Domestic Politics Archive

Former President Mauricio Funes is the latest leader to be implicated in corruption scandals that are consuming El Salvador. In June, 32 arrest warrants were issued for Funes, who was in office from 2009 to 2014, along with his first two wives, his two sons, his current partner, his secretary and other members of his inner circle, including businessman Miguel Melendez Avelar, known to Salvadorans as “Mecafe.” Most of them have been accused of corruption, money laundering and embezzlement of some $351 million. Two others have been accused of obstruction of justice. The warrants follow years of investigations into Funes’ […]

Venezuela should be benefiting from the global rise in oil prices. Instead, the country is seeing its oil income continue to plummet, along with the rest of its economy. The country’s oil operations are in a state of collapse, output is falling and other challenges Venezuela is facing are also weighing down the oil industry. When oil prices started their collapse in 2014, plummeting from well above $100 a barrel to just over $29 by early 2016, the market drama sent shockwaves across the global economy, producing winners and losers. Oil importers benefited from sharply lower import costs, while producers’ […]

Yesterday, leaders from the six countries in the Western Balkans—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia—gathered in London for the latest summit of what is known as the Berlin Process. Now in its fifth year, this annual meeting of ministers and heads of government, which includes participants from a select few members of the European Union, is meant to encourage greater cooperation among Balkan states as they prepare, some day, to join the EU. Leaving aside the obvious contradiction of a country that is leaving the EU hosting a meeting that aims to expand the bloc’s membership, the […]

As Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, famously put it, the alliance’s purpose in Europe was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. By all indications, U.S. President Donald Trump, who arrived in Brussels yesterday for his second NATO summit, is dead set on reversing all three elements of Ismay’s formula. Having already proposed that Russia be invited back into the Group of Seven forum of advanced economies, it would surprise no one at this point if Trump suggests that Russia play a greater role in European security when he meets President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki […]

NAIROBI—In late April, Wanuri Kahiu, the Kenyan filmmaker, was busy preparing to walk down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in France. With just a week to spare, she needed to finalize arrangements with the fashion designers and stylists who would provide the various looks for the media whirlwind, as well as prepare for a barrage of meetings with other directors, producers and potential funders. For an independent filmmaker, Cannes has always been the premiere event for those hoping to get a film seen and sold. As the first Kenyan ever invited to screen a film there, Kahiu […]

More than four years after Thailand’s military seized power in a coup—the 19th coup or coup attempt since the end of absolute monarchy there in 1932—the country still seems far from a return to civilian rule. Since his putsch, junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha has repeatedly promised that elections will be held, only to put them off again and again. Most recently, the junta allowed political parties to register earlier this year and suggested that new elections would be held by February 2019 at the latest. However, in recent weeks the military has again waffled on that date, and is now […]

On Friday, Luiz Antonio Guimaraes, a Brazilian prosecutor who was Sao Paolo’s attorney general from 1996 to 2004, was sworn in as the head of the Mission Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras, known as MACCIH. Guimaraes’ predecessor, the Peruvian Juan Jimenez, resigned in February, citing obstruction by Honduran officials and a lack of support by the Organization of American States, which sponsors the mission. The swearing-in came days after Honduras’ legislature re-elected Attorney General Oscar Chinchilla to continue in that key post, and amid a massive corruption scandal known as the Pandora Case that has implicated hundreds of current […]

Can big ideas, big data and even bigger academic books save the global system? It is now conventional wisdom that international institutions are facing an almost existential crisis. The U.S. president regularly disparages multilateral mechanisms. China and Russia want to roll back many liberal norms. This is a bleak scenario for academics and pundits who believe in international cooperation. Under the circumstances, bright scholars of foreign policy would seem well advised to study realpolitik and interstate war, not how countries can get along better. Yet counterintuitively, the current political crisis in global cooperation is coinciding with a small surge in […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent.It’s been a rough few weeks for the G5 Sahel Joint Force, a counterterrorism initiative involving five West African countries that launched its first deployments last November. A series of recent setbacks have exposed indiscipline within the force’s ranks, the severity of the security challenges it faces and a lack of political will to ensure it succeeds. First, the U.N. mission in Mali, where the G5 Sahel is headquartered, reported last week that Malian members of the force “summarily and/or […]

