Global News Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan’s political crisis

Never in the history of Pakistan has a democratically elected civilian government served out its full term and then been replaced by another one, also through democratic elections. It is that context that makes the latest political crisis in Pakistan so important.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scrambling to save his PPP-led government after it lost its parliamentary majority when its coalition partner, the  Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), announced it would go into opposition.  A smaller religious party, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), already quit the coalition last month.  If the government falls and elections are held ahead of schedule in 2013, the opportunity for Pakistan to have a government which serves its full term will be lost. 

The prevailing view among political analysts appears to be that the government is now less likely to last until 2013, even if it manages to survive in the short term. But given the peculiar nature of Pakistani politics, where the military exerts a powerful role behind the scenes, no one is predicting anything with any certainty.

The main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has shown little enthusiasm for forcing an early election which could propel his Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) into power at a time when the country faces huge economic and security problems. Better to wait it out until an election in 2013 that his PML-N is seen as likely to win. Having been ousted in a coup in 1999, Sharif also remains deeply suspicious of the army, and he has ruled out supporting any moves against the government that might be orchestrated by the military. Giving democracy time to bed down, by allowing the government led by the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) to serve its full term, could set a useful precedent for a future PML-N administration. 

The army itself has shown no inclination to run the country directly, and it already controls the issues that matter most to it - foreign and security policy.  It has barely disguised its frustration with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari -- who also leads the PPP -- particularly after he travelled to France and Britain last summer while the country suffered from devastating floods.  But that does not translate into wanting to see Sharif back in power. According to a U.S. embassy cable released by WikiLeaks,  army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani made it clear to U.S. officials that "regardless of how much he disliked Zardari, he distrusted Nawaz (Sharif) even more".

Another option, possibly more palatable to the army, would be an alternative coalition of smaller political parties which might be able to challenge both Zardari and Sharif in the next election. But that will take time to fall into place, possibly right up to 2013, if at all.  Don't rule anybody out, however unlikely they seem now, as part of an alternative coalition. That includes former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who set his sights very firmly on 2013 when he launched his political party in London in October.

A couple of final points. We don't actually know for sure whether there is a groundswell of popular support in favour of ditching the current government, though there is, as Nadeem Paracha argued in Dawn,  a great deal of populist sloganeering on television channels about the state of the country.  "Akin to a black comedy is the fact that most TV anchors and hosts that go on spouting all these concerns – unemployment, inflation, drone attacks, ‘good governance’, Aafia ki wapsi (jailed Pakistani scientist Aafia Siddiqui)  etc. – are sitting pretty with hefty salaries and perks, and, what some would suggest, an agenda to safeguard the interests of some of the most anti-democracy classes in this country i.e., the military, the mullah and large sections of the upper and middle-classes."

Japan’s not-so-hot election

Candidates on the campaign trail in Japan are sweating through the summer heat but voters have been cool towards this Sunday’s upper house election.

Sure, the government won’t change because the ruling Democratic Party will still control the more powerful lower house.

But the election matters because failure for the Democrats to win a majority would split parliament and stall policymaking, blocking Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s pledge to cut Tokyo’s huge public debt, create jobs and fix the creaking social security system.

So why aren’t voters fired up? For one, the campaign has been pretty dull.

Rules require media to give equal coverage to all the political parties — not great for viewership when there are more than 10 of them. TV debates have had no fewer than seven party leaders arguing over issues ranging from the economy to diplomacy.

The debates are squeezed into shows lasting an hour or less, and include brief intervals showing pre-recorded comments from other party heads. Even Yasuo Tanaka, leader of New Party Nippon with just one seat in parliament, gets air time.

from MacroScope:

Deficit-obsessed Czechs grapple ahead of vote

If one were to believe the noise coming from right-of-centre politicians in Prague, the Czechs are on the brink of a Greece-style budget meltdown, and victory by the leftist Social Democrats in a May 28-29 election would plunge them into economic collapse.

