Domestic Politics Archive

“The citizens of Kosovo voted massively for change,” said Albin Kurti, the country’s newly installed prime minister. “Kosovo is ready to turn a new page.” He may be right, but will they and their neighbors throughout the Balkans actually see that transformation, if their leaders can’t put the 1990s and the troubled years since behind them? In exclusive comments to WPR, Kurti said that countries in the Balkans “are still suffering from the past while struggling to build the future.” A few years ago, Kurti was leading his fellow lawmakers in setting off tear gas amid a protest in Kosovo’s […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. As the rate of domestic coronavirus transmission in China continues to fall, the Chinese government declared last Thursday that the peak of its COVID-19 outbreak has passed. With the epidemic at home largely under control, Beijing is directing its attention to cases imported by infected travelers. It is also seeking to reshape the narrative of a global pandemic that originated in China. Wuhan, the city in central China at the epicenter of the outbreak, remains on lockdown. But the […]

After months of political turmoil in East Timor, a new six-party coalition government led by Xanana Gusmao, a former president and independence hero, and his National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction, or CNRT, is set to take office. The previous government, led by Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak, collapsed after failing to pass a budget in January. President Francisco Guterres must now decide whether to accept Ruak’s resignation and install the new government. But even if he does, the new CNRT-led coalition could be difficult to manage, says Michael Leach, an expert on East Timor’s politics at Swinburne University of Technology […]

After a surprise victory in Slovakia’s parliamentary elections late last month, the enigmatic Ordinary People and Independent Personalities party, known as OLANO, will lead a diverse majority coalition in the legislature. President Zuzana Caputova is scheduled to swear in the new government on March 21. Many Slovaks have welcomed the change after the nationalist and populist Smer party governed the small eastern European country for most of the past 14 years, with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. OLANO has pledged to clean up the “Mafia state” that allegedly flourished under Smer, following an election that was overshadowed by mass protests over the […]

The transitional government in Sudan announced last month that it will extradite former dictator Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he is wanted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity committed in Sudan’s Darfur region. The move was a sign that the new government in Khartoum, which took over last year after Bashir was ousted by the military amid popular protests, is trying to present itself as a responsible member of the international community. It also wants to draw a clear line under the Bashir era domestically and undertake serious peace negotiations with rebel […]

MADRID—After a series of gut-wrenching incidents of rape sparked a massive public outcry in Spain in recent years, the country’s new leftist coalition government has quickly focused on overhauling its sexual assault laws. It has public opinion on its side, as several high-profile trials, including the conviction last summer of five men calling themselves the “Wolf Pack” who gang-raped an 18-year-old woman during the annual bull-running festival in Pamplona in 2016, have galvanized support for tackling this issue. According to the Madrid-based Sociological Research Center, 93 percent of Spaniards find sexual assault to be a worrying problem and 71 percent […]

In the most sweeping reshuffle of his government since he took office last May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired his Cabinet and appointed a new prime minister earlier this month. The announcement comes at a tricky time, as the government is considering several reform measures that are seen as important to winning much-needed investor confidence. In an email interview with WPR, Steven Pifer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, discusses the factors behind Zelensky’s move and why the new Cabinet will need to work hard to prove it can bring about real […]

Less than two years after Malaysia’s landmark May 2018 election that ousted its long-ruling coalition, tensions within the government exploded into the open in recent weeks, upending the country’s politics. Nonagenarian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad resigned late last month in an apparent attempt to ditch most of his allies from the Pakatan Harapan coalition, which he had led to an upset victory against the scandal-plagued Barisan Nasional bloc in 2018, and form a new, essentially ethnic Malay government. It would have included his old party, the United Malays National Organization or UMNO, which led the Barisan Nasional during its six-decade […]

