Briefing Archive

The results of Mexico’s local elections on Sunday, June 5, represent a nadir for President Enrique Pena Nieto and the dawn of his administration’s long exit. Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI—the erstwhile hegemon that he led back to power after more than a decade in the opposition in 2012—lost seven of Mexico’s 12 gubernatorial races, which were the centerpiece of the day’s contests. While that may not sound like much, the PRI dramatically underperformed both its leaders’ and most pollsters’ predictions. This leaves the party in charge of just 15 of Mexico’s 32 states, its lowest number since […]

France has always claimed to be a power in the Asia-Pacific, but some recent strategic developments have given additional credence to that claim. In April, France won a landmark contract to sell 12 attack submarines to Australia, after securing a deal with India for the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets last year. The Australia submarine contract, worth some $39 billion, is viewed in Paris as heralding a new beginning for France-Australia ties, which until the late 1990s were marred by disputes over French nuclear tests in Polynesia. Australia had been mulling Japanese and German bids. The Asia-Pacific market is […]

For more than 20 years, Israel’s ties with countries in Asia have gradually increased, enough to warrant talk of Israel’s own pivot to the region. But it is not just a pivot. Instead, it is a major realignment of Israel’s foreign policy on a broad scale, supported by geopolitical developments and motivated by Israel’s slowly eroding political relations with Europe and the United States. The origins of this process can be found in Israel’s desire to stake out a claim in booming world trade with China, whose massive growth in recent decades could leave no trading partner indifferent. But what […]

LIMA, Peru—After trailing Keiko Fujimori in the polls for weeks, former World Bank economist and investment banker Pedro Pablo Kuczynski enjoyed a surge of support just before Peru’s run-off election on June 5 to win one of the most contested presidential races in the country’s history. Kuczynski is widely regarded as capable and honest, but he faces major challenges as he attempts to strengthen the economy and improve life for Peruvians. The country’s cities and northern regions suffer high crime rates; its vast jungle regions are dominated by drug traffickers; and corruption is rampant in the national police and courts. […]

Benin’s two-round elections, held earlier this year on March 6 and March 20, delivered a decisive victory for opposition candidate and cotton magnate Patrice Talon. As in some other Francophone West African countries, the two-round system facilitated a political upset. Talon finished in second place in the first round, with just 23.5 percent of the vote. In the second round, however, he defeated outgoing President Thomas Boni Yayi’s handpicked candidate, then-Prime Minister Lionel Zinsou, with more than 65 percent of the vote. Zinsou quickly conceded, and Benin won international acclaim for the latest milestone in its 25-year-old democracy. Talon has […]

Last week, the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, released an opinion accusing Poland’s government of endangering the rule of law and violating the EU’s democratic principles. The report is the first step in a process that could lead to EU sanctions on Warsaw, including the suspension of voting rights in EU deliberations, and comes after a months-long investigation into changes made to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Many observers have called the changes, which have plunged Poland into a constitutional crisis, undemocratic. The crisis began last October, when the previous right-of-center government led by the Civic Platform party, […]

When a country’s economy is doing poorly and voters are suffering, a government can expect to be voted out of office on election day. So Mongolia’s upcoming parliamentary elections June 29 could see a staggering defeat for the ruling Democratic Party (DP), which has led successive governments over the past four years. This is not lost on DP officials. Yet rather than offer a compelling vision for Mongolia’s future, their campaign strategy has focused on reconfiguring the entire election system, creating more problems in the process. Two factors have combined to depress the Mongolian economy: world commodity prices and domestic […]

The current era of democratic politics in the West is marked by dysfunction. Long-standing political institutions are creaking. The establishment consensus of free trade, economic openness and liberal migration policies that has buttressed the U.S.-led postwar liberal system is quickly losing its popular legitimacy. Since the late 1980s, electoral turnout has fallen in much of Europe; the joint vote share of center-right and center-left parties is hitting all-time lows; and various populist and anti-establishment parties have filled the void with the promise of easy solutions. At a time when the European Union is heavily criticized for being run by unelected […]