An ad in newspapers this week from the right-wing Civic Democrats (ODS) showed masked Greek rioters in front of a burning barricade. “Socialists in Greece – the same as in the Czech Republic”, the headline read. Alongside, a picture of Jiri Paroubek, leader of the Social Democrats (CSSD) bore the caption “CSSD = State Bankruptcy”.

The ad angered the Greek embassy, which summoned ODS’s campaign manager to complain. It also puzzled many analysts as to why a country with relatively sound economic fundamentals could be worried about national bankruptcy in the short term.

The Czechs run in the middle of the pack in terms of European Union budget deficits, and they have one of the bloc’s smallest debt piles overall – only 35.4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with an EU average of 73.6 percent.

On the other hand, they suffer acutely from a fiscal risk common to many EU states. The ageing Czech population is for the first time threatening the country’s unreformed pension and healthcare systems with billion euro deficits each year – a trend that economists say will only worsen unless policymakers reform the systems now.

So, while fellow EU newcomer states like Romania and Hungary are aiming for higher-than-previously estimated budget deficits. The fear of the impending demographic crisis in the Czech Republic has prompted the caretaker government, to propose more spending cuts to make sure the country does not exceed its planned budget deficit of 5.3 percent of GDP this year.

"Otherwise we will really make ourselves huge problems. I am not fearmongering here, that is reality," Prime Minister Jan Fischer told Reuters in an interview in April.

In line of fire at Bangkok protests

It was 2 a.m. on a Friday morning and we were stuck in the Reuters office on the 35th floor of the U Chu Liang Building. Thai anti-government protesters had begun rioting after their military strategist, a flamboyant major-general known as  “Commander Red” was shot in the head as he was being interviewed by the New York Times at the “red shirt” protest encampment that occupies a huge chunk of expensive real estate in the Thai capital.

The protesters had swarmed into our parking lot, troops hot on their heels. One red shirt was shot dead, taking a bullet through his eye, outside our office.  Our managers  had ordered us to evacuate, but we had to wait until the violence died down outside.  I strapped on a 10 kg flak jacket and helmet emblazoned with “press stickers”, took a ride down the cargo elevator in a building under emergency power, and stepped carefully into the parking lot, looking around to see if it was safe for the remaining people in the newsroom to leave. It was quiet, as I crept around the parking lot, dodging from car to car, feeling slightly ridiculous. A taxi was parked just outside. I was beginning to understand what gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson meant when he said in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:  ”When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

I was about to enter the taxi,  when BOOM! The sound of a grenade maybe 50 metres away, followed by the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire. I jumped into the taxi, and told the driver to take me to my hotel. Quickly please. “Boom!”, he said, and laughed. “Boom, boom,boom,” he added, mimicking the act of firing a gun. And laughing once more we drove off into the terrifying night.

For the past four days, journalists have been moving out of their offices into hotels, and then out of their hotels into ones further from the combat zone, as violence escalated across the city of 15 million people in random urban warfare. The military was firing at groups of protesters setting up barricades of burning tyres, behind which they hurled petrol bombs and projectiles with slingshots. At least five journalists have been among the seven foreigners shot. One journalist took a bullet in the chest, but since he was wearing a heavy flak jacket, he just fell down and hurt his back.

A Canadian journalist working for a French television station was not as well protected. He was shot three times — in the arm, leg and abdomen — while covering the protest on Friday, but was recovering in hospital. The spiralling violence that has turned Bangkok’s bustling business district into a war zone has killed 37 people and injured nearly 270 since Thursday. A Reuters television cameraman, Hiro Muramoto was among those killed in the  melee of an April 10 protest that marked the point at which these protests that began rather festively turned violent.

I have moved hotels three times in the past week, as the combat zone widened

I was the last guest to leave the splendid Metropolitan Hotel on Sathorn Road on Saturday. The night before, I had walked back late at night on that road toward a line of soldiers metres away, who were firing on a group of  protesters, muzzle flashes punctuating the darkness. 

