During the final stages of Turkey’s elections, many observers pointed to distant moments from the country’s history to explain its contemporary political conflicts. One more recent event was particularly crucial to reinforcing the social polarization tearing at Turkish society today: the military coup of September 1980.
In the two years she has been in power, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan has implemented a series of domestic political reforms, while consolidating her power base within the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party. Her reform agenda has been a welcome transformation. But for now, it has yet to be institutionalized.
Earlier this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis officially threw his hat into the ring for next year’s U.S. presidential election. Fashioning himself as a credible challenger to Trump, his entrance into the race all but guarantees that the migration crisis on the United States’ southern border will figure centrally in the campaign.
Ghana’s latest IMF bailout was necessitated by a combination of global shocks and domestic factors, primarily a spending spree by President Nana Akufo-Addo’s administration. Akufo-Addo campaigned for the presidency in 2016 on the promise of change. Seven years on, change has indeed come. But it has not been in the promised direction.
When Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva reestablished the country’s Ministry of Culture on his first day back in office, the move was greeted by a muted response. The absence of media coverage was surprising, considering that for most of the past decade the ministry had been at the center of Brazil’s culture wars.
While the exodus of millions of Venezuelans from their homeland to countries across the Western Hemisphere has attracted considerable attention in recent years, another equally significant migratory pattern in Central America has been taking place with less notice: the roughly 200,000 Nicaraguans who have fled to Costa Rica.
At a recent conference of the U.K.’s self-described National Conservatives, senior Tory MPs and a Cabinet minister espoused views that align with those of European far-right parties. It’s an indication of how strong these factions, which just a decade ago remained at the outer fringes of the Conservative Party, have now become.
In the Global South, the rush to create green economies risks leaving behind workers in the informal sector unless there are targeted efforts in education and job training—policies and talking points often left out of this new green rush. Chile, considered to be Latin America’s most developed economy, is a case in point.
Last week, Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso used his constitutional authority to dissolve Congress, which had been trying to impeach him, and rule by decree until new elections are held for both the president and legislature. The move paralleled last year’s events in Peru, but the region’s response has been remarkably different.
Around the world, democracies are suffering from voter apathy, political polarization, anti-establishment sentiment and abuses of majoritarian rule that have facilitated the spread of autocracy. Now countries are increasingly experimenting with a new way forward: citizens’ assemblies put together by random selection.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has gone out of his way to show that he is putting the climate agenda and preservation of the Amazon rainforest at the center of his presidency. But there are limitations to his ability to achieve his climate ambitions, not to mention some incoherencies within his government’s priorities.
EU officials are still digesting the result of Turkey’s general election, which saw the presidential race head to a second-round runoff. While President Erdogan’s antagonism toward Europe has won him few friends in Brussels, many are also wondering if the runoff might present a case of “better the devil you know.”
Turkey’s election results came as a disappointment not only to Turkish voters who wanted to bring an end to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 20 years of increasingly autocratic rule. They also dashed the hopes of many outside observers that Turkey would become one of the countries where the global drift to autocracy begins to reverse.
Spain’s landmark law on sexual crime made explicit consent—or the lack thereof—the benchmark for determining guilt in rape cases. But the law had an unintended consequence: Hundreds of convicted sex offenders’ sentences were reduced on appeal, leading to public outrage and infighting within the leftist governing coalition.
The U.N. recently projected that India will replace China as the world’s most-populous country this year, fueling discussion about whether India’s swelling population could create a “demographic dividend” that would allow it to surpass China economically as well. But India has a lot of ground to cover to meet those expectations.
The aftermath of Romania’s post-communist transition, particularly the struggle to overcome corruption, left a toxic legacy that hampers Bucharest’s ability to exert influence over EU decision-making to this day. But Romania’s reluctance to be proactive in policy debates within both the EU and NATO has now become problematic.
Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, or “catastrophe.” It comes at a time when the prospects for peace are particularly dim, with internal political challenges on both sides and recurrent violence punctuated by periodic outbreaks of heavier fighting.