#elections

When oppositions win by significant margin, the tendency is for sweeping changes. The previous regime’s leaders are investigated, arrested and prosecuted for corruption. Policies are thrown out the window and new constitutions are drafted. Myanmar has taken a different path.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are at it again.

Nigeria, a country of 170 million, spread out in several hundred ethnic groups and split right down the middle between a Christian south and a Muslim north, will head to the polls on Feb. 14 to elect its new president in what promises to be the country’s defining democratic moment.

In case you haven’t heard, the Republicans had a strong showing in the 2014 midterm elections. They now control both houses of Congress with majorities that they have not seen in decades, setting off the next phase of an era of unusual turmoil in Congressional politics.

Algeria just re-elected its longest-serving president for a fourth term, in what many describe as a fraught campaign punctuated by violence and citizen apathy. While the April 17 vote yielded no surprise, it unleashed a pertinent debate about the future of Algeria’s seemingly impermeable regime. In an awkwardly short ceremony, Abdelaziz Bouteflika was sworn in on […]

  With the Hungarian parliamentary elections just days away, Western media remains perplexed by the popularity of Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party in polls. Having been denounced time and again as a power-abusing autocrat by outsiders, Orbán’s image within his home country remains relatively unscathed. Many observers have misunderstood the reality of Orbán’s […]

This past week, radical Islam reared its ugly head again, this time in a seaside suburb of Tunis.  On Monday afternoon, the National Guard was called in to investigate a reported terrorist hideout in the Raoued suburb of Tunis.  The 24-hour standoff that ensued resulted in the death of seven militants and one police officer, […]

Millions of citizens of African countries will go to the polls in Presidential, parliamentary/legislative, state/provincial, and local elections in 2014. We will surely cover many of those here at the FPA. Here is an early preview of which elections are happening where (as of January 8) with brief commentary on several of them: Southern Africa:  […]

Life has been good for Serbs living in northern Kosovo. For the past 14 years, since the NATO-led bombing campaign forced Serbia’s government out of power, some 50,000 residents in the four municipalities north of the Ibar River in Kosovo, which is mostly ethnic Albanian, have inhabited a sort of gray area in which both […]

In my previous post, I noted how there isn’t likely to be a dramatic shift in Norway’s Arctic policy even though the Conservatives will now be at the helm of government. Regardless of whether Labour or the Conservatives dominate, oil will still be one of Norway’s top priorities in the Arctic. But questions remain as […]

This past weekend South Africa’s Sunday Independent published a lengthy (by op-ed standards) piece of mine on the Zim elections, which are taking place today. It continues one of my prevailing themes in the last few weeks, and indeed represents an attempt to synthesize my last month’s writing on Zim here at the FPA and […]

Zimbabweans will go to the polls on Wednesday to participate in an election that will be closely monitored by hundreds of foreign observers, mostly from around Africa. One country that will be watching despite Western observer missions not being invited is the United States of America. Relations between Washington and Harare are definitely nowhere near the […]