Colombian election heats up

Just a month ago all seemed set for Juan Manuel Santos to secure Colombia’s presidency. Santos, a former defense minister for President Alvaro Uribe, is credited with some of the most successful operations against the country’s FARC guerrillas. But now Santos has a fight on his hands after the surprising surge for two-time Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus. 

 Known as much for his successful city administration as for his off-beat style, Mockus has won supporters with his message of clean government and continuity of Uribe’s policies. Polls now show Colombians are more concerned with bread-and-butter issues like jobs, healthcare and education than with violence from the waning war.

Could Santos be a victim of Uribe’s security success in that Colombians now see the need for someone like Mockus, who promises to crack down on corruption and pay more attention to social and economic development? Or is Santos paying the price for scandals over rights abuses and corruption that rattled Uribe’s second term?

Both men will guarantee the continuity of Colombia’s tough security and pro-business approach. But Mockus has caught voter attention for now with a fresh approach that contrasts sharply with the way conservative Uribe ran the presidency.

A former university rector, he once dropped his pants and showed his backside to students to get their attention. As mayor he used street mimes to shame Bogota residents into obeying the law. He says he is more conservative now and touts his fiscal management and his solid law-and-order record in the capital as credentials for the presidency. 

Undoubtedly the race is still very tight, but after eight years of Uribe could Colombians be ready for a change in style in the presidential office?

 Reuters photo by Jose Miguel Gomez

from Africa News blog:

Yar’Adua death leaves succession wide open

The death of Nigerian President Umaru Yar'Adua is unlikely to plunge Africa's most populous state into crisis, but it intensifies what was already shaping up to be the fiercest succession race since the end of military rule.

Yar'Adua has been absent from the political scene since last November, when he left for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, and his deputy Goodluck Jonathan has been running the country since February and has since consolidated his position.

Yar’Adua’s death now piles pressure on the powerbrokers in the ruling People's Democratic Party to resolve the impasse over who should succeed him.

According to the party's constitution, power should rotate between Nigeria's geographical zones, and there is an unwritten agreement that the presidency should alternate between the Muslim north and Christian south every two terms.

The conventional thinking was that should Yar'Adua -- a northerner -- die during his first term, as has happened, Jonathan -- a southerner -- would pick a new northern vice president and the pair would finish the unexpired term.

That northern vice president would then stand as the ruling party's presidential nominee in the next election.

A string of northern names has been bandied around in the media and by political analysts as possible candidates to serve with Jonathan and then run at the next election.

The “Japan High School Party”

If ever proof were needed that personal ties can trump policy in Japanese political alliances , a new party being set up by a band of ageing opposition MPs should do the trick.

Former Finance Minister Kaoru Yosano, 71, favours raising taxes to pay for burgeoning social welfare costs in Japan’s greying society and helped push to privatise Japan’s huge postal system back in 2005.

His partner, ex-trade minister Takei Hiranuma, 70, is an ultraconservative who touts “traditional Japanese values” and left the then-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 2005 because he staunchly opposed taking Japan Post private.

“Mr Yosano is not opposed to my ideas,” Hiranuma told reporters this week as the two plotted to start their new “Stand Up, Japan” party amid criticism that their policies hardly matched. “We were in the same class at Azabu High School and our seats were next to each other.”

Drafted as a fifth member needed to meet a legal requirement for setting up a new party was upper house lawmaker Yoshio Nakagawa, whose main qualification appears to be that his lawmaker brother, now deceased, was once an aide to Hiranuma.

Hiranuma himself would seem to be a better ideological fit with banking minister Shizuka Kamei, who also left the LDP in 2005 and started the People’s New Party to battle postal privatisation. But cynics say the small party couldn’t accommodate two big egos, and Kamei now belongs to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s coalition, which took power last September after Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) trounced the long-dominant Liberal Democrats.

