Domestic Politics Archive

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and host Peter Dörrie discuss the elections in Iran, South Korea’s missile defense program and the Colombian government’s peace talks with the FARC. For the report, Robert Crews, the director of the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, joins us to explain how Russia’s Muslim population fits into President Vladimir Putin’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. Listen:Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant articles on WPR: Iran’s Election Results Show Pendulum Swinging Away From Hard-Liners North Korea’s Provocations Revive U.S. Missile Shield in South Korea Santos […]

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela’s ongoing political battle between its three branches of government, which has paralyzed efforts to stop the country’s slide into the economic abyss, is slated to get worse this weekend when the opposition takes to the streets to press President Nicolas Maduro to resign. The Democratic Unity Roundtable—the opposition coalition known by its Spanish acronym, MUD, that won a parliamentary majority in last year’s elections—has called for demonstrations in Caracas and other cities Saturday as part of a full-court press to end Venezuela’s crisis peacefully by forcing Maduro out and holding fresh presidential elections. In a press […]

Clashes erupted in the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdane on Monday when Islamist fighters attacked military and police posts. Scores were killed, including seven civilians, 13 security officers and 46 militants. Many observers have characterized the assault, which occurred just 20 miles from the Libyan border, as the latest example of the Libyan conflict’s dangerous spillover across a porous border. But the attack also reveals that, even as the self-proclaimed Islamic State gains ground in Libya, the most significant threat to Tunisia’s security resides within its borders. That’s because the militants, who claimed to be taking over the town as […]

Last month’s elections for Iran’s parliament and Assembly of Experts were complicated by the elaborate and extensive vetting procedure that filters out candidates considered too radical for the system. The overwhelming majority of those disqualified candidates belonged to the progressive end of the spectrum, usually referred to as reformists. Yet despite the authorities’ efforts to manage the outcome, Iran’s hard-liners still lost their majority in Iran’s 290-member parliament, or Majlis, while moderates won a majority in the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body tasked with choosing the next supreme leader. Key hard-liners, including two prominent clerics from the Assembly of […]

Colombian peace negotiators and their counterparts from the country’s largest guerrilla group are working against the clock, with less than two weeks remaining before the March 23 deadline for a peace deal set by President Juan Manuel Santos and leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). But while the calendar says peace is only days away, the reality on the ground suggests that reaching a permanent agreement could be more difficult now than it appeared only a few months ago. Colombians, who will ultimately vote on whether or not to accept the final deal, are growing increasingly skeptical […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the impact of corruption and various countries’ efforts to combat it. Prosecutors in Brazil announced last month that they are investigating Peruvian President Ollanta Humala for allegedly taking bribes worth $3 million from the Brazilian engineering firm Odebrecht. In an email interview, Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt, an associate professor at St. Mary’s University in Canada and author of “Corruption as Power: Criminal Governance in Peru during the Fujimori Era (1990-2000),” discussed corruption and governance in Peru. WPR: How widespread is corruption in Peru, and what impact does it have on […]

Seven years ago, as he prepared to take office, Barack Obama made it clear that when it came to the issue of torture, his inclination was “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Obama clearly believed that torture had taken place under the Bush administration; he declared unequivocally in January 2009 that “waterboarding is torture.” But Obama decided that opening up questions about the practices the Bush administration had authorized could do more harm than good, and would be a distraction from his larger political agenda. To a large degree, he was right. It’s highly unlikely that prosecuting Bush […]

Last week, Andrew Holness, leader of Jamaica’s opposition Labour Party, was sworn in as prime minister, after winning the Feb. 25 elections on an anti-austerity platform. In an email interview, Jermaine McCalpin, a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, discussed the election and politics in Jamaica. WPR: What were the major policy priorities of the outgoing People’s National Party (PNP) government, and what was its track record while in office? Jermaine McCalpin: The PNP-led government made economic stability one of its primary goals. It successfully negotiated several International Monetary Fund-backed loans, improved the country’s credit rating and lowered […]

In September 2015, an elaborate ceremony marked the opening of a mosque that promises to be the grandest in Europe. The mosque—a sprawling white marble complex with emerald and golden domes and minarets that spiral toward the sky—emerged not in Paris, Brussels, Berlin or London, but in the center of Moscow. There it joined a cityscape dominated by the golden onion domes and crosses of the Russian Orthodox Church and the bell towers of the Kremlin. The event took on special meaning for many of the Russian capital’s Muslim residents, mostly migrants from across the country and the former Soviet […]

After welcoming more than a million refugees into Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval ratings have seen better days. Discontent with her open-door policy has steadily risen, and so has support for right-wing populists. Her push for a European Union-wide solution seems increasingly likely to fail, while the question of her political survival has crept into headlines at home and abroad. The sheer scale of Europe’s escalating refugee crisis, the most serious since World War II, has been the driving external force behind this unsettling reversal of Merkel’s political fortune. But there has also been a strong domestic one: Horst Seehofer, […]

The migrant and refugee crisis, the dangers lurking beneath the surface of the eurozone, the United Kingdom’s potential exit, war just beyond its borders—the European Union arguably faces the greatest risks in its nearly six-decade history. Linked to all these challenges are some of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which once most enthusiastically embraced the EU project but are now starting to push back against Brussels. An extraordinary conference of the prime ministers of the Visegrad Group—Poland, Hungary, and the Czech and Slovak Republics—on Feb. 15 led to a statement reasserting the members’ insistence on “more effective protection” […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the potential impact on members’ economies. Last month, following large protests against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Santiago, Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Munoz defended the 12-country trade pact, calling it a politically and economically sound route for Chile. In an email interview, Roland Benedikter, a senior research scholar at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and author of “Chile in Transition: Prospects and Challenges of Latin America’s Forerunner of Development,” discussed the benefits and drawbacks of Chile’s membership in the TPP. WPR: What are the […]

On Feb. 5, Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, removed the entire high command of the country’s armed forces. The move followed a public dispute about the amount paid by the Ministry of the Environment in 2010 to acquire a military-owned plot of land in the city of Guayaquil, which was incorporated into a natural reserve. After an investigation, the government claimed that it had overpaid by $41 million and would therefore reduce its obligations to the Social Security Institute of the Armed Forces (ISSFA), the original owner of the land. The military publicly rejected the accusations and resisted the reimbursement of […]

If ever there was a case study on the dangers of allowing unlimited presidential terms, it is Zimbabwe. The southern African country shows in stark relief the perils of allowing one man to helm the state indefinitely. It demonstrates how difficult it becomes to remove him the longer he stays in power. And, tragically, it reveals what a high price the people pay when a regime becomes immovably entrenched. In the event anyone doubted the plans of aging Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, he spelled them out as clearly as anyone could a few weeks ago at the African Union summit […]

On Feb. 21, voters went to the polls for the first round of Niger’s presidential election. Like many other West African states, Niger has a two-round system, in which the election goes to a run-off if no candidate wins an absolute majority. Niger faces just such a scenario: According to official results, incumbent President Mahamadou Issoufou, who took office in 2011, scored 48.4 percent of the votes. In the second round, scheduled for March 20, Issoufou will face the former speaker of the National Assembly, Hama Amadou, who won 17.8 percent in the first round. Despite the vulnerability that incumbents […]