Domestic Politics Archive

For many years, North Korea’s relationship with the outside world has endlessly cycled between belligerence and crisis, always backed by an endless chorus of hysterical hostility. Recently, though, things seemed to be heading in a very different direction. Since late March, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has held two cordial meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. And during a landmark April summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Kim promised to work toward an official end to the Korean War and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The next big step for Kim was a planned June meeting with […]

The announcement last week that Singapore will be the site of the summit on June 12 between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—just a week after it will host the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s premier security forum—once again put the city-state in the international spotlight. But within its own region of Southeast Asia, Singapore already faced a year of heightened attention and expectations. It holds the annual rotating chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations amid a series of domestic, regional and global challenges, and has recently become a more vocal defender of the […]

Iraqis went to the polls last weekend in an election that was closely watched by outside powers, especially Iran and the United States. Both Tehran and Washington had hoped voters would solidify their own respective plans for Iraq by choosing their preferred candidates to lead the next government in Baghdad. The results came as a shock. It’s early in the government-forming process and surprises could still occur. But the election alone suggests the biggest geopolitical loser from Iraq’s latest democratic exercise was neighboring Iran. That doesn’t mean, however, that the U.S. found much to celebrate in the results. The top […]

ATHENS—“Burn them alive!” The sinister shouts of far-right thugs to migrants and refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos last month made news all over the world. The thugs had attacked and injured hundreds of refugees camping in the central square of Mytilene, the island’s capital. The police didn’t intervene. While many hoped it was a one-off, the scenes were repeated two weeks ago, when Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras visited the island. The same far-right groups attacked activists, journalists and even police officers. Again, no arrests were made. For those following Greek politics, this might sound all too familiar. […]

NAIROBI, Kenya—Epitace Nimbona spent 17 years in the Burundian army, climbing to the rank of captain. As an infantry soldier, he fought against rebels during the country’s civil war. He then advanced to a military university and underwent logistics training in the capital, Bujumbura, and in nearby Kenya. Later, he trained with American soldiers and deployed with two separate peacekeeping missions elsewhere in Africa. His career, however, ran aground following President Pierre Nkurunziza’s bid for a third term in 2015—a bid that many people inside and outside the country deemed to be unconstitutional. Protests against it, and Nkurunziza’s ensuing crackdown, […]

The United States has found a new way to hurt the United Nations Security Council: Ignore it. Last week, I predicted that U.S. President Donald Trump was about to pull out of the Iranian nuclear bargain, setting the stage for a showdown in the council. This was half right. Trump quit the deal Tuesday. But his national security adviser, John Bolton, signaled that the U.S. does not plan to return to the U.N. to reimpose multilateral sanctions on Tehran. Instead, Washington will rely on unilateral secondary sanctions, which can cut non-American companies out of the U.S. market if they continue […]

In a result few pollsters and analysts predicted, including myself, last week Malaysia’s opposition coalition, led by 92-year-old former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, defeated the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Najib Razak in national elections that marked the first transfer of power in Malaysia’s modern history. The long-dominant United Malays National Organization, or UMNO, and the coalition it leads, Barisan Nasional, have governed Malaysia since its independence in 1957. To the Najib government’s credit, despite rumors on election night and the following morning that it would take measures to defraud the voters, or prevent a change of government, the transition […]

Last week, a significant number of Gabon’s top politicians suddenly found themselves out of work. On April 30, the country’s Constitutional Court delivered a surprise ruling that dissolved the National Assembly, the lower house of Gabon’s parliament, and called for the government to step down. Prime Minister Emmanuel Issoze-Ngondet complied the next day, issuing a letter of resignation on behalf of himself and his ministers. At first glance, the ruling appeared to be a straightforward rebuke of the government’s failure to hold legislative elections, which are now nearly 18 months overdue. “It is clear that the government has not been […]

On May 8, Armenian opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan was chosen by lawmakers to become the next prime minister, culminating three weeks of massive popular demonstrations against the country’s opaque and corrupt political establishment. The initial catalyst for the demonstrations was former President Serzh Sargsyan’s effort to hold onto power by assuming the premiership, having already revised the constitution to strengthen the prime minister’s executive powers. With expectations for change now running high, Pashinyan has his work cut out for him if he is to retain the support of the diverse coalition that brought him to power. In an email interview, […]