Confused? Not surprising.

from Africa News blog:

What can Nigeria expect now?

The return of Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua three months after he left for a Saudi hospital might normally have beeen seen as a sign that a long spell of debilitating uncertainty was over.

But this was no ordinary return for a long absent president with an army band and a red carpet.

Yar’Adua was moved under cover of darkness from a plane to an ambulance and then driven to the Aso Rock presidential villa in Abuja. No pictures. No comment.

In fact, nobody outside his immediate circle has had a chance to see him and that apparently includes Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, who two weeks ago assumed executive powers with the support of parliament to end a power vacuum.

A statement from Yar’Adua’s spokesman thanked Jonathan for his help and said he would continue running affairs of state while the president convalesces. Before seeing the president, he was due to meet his wife, Turai.

Yar’Adua’s return was welcomed by many in the country of more than 140 million although there were widespread doubts  about whether he would return to office and questions over what would be the role of his aides and powerful wife.

What will the new arrangement mean for chances of addressing problems such as unrest in the Niger Delta, power shortages, ensuring fair elections and corruption? What will it mean for the political intrigues ahead of an election due within just over a year?

Little help from celebs for Germany’s undecided voters

Nobel prize-winning writer Guenter Grass is dressed in a mustard-brown cord suit and reading his work to a reverent audience in a hushed Berlin night club.

It feels more like a book launch than a political campaign event just days before the German election. Yet as far as celebrity endorsements for German political parties go, this is as big as it gets.

The Social Democrats (SPD) have boasted Grass, author of “The Tin Drum”, among their most famous  and vocal supporters for 40 years. Party leaders have come and gone, but 81-year-old Grass is reassuringly familiar — and strangely ageless as he reads in an expressive, animated voice.

The mood is convivial. Hardly what is required to provide the much-needed shot in the arm for the SPD, who lag Chancellor Angel Merkel’s Christian Democrats in the polls.

Political endorsements by Germany’s stars of stage and screen have always been earnest and low-key, in sharp contrast to the glamour Hollywood celebrities or chart-topping musicians hope to inject in U.S. elections.

But this time around, in an election campaign lacking dynamism and momentum from all sides, even the endorsements sound particularly flat, as the testaments on campaign websites for the two leading candidates show.

“When I see him and hear him speak, I see a man who is very clear,” explains Katharina Saalfrank, a television presenter famous for reforming naughty children in the show “Super Nanny”, on a website supporting Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the SPD Chancellor candidate.

Flashmobs target Merkel at final election rallies

Getting pelted by eggs or tomatoes is an occupational hazard for most hardened politicians on the election trail.******But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, seeking re-election on Sunday, has been confronted with a new kind of protest during her final campaign rallies: flashmobs.******The mobs, groups of people summoned over the Internet to show up at a specific time and place to do something unusual, have materialised at several election events in the last week to wave flags and banners and heckle the unsuspecting Merkel.******Mostly, they have been chanting “Yeahhhh!” after every sentence she utters and the slogan is meant as an ironic expression of support.******It may not sound like the most damaging critique, but Merkel has cottoned on to the flashmobs and now even addresses them at the rallies as “My young friends from the Internet”.******So is this a new form of political protest or just a bit of fun?******Blogger Rene Walter, who writes for nerdcore, says there is a serious idea behind the light-hearted gatherings.******”We are not just going to swallow the election messages, we are spitting back the rubbish Merkel speaks in the ironic form of a “Yeahhh!”, he says in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.******Many involved in the flashmobs support the Pirate Party, who are popular among young voters and oppose what they say is censorship of the Internet that has been brought in under Merkel’s government.******One thing is for sure. Flashmobs are injecting some much-needed spontaneity into the final days of a campaign which many voters think has been the most turgid in decades.******But are flashmobs here to stay? Could they become the political protest movement of the Internet age?