Category: Elections

Could Tunisia’s election reshape the political system?

     

Presidential candidates Selma Elloumi Rekik and Abir Moussi want to fight against creeping fundamentalism that has threatened Tunisian women’s freedoms and improve economic prospects for unemployed youth. Their chances of winning… Read more »

‘How To Hack A Democracy’: Are disruptive populists the new normal?

     

A group of philanthropies working with Facebook Inc to study the social network’s impact on democracy threatened on Tuesday to quit, saying the company had failed to make data available… Read more »

Russia protests show Kremlin ‘failing to keep its system afloat’

     

  Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny today walked out of a Moscow jail after serving a 30-day sentence for violating Russia’s restrictive protest laws. He spoke defiantly to journalists waiting… Read more »

150 years of data proves autocrats are bad for the economy

     

Deference to autocratic rulers is not only a bad idea for democracy: It’s terrible for the economy, too, according to a new analysis. The authors of the study published in… Read more »

Tunisia’s democratic experiment ‘faces toughest test’ and risk of fragmentation

     

  Tunisia’s election commission has approved (HT: FP) a list of candidates for the country’s presidential vote. There are 26 candidates, among them the current prime minister and defense minister, a… Read more »

Moscow in Movement: Record protests present new challenge to Putin’s dominance

     

An estimated fifty thousand people in Moscow (Moscow Times/CFR) protested the barring of independent candidates from the ballot in an upcoming local election in what was one of the country’s… Read more »

Kremlin under siege: after 20 years in power, Putin ‘looks weaker than ever’

     

Twenty years ago, Vladimir Putin appeared on the political Olympus in the guise of an effective bureaucrat with a security services background; a market-oriented statesman and pragmatist without ideological pretenses,… Read more »

Is Russia’s ‘new civic activism’ testing Putin’s grip on power?

     

  More people in Russia view the late Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union as “close to the people” than they do President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, according to a survey… Read more »