Intro into IR

There seem to be many interesting events going on in the world today. One of the most interesting seems to be happening in Israel. In the Jerusalem Post, they report about the end result of an election with three major contenders and parties: the Likud Party backing Binyamin Netanyahu; the Kadima Party backing , and Israel Beiteinu backing Avigdor Lieberman. It seems that none of the parties have won enough seats to win a majority with the Kadima and Likud Party both being further ahead and so both want Israel Beiteinu to join with them. However, Lieberman wants an easing of the conversion process and civil registration for couples that want to be married but are unable to under the Orthodox law. While it seems Lieberman wants a high post as well, the two positions mentioned before are the ones that determine if he will join with Likud. Lieberman wants to be in a right-wing coalition but the ultra Orthodox Shas (a important bloc in Likud) dislike Lieberman intensely but if Netanyahu wants to gain power he will need Lieberman. A fact made more difficult by the fact that the Shas are heavily opposed to the two major things (eased conversion and civil marriage) that are most important to Lieberman. Still, Netanyahu has picked former justice minister Yaakov Neeman who led an effort to unifiy different factions of Judaism in teaching courses so it seems that Netanyahu is moving into the direction of actively courting Lieberman. Things look as if they are moving in the direction of a right-wing government. It will be some time before we actually see what happens in that situation.

Not that far away, there was another interesting election going on. The International Herald Tribute reports President Robert Mugabe has sworn in his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai as the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. This is a surprising turn of events in many regards because of the violence that has occurred around this election on the part of supporters of Mugabe on supporters of Tsvangirai. This occurred with some pressure from South Africa on Tsvangirai to join in a power sharing government with Mugabe after the election issues that occurred last year. Despite agreeing to rule together they argued intensely over many issues of power like Tsvangirai wanting to have control over the police but they are sharing that power while Mugabe still has other elements of the security under his control. This is a sources of Mugabe’s power. Tsvangirai also has announced that he will name his party’s secretary general Tendai Biti as the finance minister. An interesting situation since Biti has called Mugabe a dictator and harshly criticized his economic policy. Though the tension is not one sided with Biti only recently having treason charges again him dropped.

Finally, there have been another set of elections in Iraq recently. These elections have been supported and applauded by the US and Iraq however the author of this piece, David Salman, notes that there was an unusually low voter turnout. In fact, he states that turnout is lower than any other election since the US invaded Iraq. There were lots of efforts by the candidates, media, electoral commission and an increase in security to make these elections a success but they feel well below the predicted 70-80 percent of the vote and were about 51 percent. Many complained of the job of the current councils and that they were not getting good services when asked why they did not vote in this election. Others said they were too busy trying to make a living or had difficulty trying to decide who to vote for between the 14,400 candidate for 440 seats on the provincial council. In Karbala, there were 1200 candidates alone. Also, Sunni areas had lower turnout that other areas. While it is disappointing that the turnout in Iraq was so low, being that Iraq has rarely had truly democratic elections (as far as I know), it seems odd to be comparing the elections here to those. Also, while 51 percent is not a great number, it’s only about 11 percent above the United States. The fact that they were aiming for 70-80 percent is interesting since we rarely get such good numbers here. Still, the world of elections around the world are quite fascinating.