Domestic Politics Archive

Faure Gnassingbe was reelected late last month for a fourth term as president of the small West African country of Togo. The result was no surprise. Faure, as he is known locally, and his father before him, Gnassingbe Eyadema, have ruled Togo and its 8 million inhabitants for over five decades combined. Despite a lighter touch than his notoriously brutal father, Faure has effectively hollowed out ostensibly democratic processes like elections to perpetuate his family’s long reign. Togo’s Constitutional Court this week certified that Faure won the Feb. 22 election with more than 70 percent of the vote to former […]

When I landed in Cairo in late January 2011 to cover the growing wave of demonstrations that had mobilized Egyptians, I was unsure whether or not the protest movement could topple then-President Hosni Mubarak. After all, he had been ruling for almost three decades, enjoyed Western backing and commanded a robust security apparatus. But as I drove through downtown Cairo from the airport, I saw the headquarters of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party in flames. It was difficult to see at the time just how much that burning building would come to symbolize about post-Mubarak Egypt. In the end, it took […]

If you thought judicial appointments were an explosive issue in the United States, just look at Armenia, where over the past year, the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has declared war on Armenia’s senior judges. Most recently, Pashinyan has called a popular referendum for April 5 to remove seven of the nine judges on the Constitutional Court, whom he accuses of blocking his reform agenda. The government sees this as a last-ditch measure to clean up a corrupt justice system that Pashinyan inherited from former President Serzh Sargsyan. For the judges, it is an assault by politicians on the […]

Millions of voters in the Dominican Republic got a surprise when they showed up to cast their ballots in municipal elections on Feb. 16. Several hours after balloting had begun, the government said it had found inconsistencies in the functioning of voting machines and ordered the immediate suspension of the elections. In numerous cases, opposition candidates’ names did not appear on the electronic ballots. The next day, the country’s electoral board announced the municipal elections would be postponed to March 15, and would be conducted with paper ballots. The cause of the malfunctioning voting system, which was recently purchased for […]