OK, time for another new post as we wait for news from Kiev. The Central Electoral Commission is meant to be having a press conference now to declare the result but there’s still no news. As I mentioned in the thread below, the current rumours on the streets are that the official announcement (followed by [...]

It was another quiet night in Ukraine with, thankfully, all the rumours of a crackdown by security forces not coming true. Neeka has a couple of posts on what happened overnight. She also points out, that amidst everything else going on, Dynamo Kiev played at home in the Champions League last night, and won 2-0. [...]

I’m starting a new post for the latest information as the old one was starting to get a bit long. The session in Parliament has broken up as there were 191 deputies there, but 226 (50%+1) were required for a quorum, so no action could be taken. However, the Kyiv Post reports that Yushchenko has [...]

Just a quick update on events in Ukraine today. Mass protests are still taking place in Kiev and Lviv, and the rumoured crackdown by security forces on protestors during the night didn’t take place. Yushchenko has asked the protestors in Kiev to march to Ukraine’s Parliament which is debating the elections. I can’t read it, [...]

The Ukrainian election is turning into a huge story, as careful observers had suspected. At stake is whether Ukraine — as big as France, with a population of 48m — will make a decisive political turn toward Euro-Atlantic structures, or whether it will go down the CIS road of defective democracies and subordination to Russia.
(Not [...]

So it’s done. We have four more years of George W Bush to look forward to. A quick tour of the American blogs shows a few trying to pull some sort of moral victory from this election, but the truth is that they’ve lost everything. Not only has the president finally won [...]

Usually, it’s impossible to argue with people who make comparisons between the incumbent US administration and various past totalitarian systems, particularly when the argument turns to a comparison between George W Bush and the Austrian guy with the Charlie Chaplin moustache. Whatever you think of George W Bush and his administration - still a mystery [...]

In a state election (Landtagswahl) in the Saarland that was widely considered another benchmark for the approval of the German federal government’s reform efforts, particularly of the labour market deregulation programme known as “Hartz IV” - these elections are, often to a significant extent, second order national contests - the Social Democrats have been dealt [...]

Yesterday was regional elections day in France. France has not traditionally had any strong local government structure - one of the first acts of the revolution was the abolition of the old provinces and their replacement with purely administrative “departments.” However, the last 20 years have seen radical changes in the way French [...]

Maybe it’s the presence of Talos in the comments section, or maybe it’s the arrival of the Athens Olympics on my personal horizon, but something this morning is carrying me back to the world of the Greeks, and to some early ideas of how best to secure objectives in the face of adversity.
First metis [...]