Category: Democratic institutions

Russia’s ‘Kremlin Playbook’ boosts covert influence in Eastern Europe

     

Russia has mounted a campaign of covert economic and political measures to manipulate five countries in central and eastern Europe, discredit the West’s liberal democratic model, and undermine trans-Atlantic ties,… Read more »

How can West start winning global battle for democracy?

     

Why are the world’s despots thriving, and how can the West start winning the global battle for democracy? Have we hit democracy’s high water mark? These questions are among those… Read more »

Morocco: PJD electoral success highlights new breed of Islamism

     

In last Friday’s legislative elections in Morocco, the ruling Islamist Party of Justice and Development (PJD, left) again secured a plurality, but while the elections were hailed as proof of… Read more »

Pakistan: journalist travel ban ‘against the norms of democracy’

     

Pakistan’s government should immediately drop the travel ban on a leading journalist and respect a free and open working environment for the media, Human Rights Watch said today: On October… Read more »

Kleptocracy not only a problem of ‘faraway, nasty countries’

     

A sorry parade of arms smugglers, oligarchs, defense contractors, mafia dons, drug dealers, gambling fraudsters, sanctions breakers, and kleptocrats emerge from the Panama Papers, journalist Alan Rusbridger writes for The… Read more »

The problem with plebiscites

     

The unanticipated and widely debated results in Colombia and Great Britain – indeed, the very decision to use the mechanism of popular consultation to identify the citizenry’s will – obliges… Read more »

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 »

Protecting fundamental freedoms in Morocco?

     

Morocco’s King Mohammed on Monday named moderate Islamist leader Abdelilah Benkirane as prime minister for a second term after his party won the most seats in last week’s election, Reuters… Read more »

Is Africa’s model democracy in danger of faltering?

     

With just under two months to go before the polls, several signs indicate that, despite Ghana’s track record, problems will plague the upcoming elections more severely than in the past,… Read more »

Georgia’s free and fair elections confirm political polarization

     

Georgia’s parliamentary elections were free, fair, competitive and overall confirmed existing trends, most observers attest. The results nevertheless confirmed continued polarization of the political space between the two dominant political… Read more »