Spending a whole day with Bolivian leftist president Evo Morales requires a great deal of stamina.
    Morales, an Aymara Indian who has introduced a battery of controversial reforms to give Bolivian Indians more power and has put the state in the driving seat of the economy, is hyperactive, to say the least.
    He tends to start the day meeting diplomats or government officials at about 6 a.m. and often wraps up after midnight.
    In the three years I have been living in Bolivia he has not been on vacation, and it is not unusual for him to visit three or four far-away places in a day.
    Today is one of those days.
    Morales, who herded llamas as a child, lost four siblings to poverty and never finished high school, became the country’s first Indian president in early 2006. He is revered by poor Indians, who identify with his moving underdog story and are benefiting from heavy social spending.
    But he is frowned upon by the middle classes who fear he may try to install a Cuban-style socialist regime in the country.
    Critics see Morales, an ally of Venezuelan leftist President Hugo Chavez and Cuban revolution leader Fidel Castro, as a dangerous socialist.
    The day we spent together, he was wearing jeans, a wrinkled short-sleeve shirt and unbranded sports shoes. He was good humored and cared little for protocol; addressing me as “comrade” or “brother” and once simply with a “What’s up, boss?”
    “I don’t know how he does it. I can’t keep up sometimes. I’ve got soroche — high altitude syndrome,” said a close Morales’ aide, when I asked about the president’s hectic schedule, which often includes trips from the Andean plateau to the lowlands and back.
    I met Morales, a clear favorite to win a presidential election in December, at a campaign rally at 7 a.m. in El Alto, a sprawling shantytown in the outskirts of La Paz.
    “Evo governs and plays but does not get tired,” chanted hundreds of supporters while he played soccer after the rally.
    Then we took a plane to the country’s constitutional capital, Sucre, to catch a helicopter to Tinguipaya, a tiny Quechua village of adobe houses in the central Potosi region, where no Bolivian president had ever visited before.
    After a campaign event in Tinguipaya we flew to the southern town of Tarija, where he presided over an award ceremony for a soccer tournament, and then off to the northern town of Cobija.
    On the plane Morales bragged about a penalty he scored in an impromptu kick about.
    “I fooled the goalkeeper. Did you see?,” he said.
    By 4 p.m. we had visited four places all over Bolivia — a country of 10 million that is roughly the size of France and Spain combined — traveling by car, plane and helicopter. At one point I tried to take a nap but Morales woke me up listening to loud Bolivian pop music on his cell phone.
    At times during the day he looked over papers handed to him by a military officer and he also had private meetings with the defense minister and a governer during our travels.
    Morales, a bachelor with a mop of thick black hair and copper skin, was going to turn 50 the day after our trip.
    “How are you going to celebrate your birthday?” I asked.
    “I can’t,” he said. “It’s forbidden. I’ve got to work. I have a meeting at 5 a.m. … you have to be there, let’s see whether you can keep up with me.”

   “I don’t think I can. I’m already exhausted,” I told him.
    Morales ate little during the morning and early afternoon, just drinking water and popping propolis lozenges, a health food made of resin from beehives. I told him I was hungry, that I could not believe he agreed to take us around for a day but failed to offer us food.
    He called a flight attendant, who brought out a take-away plastic container with lukewarm chunks of beef and potatoes.
    In no time Morales, Reuters’ photographer David Mercado, an army official and myself were all picking food from the container with our fingers. It was a working-class feast inside a presidential plane.
    In Cobija Morales met government officials, dined with supporters and presided over a second sports ceremony.
    After 14 hours of traveling throughout the country Morales, a keen soccer fan, was still going strong and decided to play soccer with a local team.
    On the flight back to La Paz he finally dozed off for an hour or so. We arrived in El Alto after 1 a.m.
    “Comrades, I see you at 5 a.m. at the presidential palace. Don’t let me down,” he said before waving goodbye.

