Back to Elections!

In the, Globe and Mail, one of the candidates for parliament discusses the elections currently going on it India. On the theme of elections, the world’s largest democracy, India, is having its elections. They are electing a new national parliament and have gone through this process fourteen times since getting their independence. The electorate includes a whopping 714 million voters with votes cast in 828,804 polling stations. There are more that 5,000 candidates from seven national political parties and the process involves four million electoral officials and 6.1 million police and civilian personnel. In other words, it’s massive process. So massive that it will happen over 5 stages and starting in mid-April, will not end until May 16th. Also, since a large amount of the population is illiterate, there are party symbols so that voters can vote according to that. Their elections are free of violence, honest, and they use electronic voting so there is not an option of stuffing the ballot box. This is a part of what makes India unique in that there are few developing countries with strong democracies. It is even more rare considering that there is still large amounts of poverty and illiteracy.

This article likely has some bias considering that it is a candidate running for the elections in India. For my next blog I intend to focus more on this election. It will be going on for a while so there should be a lot to talk about and to focus on. Still, it is interesting just to think about the fact that India is the world’s largest democracy. This is something that people just do not think about. It makes me wonder if it is possible to learn something from how their system works because our huge population has made elections somewhat difficult recently. One particular thing of interest is that they are using electronic voting. That has become a problem in the US and I do not know if the Indians have come up with a better solution there or if they have just not run into problems yet because it’s new there. That is something that I will continue to look out for. I also hope to find out more about the political environment as I follow these elections.

The American Prospect reports that Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to power and created a coalition. However, it questions whether he is actually in charge of the coalition that he has created or not. They argue that Netanyahu has a coalition of people that are not up to the job of dealing with Israel’s crisis and that Netanyahu in particular is not a strong deal maker. He built his coalition with five other parties besides his own Likud party and shut out the centrist Kadima party that won more votes in the Knesset than his party did. He got the other groups in with various favors and gifts. For instance, he gave the ultra-Orthodox Shas party a system of state subsidies that had ironically enough been removed by him, gives funding to Orthodox schools, and lets the Shas party be in charge of the Housing Ministry. Avigdor Lieberman received the job of foreign minister and control over judicial and law enforcement post. To get Labor, he gave half the members of Labor in the Knesset cabinet positions and let Ehud Barak stay on as defense minister. This left him with very few cabinet positions for his own party so he had to split cabinet position to reward his own Likud party and has quite a few ministers with no portfolio. Also, Lieberman made the point that Israel was not required to continue the talks they had started with the Palestines but Netanyahu release a press statement soon after saying he supported Obama’s quest for peace in regards to the Israelis and Palestinians. The American Prospect ultimately makes the argument that on this and many other issues, Netanyahu will zig and zag on various different issues in an attempt to try and consolidate power as opposed to an attempt to act on his principles. They note that he is a hardliner and that is part of the reason for his hard-right conservative parliament but that he is easily deterred from his views.

The Israeli elections have continued to be rather interesting to follow. However, since the cabinet is picked, it seems that I will probably move away from talking about Israel. One thing of comment is that this article seems to have a left-wing bias. If I’m not mistaken the American Prospect is left-leaning. They are very critical of Netanyahu but what seems interesting to me is that they seem to criticize his willingness to compromise and usually that is considered a good trait. Regardless, this is a much more right-wing government so it will be interesting to see how it works with the US and other countries and how the Middle East peace process is affected by what is going on.

A Stratfor Intelligence report discusses Iranian influence in Iraq as well as the effects of elections in Iran around the issue. The Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani has met with the most powerful Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Iranian Assembly of Experts Chairman Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani led a delegation to meet with Al-Sistani and other political Iraqi officials including the president earlier this month. Both men are powerful figures in Iranian politics, members of the pragmatic conservative wing and both have issues with the current president Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Also, interestingly, al-Sistani was willing to host both men but refused to host Ahmadinehjad. While the election in Iran is between hardliners like Ahmadinejad and reformers like Mir Hossein Mousavi, it is important to note that the person who is actually in charge is Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In some ways, the election in Iraq is more important because of this simple fact. Iran’s plan was to unifiy Shiite power in Iraq and use it to expand their influence. They wanted to do this either by creating a federal Shiite zone in Iraq’s oil-rich south to give Iran influence in Shiite political factions in Iraq and give them a link to the oil revenue. Their main method was to use the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), an allied Iraqi faction led by Abdel Aziz al-Hakim who has pushed this idea. However, they did poorly in the January elections with Shiite parties less connected to Iran doing fact better. In retrospect, the ISCI’s “close affiliation with Iran, use of religious symbols in campaigning, false claims of al-Sistani's backing and the push for the creation of a Shiite federal zone in southern Iraq “ hurt it badly in the election. This is a problem for Iran in that it shows they are having less influence on Iraqi politics than they want. Now Iran is trying to gain support in various Shiite groups and work to have their political allies in Shiite groups, as well as Sunni and Kurdish groups, to unseat Prime Minister Al-Maliki but that will take a large amount of effort as well. The 2003 Iraq War has created an opening for Iran to try and spread it’s influence but the Turks, Americans and other Arab powers are filling in the gap so far. Things may change with the reduced US presence but it seems that for now this will be a difficult task for Iran.