Turkey’s 30-year coup
According to Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the recent attempted coup was not a legitimate sign of civic unrest, notes Dexter Filkins. In fact, it did not even originate in… Read more »
Category: Democratic degradation
Venezuela in a ‘peculiar predicament’
Venezuela is no longer a country split between roughly two antagonistic halves: a pro-government left and an opposition-minded right, notes Francisco Toro, the editor of CaracasChronicles. A broad and diverse… Read more »
Poland highlights the ‘specter haunting Europe’
Tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets of the Polish capital Warsaw Saturday (24 September) to rally against moves by the rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) government that they… Read more »
Sources of the real power of Putin
We needn’t look to the post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004), let alone to the more recent demonstrations in Moscow against election fraud (2011–2012), for the source… Read more »
Why Russia is degrading democracy around the world
In the light of Ivan Ilyin’s rehabilitation as Russia’s leading ideologue, Moscow’s manipulations of elections should be seen not so much as a failure to implement democracy but as a… Read more »
Kremlin’s big win in Russian elections ‘may not be a victory’
Vladimir Putin cemented his supremacy over Russia’s political system when his ruling United Russia party took three quarters of the seats in parliament in a weekend election, paving the way… Read more »
Russia – poster child for electoral authoritarianism
Russia is the poster child for a type of governance termed electoral, or competitive, authoritarianism, analysts Erik C. Nisbet and Elizabeth Stoycheff write for The Washington Post: These autocratic governments… Read more »
#ConCaracas: Venezuela approaching tipping point?
A major opposition protest planned for September 1 could determine the political future of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. Opposition leaders say they will take to the streets of the capital Caracas to insist… Read more »
Nicaragua: ‘no one left to vote for’
The democratic transition that we Nicaraguans began in 1990, and the peacebuilding we undertook after a tragic war between brothers, relied on an essential foundation: honest and transparent elections, notes… Read more »
Venezuela – ‘a nation with no future’?
About 20 percent of Venezuela’s children face problems of malnutrition, and the number of children admitted to hospitals for severe malnutrition has spiked, The Miami Herald reports: A survey carried… Read more »