(Photograph by David Mercado/REUTERS, October 25, 2009)

Greek elections have traditionally been raucous, ebullient affairs, a true celebration of democracy in the country that gave birth to the concept. This year, the mood is noticeably more sombre ahead of Sunday’s vote. Colourful elections kiosks at main squares stand nearly empty, attracting few voters. The chat at cafes and on the Internet usually centres on voters’ disappointment with politics as a whole for failing to fight corruption and put the economy on a steady growth path.

“Our expectations were dashed,” said financial analyst George Kaisarios on the NewsTime blog. “The three pylons of our development strategy in the last decade, euro zone entry, Olympic Games and credit expansion, have been wasted. And unfortunately for all of us, there is nothing on the horizon to replace them.”

One mood damper for Greek voters is that Oct 4 election is another big battle between the political dynasties trapped in an endlessly revolving door of political rule, with few fresh faces to excite the crowds.

The heirs to Greece’s two most prominent political families are facing off for the third time. Socialist opposition leader George Papandreou seems set to wrestle power back from conservative New Democracy Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis after 5 years, according to the last published opinion polls.

A government ban on publishing polls for the two weeks leading to the ballot, to protect Greek voters from being manipulated, has angered polling agencies and the press. With no fresh numbers out, Greeks find less amusement in what was once a favourite Greek pastime - political debate at the dinner table.

Gone also are the “paper wars”, when rival party youths raced to cover each other’s campaign posters at night. The only face looking down from huge election campaign posters in Greece these days is that of Karamanlis. Papandreou has opted for the
environmentally-friendly option of fighting his campaign through electronic media ads.

The one constant has been the traditional Greek mix between comedy and politics. Greece’s favourite TV satirist, Lakis Lazopoulos, opened his first TV show of the season by mocking both Karamanlis — for reacting slowly — and Papandreou — for his linguistic faux pas. The show’s rating hit 60 percent.

The satire has also moved into the blogosphere. A pro-New Democracy blog missed no opportunity to poke fun at Papandreou’s efforts to appear Obama-like.

And togreki blog showed Karamanlis and his ministers dealing with the economy by “breaking the bank”.

Sunday’s federal election threw Germany’s Greens into a state of disarray — should they celebrate their best result ever or mourn the fact they failed to prevent a centre-right coalition and languished in fifth place?

“A Victory that is a Defeat”, “Triumph and Bitterness”, “Celebrations despite missing goal,” read newspaper headlines on Monday.

(Photo: Kuenast and Trittin, top candidates of the Greens party, arrive on stage after the general election, Sept 27, Reuters/Ralph Orlowski)

The Greens, one of the world’s most successful environmental parties, won more than a tenth of the vote — not bad for a party whose members entered parliament as revolutionary rebels in the 1980s flourishing potted plants and sporting woolly jumpers.

“We feel strengthened in our fight for ecological modernisation, social justice and civil rights by the best result we have ever had,” co-leader Juergen Trittin told hundreds of party faithful on Sunday evening at the Greens headquarters in Berlin.

But a German colleague who attended the event, Hans-Edzard Busemann, told me the ambiance was confused rather than euphoric, and faces fell when they saw the results for the first time.

No wonder. The Greens were hoping to be the third strongest party at the elections and kingmakers in governemnt coalition talks — a goal they missed by a long stretch, trailing behind their nemesis the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) on 14.6 percent and the far-left Linke on 11.9 percent.

They campaigned hard to prevent a centre-right coalition of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives with the pro-business Free Democrats — and failed.

Such a coalition is likely to undo much of the work that the Greens, who emerged from the anti-nuclear and peace movememnts of the 1970s, carried out while ruling with the Social Democrats from 1998 to 2005.

For a start, it will probably rewrite a national nuclear phaseout deal by allowing reactors to run longer than the previously agreed 2020 deadline. (Click here to see a story that a colleague in Frankfurt, Vera Eckert, wrote about this earlier today)

It will also likely change or drop the generous feed-in law for renewable energies introduced by the Greens and SPD, a prospect which sent shares in highly subsidised solar firms such as Q-Cells and Solarworld sliding on Monday.

