Wikimedia Creative Commons But Finance Minister & over 100 MPs wanted him to quit These are desperate times for the ruling party – the PM is deeply unpopular, polls indicate it will lose the next election badly, there has been a messy cabinet reshuffle and there is a groundswell among the party’s MPs for a new leader to take over. All of this is very familiar from British politics, but is currently being played out in Tokyo as well as…
A Guest Article from Socrates There has been much talk over Sarah Palin’s shock announcement that she is resigning from her post as Governor of Alaska before the end of the first term. The primary questions in much of the coverage have been “What the hell is she up to?” and “Why on Earth does this help her?” I am convinced the answers are quite straight forward: Sarah Palin has decided to run for the 2012 Republican nomination for the…
Is her resignation a masterstroke or a blunder? It could be the start of the 2012 presidential election campaign or it could be the end of that of 2008. Former Republican Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s decision to resign as Governor of Alaska later this month has raised a lot of questions but answered few. In her announcement, in which she rambled and at times rivalled John Prescott’s ability to string non-sequiturs together, she gave few reasons other than the pressures…
BBC BJP leader Advani resigns, Rahul Gandhi for Cabinet? India may have the world’s longest election in terms of the schedule of official voting days, but with the electronic voting machines the results are out fairly quickly – within a few hours of counting commencing at 8am local time, the trends had become clear and the UPA/Congress had posted a comfortable seat lead over NDA/BJP that kept on growing. The opinion polls that had the two big parties around 140…
Wikimedia Creative Commons License Three rounds of voting down, two to go in India America may claim to be the world’s greatest democracy, but India is unchallenged as the world’s biggest – and countries that at first seem politically complex, such as Israel, Italy, or Switzerland, pale into elegant simplicity when compared to the behemoth that is Indian politics (the US by contrast seems almost laughably straightforward). The sheer numbers involved in the Indian election are simply mind-boggling. Just two…
BBC News ANC misses 2/3rds, DA wins W Cape, COPE disappointing So, for the first time during the post-apartheid era, the ANC had to pull out all the stops during an election campaign, the emergence of the new COPE party galvanising its efforts, and in the event, its vote share at 65.9% was only four points down on 2004. However the ANC will not have a constitution-changing two-thirds majority in the new National Assembly, with its final tally of 264…
BBC News …but will it be a two-thirds majority? As Alistair Darling rises in the Commons for the Budget speech, thousands of miles away voters will be casting their ballots in South Africa’s fourth national election since the end of apartheid, with provincial elections also taking place on the same day. For the first time since that historic 1994 election, the ANC, on paper at least, finds itself facing a serious challenge – but as with football, it’s what happens…
PR Week Make of this what you will One of the more off-beat places to look for information about life in No. 10 since the Brownite take-over has been the trade magazine PR Week which has much to chew over in its latest edition. David Singleton writes: “…One Downing Street insider said there had been ‘endless conference calls and crisis meetings’ since the story of McBride’s plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday. The source added: ‘This is a…