan’s extravagant array of natural resources—including world class deposits of iron, gold, copper, lithium and lucrative rare earth metals—are in serious jeopardy. Wavering international investors, Afghanistan’s unresolved and contested new draft law concerning resource extraction and the political uncertainty associated with next year’s presidential elections and substantial NATO drawdown risk dashing efforts to transform Afghanistan into an economically […]

Al-Shabab, the Islamic extremist group behind the recent siege on an upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya, has since carried out attacks on Kenyan towns near the Somalia border. The group has threatened to continue the violence until Kenyan troops withdraw from Somalia, and even as forensic experts work to put the pieces together and determine the death toll after the devastating terrorist attack on Nairobi’s Westgate mall, analysts are beginning to ask what is next for al-Shabab. “The concern is that because al-Shabab is not really a conventional threat anymore, and yet they clearly want to retain their credibility and […]

Brazil and the United States have long had a relationship unlike others in the Western Hemisphere. Despite some obvious similarities and important common interests, Brasilia and Washington have not traditionally shared the same worldview—perhaps they never will. As a result, policymakers are frequently left searching for an elusive equilibrium in the relationship, and casual observers can be taken by surprise when events, such as the revelations of U.S. intelligence gathering activities in Brazil, occur that highlight both the promise and also the fragility of the bilateral partnership. Brazil is clearly a nation on the rise. Its strong democracy makes it […]

A group of Tuareg rebels in northern Mali, whose rebellion against the central government sparked a coup and eventually a French intervention, announced yesterday that they were backing out of a June 2013 peace agreement with the Malian government. The move is a step backward for the efforts to stitch Mali back together again. But as Kamissa Camara wrote in WPR earlier this month, the agreement put on hold yesterday was problematic to begin with: Mali’s central government has signed a series of peace agreements with Tuareg rebels over the years, but they have only served short-term purposes. The latest […]

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is meeting U.S. President Barack Obama today at the White House, where the two leaders are expected to reach deals on defense cooperation and trade in nuclear technology. That reflects the interest on both sides to move past the “differences and divisions have taken center stage in recent months,” as Richard Fontaine explained in World Politics Review last month: Despite drift in some key areas of the relationship, the underlying strategic rationale for it remains. Washington is rebalancing its foreign policy to Asia, attempting to allot that region greater diplomatic attention, military resources and commercial […]

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, Madagascar’s unelected transitional president, Andry Rajoelina, told world leaders that he had decided not to run in his country’s upcoming presidential election, slated for Oct. 25. The decision, Rajoelina said, would “unblock the political crisis.” Rajoelina came to office on the back of a military coup in 2009 that ousted elected President Marc Ravalomanana, who is currently living in exile in South Africa. As Simon Massey wrote in a WPR briefing last month, Madagascar has suffered from the ensuing protracted crisis: The intervening period has seen deterioration in the rule of law, declining standards […]

When heads of state attending the United Nations General Assembly arrived in New York two years ago, they shared the spotlight with another group of people massing in the city. Lower Manhattan was becoming the epicenter of a movement that became known as Occupy Wall Street, a manifestation of the wave of people power that was sweeping the globe. Back then, masses of everyday citizens were flexing their muscles worldwide. Demonstrators seemed to have the upper hand—peacefully toppling dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, raising complaints and demands seemingly everywhere. The very meaning of power seemed to be changing. Over the […]

This month, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy offered to hold talks with Catalonia but did not offer a vote on independence for the Spanish region whose citizens have long sought greater autonomy. In an email interview, Elisenda Paluzie, a professor of economic theory at the University of Barcelona, explained the state of the Catalan independence movement. WPR: What is the state of the Catalan independence movement in terms of its degree of organization and level of popular support? Elisenda Paluzie: On one hand, there is an important grassroots movement for independence, which has strong popular support and is very diverse […]

India’s sheer size and poverty have meant that addressing the needs of its hundreds of millions of poor and vulnerable citizens has preoccupied Indian policymakers since independence. Unsurprisingly, the mix of strategies, the resulting policy instruments to undergird them and their relative effectiveness have been a matter of contentious debate. As with other poor developing countries, India’s efforts to improve the welfare of its vulnerable populations have, at least in principle, involved three major components. The first, given the abysmally low income of the average Indian household, has been to try to raise incomes through growth with the assumption that […]

By most measures, the income gap between urban and rural households in China is one of the largest in the world, with urban residents’ incomes more than triple those of their rural counterparts. Not surprisingly, then, improving rural incomes has become the main target of social welfare policies in China today, though it is too early to tell whether such policies will be enough to reduce the rural-urban income gap. The new social policies have also been introduced in the context of two long-term demographic trends of great significance: China’s high-speed urbanization and the rapid aging of its population. China’s […]

Among developing countries, Brazil is increasingly seen as a model for social development. Its achievements over the past two decades are impressive. The share of the population living in extreme poverty fell from 16.4 percent in 1995 to 4.7 percent in 2009. Inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient fell more than 10 percent in the same period, to 0.53, where 0 represents perfect equality of income distribution and 1.0 perfect inequality. Growth has been an important driver for these trends, particularly because over the past decade Brazil’s growth has been distinctly pro-poor: Personal income among the poorest 10 percent […]

A state of emergency in place, curfews that begin at 7 p.m. on Fridays, army tanks in the streets, Islamists either dead or in prison, Egypt’s aging former dictator Hosni Mubarak out of jail, a rise in Islamist militant attacks against security targets and the intimidation of journalists and human rights workers: These are some of the developments since June 30 that have left some wondering whether, two and a half years after the uprising that brought Mubarak down, Egypt is in fact going through a counterrevolution. On July 3, three days after millions took to the streets calling for […]

BERLIN—In national elections on Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), performed even better than their own polls suggested they would. The CDU and its Bavaria-based sister party, the Christian Social Union, won 311 seats in parliament. The Social Democratic Party won 192 seats, the Left Party 64 and theGreen Party 63. But Merkel’s victory comes at the price of losing her Free Democratic Party (FDP) coalition partner as the third-term chancellor works to form her new government, most likely in a coalition with the Social Democrats. The FDP failed to win the 5 […]

The terrorist assault on Nairobi’s Westgate mall comes amid a lengthy military campaign by Kenyan forces to root out the militant group al-Shabab from southeastern Somalia. That intervention has proved more difficult than Kenyan officials initially predicted and sparked fears—now apparently realized—of terrorist blowback within Kenya. This background note reviews WPR’s extensive coverage of the Kenyan intervention and Somalia’s state of governance and security. Al-Shabab’s Looming Threat in Kenya After Somalia Intervention, Kenya Faces War Within, by Charles Wachira, Dec. 12, 2012: In the wake of its intervention into Somalia, Kenya has feared a backlash at home. Kenya Gets Pro-Active […]