Voters in Colombia are heading to the polls to elect new legislators.
And one of the 2,500 candidates for congress is Francisco Javier Lozano Neiva – who belongs to a party called “PAIS” – composed mostly of social leaders and indigenous groups.
He had to flee his home in 2005 after paramilitaries attacked his town, committing a massacre of civilians.
And now the experience is pushing Neiva to try to stop the cycle of violence and political corruption in Colombia
Worldfocus looks at this Sunday’s Iraqi parliamentary elections, which could exacerbate sectarian divisions. They also examine what has changed in the seven years since the Iraq invasion. Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, and Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
Since campaigning officially began on February 12, cities across Iraq’s northern Kurdish region have been waiting for the election in anticipation.
Posters depicting a number of candidates and officials festoon the streets and lamp posts are strewn with banners and bunting.
Traditionally there have been two main Kurdish parties, but as Zeina Khodr reports from Sulaimaniyah, there is now a powerful, new force to contend with.
Most ethnic Kurds in Iraq’s northern region known as “Iraqi Kurdistan” see the national elections on March 7 as about safeguarding their hard-won political gains since the US-led war ousted the Baathist government in 2003.
The upstart opposition party Goran, or Change, is giving the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan a tough fight in Sulaymaniya, in northern Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region. More on the Goran party from the Los Angeles Times:
The party machine of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is pulling out all the stops. On-duty security forces string up PUK banners, and young men break curfew to hang out of cars waving ivy-colored pennants. The streets of Sulaymaniya are a sea of green.
But in the final days before Iraqis vote for a new national parliament, flags of another color are grabbing all the attention. They’re blue, and emblazoned with a burning candle and one word: Change.
The PUK, the longtime ruling party of Sulaymaniya, in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan enclave, is in a fight for its life against the upstart Change movement. And with nerves rattled by a shootout between the two sides, the electoral battle could threaten the stability of a region long deemed the “success story” of Iraq.
“I am ready to die for this flag,” said Change supporter Anwar Omar, 21.
The PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, in a sometimes uneasy alliance, have had a 19-year monopoly on power in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the least, the elections Sunday probably will shatter the PUK’s dominance in Sulaymaniya and chip away at the KDP’s hold in the neighboring provinces of Irbil and Dahuk. The three areas make up the semiautonomous region.
Change party supporters, harnessing anger over “business as usual” politics not unlike the “tea party” movement in the United States, say they’re fed up with endemic corruption and what they call the two parties’ autocratic ways and suffocating grip on economic life in the north.
Mohammed Tofiq once belonged to the PUK’s politburo. Now he’s one of the leaders of Change. He said PUK corruption dated to 1991, when the Kurds first established their semiautonomous enclave, protected from Saddam Hussein. He sharply criticized the PUK leader, Jalal Talabani, now the Iraqi president.
“After the uprising, he became interested in his own power and wealth and his family went into business and he surrounded himself with ‘yes’ men,” Tofiq said.
He disputed Bush administration assertions that Kurdistan was a model for the rest of Iraq.
“The American administration had to say . . . that one part of Iraq was a genuine democracy. They had nothing else,” he said. “I don’t say that. It’s not true. It’s a lie.”
Talabani bristles at the notion that the new party represents genuine reform. “Those who were corrupt are now in Change,” Talabani said in an interview this week.
Billed as “the other Iraq” for its relative absence of suicide attacks and sectarian bloodshed, the Kurdish region has wooed foreign investors since 2003 and enjoyed an economic boom.
But shattering the status quo has the potential to trigger major internal Kurdish violence for the first time since 1998, when Talabani and the KDP’s Massoud Barzani formally ended a four-year civil war that followed the collapse of a power-sharing arrangement.
Mindful of history, Kurdish leaders have vowed to act swiftly to quash any unrest.
The people “have the right to be worried about the situation but the whole context has changed,” Barzani, now president of the region, said in an interview.
“Even if there is a small incident here and there, it will be easily and quickly controlled.”
No one wants to be blamed for jeopardizing the hard-won gains of the enclave, and PUK and KDP officials downplay the strife in Sulaymaniya as the fruit of an emerging democracy.
“It is a scary game sometimes. In Iraq and the new Kurdistan, it is not easy, but I feel blessed that we are part of that generation who in the years to come will be looked at as the founding fathers of democracy,” said Iraqi Kurdistan Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a senior PUK leader.
