Domestic Politics Archive

After months of delays, polling booths finally opened in Venezuela last Sunday for gubernatorial elections in each of the country’s 23 states. Accusations of fraud have already marred the results, as candidates backed by President Nicolas Maduro and his regime won an overwhelming majority of seats despite poor polling numbers that pointed to an opposition victory. Candidates with the opposition coalition have demanded an electoral audit in every state, citing cases of voter intimidation, repeat ballots and nonfunctioning polling booths. The opposition’s failure to turn the tide on the regional level looks like a major political loss, but the situation […]

The royal decree permitting Saudi women to apply for driver’s licenses in June 2018, issued late last month, was a highly visible statement of intent from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that his plans to modernize and reform Saudi Arabia remain on track. Uncertainty over the viability of the crown prince’s much-vaunted plans to transform the Saudi economy had mounted after the partial reversal of austerity measures last April and reports in September that the National Transformation Program, a series of economic reforms with a target date of 2020, was being revised. Slower than expected progress on restructuring Saudi Aramco, […]

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on income inequality and poverty reduction in various countries around the world. In late August, British Prime Minister Theresa May wrote in an op-ed that excessive pay to some business executives in the United Kingdom represented the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” The statement followed up on her Conservative Party’s manifesto, which was unveiled last spring and includes a proposal to limit corporate executive compensation in an effort to reduce income inequality. But those plans have gone nowhere so far, despite popular resentment over Britain’s inequality—an important factor in the […]

On Nov. 26, Cubans will go to the polls to elect delegates to 168 municipal assemblies, the first step in an electoral process that will culminate next February when the National Assembly, Cuba’s parliament, will select a new president. In 2013, when Raul Castro pledged not to seek a third term, he also imposed a two-term limit for all senior government and Communist Party leadership positions. That means the succession will replace not only Castro but almost all the remaining members of the “historical generation” who fought to overthrow Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship in 1959. The changing of the guard comes […]

BOLOGNA—Italy’s Five Star Movement has a new leader. At the national meeting for the upstart populist party late last month—calling it a congress would be far too formal for the anti-establishment movement—its co-founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, stepped down as the political leader, although he will remain its “garante,” or judge of final appeal for internal disputes. An online primary in which a mere 37,000 people voted anointed Luigi Di Maio as the new political head of the M5S, as the party is known in Italy. The election was clearly the result of a backroom fix of the kind the M5S […]

When China’s top officials convene in Beijing next week for the Communist Party’s 19th Congress, President Xi Jinping could further consolidate his growing political power and advance his agenda. Xi has already dismissed two high-ranking generals, in his latest maneuver to reform the People’s Liberation Army and assert more authority over its ranks. In an email interview, Timothy R. Heath, a senior international defense research analyst at the RAND Corporation specializing in China, explains what further steps Xi will likely make at the Party Congress, what they mean for reform in the Chinese military, and if Xi could face any […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss the Trump administration’s move to decertify the Iran nuclear deal and what it means for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. For the Report, Emirza Adi Syailendra talks with Peter Dörrie about why 19 years after the fall of Suharto, Indonesia’s democracy remains tenuous and its institutions weak. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines, as well as what you’ve seen on WPR, please think about supporting our work by subscribing. We’re currently offering a 25 […]

The hurricanes that swept through the Caribbean last month were a stark reminder of the vulnerability of its small island states to events largely outside their control. In recent years, Caribbean countries have entered a new era of economic and environmental instability entirely different in scope from what they endured only a decade ago at the height of the global financial crisis, which hit many islands hard given their dependence on trade, tourism and investment from the United States. Climate change and the shifting effects of globalization are significant new obstacles to their continued growth. With the earth’s climate beginning […]

