Category Archives: Governments and parties

Two Tetris’ Worth

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Over at another blog, I was asked what I thought about Obama’s visit to Moscow, how it was playing in Tbilisi and what it meant for Georgia. Here are my two tetris’ worth:

Saakashvili is pleased that the only explicit area of disagreement mentioned between the US and Russia was Georgia; Obama made time in his statement to reiterate that the US supports the territorial integrity of Georgia. Obama also said that his discussions of Georgia with Medvedev had been “frank,” the next best thing in diplo-speak to “full and frank,” which generally indicates thrown crockery.

On the other hand, Obama also clearly indicated where Georgia is on the US list of priorities in his administration: after nuclear disarmament, Afghanistan, non-proliferation in re Iran and North Korea. Much as I like Georgia, that’s a sensible set of priorities for the US. I hope that Georgian authorities will have read Obama’s signals the same way.

Interestingly, there are some signs of Abkhaz discontent. Russia has apparently been high-handed in setting up the details of guarding some of the self-declared external Abkhaz border, and is also presenting a different version of where the notional Russian-Abkhaz border lies. (Not surprising, all things considered.) Anyway, not everybody who’s anybody in Abkhazia likes that approach. And as I read through the history of the region, I find that Abkhazia in particular has made its way by cozying up to one side of regional power struggles and then shifting a bit when the embrace becomes too close, eventually changing partners. I don’t think that a new dance is about to begin, but complete subservience to Russia is not necessarily what all of the Abkhaz had in mind.

action: (I)D-day, 8th July

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OK, it’s coming down to the wire. Next week, on Wednesday, 8th July, the Government is going to put three regulations before the House of Commons. These are the crucial executive orders that put the guts of the Identity Cards Act in place; specifically, they are the ones that make it possible to force anyone who wants a passport (or any other official document not yet specified) to be fingerprinted, recorded, and loaded into the National Identity Register, to force the same people to pay for the dubious privilege unless they work at Manchester or London City Airports and have an airside security pass, and to pass any and all information from the Register to a variety of authorities including private credit-reference agencies and anyone who those authorities want to give it to.

At the current time of asking, this would appear to include the Uzbek secret police, so long as a police officer above the rank of inspector (!) acting on orders from a more senior officer, or the authorised agent of either secret service, GCHQ, SOCA, or the Inland Revenue says so. There is a clear hierarchy of priorities here; the fee is no problem so long as the compulsion doesn’t get in, and although obviously evil, the data-trafficking is considerably less problematic if the compulsion doesn’t get in.

So, time to write to them; remember that the scheme will be compulsory for anyone who ever wants to leave the country, which is another way of saying there is no choice; remember that the system is wildly insecure, that the biometrics have been hacked repeatedly, and that the Government wants to use the Chip-and-PIN infrastructure as a major part of it, and some Chip-and-PIN terminals mysteriously contain GSM radios that call numbers in Pakistan; remember that it will cost a fortune; and remember that many of the supposed “allied” intelligence services who will be able to ask for data from it have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted not to torture British citizens.

If you’re scared of the whips, vote for the fees regulation and maybe the data sharing one if you’re desperate and they’ve shown you the photos; but whatever you do, vote down the Information and Code of Practice on Penalties Order. It’s secondary legislation, so it just takes one loss in the Commons to kill it.

The texts are here, here, and here.

The Glorious Fourth

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When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Continue reading →

Senegal: Islam, democracy, sexy

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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, by African standards.) Senegal has never had a military dictatorship, a civil war, or a coup. Okay, the first couple of Presidents ruled for twenty years each, but they seem to be past that — the current President won a free and fair election. He’s also term limited, and everyone is already looking forward to a gloriously democratic free-for-all in a couple of years when he steps down.

I don’t want to overstate here. Senegal has all the usual African problems. It’s desperately poor. About a third of the population is still illiterate. There’s spectacular corruption. The President is clearly grooming his son for the succession; this involves putting Junior in the path of some rather large business opportunities. And while Senegal is a democracy, I might hesitate to call it a fully functional liberal democracy. Media that criticize the President too sharply may get hassled or shut down, government money is poured out like water to win elections, and many Ministers and members of Parliament are pretty openly for sale.

On the other-other hand, the opposition won the midterm elections last year, sweeping the President’s party out of almost every local government. To his obvious irritation and dismay. You don’t see that happening in Turkmenistan or Belarus.

So why doesn’t Senegal get any respect? Continue reading →

Iranian elections, with SCIENCE

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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 doesn’t correlate with anything – as if the uniform national swing beloved of psephologists was real, or for that matter, as if someone had simply shifted the numbers across the board. For comparison, he ran the same exercise for the 2005 German elections, which shows a wide scatter of points with a concentration of big CDU leads in the south.

Then, however, comes the genuinely scientific bit. What would Benford’s law, the principle that in most data sets there is a large excess of numbers that begin with low digits, and that therefore fake data can be identified by its divergence from this, make of it? (The data, by the way, is available here.) Well…it turns out that the results pass the Benford test, which may mean that they are honest or possibly that the Iranian Ministry of the Interior reads blogs, too.

Not Exactly a United Opposition

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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 fronts, one reason why they, collectively, do not appear quite ready for prime time.

Here’s one theme, what role foreign embassies to Georgia should play in the confrontation between the opposition and the ruling party:

Nino Burjanadze, leader of Democratic Movement-United Georgia party, called on foreign diplomats accredited in Tbilisi to react and condemn “illegal actions” taken by the authorities… (Civil.ge, May 21)

Levan Gachechiladze, an opposition politician, called on the western diplomats to give up “indifferent stance” and make “concrete statements” about the crisis in Georgia, instead of only repeating “one word – ‘dialogue’.” (Civil.ge, May 29)

…Opposition leaders said foreign diplomats should not involve themselves in internal politics.

“This is considered as interference in domestic political processes, which they are not entitled to do,” said Salome Zurabishvili, Georgia’s former foreign minister and the leader of the Georgia’s Way Party, according to the Interfax news agency. (New York Times, June 15)

Maybe this is why Napoleon preferred to be opposed by coalitions?

Green Shoots, 2

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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 situation evolving very quickly, as darkness has just fallen in Tehran.

NYT blog is forwarding reports of shooting in Azadi Square. If true, and if there is more, that would certainly change the game. Does the opposition have enough people power? How much force will the government use? Those are tonight’s questions.

Green Shoots?

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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 heavy emphasis on the government’s efforts to keep international reporters away from any stories. ARD filmed from the correspondent’s office, and told how revolutionary militias had forced their way in earlier, threatened everyone and abducted one of their technicians. According to the report, international journalists are also being regularly detained by government forces, but usually released after a few hours.

Despite these efforts, there’s lots of news getting out of the country. In addition to all of the media, here is a list of English-language Twitter feeds coming from Iran. (Thanks, Tobias.)

We’ve seen some of this story before, but the ending is far from certain. Is it like Kiev, where electoral fraud brought people out for long enough to force change? Is it like Belarus, where the opposition stayed intimidated? Is it like China, where the powers that prevented change with a massacre? This morning, all of these seem possible.

But with the Khameini calling Ahmadinejad’s alleged victory “a divine miracle”, the power structure looks to be lining up behind the status quo. The government is not shrinking from using violence, and with non-uniformed “militias” and “activists” committing much of the violence — what would be criminal in other countries — this looks like a severe test for Moussavi supporters. Do they have countervailing powers? Any police or militias or military going over to the opposition? Absent something along those lines, change is unlikely. At least not now.

(Just want add that Google’s News page is fantastic. Quick links to full coverage of articles, blogs, local sources, images, quotes and videos. In decades past, presidents were probably not so well informed.)

Not so socialist Europe

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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 aren’t unusually rightwing in policy. Ireland and Poland and the Baltics are a different story.

Then there’s the Lib Dem’s, and various other left-liberal parties that belong to ALDE in the European Parliament.

The caucus groups are fairly important, and sometimes vote as a block. So even if from one perspective, the rightwing dominance is an illusion, it does give rightwingers a bit of a structural advantage in the Parliament.

The new parliament: A bit like the old one

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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 to change caucuses and the official results site counts them as unattached. I had to do a lot of very tedious counting and adding up to make this post, the kind of thing journalists need us bloggers to do. I’ve assigned most nominally unattached parties to a group. This is based on known plans plus a few educated guesses, but the guesses mostly involve tiny parties.

As it turns out, PES+greens+commie parties will go from a combined 38, 3% of seats in 2004 to 36,2%.

If we count the liberals (reasonable-ish in the Parliament context), the present mainstream right went from a combined 55,0% of seats to 56,2%.

By my count, 2% of the old parliament’s non-inscrits were extreme nationalists, and 3,1% of the new parliament’s.

Results by group:

EPP-ED+UEN parties (including the Tories and ODS and Law) 44,2% of seats. (42,3% in the old parliament)

Counting them separately is pointless since they’re about to merge and split. This process of musical chairs tend to happen after every election.

* ALDE/ADLE: 10,9%. (12,6%).
They’re the liberal group (well, basically). The members parties mostly line up as center-right domestically, but some are center-left or just vaguely centrist.

* PES 25,2% (27, 6%)
Worse than it seems, because all parts of Italy’s Democratic Party, which didn’t exist in 04 is included in my count.

*Greens/EFA 7,1% (5,5%)
Impressive considering the many countries with no green representation

*GUE/NGL 4,5% (5,2%)
This is the far left

ID, the eurosceptic group went from 2, 8% to 2, 6%

So the storyline’s not flat wrong, but the changes aren’t very dramatic.