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and managing editor, Frederick Deknatel, discuss the resurgence of nationalism in global politics, the factors driving it and the implications for the liberal policy consensus in international affairs that dominated the preceding two decades. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. The newsletter offers a free preview article every day of the week, plus three more complimentary articles in our weekly roundup every Friday. […]

The result was almost inevitable, yet Mexico still awoke with a sense of uncertainty Monday as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a veteran leftist and long-time critic of the country’s political establishment, finally captured the presidency in a landslide victory. AMLO, as he is better known in Mexico, fulfilled poll predictions by sweeping aside his rivals, Jose Antonio Meade of the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and Ricardo Anaya of the Citizens Front alliance, winning 53 percent of the vote. His Together We’ll Make History coalition captured majorities in both houses of Congress. His victory had appeared a mere formality […]

Driving past the presidential palace in Islamabad these days, one is confronted by the sight of cargo containers haphazardly lying around its perimeter, looking like a child’s forgotten toy blocks. But the containers, which the government uses as barricades against street protesters and other security threats, have a more serious message. They are a sign of a nation braced for unrest as political factions vie for primacy in the run-up to Pakistan’s general elections on July 25. Pakistan’s restive capital is used to political demonstrations and even large-scale riots, many of which have recently been driven by youth organizations asserting […]

To whatever extent it is possible to become accustomed to the president of a major liberal democracy continuously lying, day after day, the world has grown more or less used to President Donald Trump’s practice of incessantly spraying his unique stream of falsehoods across social media, political rallies and assorted public events. Editors at major media organizations have grappled with the complications of deciding whether or when to label the president’s untruths as “lies,” noting that a lie requires a conscious intention to deceive and knowledge that a statement is incorrect—and it is not always clear that is the case […]

NOUMEA, NEW CALEDONIA—In early May, French President Emmanuel Macron touched down in the tropical archipelago of New Caledonia following a two-day visit to Australia, the islands’ closest major neighbor, some 750 miles west across the South Pacific. Macron was more than 10,000 miles from the Elysee Palace in Paris. Famed for its diving sites along an expansive barrier reef, New Caledonia is a French overseas territory that has enjoyed a special, semi-autonomous status for the past two decades, with certain powers gradually being transferred from France to local officials. Yet Paris retains control over critical governance areas such as foreign […]

In mid-June, Georgia’s former finance minister, Mamuka Bakhtadze, was quickly confirmed as its new prime minister following the resignation of Giorgi Kvirikashvili amid a cloud of party infighting and swelling street protests. Following a swift confirmation by parliament, Bakhtadze announced plans to shrink the size of the Georgian government, while simultaneously pursuing more robust social welfare reforms. Internationally, the new government has vowed to maintain the country’s longstanding pro-Western policies, though broader strategic conditions continue to complicate Tbilisi’s persistent Euro-Atlantic ambitions. Kvirikashvili departed from the premiership last month almost as abruptly as he found himself catapulted to the leadership in […]

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate trade, and for more than a century it did so with gusto. Then, grasping for ways to escape the Great Depression and reverse the downward economic spiral that followed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which passed in 1930, Congress delegated some of its trade power to the executive branch. In subsequent decades, Congress provided additional authorities allowing the president to control trade policy. Now, however, with concerns about President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy moves—imposing a range of tariffs on close allies and rivals alike, and threatening more—there are calls to […]

In the end, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan easily defeated his electoral challengers last week, winning re-election outright in the first round of voting on June 24. By taking nearly 53 percent of the vote, he even narrowly bested his performance in the 2014 presidential elections, when Erdogan was seeking the newly empowered office of the presidency after more than a decade as Turkey’s prime minister. Perhaps even more impressive, his electoral alliance—made up of his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the hard-right Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP—managed to win a majority in Parliament, defying many predictions as […]