“Look, we’ve asked for democracy and it has happened, not in its mature sense in every way, but nonetheless it’s politics. . . . People compete for votes. This is good and that is the fundamental story of the place.”
For residents of Sulaymaniya, such assurances are not enough.
Early voting has begun in Iraq’s parliamentary elections.
Security personnel, detainees and hospital patients were among those allowed to vote ahead of Sunday’s election, when most Iraqis will cast their ballots. Security is also tight after Wednesday’s suicide bomb attack in the city of Baquba, which killed at least 32 people.
These are only Iraq’s second elections for a full parliamentary term since the US-led invasion in 2003.
Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats today responded to questions posted to Facebook (Facebook.com/nickclegg) and Twitter (@Nick_Clegg) in his latest online Q & A session with voters.
Mohamed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has returned to his native Egypt saying he wants to serve the country. Could he become the next president of Egypt? Can he overcome the current political and constitutional restrictions to be elected president? And in a country where the vast majority of the population do not vote and many do not trust the ballot box, will Egyptians see El Baradei as a long-awaited for saviour?
Inside Story looks at the obstacles that confront Mohamed El Baradei and the prospects for an opening of Egypt’s political process.
Para hundir el referendo, el grupo de Alianza Ciudadana por la Democracia le recetó ConstituTrón 91 a la Corte Constitucional. Se trata de un medicamento que, según sus creadores, contiene democrasina de alta pureza y equilibrina de poderes. Con este “reconstituyente primario” y una intervención ciudadana en contra del referendo reeleccionista, el grupo de ex constituyentes del 91, académicos, artistas, estudiantes y ONG, busca que la Corte declare la inexequibilidad de la ley que permite la re-reelección a partir de 2010.
Conozca cuál fue la estrategia de Alianza Ciudadana por la Democracia para defender la Constitución de 1991 y atacar el referendo re-eleccionista.
Laura Chinchilla of the ruling Partido de Liberación Nacional, traditionally a social-democratic party but one that has adopted a neo-liberal economic programme, won a decisive first round victory winning 46.8 percent of the vote in a four-way race. Her margin of victory was wider than expected. A former Vice President, she becomes the first woman to win the Presidency in this small Central American country. She assumes office on May 8th.
Ms. Chinchilla beat out Ottón Solís of the center-left Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC) who finished second with 24.4 percent and Otto Guevara of the Movimiento Libertario (ML) who finished a disappointing third with 21.4 percent of the vote. Guevara had been expected to perhaps force a second round. In Costa Rica, the winner must receive 40 percent of the vote to be elected in the first round. Guevara heads a right of center libertarian party – a rarity in Latin America. He had proposed a radical free market system, privatizing Costa Rica’s public health insurance sector and abandoning the Colón in favor of the US dollar as the national currency. For Solís, who narrowly lost four years ago, this election marks a disappoint as well. He finished 15 points below his 2006 showing. Solís had opposed the neo-liberal economic program and ran against the Central American Free Trade Agreement, a trade agreement between the US and various Central American nations.
A fourth candidate Luis Fishman, the first person of Jewish descent to run for President in a Latin American country, of the center-right Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC) finished fourth in single digits.
For Costa Rica, these elections marked the 15th consecutive since 1948 when civilians ousted the military and restore democratic rule. The turnout was approximately 70 percent in this country of 4.4 million people. Also at stake was the National Assembly and two Vice Presidential posts. Costa Rica elects two Vice Presidents, one of whom must be a woman.
With Chinchilla winning, little is expected to change in the way of policy.
Sergio Fajardo Valderrama introduces his legislative list for Colombia’s upcoming legislative elections on 14 March 2010. Dr. Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellín, is running for President in Colombia as an independent.
Dr. Fajardo’s candidacy forms part of new trend of independent civic actors engaging in politics apart from any political party. These civic movements are appearing in Costa Rica, Colombia and Perú and cut across ideological lines. They are largely backed by the professional middle class tired of politics as usual.
With a general election in the United Kingdom due by June 3, 2010, polls now indicate a tightening race. The latest poll by The Independent shows the Conservative party down to 38 percent, down seven points since December, with Labour up two points to 31 percent. The Liberal Democrats polled third with 19 percent. Based on these projections, the Tories would fall short of a majority by 24 seats.