Last week’s defeat of a controversial amnesty measure underscores the difficulties facing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Having deftly engineered an improbable return to office after last year’s elections, Sanchez now finds himself at the head of a coalition even more unruly than his previous complex, multiparty alliance.
Senegalese President Macky Sall announced on Saturday that he had indefinitely postponed the country’s presidential election, a move the opposition has denounced as an attack on West Africa’s most stable democracy.
The past three decades of Latin American history are full of presidents who stretched the constitutional limits of power and extended their mandate. Most, but not all, left their country worse than they found it. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele’s name can now be added to that list. His legacy depends on what happens in the coming five years.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel replaced the country’s economy minister, amid delays to planned price hikes for fuel and transportation that the government blamed on a cyberattack. The fate of the measures, which had been scheduled for Feb. 1, is now uncertain. But the economic crisis that made them necessary is exceedingly clear.
The coup that rocked Myanmar three years ago showed just how fragile the country’s democratic transition was, even as its aftermath has shown how resilient the country’s pro-democracy movement remains.
Is U.S. President Joe Biden too focused on defending democracy, as some observers have claimed recently? One can argue that the Biden administration is too maximalist in its aims, even to the point of trying to do too much. But is it truly due to a hyper-focus on the defense of democracy, both at home and abroad?
Djibouti has built its economic model around shipping services and maritime logistics, and among its most prominent partners is its landlocked neighbor, Ethiopia. To cater to Ethiopia’s needs, Djibouti has built a host of new infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, Ethiopia’s port deal with Somaliland has set off alarm bells in Djibouti.
EU leaders unanimously agreed to extend €50 billion in new aid to Ukraine, overcoming weeks of resistance from the sole holdout, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban. The aid package is a significant boost for Ukraine’s finances and morale as well as a victory for Brussels.
One of the most important elections of the year, especially for the United States, will be in Mexico, where the next president will have to navigate not only the country’s internal problems, but also manage ties with Washington and deal with the increasingly negative attention the country receives north of the border.
When Nigerian President Bola Tinubu was elected chairperson of the ECOWAS last July, he underscored his commitment to defending democracy across the region, which had already seen a string of military coups. That could come back to haunt him, given recent developments in the region and ECOWAS’ performance under Tinubu’s leadership.