Domestic Politics Archive

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looked at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II focuses on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Despite Tunisia’s success navigating its political transition by holding peaceful, fair elections, the challenges of keeping it sustainable remain enormous. If Tunisia’s newly elected leaders don’t deal with those challenges carefully, they could undermine the steady progress Tunisia has made over the past four years. The most alarming issue is the absence of a clear economic agenda in […]

Gambia yesterday accused the former head of the presidential guard of leading a small coup attempt that two U.S. citizens were also involved in. In an email interview, Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, discussed Gambian politics and the recent attempted coup. WPR: What is the nature of President Yahya Jammeh’s regime, and how strong is his support among the general public and military? Jeffrey Smith: Yahya Jammeh is a retrograde dictator, one of the last remaining strongmen in power on the African continent. For West Africa, a region that […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looks at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II will focus on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Tunisians are making history again. The birthplace of the Arab Spring seems to be setting itself up to be the home of Arab democracy, pluralism and peaceful transition—and a model for the entire Arab world. Last month, for the first time since its independence from France in 1956, Tunisia successfully held competitive parliamentary and presidential elections—praised by […]

Sweden was plunged into political crisis last month when its prime minister, Stefan Lofven, initially called for new elections to be held in March after the populist Sweden Democrats joined with the center-right opposition coalition to vote down the ruling Social Democrat and Green Party government budget. The crisis came just two months after a general election that brought the Social Democrats back to power. With the Social Democrat-Green coalition ruling as a minority, the Sweden Democrats found themselves in the powerful position of being the deciding vote in parliament. That allowed them to act on their hardline anti-immigration platform, […]

On Dec. 16, 2014, seven gunmen broke into a school in a high-security zone in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar, shooting indiscriminately into crowds of children, before splitting up and going room by room to execute dozens more. Armed with explosives, suicide jackets, automatic rifles and pistols, these men cornered their targets in their classrooms, setting one teacher who attempted to resist on fire as a lesson to the rest. Once in the school’s auditorium, they first shot and killed all those attempting to escape, and then went row by row to execute those who were left. Many were […]

The open feuding within Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, intensified last month, as rivals battled over the succession to 90-year-old President Robert Mugabe. This culminated in the dismissal by Mugabe of Vice President Joice Mujuru and her allies in the Cabinet, a move that handed Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa the advantage in the succession race. Mnangagwa benefited from the support of the president’s wife, Grace Mugabe. With Mujuru apparently neutralized, the question is whether that alliance will hold, or whether it will be undermined by rival ambitions. The purge of December 2014 still leaves a whole host of issues unresolved in […]

Just before Russians rang in the new year, opposition activist Alexei Navalny received a three-and-a-half-year suspended sentence for alleged fraud, while his younger brother Oleg faces imprisonment for the same term. Since Oleg is not known for his political activities, the move was widely interpreted as hostage-taking, indicating that Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to silence the elder Navalny without making him a martyr. As Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker, “This is a familiar tactic in a state with a long legacy of terror: in the nineteen-seventies, the Soviet government forced dissidents to leave the country by making […]