For the first time in almost a decade, Lebanese voters went to the polls last weekend and delivered a subtle but important message with regional ramifications. The results will do nothing to ease tensions, instead sharpening enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran while marginally increasing fears of an impending confrontation between Israel and Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. From a regional perspective, the outcome of the Lebanese election is clear: Iran has grown more powerful inside Lebanon, adding to Tehran’s influence across the Middle East. The election strengthened the hand of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite organization and political party […]

Five years after emerging from its last political crisis, the island nation of Madagascar has once again entered a period of heightened tensions, this time over new electoral laws passed in the run-up to elections later this year. The current impasse is driven by familiar underlying factors, but it also features new fault lines and surprising alliances. In an email interview, Cornelia Tremann, an expert on Madagascar’s politics of development and the country’s relations with China, discusses what is behind the current standoff and the role outside actors might play in mediating it. World Politics Review: What is the proximate […]

In politics, as in marital disputes, being right is overrated. That lesson was learned the hard way by defenders of the Iran nuclear deal, which President Donald Trump formally pulled the United States out of yesterday. No one, even among the deal’s most ardent supporters, disputes the claim that the agreement is flawed and imperfect from an American perspective. After all, it required compromises and concessions that were necessary to reach a negotiated, rather than an imposed, final agreement. Whether or not those concessions were too generous is a valid subject of debate. It is possible, though unprovable, that Iran […]

For much of the past 15 years, Turkey had been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. The “Turkish miracle” earned plaudits from the global financial elite, drew billions of dollars of investment into the country, and helped the political fortunes of its powerful Islamist leader, the prime minister-turned-president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now eyeing even more authority in snap elections next month. But those halcyon days of the Turkish miracle are gone. Over the past year alone, the Turkish lira has lost over 10 percent of its value against the dollar, and this week Turkey’s credit rating was lowered […]

It has become conventional wisdom that the Middle East’s popular uprisings of 2011 failed, and that the prospects for true democracy in the region are dim for the foreseeable future. The return of authoritarian leadership in Egypt is the most dramatic reversal of the Arab Spring, but one can also look to Yemen, where a shaky political transition later plunged the country back into civil war, or of course Syria, where the early days of peaceful protest, brutally repressed by the Assad regime, seem like a distant memory in the ongoing civil war. There is occasional turbulence in Morocco, too, […]

In late April, the European Union and Mexico announced the successful conclusion of negotiations to update their current trade agreement. The new framework, which still must be formally ratified and signed, will expand the range of products exempted from tariffs. It represents the latest effort by both sides to diversify their free trade arrangements against the backdrop of rising American protectionism under President Donald Trump. In an email interview, Sean Goforth, a contributing analyst at the geostrategic consulting firm Wikistrat, discusses how the new deal will affect EU-Mexico trade, opportunities and obstacles for expanding commercial ties, and the implications of […]

On Saturday, thousands of demonstrators marched in Paris to express their disapproval of French President Emmanuel Macron on the one-year anniversary of his election. Macron has wasted little time following through on his campaign promises of economic and fiscal reforms. But his efforts to overhaul France’s labor regulations as well as his willingness to use extraordinary executive powers to push through his agenda have led critics to call him authoritarian and the “president of the rich.” In an email interview, George Ross, distinguished Jean Monnet Chair and visiting professor of political science at the University of Montreal-McGill Center for Excellence […]

Despite a steady stream of denials from Kigali and Kampala, ties between Rwanda and Uganda appear to be deteriorating rapidly. The latest ebb in this historically volatile relationship stems from the Ugandan government’s pushback on what it perceives as Rwandan meddling in its domestic affairs. Though Ugandan officials have not gone public with any formal allegations, their dissatisfaction can be read in a recent string of increasingly high-profile incidents. Last year, the Ugandan government mounted a crackdown on suspected Rwandan spies operating in Uganda, including the arrest of a handful of Ugandan police officers accused of being part of a […]