Iran’s parliamentary elections last month were an unmitigated success for conservatives and hard-liners. Aided by unprecedented low turnout and the disqualification of thousands of their opponents, they won 221 of the legislature’s 290 seats, while reformists and moderates took only 19—down from 121 in the 2016 elections. The outcome profoundly changed the balance of power in Tehran, which will have serious repercussions for Iran’s domestic and foreign policies. Forces loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are now well-positioned to consolidate power over Iran’s governing institutions and likely win the presidency in 2021, when Hassan Rouhani, a centrist who was first […]

BANJUL, Gambia—In late February, eight political activists were released on bail from the Mile 2 maximum security prison outside Banjul, the capital of this small West African country. They had been arrested along with more than a hundred others for participating in a demonstration in January calling on Adama Barrow to follow through on his earlier promise to step down as Gambia’s president this year. The protest’s organizers had received authorization from the government. But as a crowd gathered on the outskirts of Banjul to start the march, police fired teargas and charged the would-be protesters with batons. Dozens were […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The new head of the traditionally pro-China Kuomintang party, or KMT, is promising to take a harder line against Beijing’s influence in Taiwan. Lawmaker Chiang Chi-chen was elected chairman of the KMT on Saturday in the wake of the party’s defeats in Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections earlier this year. China’s campaign to bring Taiwan under its control was a major factor in that vote, and it could be dealt another blow if the KMT reconsiders its closer ties […]

Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran is accelerating its production of enriched uranium. It was just the latest in a series of progressive breaches by Tehran of the 2015 nuclear agreement, as part of an effort to raise the pressure on the Trump administration for withdrawing from the deal and reimposing devastating economic sanctions on Iran. But last week’s announcement marked a key milestone: For the first time in years, Iran possesses enough low-enriched uranium to manufacture a nuclear weapon, although it would first have to enrich the uranium to a much higher level. Experts now […]

These are humbling times to be American, or at least they should be. They are humbling times to be an American journalist, too, especially one of my generation, who spent a career spanning the 1980s to the end of the aughts traveling the wide world as a foreign correspondent. America, of course, had problems back then, indeed very real problems. But one function of America’s immense wealth and power during this period was the illusion, which foreign correspondents could sustain without too much difficultly, that the world was innately more interesting than their own country, because the world was where […]

From the moment he took office as Argentina’s president last December, Alberto Fernandez has been constrained by two realities. The first is the country’s grave economic crisis, which he inherited from his pro-business predecessor, Mauricio Macri. Argentina’s GDP is projected to contract for the third year in a row in 2020, while inflation is expected to top 40 percent, all while the government tries to restructure its staggering foreign debt. The second constraining reality is Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who was initially expected to run for president last year but instead picked Fernandez—who is not related—for the top […]

In September 2018, after years of modeling and development, the Ocean Cleanup project launched System 001, a floating barrier designed to scoop up plastic debris from an area in the Pacific Ocean that, because of prevailing currents, had become a natural repository of ocean-borne plastic waste. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as the area the size of France became known, was first discovered in 1988, but it gained prominence after a public awareness campaign in 2008. Although System 001 ultimately failed to hold onto the plastic debris it collected, Ocean Cleanup announced late last year that a modified prototype known […]

TUNIS, Tunisia—Tunisia’s parliament voted late last month to approve a new government under Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh, ending months of political limbo. While a new president and a fresh crop of lawmakers were sworn in after elections last fall, the ballot produced a highly divided parliament that had been unable to agree on a government until recently. In Tunis when the new government was announced, many of the Tunisians I spoke with were breathing a sigh of relief that the country narrowly avoided fresh elections, which would have been likely had Fakhfkakh failed to win support. However, others, from young […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. As a political crisis escalates in Guinea-Bissau over its disputed December presidential vote, a West African regional bloc is warning the country’s military against intervening in the standoff. The roots of the crisis trace back to New Year’s Day, after the National Electoral Commission declared opposition leader Umaro Sissoco Embalo the winner of the second-round run-off election with nearly 54 percent of the vote. Embalo defeated Domingos Simoes Pereira, the candidate of the long-ruling PAIGC party. A clean election with a clear […]