Domestic Politics Archive

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—In late January, at the Bronte Hotel—a favorite haunt of foreign correspondents in Harare—a brand-new Zimbabwean opposition party was officially launched. Just three months later, that party, known as the Citizens Coalition for Change or CCC, was celebrating what looked to be a triumphant start. In a round of by-elections late last month, its candidates won 19 of the 28 parliamentary races and 61 percent of the local council seats that were up for grabs. This was proof, insisted party leader Nelson Chamisa in a press conference shortly after the results were announced, that the newcomers, who were hard to miss […]

Earlier this month, the American Library Association released a list of the “top 10 banned books” of 2021 to mark an unprecedented surge in attempts to drop books from school curricula in the United States. The list included best-selling titles such as “This Book is Gay” by Juno Dawson and “The Hate U Give” by Angie Thomas, which have been criticized for, respectively, “providing sexual education and LGBTQIA+ content” and for promoting an “anti-police message.” Book banning is not a new phenomenon. Adam Laats, a historian of American education, told Vox that when it comes to book banning, “history repeats itself.” Since the early […]

Earlier this month, the lead U.N. representative for Yemen announced a two-month cease-fire, the first major breakthrough since 2015 in the conflict between the Houthi rebels and Iran on the one side and the Yemeni government and its Gulf backers on the other. The news was a ray of hope in an otherwise unremittingly troubling international context. Or was it? Coming on the heels of the Taliban’s assumption of power in Afghanistan and the normalization of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the cease-fire, which appears to be the product of Houthi advancement rather than international diplomacy, suggests that, in many cases, it […]

Nepal’s recent political turmoil put its internal divisions in the spotlight and raised questions of where the country stands 16 years after the end of its civil conflict and five years after the first elections held under its new federalist constitution. Ostensibly a dispute over whether or not to accept a U.S. aid package—a $500 million Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC, grant first initialed in 2017—the crisis saw years of indecision, polarization, disinformation and recently violent protests before Parliament eventually ratified the grant in February. The protracted ordeal over what was seemingly a straightforward development grant exposed deep cracks in […]

In 2019, Ethiopia’s young and dynamic prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to resolve the longstanding tensions between his country and Eritrea. His announcement of domestic political reforms were received well both abroad and at home, many Ethiopians had felt excluded by a political system seen as having been captured by the country’s Tigrayan ethnic minority. Today, none of this enthusiasm is left. In late 2020, long-running tensions between the central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, once the dominant ethnic party in the ruling coalition, escalated into a full-blown civil war. […]

Barely a month into his presidency, Chile’s young leftist leader, Gabriel Boric, is running into unexpected turbulence. The 36-year-old former student leader aims to overhaul the country’s conservative political and economic system in order to tackle chronic inequality, and hopes to usher in a new constitution as the vehicle for that transformation. But the constitution-writing process, once launched with high expectations, is now losing favor among the Chilean people. Last week, Boric announced the official date for the plebiscite in which Chileans will cast a mandatory vote on a proposed constitution, which is now being drafted by a constitutional assembly. […]

He’s been called Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest ally in the European Union and accused of “eliminating democracy,” and he’s become the poster child of the global hard right. Now Viktor Orban has won a fourth consecutive term as Hungarian prime minister in a landslide. In parliamentary elections on April 3, Orban’s Fidesz and its small satellite party KDNP took more than 50 percent of the vote, with the opposition coalition United for Hungary winning just 35 percent. The new far-right Our Homeland Movement also entered parliament with around 6 percent. The result will give the Fidesz-KDNP coalition 135 seats […]

Shanghai is gradually easing the draconian lockdown it implemented since late March following the largest nationwide outbreak of the coronavirus since the pandemic began. The extended shutdown led to widespread shortages of food and supplies across China, triggering an uproar against the country’s “Zero-COVID” policy. But with the number of daily infections topping 20,000 this week and the virus spreading to other provinces across the country, China is far from out of the woods. The two-phase lockdown was originally supposed to last four days each for Pudong and then Puxi, which comprise the city on either side of the Huangpu River. But it […]

