Leading Off
● Malaysia – parliament (May 9)
In a potentially groundbreaking development for Malaysian democracy, the opposition Pakatan Harapan alliance won a parliamentary majority for the first time ever in elections earlier this month, delivering a major defeat to the right-of-center Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which has ruled the country ever since it won independence from the United Kingdom in 1957.
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This victory was particularly notable because BN had gone to the limit and beyond in a desperate effort to retain power: They threw opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim in prison on trumped-up sodomy charges for a second time; they gerrymandered electoral districts; and they even moved Election Day to a weekday from its traditional weekend date. But all this interference wasn't enough to save BN's majority.
Two major factors led to the downfall of the ruling party. The first and most significant were the corruption allegations against incumbent Prime Minister Najib Razak. As part of the so-called 1MDB scandal, the Wall Street Journal revealed, $700 million dollars had been channeled into Najib's personal bank account from a state-owned investment firm. Najib implausibly claimed that the money was donated to him personally from Saudi Arabia as a thanks for fighting ISIS. He fired the attorney general when he started investigating the scandal and removed the country's deputy prime minister from his position when he criticized Najib.
Najib was able to hold on to his position within his party and in parliament, but he lost the support of many working-class Malays, long the core of BN's support. The scandal led to the second big development in this election, the return of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Mahathir led BN and governed Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 before retiring, but he returned to politics in 2017 after harshly criticizing Najib for the scandal and for refusing to step down. With opposition leader Anwar in prison, Mahathir became the leader of the Pakatan Harapan. This gave the opposition something it never could have developed on its own: a trusted, experience hand that all Malays would be comfortable voting for.
Mahathir, despite being 92, was still an energetic campaigner and led Pakatan Harapan to 48 percent of the vote and 121 of 222 seats in parliament. Upon getting sworn in as prime minister, he became the oldest head of government in the world. BN, meanwhile, won just 79 seats and 34 percent of the vote, and Najib resigned as head of the party. He has since been barred from leaving the country as the investigation into him has resumed. (An Islamist alliance won 18 seats with the remaining 17 percent of the vote.)
Mahathir has already won a royal pardon for Anwar (Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy), who has now been freed from prison. Mahathir has promised to step aside sometime during this term and allow Anwar to become prime minister. Anwar's wife, Wan Azizah Ismail, is currently serving as deputy prime minister, and his daughter is also a member of parliament.
Mahathir and Anwar's incredible history goes back to the 1990s, when both were members of Barisan Nasional, with Mahathir as prime minister and Anwar as finance minister. Remember how BN had Anwar imprisoned on his second bogus sodomy charge? In 1998, Anwar was sacked by Mahathir and started a reform movement, leading to his arrest and imprisonment for sodomy the first time. The man responsible: Mahathir Mohammed. Anwar served six years in prison until the Malaysian Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2004. He's since said that he and Mahathir have made peace, and it's now up to them to lead Malaysia once again, 20 years later.
Notable Developments
● Armenia – prime minister
In a stunning turn of events, former president-turned-Prime Minister Serzh Sarksyan resigned last month in the wake of anti-government protests. Sarksyan had tried to circumvent presidential term limits by shifting powers from the office of president to the office of prime minister and then taking up the new job, despite previous vows not to do so. Nikol Pashinyan, a former journalist and one-time political prisoner who led nonviolent protests of Sarksyan, was elected prime minister to replace him. Sarksyan was a longtime ally of nearby Russian President Vladimir Putin but Pashinyan was able to avert any Russian interference by vowing to maintain Armenia's close ties to Russia.
● Brazil – president (Oct. 7)
Brazil's October presidential race experienced a political earthquake when former leftist President Lula da Silva surrendered to police last month after he was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Lula, as he is commonly known, was extremely popular during his tenure from 2003 to 2011 thanks to strong economic growth and massive public programs to help reduce poverty in one of the world's most unequal countries, but enormous corruption scandals have since tarnished his record. Lula had been polling as the front-runner in his comeback bid, but his incarceration bans him from running.
Corruption is an epidemic in Brazil, and current center-right President Michel Temer has an approval rating in the single digits after pushing through a harsh austerity program after he and his allies undertook a legislative coup to remove leftist President Dilma Rousseff from office in 2016. Rousseff was Lula's hand-picked successor, and without him leading the ticket, it's hard to see their Workers' Party recovering from Rousseff's unpopular tenure overseeing Brazil's worst recession on record. Consequently, Lula's departure from the race throws it wide open, potentially benefiting far-right legislator Jair Bolsonaro and socialist environmentalist Marina Silva.
● Costa Rica – president (April 1)
In a major surprise, center-left candidate Carlos Alvarado didn't just beat staunch religious-right conservative Fabricio Alvarado in last month's presidential runoff, he did so by a 61-39 landslide in a race that had largely become a referendum on same-sex marriage. After the Inter-American court of Human Rights, to which Costa Rica is bound by treaty, ruled that the country's ban on same-sex marriage was illegal, Fabricio Alvarado's campaign surged on a platform of anti-LGBT zealotry. Carlos Alvarado, however, supports same-sex marriage and promised to abide by the court's decision. (The two Alvarados are unrelated.)
The outcome was particularly unexpected in light of how well the right, especially the religious-right, did in legislative elections earlier this year while left-leaning parties suffered major losses. At age 38, new President Carlos Alvarado is Costa Rica's youngest-ever president, while First Vice President Espy Campbell is the country's first Afro-Costa Rican to hold the office. Alvarado unveiled a cabinet with a balanced number of men and women that also includes members of multiple parties.
