#elections

With the backing of Brazil’s most popular president in history and support from the state’s publicity machine, Dilma Rousseff’s ongoing tie in opinion polls forces a shift in strategy. Presidential opinion polls released this week continued to show the PT’s Dilma Rousseff and the PSDB’s José Serra in a ‘technical tie’, with Jose Serra at […]

Deadlocked efforts to resolve Iraq’s governing crisis nearly four months after parliamentary elections failed to produce decisive results, are at the heart of this current wave of political violence.

The 2010 Ibrahim Prize for excellence in African leadership goes to…no one. The prize committee of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation announced last week they are not granting the award this year, as they found no suitable candidates. The Ibrahim prize is granted to an African leader who has achieved positive developments in their country, and, […]

by Jessica D’Itri Mu Sochua, 55, the most prominent woman in Cambodia’s Sam Rainsey opposition party is on the campaign trail three years in advance of the scheduled parliamentary elections. Sochua, a human rights and women’s rights activist, faces a tough and at times vicious campaign. The Prime Minister, Hun Sen, of the ruling Cambodian […]

At the press conference on 14 March 2010, immediately after the close of the National People’s Congress annual session (NPC, China’s legislature and highest state body), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao discussed Hong Kong. The speech came in the wake of a stormy political debate over the slow progress towards universal suffrage that has seen clashes […]

China has eight non-communist parties under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). What at first seems like an oddity under an one-party system is not so once we understand the reality of the relationship between the CCP and these parties. Open political debates are strictly constrained in China. The CCP maintains its dominance […]

Brazil’s success in diplomacy, international commerce, and becoming a world player have been in part dependent on President Lula’s success during his administration. Now, with an election coming up this year, there is a possibility that the tides will change and Brazil may change its course with new leadership. José Serra, the governor of São […]

Lula, o Filho do Brasil, the film by Fabio Barreto that was recently released in Brazil, has been controversial since its release. The biopic about President Lula da Silva has come under fire for various reasons, including the plot and the political message. While President Lula is a popular president with high approval ratings, the […]

Campaign finance is one of the gray areas of corruption, a practice that makes those concerned with accountability squirm, but one that is largely legal. Few would claim that democracy is served when a donor’s financing of a political campaign leads directly to policies in favor of that donor – but such a link is […]

Can democracy survive 21st century capitalism? In October, the courts of France dismissed a suit by Transparency International (and other plaintiffs) that sought to investigate how three African dictators in Francophone Africa came to possess hundreds of millions of dollars even though the people of  their countries were amongst the poorest in the world. The […]

For at least three decades now, personal wealth has been a political asset. In both the industrialized and developing worlds, in the words of Deng Xiaoping of China, “to get rich is glorious.” Money was access to political power, political power (especially in the developing world) access to money. I remember about four years ago, […]

President Hugo Chávez is on a weeklong trip overseas, to strengthen alliances in “the fight against imperialism”. His itinerary includes stops in Libya, Syria, Iran, Algeria, Belarus, and Russia. Freedom House, a US-based non-profit (and declaredly non-partisan) publishes “Freedom in the World, the annual survey of global political rights and civil liberties”. It ranked each […]