April has been quite a dramatic month in Yemen, with the first major cease-fire reached between the government, the Houthis and other smaller combatant parties since the early stages of the war in 2015. Combined with a change in leadership among the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, the quieting of the guns, though temporary, could open a window of opportunity for resolving the conflict. But both developments also underscore the difficulty of ending a war that has resisted efforts to do so for years, with no relief in sight for the long-suffering civilians who are bearing most of its deadly cost. The […]

In most of the world, the International Monetary Fund is just a multilateral financial institution. In Argentina, in contrast, the fund is a fundamental and highly controversial part of economic and political life. As if to highlight that, the country’s ruling Peronist coalition is currently unraveling from internal divisions following a recent agreement between the government and the IMF, approved only weeks ago. The Peronists returned to power in 2019 due to a clever political move by former President Cristina Fernandez. Aware that she herself was too polarizing, she anointed Alberto Fernandez—a moderate who is no relation—as presidential candidate, while she […]

Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of police abuse, abduction and torture. The soldiers arrived at the Kampala home of Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, the award-winning Ugandan novelist, on a mid-afternoon in late December. Armed with machine guns and sledgehammers, they beat him and dragged him out, shoving him into the backseat of an unmarked car. The writer, desperate, attempted to call a lawyer, but his phone was swiftly confiscated by his captors. Rukirabashaija spent the next two weeks in the bowels of a detention facility, where he was tortured daily. He emerged 26 pounds lighter and unable to walk on his own, […]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, put on an extraordinary performance in recent state elections, winning 4 out of the 5 states that went to the polls in February and March. Not only did the BJP manage to win reelection in the states of Goa and Uttarakhand, despite polls suggesting high levels of anti-incumbent sentiment, it also put on a commanding performance in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state with a population of over 200 million and nearly one-sixth of the country’s population. This allowed incumbent Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a hardline Hindu monk and BJP member, to become […]

French President Emmanuel Macron is comfortably ahead in the polls for the first round of France’s presidential election, which takes place Sunday. With far-right candidate Marine Le Pen likely to finish second, the second-round runoff is shaping up to be a repeat of 2017. But while Macron won in a landslide in 2017 with more than 60 percent of the vote, this time the gap is much narrower, with less than 10 percent separating Macron and Le Pen in opinion polls and the momentum clearly in Le Pen’s favor. Macron came into office on an ambitious and popular foreign policy […]

Just before midnight on Monday, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo appeared on television to declare an unprecedented state of emergency for Lima, the capital. All the city’s residents, he said, were to stay indoors for 24 hours, beginning just two hours after his announcement. The controversial decision, which would later be rescinded after protesters ignored it, came in response to widespread demonstrations by truck drivers and transportation syndicates against the spike in fuel prices caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Peru’s new crisis came just after Sri Lanka’s president declared a state of emergency in his own country. The Indian Ocean nation […]

Following nearly three years of debate, Costa Rica finally legalized medical cannabis on March 2. Upon signing it into law, outgoing President Carlos Alvarado said that the bill—which legalizes medical marijuana and the cultivation of hemp for industrial purposes, but still restricts its recreational use—would be a “great benefit for the country.” However, to what extent medical cannabis legalization, and potentially recreational legalization, will be a positive development for Costa Rica or serve as a model for the broader region remains to be seen. Costa Rica’s medical marijuana legislation has been years in the making. As early as 2014, a survey […]

Addressing a security forum in Islamabad on Saturday, Pakistan’s army chief of staff, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine in no uncertain terms, describing it as an “invasion” and “aggression against a smaller country that cannot be condoned.” These statements would be uncontroversial had they not contradicted the official position of Pakistan’s civilian government, which is in the midst of a political crisis that also involves the army. Indeed, Pakistan’s ongoing political turmoil—which has seen Prime Minister Imran Khan avoid a vote of no confidence through questionable parliamentary maneuvers, as his coalition and party fracture amid pressure […]

The lack of accountability can explain a lot of the worst behavior of state actors around the world. This is especially true in the Middle East, where elite impunity has been an ongoing driver of the cycles of conflict and destruction that have eviscerated the region in recent decades. And rarely is the connection between impunity and harm done by the state as clear as it is in Lebanon’s ongoing, epic economic meltdown. Since February, the symbol of that meltdown has been the head of Lebanon’s central bank, Riad Salameh, who is currently on the lam, fleeing the criminal charges […]