People should not dismiss the meaning of a spate of shocking electoral results, for the world may be entering a period of democratic decline.
Tag: democracy
As Turkish President Erdogan pushes his country towards despotism, European Union leaders — especially in Germany — must take a harder line.
Momentous national referendums in Colombia and Britain have shown how dangerous it can be to put complicated decisions in the hands of a fickle populous.
-OpEd- BERLIN — The ministers of the interior of Germany’s 16 federal states have presented their plan against terrorism. Among them, the abolition of the dual citizenship and a public ban on wearing the burqa. As far as is known, no dual citizenship holder has committed a crime of a terrorist nature. The number of […]
CASABLANCA — Morocco is no stranger to the jihadist violence afflicting other Muslim countries: In 2003, a suicide bombing killed 33 people in the country’s largest city, Casablanca, while a 2011 attack killed 17 in Marrakesh. But unlike most of its neighbors, Morocco has a detailed policy to reform rather than destroy followers of Salafism, […]
Recounting and reflections of the failed Friday night coup, and the mob mentality left in its wake.
Can practitioners of Islam also believe in the ideals of a secular state and democracy? A Turkish academic poses the question and finds some interesting answers.
Signing a petition challenging Donald Trump’s right to run for U.S. president is one bad good idea. A novelist who lived through Balkan tragedies knows this well.
BOGOTÁ — For Latin America, the U.S. presidential elections have become a big-screen spectacle that affects the tone and register of local politics, in a region that combines democratic aspirations with an enduring admiration for its northern neighbor. The televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy generations ago began a process that has […]
A female Islamist member of Parliament and an alternative-minded blogger have very different ideas about the role of religion in post-Revolution Tunisia.
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A Libyan Family’s Quiet Resilience
MISRATA — The weather is fair as the moon hangs over a family home in Misrata. The al-Rufai’s tiled courtyard, with its table and plastic chairs, and a vine shoot wrapped around the arbor, feels strangely peaceful this evening. Inside a dismantled Libya, the enclosure is an unexpected oasis, a welcome safe-haven against the chaos. […]
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On This Day – January 25
Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa insists he will retire from politics when his term ends. Yet he has spent the past year lobbying to end presidential term limits, which a loyal parliament has now granted. Does he have a hidden agenda to remain in power?
LISBON — Portugal is relearning one of the basic tenets of democracy: Majority rules. The country’s four left-leaning parties are expected to bring down the minority center-right government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho with a vote of no-confidence on Tuesday, newspaper Diário de Notícias reports. The center-right coalition that has been governing since 2011 […]
Patients versus doctors, electors versus parties and disappointed refugee aid response. The Internet may actually widen the gap between citizens and modern democratic institutions.
Modern life, with its rules and material rewards, has robbed people of the most basic sense of happiness. What do we have to lose by ridding ourselves of so many imposed ideas?
-Editorial- PARIS — During the nail-biting four days of an election that many warned would be too close to call, Nigeria was in a collective state of high anxiety. Then, in a twist for Africa’s most populous nation, a presidential election that had threatened to end in a bloodbath instead concluded peacefully with the incumbent […]
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Why The Jihadists Fear Tunisia
The biggest threat to murderous Islamists are Muslims who believe in democracy.
The latest deadly anti-Semitic terror attack happened to come in a city that once heroically saved most of its Jewish citizens from the Nazis. What’s the lesson for today?
La Nación (Argentina) January 20 2015 Protests denouncing Argentine President Cristina Kirchner erupted all over the country Monday after prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead Sunday morning. Authorities are calling the death an apparent suicide, but protestors believe he may have been murdered for accusing the president of concealing Iranian culpability for the 1994 bombing […]
The discourse of East and West, and specifically Islamic East and Christian West, is flawed and implicitly destined for conflict. A view from Latin America as Paris burns.
Argentina’s electoral routine fosters inequality and injustice, enabling opportunists to cash in. It’s time for a new approach.
Hong Kong’s umbrella protesters have all but conceded defeat, and China is taking a victory lap. The showdown offers a glimpse of Beijing’s new use of smart power, and its deeper weaknesses.
After Latin America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa want to bury their dictatorships. But it is an arduous and often twisted process of political revolution.
Thomas Sankara, the Marxist icon of the 1980s, was killed in a coup by now ousted Burkina Faso leader Compaore. Today’s youth movement is still inspired by the African revolutionary.
The midterm elections were a stinging defeat for Barack Obama. But it was also a wholesale indictment of U.S. politics, which is both disturbing and confounding when viewed from abroad.
Mario Vargas Llosa sits down with Clarin in the Nobel laureate’s home to explore why the hopes at Communism’s fall have been replaced by deep religious hatred and a secular cynicism.
Chinese and German leaders met last week to further extend economic ties. Yet in the shadow of Hong Kong, issues like espionage, democracy and competition make for a fragile relationship.
Could the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong spread to the mainland? The choices taken by the Chinese Communist Party could have long-term implications.
HONG KONG — Pro-democracy protesters took to the streets over the weekend in Hong Kong, flooding downtown around Admiralty, the government complex. Occupy Central activits rallied against the government’s plan to limit electoral changes. The city’s authorities had promised Hong Kong residents they would be allowed to choose their own leader by 2017, but the […]
Nobody wants to die for Donetsk, but much more is at stake for the West than just Ukraine’s borders. In the face of Vladimir Putin’s ambitions, it’s time to ask the hard questions.
Not the same imminent threat as Vladimir Putin, but the Hungarian prime minister is posing a bold challenge to the West, with a troubling speech in Romania that flew below the radar.
Since Indonesia transitioned to democracy in the late 1990s, life for the long-suffering ethnic Chinese population has gradually improved. It’s about to get even better.
-OpEd- It’s anything but a surprise, given the weakness of the opposition and an election played out in advance: Recep Tayyip Erdogan won after the first round of voting in Sunday’s presidential election — the first ever in Turkey by direct universal suffrage. Erdogan thus perfects a political career marked, for 20 years, by one […]
Israel’s supporters have responded to criticism of the Gaza intervention by asking why similar anger isn’t directed at the toll in Syria. It’s a bogus comparison, for many reasons.
A visit in southern China to a movement afoot to openly challenge the regime. It remains, 25 years after the Tiananmen Square protest was crushed, a risky affair.
Reports of the Thai army taking control in a military coup come as a growing number of activists are openly challenging the country’s long-reigning King Bhumibol.
The recently botched execution in Oklahoma is the just the latest sign that this ‘quaint and cruel’ form of American justice is not worthy of a democracy.
False visions of political concepts thrive in Argentina, where dictatorships past and spin doctors present employ their own forms of double speak.