● Hungary – parliament (April 8)
Unsurprisingly, radical-right autocrat Viktor Orban's Fidesz party easily won last month's election over a disorganized opposition, thanks in no small part to a gerrymandered electoral system that gives a huge bonus to the biggest party. Orban and his allies in the Christian Democratic People's Party also managed to maintain the exact two-thirds supermajority they need to unilaterally amend Hungary's constitution, even though they won just 49 percent of the vote.
Consequently, Orban has consolidated more power and will be emboldened to further dismantle what's left of liberal democracy—indeed, he literally stated as much when he said, "We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st-century Christian democracy." Orban's next steps will likely involve passing more laws to bend any opposition institutions to his will, which means targeting independent media, the judiciary, non-governmental organizations, and continuing to weaponize anti-Semitism against billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is Hungarian-born.
Distressingly, the European Union, of which Hungary is a member, has done little to constrain Orban and protect Hungarian democracy. That's in part because the center-right European People's Party, the largest bloc in the E.U. parliament in Brussels, has turned a blind eye since Fidesz, which also sends representatives to the E.U.'s legislature, supports the EPP. With the E.U. parliament unlikely to act, the European Commission, which is the E.U.'s administrative bureaucracy, is considering tying the substantial funding it gives to Hungary (and Poland) to maintaining liberal democratic norms like an independent judiciary, but such efforts are years away at the soonest.
● Iraq – parliament (May 12)
Muqtada al-Sadr's Sairoon Alliance came in a surprising first place in Iraqi parliamentary elections, beating out both the Shia militia chief Hadi al-Amiri's Iran-backed Fatah Coalition and incumbent Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's Nasr Coalition. Al-Sadr, known over a decade ago for leading his own Shia militia opposed to the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, has reinvented himself as a fighter of corruption and Iranian influence. He's also allied with the Iraqi Communist Party to appeal to more secular voters.
Despite Al-Sadr's victory, Abadi is favored to retain his office going forward. Fatah would far prefer the middle-of-the-road Abadi to al-Sadr, and Fatah and the Nasr coalition should be able to gain enough support from various smaller parties to comfortably form a government and send al-Sadr into opposition. Alternatively, Abadi could try to ally with al-Sadr and co-opt his message, but a parliament used to horse-trading and handing out patronage would likely resist Sadr's demands for a technocratic cabinet.
● Lebanon – parliament (May 6)
Lebanon finally held its long-delayed parliamentary elections, and the political arm of the Shia Muslim terrorist organization Hezbollah and its pro-Iranian allies gained a majority at the expense of the Saudi-backed Sunni Muslim parties that support Prime Minister Saad Hariri. However, Lebanon's constitution mandates sectarian power-sharing, which could limit Hezbollah's power. Indeed, since the end of Lebanon's civil war in the 1990s, the president has always been a Maronite Christian, the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim, and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim.
These elections were the first to take place in nine years, which was five years later than they were originally supposed to be held. But political gridlock and turmoil from the civil war in neighboring Syria prompted lawmakers to delay elections multiple times before finally agreeing to a new electoral system last year. Indeed, Lebanon has seen an influx of Syrian refugees equivalent to one-third of the nation's pre-conflict population, putting a strain on public services. Despite these pressures, though, non-sectarian candidates campaigning for reform and improved services failed to break through in this month's vote.
● Paraguay – president & legislature (April 22)
Paraguay's right-wing Colorado Party has retained power after Mario Abdo won by a slim 46-43 margin over Efrain Alegre, a member of the centrist Authentic Radical Liberal Party, who had the support of a center-left coalition. The Colorado Party narrowly retained its outright majority in the Chamber of Deputies, but they only hold a plurality in the Senate.
Abdo's victory means the Colorado Party will have been in power for all but five years since 1947. The party governed the country in an authoritarian regime under longtime President Alfredo Stroessner until a 1989 coup, and it wasn't until 2008 that leftist Fernando Lugo ousted the party from the presidency. However, the opposition-controlled legislature removed Lugo from office in 2012 in what was widely seen as a legislative coup, and the left has struggled electorally ever since.
● Sierra Leone – president (March 31)
Opposition leader Julius Maada Bio of the centrist Sierra Leone People's Party defeated All People's Congress nominee Samura Kamara by a narrow 52-48 to oust the governing party from office after nearly 11 years out of power, though the election was marred by some reports of violence and voting irregularities. Bio once served in the army and participated in a 1992 coup that installed a military junta, but he ceded power to a democratically elected government after carrying out a coup of his own and briefly serving as head of state in 1996.
Grab Bag
● Colombia – president (May 27)
Colombians will head to the polls on May 27 to hold their first election since the country's five-decade civil war with the far-left FARC rebel group came to a historic end in 2016. Centrist President Juan Manuel Santos, who negotiated the peace deal with the former rebels, is term-limited. The most likely contenders to make it into the runoff are right-wing Democratic Center nominee Ivan Duque and leftist Gustavo Petro, while centrist Sergio Fajardo potentially might upset Petro to win the other runoff spot. Duque is likely favored following the right's major gains in recent legislative elections.
● Italy – government formation
After weeks of brinkmanship, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League party have come to an agreement that should pave the way for the two groups to form a governing coalition in Italy's parliament, though they have not yet determined who will become prime minister. The two populist parties, which both exceeded expectations in the election, will have a comfortable majority in both houses.
● South Korea – former president
Former President Park Geun-hye, a conservative who was removed from office in 2017 over an enormous corruption scandal that led to historic protests, was sentenced to 24 years in prison last month and fined $16.8 million for her abuses of power when in office, including bribery, extortion, and other crimes.
● Turkey – president & legislature (June 24)
After narrowly passing constitutional changes that eliminated the office of prime minister and significantly strengthened the presidency, autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called early elections to complete the government's transformation. The election, originally scheduled for November 2019 and now set for June 24 of this year, will officially enact the approved changes and likely give Erdogan the expanded power he's long sought.