The Republic of Congo rarely captures global attention, but the government’s military attacks on civilians, which have raged since early April, have become impossible to ignore. On April 4, amid a five-day media blackout, the results of the March 20 presidential elections were announced. To nobody’s surprise, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso secured yet another term. Sassou, as he’s known in Congo, has held nearly uninterrupted power since 1979, through elections that are routinely marred by fraud and closed to international observers. The March vote was no different. After the results were announced, young protesters set fire to the government’s administrative headquarters […]

BELGRADE, Serbia—Sixteen months after its rumbling political crisis erupted with allegations of government wire-tapping—which exposed abuses like corruption, voter fraud, the suppression of free media, and attempts to manipulate the judiciary—Macedonia remains in limbo. The country’s predicament has raised concerns that it could pull its neighbors into a new Balkan conflagration. It has also revealed the shortcomings of the European Union’s approach to the region at a time when Macedonia’s path toward EU membership is looking as precarious as ever. In an interview with WPR, Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki says that “a stable Balkans goes through a stable Macedonia. […]

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Since ascending to the Saudi throne in January 2015, King Salman has launched a range of reform initiatives. One of the more radical, but least sign-posted, is a drive for greater accountability and transparency in public life. Saudi commentators believe the move is aimed in part at cutting the ground out from under the scores of critics on social media who accuse senior Saudi officials and members of the royal family of pocketing a large share of the country’s huge oil revenue. The initiative may also be intended to compensate for the absence of political reform in the […]

The conviction last week of Chad’s former president, Hissene Habre, for crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture is a significant victory for the civil society campaign that has fought tirelessly for more than 20 years to bring him to justice. In a Senegalese courtroom last Monday, Habre was sentenced to life in prison for his ultimate responsibility, as Chad’s head of state from 1982 to 1990, for thousands of cases of torture in secret prisons, along with killings, rapes and waves of repression against communities that opposed his rule. Delivering his verdict, the head of the specially created Extraordinary […]

Last week, El Salvador’s president, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, celebrated two years in office. El Faro, the country’s premier online investigative news source, acknowledged the milestone with a feature titled, “Seven Years of Governing Like ARENA.” It was a pointed commentary on the policy similarities between Sanchez Ceren’s left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and its rival party, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which were also foes on the battlefield during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Since assuming office, Sanchez Ceren, a former leftist guerrilla commander, has continued the hard-line policies on gangs that go back to ARENA-led governments […]

Last Friday, Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic made an unannounced visit to Moscow. The trip came amid reports of Russian concern with Serbia’s overtures to the West, including taking steps toward joining the European Union. Later that day, Russian President Vladimir Putin headed to Greece, where he discussed energy cooperation and investment with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, before visiting the male-only Monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos with the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church. The trip was Putin’s first to an EU country this year, as the debate heats up in Brussels over renewing EU sanctions against Russia […]

Energy minsters and clean energy leaders from around the world descended upon San Francisco, California, this week for the seventh Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM), the first major international follow-up to the historic global climate accord struck in Paris last December. Diplomats and negotiators have rightly been praised for the success of the COP 21 Paris agreement, the most comprehensive global deal to date on climate change, with buy-in from virtually every nation on earth. But to mitigate the worst effects of climate change by displacing greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels, countries must expand their clean energy infrastructure. The CEM, which has […]

LIMA, Peru—As Peruvian voters head to the polls this Sunday to elect a new president, many will be thinking of former President Alberto Fujimori, who governed from 1990 to 2000 and is now imprisoned in Lima for crimes ranging from corruption to authorizing death squad killings. Reviled by some Peruvians and admired by others, Fujimori has a polemical but powerful political legacy here, where his daughter Keiko is the front-runner in the presidential race, his son Kenji was recently re-elected to the Peruvian Congress, and a political movement he created won a majority in the Congress during the first round […]

Kenya’s national elections are more than a year away, but political tensions are already rising. Starting in late April, the main political opposition group began organizing a near-weekly protest against the commission charged with organizing the vote. Known as the Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) and led by former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, it has accused the commission’s members of being in the pocket of President Uhuru Kenyatta, who is set to stand for a second term. The recent demonstrations have consistently been met with widespread police brutality; at least three protesters were killed during the latest incident late […]