Insights

A political truce concluded in mid-2018 helped to calm domestic tensions, but the respite proved temporary, and a renewed eruption of violent protests prompted officials to postpone legislative elections that were scheduled to take place in January. The government’s failure to adhere to the terms Read Entire Entry

The founding of a new political party, the PSP, by dissident members of the PAP headed by Tan Cheng Bock will enhance perceptions of political pluralism in the city-state without posing a significant threat to the hegemony of the governing party, which has maintained a stranglehold on power since Read Entire Entry

Until mid-February, all indications were that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika would seek a fifth term at an election scheduled for April 2019, despite significant physical limitations caused by a stroke he suffered in 2013 and questions surrounding the actual role of the 82-year-old leader in making Read Entire Entry

The OAS-sponsored anti-corruption body, MACCIH, managed to dodge what could have been a fatal bullet last year, when the Congress unexpectedly rejected all five of President Juan Orlando Hernández’s nominees for the attorney-general’s post, and instead reappointed the incumbent, Oscar Read Entire Entry

The country’s longest-ever delay in the post-election formation of a government ended at 131 days, when Stefan Löfven, the leader of the Social Democrats, was sworn in for a second four-year term, once again at the head of a minority government made up of the SAP and the Greens. As was the case Read Entire Entry

President Denis Sassou-Nguesso is firmly in control following the predictable landslide victory of the governing PCT and its various legislative allies at elections held in 2017. The impotence of the divided opposition has been compounded by government repression that has resulted in the detention Read Entire Entry

The recent annual convening of the so-called “two sessions” of China’s legislative bodies, the rubber-stamping NPC and the advisory CPPCC, resulted in the approval of a revised foreign investment law that will take effect in 2020.  Details have not yet been published, but Premier Li Keqiang Read Entire Entry

The death of President Tran Dai Quang in September 2018 delivered an opportunity for Nguyen Phu Trong, the secretary-general of the ruling CPV, to consolidate his position of authority in the command structure of the single-party state. Trong had previously won a power struggle with former Prime Read Entire Entry

Voters will go to the polls to elect members of the national Parliament in late April, more than a year ahead of schedule, after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s minority government failed to secure support for its 2019 budget. The impasse is partly attributable to the ideological incompatibility Read Entire Entry

President Vladimir Putin won a six-year extension of his tenure as president by a landslide at an election held in March 2018, and his allies in United Russia control a comfortable majority in the national legislature. However, Putin’s stock has diminished in recent months, amid rumblings of Read Entire Entry