(Photo: Supporters of the Green party react after the first exit polls, Sept 27, Reuters/Ralph Orlowski)

And as if all that that weren’t enough, Greens co-leader Cem Oezdemir — the only member of an ethnic minority to have ever headed a German party — failed to win a seat a parliament despite securing 30 percent of the vote in his constituency in Stuttgart.

So despite their best election result ever, the Greens may not be able to avoid some soul-searching over the coming weeks and months.

Some political analysts argue very little has changed in their manifesto over the past four years and the party executive, with the exception of Oezdemir, is still the same. Will Sunday’s result prompt a Greens renewal?

Visitors to Greece’s capital these days cannot escape the fact that a general election is on he way.  But it is not just the constant discussion on television and the excited newspaper headlines about a U.S.-style debate between front runners that lets you know.

Peppered across the city are political stalls, open for the public to come in and be persuaded to vote on Oct. 4 for whichever party is hosting them. The style ranges from a bench and chairs manned by two ageing communists in the northern suburbs to a rather slick structure in Athen’s central Syndagma Square touting the worth  of the ruling conservative New Democracy party. For some reason the latter was blaring out The Clash’s “Rocking the Casbah” on a recent sunny morning.

It is all very frothy and something of a celebration of democracy in the city which, after all, invented it.

Which is why a quieter, almost unnoticed gallery on the corner of Syndagma is offering something all the more poignant — a reminder that it was not that long ago that such expressions of democracy would be met with batons, water cannons and even tanks.

“Mikis Theodorakis: The Composer - The Politician - The Thinker” is a temporary exhibition funded by the Greek parliament to honour one of the country’s greatest living artists and an icon of left-wing resistance.

Best known to the world at large for composing the music for Michael Cacoyannis’ 1960s film “Zorba the Greek” — now almost a Greek anthem — Theodorakis has a huge and respected body of work covering some 60 years, from operas to song cycles, ballets and symphonies. Among his film themes are those for Sidney Lumet’s “Serpico” and Costa-Gavras’ “State of Siege”.

These are all celebrated with due reverence at the exhibition, including displays of many strangely ancient-looking  record album covers. But in the current political climate, it is the politics which catches the eye.

Various phases of Theodorakis’ life are highlighted — from wounded resitance fighter in the Second World War to internal exile in the Greek Civil War that raged until 1949. His music was banned and the composer himself arrested during the brutal military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. But his escape to Paris in 1970 combined with his music and imposing presence to set him up as a voice for democracy’s return.

A particulary historic photograph for the period shows Theodorakis embracing Mercedes Sosa, the Argentine singer who had similar struggles with her own country’s junta. 

It is all puts “Rocking the Casbah” into context as Greeks ready themselves for a simple excercise in democracy.

(Photo: Jeremy Gaunt)

By Golnar Motevalli

On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — accused by thousands of Iranians back in June of stealing Iran’s own disputed election — congratulated Afghan president Hamid Karzai on being re-elected.

It was a bit premature: even Karzai himself hasn’t actually claimed victory in last month’s presidential poll.

While in Iran, the election results were announced swiftly after polls closed, in Afghanistan there is still no official result a month after the vote, and a second round run-off could now be delayed until next year. 

A preliminary count of votes shows Karzai with a majority, but the election has been marred by accusations of fraud, most levelled at Karzai’s supporters.

The U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission found “clear and convincing evidence of fraud” and has ordered a recount of 10 percent of polling stations, which could mean ballots are nullified and Karzai may face a second-round run-off.

Afghanistan has not experienced the kind of post-election protests that ran in Iran after the election there, but diplomats in Kabul fear that a disputed election result could undermine the government and increase instability.

Comparisons between Karzai’s election and Ahmadinejad’s are awkward for Western leaders, especially U.S. President Barack Obama, who has already sent thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan and is considering whether to send more.

A few months ago I asked Karzai as he left a press conference in Kabul if he had spoken to Ahmadinejad about the elections in Iran when the two men met at a summit.

At that time anti-Ahmadinejad protests were at their height in Iran. Karzai simply replied, “we just met and exchanged greetings”.

I asked Karzai if he had sought any advice or tips from his Iranian counterpart about how to conduct an election campaign. Karzai laughed-off my question and continued his way out of the room, surrounded by security and the usual scrum of photographers. 

(File photo of Ahmadinejad and Karzai)

With two weeks to go before Germany holds an election, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives have unveiled a new set of election posters, depicting Merkel, Merkel, and more Merkel.

Rather than campaigning on the issues highlighted in their election programmes, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) are keeping it simple and hoping to capitalise instead on the popularity of their leader, Germany’s first female chancellor.

(Photo: A new election campaign poster of German Chancellor Merkel is pictured in Berlin, Sept. 14, 2009, Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch)

“The key question is whether Angela Merkel, who has intelligently guided Germany throughout the crisis, should continue to govern,” said Ronald Pofalla, general secretary of the CDU, at a press conference in Berlin.

“With the new posters, we want to make clear to people that they will only get Merkel again as a chancellor if they vote for the CDU.”

The posters show only Merkel, smiling benevolently against a minimalist black background, and feature slogans like: “We vote for the Chancellor” or “We vote for confidence”.

The latest posters are emblematic of the conservatives’ general campaign, which has focused less on hard-hitting issues such as tax cuts and atomic energy than on popular personalities like Merkel and the Economy Minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg.

On previous posters, Guttenberg and other well-known conservative politicians were shown against a blurry background, alongside vague slogans such as “economy with reason”, “strong families” and “good education”.

The posters contrast with those of other parties, which make strong statements on specific policies. A poster for the Social Democrats (SPD), the conservatives’ main challenger, shows an anonymous young woman and reads “atomic energy was yesterday, clean energy is the future, and that is why I am voting SPD”.

 With the election looming, the question is whether voters will let the conservatives get away with their refusal to engage on the issues and failure to offer a new vision for the future of Europe’s largest economy.

Analysts said Merkel did worse than her SPD challenger Frank-Walter Steinmeier in a television debate on Sunday — partly because she preferred to echo the vague slogans of her campaign rather than spell out what she plans to do if she is re-elected.

Is she smart to steer clear of controversy and rely on her popularity to win a second term, or could the strategy backfire on Sept. 27 as it did in the TV debate?

(Additional Reporting by Wolfgang Kerler)

Observers of Japanese politics who have long thought the country was ripe for a real two-party system are watching Sunday's election with a dual sense of incredulity -- surprise that it has taken so long to oust the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and surprise that it finally looks like happening.

Media surveys show the decade-old opposition Democratic Party is set to win the poll for parliament's powerful lower house -- and probably by a landslide, ushering in party leader Yukio Hatoyama at the head of a government pledged to spend more on consumers and workers than the companies that benefited most from LDP policies.

That would be only the second time the LDP has lost its grip on government since it was founded in 1955.

"Every one I talk to has that feeling -- they aren't sure it's really going to happen because they thought it would happen before," said Steven Reed, a political scientist at Chuo University who has been analysing Japanese politics for decades. "A lot of people predicted based on hope, and that's not a particularly good variable for predictions."

Those with long memories can't help but recall the only other time the LDP lost power, when heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa and dozens of other lawmakers bolted the party in 1993 and voted in favour of a no-confidence motion against then-premier Kiichi Miyazawa, triggering a political quake that led to the formation of a multiparty, anti-LDP coalition under the telegenic Morihiro Hosokawa.

Hosokawa entranced a public more accustomed to staid, dark-suited and often inarticulate leaders with his media-savvy ways -- striding before cameras at an international leaders' summit with a white scarf around his neck, using a teleprompter at news conferences -- and promising to cut the bureaucratic red-tape that critics said was strangling the world's second-biggest economy.

Eight months later, though, proponents of change watched in dismay as haggling in Hosokawa's eight-party coalition and talk of scandal prompted Hosokawa to step down. Two months after that, the LDP returned to power in an odd-couple alliance with a Socialist premier at the top.

