Myanmar’s recent military coup was a shock, especially for subscribers to the view that democracy is inevitable. But it was not, for anyone who has watched the country, a surprise. The country’s National League for Democracy (NLD, headed by the revered Aung San Suu Kyi, recorded a strong, 60 per cent, majority in the country’s […]
Tag Archives: democracy
China’s formalization this week of Xi Jinping as president0 for life marks that country’s turn away from partially accountable leadership to a model that is, in effect, a dictatorship. This runs counter to not only China’s post-Mao Zedong 10 year changes of leadership but also a more general global trend towards democracy. Yet Xi is […]
Despite the hopes once held for it by the international community, Cambodia’s long slide into becoming one-party state is now effectively complete. Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, has announced that the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) will be banned and that its seats will be redistributed among other parties, including his governing Cambodian People’s […]
Blighted by anti-colonial war, revolution, a genocidal regime and then a civil war, it was hoped that the United Nations intervention in Cambodia a quarter of a century ago would result in a stable multi-party democracy. In recent days, however, Cambodia’s long slide back towards naked dictatorship has become all but complete. Last weekend, Cambodia’s […]
Timor-Leste goes to its fourth parliamentary elections this Saturday, in a process that has so far been colorful and sometimes noisy but unblemished by the violence that marred this country’s first few years of independence. By conventional criteria, Timor-Leste has passed the test of consolidating its young democracy. The number of parties contesting the elections […]
On 8 July 2015, Myanmar’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) government announced that Myanmar would go to elections on 8 November. This raised the prospect of whether Myanmar’s process of reform and liberalization – what US President Barak Obama had earlier called the country’s ‘real but incomplete’ process of democratization – would continue. In […]
If one was to believe the reporting on Hong Kongs pro-democracy demonstrations, especially the reporting in Hong Kong, one could be mistaken for believing that it was all but over. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. There is no doubt that the numbers in Hong Kong Central have diminished, especially during the day, […]
When Indonesia’s 180 million voters go to the polls tomorrow, they will be deciding whether Indonesia continues, more or less, with further developing its democratic experiment, or whether it turns away from a relatively open society that is necessary to allow democracy to flourish. While the choice might appear to be obvious to anyone committed […]
There has been a growing sense that Indonesias presidential elections on 9 July will be much closer than initially thought and that hard man Prabowo Subianto could be a real contender for office. If Prabowo is successful, his presidency would be expected to fundamentally re-shape the orientation of Indonesias post-Suharto era. This shift towards Prabowo […]
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