tiscali.cz: Předvolební kampaň na ruského prezidenta má první skandál: http://t.co/QasPJgmv

January 9, 2012 10:43 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

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Zpravy

“Preliminary campaign for Russian president has its first scandal.” Yes, it’s scandalous, if not quite entirely straightforward, as explained in the accompanying article about the discovery made by opposition activists in Moscow of the wholesale fabrication of signature-petitions being perpetrated in local universities.

Petitions for Putin? you might ask. Actually, no: petitions for one Dmitry Mezencev, currently governor of the Irkutsk region, in far-east Siberia, to enable him to get on the presidential ballot to oppose Putin. Now, how can that make sense? Simple: Russian law unfortunately decrees that no presidential election is valid unless there are at least two qualified candidates running for that office. That means that, even if the opposition could sponsor someone to oppose Putin, they could then turn around and use that candidate’s withdrawal from the race as a threat or weapon to invalidate the results.

So Putin needs some “insurance,” in the form of another candidate who can be called up in time to function as the required opponent. (Not to win, though, by any stretch of the imagination; and the piece assures us that Mezencev is a loyal Putin-man.) But you just can’t announce that you are running for Russian president, as many opposition figures have found out in the past to their cost – you have to be able to show two million valid signatures on petitions for your candidacy, if you are candidate not backed by any party represented in the Duma. Oh-so-many opposition presidential candidates have been dismissed from participation in past presidential elections for allegedly failing to meet this standard.

No time like the present, then, to start getting those petitions ready in case Mezencev needs to be called into action. The article describes how some investigators, including one female reporter from the one-remaining independent Russian radio station, Echo Moscow, easily uncovered petition-fabrication operations happening in lecture-halls of Moscow universities. They were so brazen that there were no guards or security of any kind (until later, when the occupants discovered who was visiting them) as not only students but also pensioners and anyone else in need of some extra money sat filling in names and official ID card numbers into the forms. Not signatures, mind you – that would have been illegal since of course the signatures would not be their own (although the other information was no more their own), but those can presumably be taken care of later, somewhere with a bit better security.

And of course those “visitors” have it on video, here, on something called “Rutube.” Don’t worry: I looked at it myself, it’s not a virus-site or anything like that, it’s just rather remarkable to see the cameraman walk through the lecture-hall where the people are all hard at work at electoral fraud, where he even raises a few of the bogus forms up to the camera-lens.

                          

There is a point here, and it concerns the regional elections due to take place there next Sunday (28 November). The Young Socialists want people to be sure to turn out to vote – the “tag-line” message at the end of this clip is “Voting is a pleasure” – and preferably, of course, for Socialist candidates. That’s about it for any serious purpose, though, so the whole thing is rather overboard, a clever idea, but one that probably never should have been actually carried out. It should be no surprise that the clip was roundly condemned by spokesmen and -women from the more conservative parties on the political spectrum, as well as by some Socialist members of government in fact. The BBC website captured probably the best quote, from Joan Herrera, leader of the Catalonia Greens (and a man: “Joan” is a man’s name in Catalan): that it would be “very difficult to reach orgasm voting for any of the candidates, myself included.”

But Spain: how could something like this come from Spain? However, this is not your father’s (or at least your grandfather’s) Spain, that dictatorship of the Caudillo propped up by an unreformed and reactionary Catholic Church. It has changed, dramatically, and the watershed was in 1975, when dictator Francisco Franco’s death and the resulting return to democracy (institutionalized in a new constitution of 1978) prompted Spain to some extent to swing way to the other extreme and become an “anything goes” society. Abortion was legalized as well as divorce – together with, more recently, gay marriage. Cinema aficionados can refer to the award-winning films of Pedro Almodóvar for a series of (slightly exaggerated) portraits of this new prevailing culture – prevailing in Spanish cities, at least.

So, you say you’ve never been to Spain
But you kinda like the music?
Well, the ladies are insane there
And they sure know how to use it
They don’t abuse it
Never gonna lose it
You won’t refuse it!

                          

The verdict? Bitter disappointment, as you can tell from the headline. For we have to remember that, in reality, Obama’s real mission as American head of state has always been to make the country more like the France epitomized precisely by Le Monde Diplomatique – just ask any Tea Partier. (Well, they’d probably leave out that very last part, having never heard of the publication.) Halimi writes in a despairing tone that Obama since his inauguration has “missed the chance to profoundly reform his country by pointing it in a progressive direction.” What’s more: “That the Republicans are returning to the front rank two years after the debacle of President Bush says enough, in any rate, about the ravaging power of national dissatisfaction.” Ouch!

Now, perhaps the president feels the “frustration” he can sense in the electorate is all down to a mere failure of communication. Not so, writes Halimi, and here I must quote at length to do justice to his comprehensive indictment:

In reality, the American people have just expressed more than “frustration” or unhappiness ascribable to deficient “pedagogy.” They have punished a hesitant and cowardly economic policy when it came to reviving [economic] activity; the economist Paul Krugman has never ceased to prove that the level of federal budgetary reflation was insufficient to assure recovery, taking into account the austerity policies undertaken at the same time at the state level. The electorate equally disavowed a health reform which was the visible result of compromise and bad faith bargaining, including with the main pillars (pharmaceutical lobby and insurance lobby) of an unfair and onerous system. Finally, the young, the militants, turned away from a presidency that, even though it had assured legislative support, never knew how to demonstrate either “leadership” nor the will to make a drastic break on the question of the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, nor on the closure (promised but endlessly put off) of the Guantanamo prison, nor on the climate change front, nor even towards bringing to an end the discrimination that hits homosexuals serving the colors.

                          

They summarize for Danish readers the fundamental numerical results: House lost for the Democrats, Senate retained (as Majority Leader Harry Reid “saves his political career”), and a Republican wave also taking over most state governors and legislatures. What this means for the future: “Over the slightly longer-term political chaos [awaits] in Washington, unless the parties can find a way to work together.” The authors also make mention of the “especially offensive” defiance directed at the president by “one of the election campaign’s absolute key figures,” Sarah Palin: (Translated back from the Danish) “We’re sending representatives to Washington to stop your fundamental transformation of America. Enough is enough.”

Over at the opinion newspaper Information, their long-time American affairs commentator Martin Burcharth takes a more philosophical tone (Varied outlook for cross-political cooperation). All things will pass, he assures the reader; sudden shifts in American political fortunes are really “quite common,” citing history back to Jimmy Carter (hero in 1976; goat in 1980) to prove his point. This latest heavy midterms defeat for the Democrats and President Obama need not be regarded as any real sort of tragedy.

Rather, anything is still possible for the 2012 elections, and Burcharth offers the president two possible strategies for success. He can tack to the political center (as former Clinton political advisor Paul Begala recommends) and push a new program of extensive public works, pushed as a “jobs plan,” which Republicans would not dare to oppose. Or he can stay on the left (the advice of Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) and launch a crusade against the Big Industry and Big Finance that got America into the economic mess it is in. That will also mean cutting taxes on the poor and middle-class, but not for the rich: the latter should be required to pay for their misdeeds!

Whichever he chooses, Burcharth recognizes that prospects for real cooperation between the president and the Republicans in Congress will probably last only until around the end of next year, when politicking for the 2012 elections begins in earnest. In fact, he offers the rather cynical recommendation that Democrats make full use of the “lame duck” period still open to them – i.e. when they still have majorities in both Houses, before the newly-elected representatives and Senators come to take their seats – to enact major legislation such as immigration reform and even new climate/energy legislation (always a leading Danish concern). No cooperation with political opponents even required!

It’s ingenious, in a way – except that Burcharth forgets that, even today, the Democrats’ Senate majority is only 59, which causes certain complications of its own in passing legislation, and in any event exploiting the “lame duck” session that way somewhat contravenes American ideas of political legitimacy.

UPDATE: What do you know, the Rude Pundit also sees great merit in that “use the lame duck session to pass some serious legislation” argument of Martin Burcharth’s, and develops it further. But beware: he’s rude! (Sample language: “No, you need to blow us, Boehner and McConnell.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

                          

His counterpart as most powerful official of the House now becomes Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, someone relatively unknown to this point even within the US, and certainly internationally. The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung steps into the breach today with a brief portrait entitled The Patriot.

“Patriot”? That’s taking Boehner at his own word. President Obama is of a slightly different opinion; as the election neared and he started sharpening his rhetoric against his political opponents, he began to zero in on Boehner as the face of the Republican Party – “the Party of No” – as a whole, often singling out his name multiple times in campaign speeches. (That face, FAZ correspondent Matthias Rüb adds, which is always “tanned brown.”) He also was the presumed target of the President’s now-infamous remark during an interview with a Spanish-language radio station about how Latino voters needed to start voting to “punish their enemies” who stood in the way of legislation they want, like immigration reform. No, I’m a patriot, is how Boehner responded in his own campaign speech soon afterwards, since he is against high taxes and high government indebtedness.

Be that as it may, it will no longer be possible simply to dismiss John Boehner after 3 January when he becomes Speaker of the House, so Obama and the rest of us need to get to know him better. (Naturally, Obama is way ahead on this.) He is said by author Rüb to be “amiable,” and renowned as a “renewer and clean-up man” (Erneuerer und Saubermann) within the halls of Congress, which he first started to prowl in 1991. Since that freshmen term his rapid rise to the top came about through close association with, first, Newt Gingrich and then with Tom Delay, whom he succeeded as House minority leader after the latter resigned his seat in February 2006 over corruption allegations (only now coming to trial). Interestingly, before that point his main legislative accomplishment was probably the “No Child Left Behind” education act, which he maneuvered through Congress in cooperation with then-President George W. Bush and noted liberal grandee Senator Ted Kennedy.

But there is also no need to idealize the man. For one thing, there was his own remarkable admission in a recent interview that, as far as he was concerned, the chief Republican legislative goal was to ensure that Obama becomes a one-term president. At the same time, he is by far the champion fund-raiser for Republican electoral coffers, largely because of how especially “amiable” he is towards lobbyists for financial and big business concerns, as noted in this NYT piece of only a couple months ago. But we probably cannot expect the FAZ – even the paper’s dedicated Washington correspondent – to be able to fully fathom the increasingly commercial nature of American legislative deliberations.

Post modified: Sorry, it was rather Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell who stated the bit about making Obama a one-term president being the Republican Party’s #1 objective.

                          

All that Congress stuff is not so often the focus of foreign coverage of American politics, however. Generally, it’s the President foreigners are interested in – the American executive in charge of the country’s relations with other governments, after all – and especially this one who broke once and for all the 200-year-plus color barrier to the office.

So we have, for example, a piece from France’s left-wing Libération (Midterm: Obama launches the final assault). There is a disappointed tone here even as journalist Fabrice Rousselot goes into detail about how Barack Obama (together with Michelle) has stepped up his campaigning in the last weeks before the election, using his electoral support organization Organizing for America to go after young voters especially aggressively and get them to the polls tomorrow. After all, Rousselot also notes how, this time, the President’s campaign is not about “Yes we can”; this time it’s more like “It’s hard, and we have to persevere.” That’s not quite so inspiring as a slogan, and so he doubts Obama will be able to do much to ward off a serious electoral defeat for his party.

Then again, that might be a good thing. Such, at least, is the speculation of Chritoph von Marschall writing in the (also left-wing) Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel (Liberating defeat for Obama). The President’s lack of progress on the foreign affairs front, the author admits, is even more noticeable than his domestic performance (despite the Nobel Prize): Iran, the MidEast, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo still operating. Is he fated to do even worse in the second half of his term after these elections?

Actually, probably the opposite. Here Von Marschall either draws on his own rather sophisticated study of American presidential affairs or else has access to good academic advisors, as he brings forward the insight that, after all, presidents have much more freedom of action in foreign affairs, and so it has repeatedly been the case that they have devoted themselves to these whenever they have felt stifled on the home front. After all, every president must build his own “legacy” for the history books one way or the other; the presidency is not just a matter of warming some historic seat for four or eight years.

Furthering this line of argument, Van Marschall also points out how there is also greater scope to ignore the demands of his own party in the area of foreign affairs, because of that greater freedom there to do what he sees fit. Supposedly his positions on Afghanistan and Iraq in particular are even closer to what Republicans prefer. Then again, this does not guarantee any sort of cosier cooperation between the Executive and Legislative branches coming in with the new Congress; keep in mind the almost pathological determination by Republicans to oppose anything Obama might want to do, seemingly even if at some fundamental level they agree with it. And Obama will still need a 2/3 vote of the Senate to ratify treaties, including the update to the START nuclear weapons treaty he recently signed with Russia. It’s easy to imagine that that, too (and, with it, American-Russian relations generally), could fall victim to the new congressional intransigence likely to be elected tomorrow and installed at the beginning of next January.

UPDATE: Renowned MidEast expert Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan weighs in with this closer examination (in English) of how a Republican-dominated Congress (even if it’s just the House of Representatives) could still hamper the President’s conduct of foreign policy, e.g. by calling hearings on the planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan (and even from Iraq) as a means to pressure him to slow them down.

                          

Now he has further comments which he contributed to the Financial Times. Unfortunately, that paper has a rather restrictive readership policy – i.e. it likes to force you to pay – but luckily we can resort to Denmark’s business newspaper Børsen instead. There it’s a brief piece, and Roubini’s message is clear, simple, and expressed in the title: The catastrophe commences on Tuesday.

Tuesday? That’s election day in the USA, of course, and according to Roubini that will unleash a new economic crisis because the Republicans are expected to make significant gains, recapturing control of the House of Representatives and maybe the US Senate as well. This will inaugurate paralysis in Congress as Democrats and Republicans block everything the other side tries to do, even as the US economic situation remains dire and in need of fiscal initiatives of one sort or another.

True, this insight is hardly blindingly original, and it has also certainly been advanced recently by other commentators, and then even rather more eloquently. (“In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.”)

Then again, everyone knows that Paul Krugman is a liberal (Nobel Prize-bearing) attack-dog. But this is the FT, Børsen – Dr. Doom, no less!

                          

Come to think of it, maybe you did have some inkling that something like that was about to happen, from the recent disputes you may have heard about involving attempts by the current government to disallow certain religious/political groups from standing as candidates. But this article from the Ritzau news agency in the Danish Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad deals instead with the results of a recent poll among eligible Iraqi voters undertaken for the government by the Iraqi National Media Center. A total of 63% across the sample stated to the pollsters that they intended to vote. This compares unfavorably with the 79.6% that we do know turned out to vote at that first free-and-fair national election, back in 2005. The poll’s results broke down further to show that Kurds and Shi’ites revealed themselves to be rather more ready to make it to the polls on 7 March than did Sunnis.

Whoever wrote this brief piece’s headline – whether it was the Ritzau agency or the Kristeligt Dagblad – clearly showed displeasure at this news by making it read “Only two out of three Iraqis want to vote.” But wait: Infoplease tells us that only 56.8% of American voters turned out to the polls even back in November, 2008 to either elect or try to stop Obama as president! In that light, 63% looks pretty good! Then again, you can still understand the tenor of that Danish reporting when you keep in mind that Danish voter participation is always pretty high: this Wikipedia article puts it at usually around 87%.

UPDATE: If you want further confirmation that things are really going rather OK in Iraq, here’s a guest blog-post, in English, on the Foreign Policy site from someone who definitely knows what he’s talking about. Hey, 63% – those Iraqis are simply getting more American every day, that’s all!

                          

Berlin, on the other hand, is already having to deal with a new (yet also very, very old) method of trying to provoke a cleft within the body politic, as you can see from the above illustration, and as Die Tageszeitung columnist Ines Kappert – that’s a woman’s name – complains about in a brief essay entitled Aha, Titten (which I won’t translate for you from the German; I think you can get the sense on your own). Vera Lengsfeld is the lady with the green necklace, which stands in stark contrast to her more-natural adornments, on the right side of this electoral poster from Germany’s CDU, or Christlich Demokratische Union, also the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is the similarly-adorned lady to the left. Lengsfeld posed explicitly for this poster, while Merkel’s picture comes from her appearance last year at the ceremony for the inauguration of the new Oslo (NO) opera house, where her choice of apparel excited considerable comment in the German media.

Lengsfeld’s figure in this poster is already doing the same now, including from the TAZ’s Kappert, who wonders whether “her woman-ness” (Weiblichkeit) is all that Frau Lengsfeld as challenger from the CDU has to bring to bare in her ongoing electoral challenge in Berlin’s Friedrichshein-Kreuzberg district against the incumbent, Green Party member Christian Ströbele (also known as Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the Bundestag since 1998 and in fact quite an active and prominent German parliamentarian). Kappert further:

Whoever reduces a political duel to gender differences is in fact not to be taken seriously. And it is certainly no successful demonstration of a new female self-consciousness that brings its own bosom in opposition to chauvinism in politics – or, as Halina Wawzyniak of Die Linke [the extreme-left German political party] on her posters, her own tushie [GE: "Po," meaning female rear end].

(Sorry, €S fans, I did the best work that I could possibly do with Google Images etc., but still could not locate on-line any sample of that last-mentioned image! Any reader contributions would be appreciated – I might even post the picture as an update!)

Meanwhile, a separate piece in Die Welt reveals that Frau Lengsfeld did not let Merkel know what she had in mind for electoral advertising. Says Frau Lengsfeld: “That the Bundeskanzlerin would never have been able to allow me to do. It was supposed to be a surprise.” Please note that Die Welt reveals her to be 57 years old – and very well-preserved, one must say! (It so happens that Lengsfeld was born in the former DDR and lived most of her life under that regime, as did in fact Bundeskanzlerin Merkel – could this be another example of the infamous East German doping?) Oh, and also worth mentioning: that slogan on the election-poster illustration means “We have more to offer.” Perhaps German politics is finally getting genuinely interesting even for the outside observer (at least of a certain bent).

                          

That caustic title is actually the very same as that of a new book out by Stefan Kornelius, head of the foreign affairs department at Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The expanded list he provides of “defense-only” rules under which the German troops have to work is truly ridiculous. They may fire at targets only after they have first been attacked, and even then may not pursue those enemy forces if they should then try to flee; no night flights are allowed by either fixed-winged or helicopters – and, in any case, anything German pilots may learn up there in the way of intelligence on the enemy cannot be radioed back directly (i.e. in “real-time”), but must be debriefed only after that aircraft is back on the ground. For the rule that takes the cake I almost chose the one reading “No counter-narcotics activity; you’re not here for that,” which among other things supposedly has resulted in opium poppies for harvesting being grown right next to a German base! But no, that has to yield pride-of-place to Friederichs’ mention that German government lawyers are still filing legal complaints against soldiers who fire their weapons in self-defense when it’s not clear that the Taliban have indeed fired first!

Needless to say, morale is low, especially now that the German troops are no longer engaged in the help-the-locals development work that many of them thought was why they came – it’s too dangerous now. There’s precious little coverage back in Germany of their efforts there, as well as little in the way of medals, awards, and other such recognition. Unfortunately, their morale is likely to get much lower in the near future: the schedule of Afghan government elections coming up on 20 August, followed by a German general election on 27 September, inevitably means that attacks against them are shortly to reach a crescendo as the Taliban shrewdly try to produce more casualties and thus sap support for the troop deployment further.

Tellingly, Friederichs passes along Kornelius’ assessment that, when it comes to public treatment of Afghanistan, it’s the US under Obama that is doing things right. In Germany nobody wants to talk about the deployment over there of 3,500 troops (it’s not allowed to be called a “war”), and the government likewise has no interest in actually trying to explain to its electorate precisely why they are there in the first place, particularly with those elections coming up. In the US, in contrast, Obama is said to be willing to speak openly of “the violent task of stabilizing Afghanistan.” That’s all very interesting, given that no less than the New York Times just yesterday published a piece on how the current administration still can’t figure out how to define “winning” in Afghanistan, a persistent but vital puzzle that other writers have been covering even longer back into the past.

Ultimately, for Germany the way forward – for good or for bad – depends precisely on that double-set of elections coming up that will make life for the Bundeswehr troops there ever-more precarious. Kornelius: “If the Afghan government [that emerges] after the election makes no progress, the international troops lose their basis. Militarily Afghanistan can’t be won, living conditions for Afghans must [first] be bettered. Otherwise I hold a withdrawal of the international troops in one or two years to be realistic.” Or even sooner than that for the Bundeswehr, of course, if the Left/Green/FDP opposition manages to take over in Germany after 27 September.