Not Iran this time!
I’ve been in Senegal the last couple of weeks. And, you know? Senegal is (1) 90% Muslim, and (2) a vibrant democracy.
The opposition won the last couple of elections. The press is free — sometimes obnoxiously so. Human rights violations are relatively rare. (Nonexistent, really, [...]

Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count - an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad [...]

The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they are divided on many more [...]

For a banned demonstration called off by the opposition candidate, this looks pretty big. New York Times says “hundreds of thousands,” i.e., more than came to see Obama in Berlin.
Government apparently continuing to try to crack down on media. Much information still coming out, but verification in the old media sense is difficult, and the [...]

Tehran tense, says CNN. Unrest challenges Iran’s republic, says the BBC headline writer, choosing understatement. The reporter, Jon Leyne, is less restrained: “As demonstrations against the Iranian election result continue, the situation in Tehran is becoming unpredictable and potentially explosive.”
The story got close to a third of Germany’s main news broadcast last night, too, with [...]

In case you’re wondering why there’s such an rightwing dominance in the first place (and it’s pretty much always been that way in parliament elections): Some countries aren’t polarized between a leftwing block and a rightwing block, which has meant nonsocialist parties are dominant.
Some, like Benelux countries and Finland, have centrist supermajority coalitions and [...]

By some wonderful magic, all media reports of an event tend to go with the same storyline, often kind of off. The storyline after the elections was “The right and anti-immigrant parties win big.”
Figuring out if it was accurate took some work, because some parties, for example the Tories and the Italian Democratic Party, plan [...]

It’s polling day in Iran and

Story on the geopolitical angle from Foreign Policy today. And it’s better than any story you’re likely to find in a major newspaper, too.

So the pattern seems to be that incumbent parties did well in three large countries where television news apparently isn’t as independent as you’d wish (Spain, Italy and France) and collapsed in every other country.
(Correlation isn’t always causation.)