"There was a feeling then that this would work," Reed said of the mood when Hosokawa took power. "The problem was, the LDP lost, but nobody won ... You need an alternative, and building an alternative is not that easy."

Corruption, policy missteps and the fraying of a once-mighty political machine underminded the LDP's support in ensuing years but the ever-adaptable party stayed in power through coalitions.

And when its days appeared numbered under the wildly unpopular prime minister Yoshiro Mori, the LDP turned in 2001 --albeit reluctantly -- to the charismatic Junichiro Koizumi, a wavy-haired maverick with a knack for sound bites, to revive its fortunes by staging a battle against his own party's hide-bound ways under a slogan of reform.

Koizumi's "magic" saved the party for another five years, and he led the LDP to a massive election victory in 2005. But his three successors presided over declining support rates as they stumbled over policies and personnel and failed to connect with voters.

Now smouldering voter anger -- more of a slow burn against the LDP than feverish enthusiasm for the opposition Democrats -- finally looks set to turn out the LDP, as a wary electorate prepares to give change a chance -- even if they're not sure that the new crew can do much better.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Issei Kato (top)

Opinion polls show the opposition Democratic Party of Japan is set for a runaway victory in Sunday's general election, but voters are showing none of the enthusiasm that swept Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency last year.

When I talked to more than a dozen voters in a small town near Hiroshima, western Japan,  they were interested in the election and had a lot to say about it. And most were looking for change -- but not with a great deal of fervour.

Perhaps that's because I was in Higashihiroshima, a conservative rural area surrounded by rice fields and known for its sake. The district has always voted for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has ruled Japan for all but 10 months during the past half century.

The voters were also well aware of the raft of challenges, such as growing social welfare costs, facing a new government, and seemed to have low expectations for the Democrats.

"We can go back to the old way if the Democratic party fails," 69-year-old Hiroaki Yamashita told me.

Still, they were pondering a once-unthinkable Democratic Party victory, not due to any wild enthusiam for the opposition Democrats but more so because they were fed up with the LDP.

"In the countryside, many people have been bound by personal connections with the LDP. But it is time for change," 60-year-old Reiko Nishihashi told me.

"We have to let the Democrats take power," she said at a rally by Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama outside a shopping mall, adding she had always voted for the LDP in the past.

It is a common story when talking to voters in Japan, who look past claims that the Democrats have yet to say where they will get the money to fund their campaign promises.

It may not be an Obama moment, but it may deliver a landslide for the opposition party on Sunday.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Kim Kyung Hoon

Between running an election campaign and trying to save European carmaker Opel at the weekend, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was baking a currant cake and writing out a shopping list for her husband.

Merkel has sought in recent months to soften her business-like image by opening up about her life at home, hoping to reach out to more voters ahead of the federal election on September 27.

(Photo: Merkel attends the inauguration of the Oslo Opera House, April 13, 2008, Reuters/Bjorn Sigurdson)

As Germany’s first woman chancellor, Merkel used an interview with feminist magazine Emma this week to illustrate her down-to-earth approach to juggling work and family.

According to the Allensbach Institute, a leading pollster, Merkel did not score better with women than she did with men in the last federal election in 2005.

But her gender may be playing a role this year — some 41 percent of women plan to vote for her conservatives next month compared to 34 percent of men.

Merkel, ranked by Forbes as the world’s most powerful woman for a fourth straight year, said she really enjoyed cooking and did so whenever she got the chance, sharing other domestic chores with her husband when their housekeeper was on holiday.

“My husband doesn’t cook, mostly he shops and on Friday I write him a list so he can do the shopping for the weekend,” she said.

Merkel, 55, also divulged details about her look, which was the topic of a hot debate during the federal election campaign in 2005, when she traded a low-maintenance page-boy cut for something more stylish.

“At home I prefer wearing jeans and a jumper or a cardigan,” she said. “As Chancellor I have a make-up artist. But I still have a very pragmatic style: the hairdo must last for 12 or more hours, and I can’t be powdering my nose every two hours.”