On Oct. 15, Austrians will go to the polls to elect a new government, with all signs pointing to a rightward shift in its ruling coalition. Just two weeks before the parliamentary elections, the government put into force a new law that prohibits individuals from covering their faces in public—a not-so-subtle signal to right-wing voters of the government’s stance on Muslims and the full-body burqa and other coverings worn by some Muslim women. In an email interview, Stefan Lehne, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and former director general of political affairs at the Austrian Ministry for European and International […]

Kenya’s long-running political drama is sinking deeper into crisis, testing the outermost limits of the country’s election laws. Its highest court seemed at first to have struck a rare victory for judicial independence with its declaration that August’s presidential election, which gave a second term to President Uhuru Kenyatta, was “invalid, null and void,” necessitating a rerun. But as the weeks have passed, the Supreme Court ruling looks more like a mixed blessing that guaranteed a prolonged political morass. The new vote was supposed to take place before the end of October, but very few of the underlying problems identified […]

Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about press freedom and safety in various countries around the world. The murders of two journalists in India in September were just the latest sign of the growing threat to press freedom in the country. In addition to outright attacks on their lives, Indian journalists face mounting pressure to not report on sensitive topics like extremism or on stories that are critical of the government and major businesses. In an email interview, Steven Butler, the Asia Program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, discusses the troubling history of violence […]

PARIS—France’s parliament is poised to pass a controversial counterterrorism law, after the National Assembly and Senate reconciled their respective versions of the bill Monday. The lower house is now set to vote the final text into law today, with the Senate to follow suit next week. The law serves to integrate into the statutory code many of the measures that were adopted under a three-month state of emergency declared after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015. Later extended to six months, the state of emergency has been renewed systematically since then. It will now be replaced by the new […]

After several false starts over the past decade, the United States finally lifted sanctions it first levied against Sudan nearly two decades ago. The decision came late last week, after the Trump administration had extended its deadline over the summer on whether to make the Obama administration’s easing of sanctions permanent. The sanctions relief for Sudan was one of former President Barack Obama’s final, surprising foreign policy moves in office. The U.S. has imposed the financial restrictions since the 1990s in response to the Sudanese regime’s penchant for harboring terrorists and for the atrocities it has committed, including the genocide […]

There are few things more important to average Palestinians than seeing reconciliation between their two main political factions, Fatah and Hamas. For a decade, the Palestinian political system has been divided between them, with Fatah governing in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. While the split has suited the parochial interests of both factions, which have been able to manage affairs in their respective enclaves uncontested by the other, it has been disastrous to Palestinians as a whole and to the national interest of ending Israel’s military occupation. Last week, Fatah and Hamas embarked on a new […]

Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader and former president of Iraq, died earlier this month, five years after being incapacitated by a stroke and days after a controversial referendum on Kurdish independence. His life and legacy offer insights into the complex mix of leadership and identity in Kurdistan and Iraq—or, for that matter, in Catalonia and other places where identity does not align easily with the borders of a nation state. Talabani was a towering figure in both Kurdish and Iraqi politics, and moved easily between these two magnetic poles. No one could doubt his devotion to Kurdish rights and the […]

YANGON, Myanmar—As Israel’s High Court weighs a ban on weapons sales to Myanmar, where the United Nations’ top human rights official has denounced a military campaign as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” Israel’s Defense Ministry—no stranger to isolation—is unrepentant. In the latest outburst of violence in Myanmar’s volatile Rakhine state, the military’s blistering crackdown in response to attacks in August from Rohingya insurgents has triggered an unprecedented exodus. More than 500,000 Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority, have fled into Bangladesh. International condemnation has been swift, with rights groups exerting pressure on Western nations to cut military-to-military engagement. The United […]

The stakes of the election for governor of Jakarta earlier this year were, in the eyes of nearly all observers, much larger than that particular office. After all, it was only five years ago that Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, used his victory in the same race to transform himself from a well-regarded but somewhat obscure mayor into a powerful national figure. With that precedent in mind, the candidates and their backers saw the election—a two-round affair held in February and April—as an opportunity to position themselves for general elections in 2019. The incumbent, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja […]