Political Shift Has Poland Assessing Its Values
In Poland, the biggest former Communist nation in the European Union and NATO, the question is whether the liberty and European identity that meant so much to those who toppled… Read more »
Author Archives: DemDigest
Democratizing Europe
In the wake of the UK’s Brexit vote, the European Union needs a renaissance, challenging inherited ideas about what cooperation between nations and peoples looks like. This renaissance should move… Read more »
Zambia polls: democracy hovering on a precipice?
Zambians go to the polls Thursday to elect a president for the second time in 19 months. The death of President Michael Sata in October 2014 triggered a special by-election… Read more »
After decade of Raul Castro, reform still lagging
Veteran Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas was briefly hospitalized in Santa Clara on Friday after losing consciousness in his home on the 16th day of a hunger strike to protest government… Read more »
Russia dreams of Turkey pivoting to ‘authoritarian international’
Turkey on Tuesday warned of rising anti-American sentiment and risks to a migrant deal with the European Union, ramping up the rhetoric in the face of Western alarm over the… Read more »
Post-Soviet Eurasia: What’s Gone Wrong?
After a quarter-century, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union looks like a de-democratizing event. Leading up to that fateful year, Mikhail Gorbachev had been one of the world’s great… Read more »
A case for electoral reform
There is an electoral system that improves upon the Anglo-American first-past-the-post (FPP) or plurality method of election, at least in surfacing second and third (and lower-order) preferences, argues Donald… Read more »
‘Appropriate assistance’ to Ukraine could be vulnerable?
The Russian-backed president of a separatist region in Ukraine was wounded on Saturday in an assassination attempt, highlighting rising violence in the country’s east, The New York Times reports (HT:… Read more »
Russians turning against Putin, poll suggests
Russians are feeling more indifferent towards President Vladimir Putin than at any time before the Ukraine crisis, according to independent pollster the Levada Center. …Despite military successes, Russia’s economy has… Read more »
Global democratic recession – for now
The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »