The Zimbabwean opposition is claiming victory on a monster turnout in the elections there, although this may be part of a strategy to pre-empt government rigging by claiming early and often. It would be nice if this was it, but I’m sceptical, of course.
Especially, the presence of ex-finance minister Simba Makoni as a candidate worries [...]

Hungarian intellectuals are protesting against the owner of the newspaper Magyar Hirlap, after the paper started printing some genuinely shocking anti-semitic opinions. Specifically, its new columnist Zsolt Bayer took it on himself to describe “the Budapest Jewish journalists” as “justification Jews; their mere existence justifies anti-Semitism”. That’s pretty ugly; it doesn’t help that the trope [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy was in Cherbourg to name the latest French SSBN, the appropriately named Le Terrible, this week; and he had a few things to say about the circumstances under which she might be called on to fire her M51 SLBMs. The headline grabber, which everyone picked up on, was that France is going to [...]

It looks like Nicolas Sarkozy’s pet foreign-policy idea has been sporked, good and proper; his idea of a “Mediterranean Union” is now officially an ex-parrot, after it failed to get German support. As we’ve been saying right back to 2005, the key fact of European politics at the moment is that Angela Merkel has achieved [...]

It was a long weekend for the possible Social Democratic (SPD) minister-president of Hesse, Andrea Ypsilanti. At the end of last week, she said that she would go back on the SPD’s pledge not to work with the Left party, the latest incarnation of Germany’s post-communists. She would form a minority government with the Greens, [...]

Since the dubious election, supporters of Ter-Petrosian have been occupying the main square in downtown Yerevan, trying to spark some Orange or Rose action.
Saturday morning, riot police apparently failed in a pre-dawn attempt to break up the protest and send everyone home. The confrontation escalated, and Eurasia.net is reporting two dead with “running street battles [...]

In James Gleick’s bestseller, Chaos: Making a New Science, one of the recurring phrases is “period three implies chaos.” Grossly simplified, once things start oscillating among three stable states, chaos is inevitable and ubiquitous. In politics, particularly German politics, three parties did not imply chaos, but rather orderly transitions with the hinge party making a [...]

Karl Marx said that ideology is part of the social superstructure, merely a decorative overlay on the brutal truth of the economic base. Millian liberalism was really just an expression of the pounding steam engines, Jacquard looms and downtrodden apprentices of 1840s Manchester, just as absolutism had been built on the assumption that society would [...]

A developing story, of course, but the BBC is reporting that the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy recognizing or pledging to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Wikipedia is also quick off the mark with its entry on the now-official flag.
The EU has papered over its differences, with the common foreign and security policy consisting [...]

Well, sort of. I somehow doubt Jean Monnet would have been thinking of this when he came up with the idea of a Europe so closely bound together by trade war would be forever impossible. Rogue Planet reports that the biggest buyer of Bosnian armaments is…Serbia. Bosnia is also the biggest supplier to Serbia. Yes, [...]