Judge calls Russian party ads “racist”Russia’s top court on Friday upheld a ban on a nationalist party taking part in Moscow city elections over a campaign ad that judges said incited racism. The 30-second television clip by the Rodina (Motherland) party showed a blonde woman walking in Moscow surrounded by people who resembled dark-skinned immigrants from Russia’s south or nearby ex-Soviet republics. It ended with the slogan: “Let’s clean the city of rubbish.”
“The Supreme Court’s decision clearly shows that the authorities are not ready to withstand real opposition or hold civilised dialogue with it,” Rodina said in a statement calling on voters to spoil their ballots. Rodina is the third biggest party in Russia’s parliament, and opinion polls had suggested it would take second place in the election.
We give Putin so much flack for stifling democracy, but his authoritarian rule is a good thing if this is the face of the opposition. I mean, even those who may not think much of Bush would be happy if his opposition was the Ku Klux Klan, no? The rise of the Rodina does echo of how Hitler’s Nazi party came to power. Elections don’t equal democracy.
Nepal rebels extend ceasefireNepal’s Maoist rebels extended a three-month unilateral ceasefire by one month on Friday, hours before it was due to expire. Political parties, which agreed last month to form a loose alliance with the Maoists aimed at ending absolute monarchy and returning Nepal to democracy, immediately welcomed the statement. The announcement also came just ahead of the return of King Gyanendra to the Himalayan kingdom after an African tour, and followed an appeal from the United Nations for the rebels to extend the truce – and for the government to respond in kind.
This is good news—to a point. Ceasefires are only so valuable, and sometimes it’s better if one side wins. The Maoists may just be using this ceasefire to rearm. But since the royalist government was in no situation to deal a fatal blow, this is probably a good thing. Critics of the King say restoring parliamentary democracy should be the first priority. I’m in favor of sorting out the Marxists one way or another first.
Islamist Opposition Parties Gaining in Egyptian ElectionsIn Egypt, there was violence and controversy in the third and final stage of Parliamentary elections. Police shot and killed one protestor, and opponents of the government of Hosni Mubarak say they were prevented by police from entering polling stations. Many of the opponents are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that also opposes many U.S. policies in the region.
This reminds me of what Kaplan had to say about democracy in North Africa.
In April of 1985 I found myself in the middle of a Sudanese crowd that had just helped to overthrow a military regime and replace it with a new government, which the following year held free and fair elections. Sudan’s newly elected democracy led immediately to anarchy, which in turn led to the most brutal tyranny in Sudan’s postcolonial history: a military regime that broadened the scope of executions, persecuted women, starved non-Muslims to death, sold kidnapped non-Muslim children back to their parents for $200, and made Khartoum the terrorism capital of the Arab world, replacing Beirut. In Sudan only 27 percent of the population (and only 12 percent of the women) could read.Robert D. Kaplan, Was Democracy Just A Moment? December 1997
If a society does not have a functioning civil culture, democracy can bring chaos. We cannot expect countries with high unemployment, inflation, low literacy rates, and an uneducated population to hold free and fair elections. As one of Kaplan’s north African subjects once told him, “First create an economy, then worry about elections.” I find more hope in a Russian court banning a dangerous political party than one winning an open election in Egypt.
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COMMENTS / 6 COMMENTS
Kirk H. Sowell added these pithy words on 03 Dec 05 at 5:23 amTwo comments, one short and one more substantive. First, in re to Russia, I don’t mind Rodina getting knocked down, but I would prefer that they be dealt with by actually countering their ideology than by maintaining the ideology of the state, which I think sums up Putin’s view of politics. I think a more representative example of the Russian government’s anti-democratic activity is govt control of TV and the use of the legal process against political opponents a la Khordokovsky.
In re to Egypt, I also favor maintaining the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, but I think you are giving the Egyptian government way too much slack here. I agree with the principle of develping an economy first and developing civil society, but –
(1) economic reform in Egypt has been pretty slow, fast enough only to cause some pain but not fast enough to build a commercial class strong enough to resist the MB, and(2) Mubarak’s government itself is directly responsible for the civil society problem, having continued to prosecuted democratic activists for working with international human rights groups. In one prominent case, a researcher was prosecuted for receiving a grant from the European Union to promote political openness. It was only with this past presidential election that anyone was allowed to run against Mubarak; previously it was just a referrendum with him as the only candidate. And even that freedom will be limited; the new rule is that a candidate must get 65 votes in the parliament to run for president, and unless the democratic opposition does much better in 2010 than they are doing right now, they can’t run a candidate next time. (With two-thirds of seats decided, the democratic opposition has exactly 10 seats out of 454.) It will just be Mubarak’s chosen successor, unless he runs again.
I advocate the United States cutting its $2 billion/year subsidy to Mubarak’s regime; our association with it is promoting anti-Americanism and stirring support for terrorism. Mubarak brings some stability to Egypt, but it spills over into al-Qaeda. Egypt is a model in how not to fight radical Islam.
You may remember that The Man himself said that Mubarak was part of the problem in his interview on C-SPAN. For an in-depth look at the Egyptian elections, see my recent post, The Machete & the Purse: Egypt’s Second-Round Elections, Like the First, but Worse.
Sonagi added these pithy words on 03 Dec 05 at 3:34 pmFor another example to illustrate that elections don’t equal democracy, we don’t need to look outside our borders. 95% of the incumbents in Congress are re-elected, despite the results of a NYT poll showing that 71% of the respondents thought that Congress does not represent their interests. We do not have electoral violence, but we do have elected officials with campaign war chests filled by special interest groups. Thank goodness there are term limits on the presidency.
Lyndon added these pithy words on 04 Dec 05 at 12:38 amOn the situation in Russia, there is some reason to believe that Rodina, a party that was originally created to serve as the Kremlin’s loyal opposition, is continuing in the same vein in order to provoke exactly the response that you had – “[Putin’s] authoritarian rule is a good thing if this is the face of the opposition.” It requires some cynicism to believe such a conspiracy theory, but cynicism and contemporary Russian politics go hand-in-hand.
Note that Putin’s team recently created an “anti-fascist” youth movement, “Nashi” – maybe now they need some fascists to demonstrate against, and Rodina is being intentionally transformed into just such a target. While the kids are demonstrating in the streets and the Western press is busily tut-tutting, the guys in the Kremlin wind up looking like the heroes, saving Russia from a downward spiral into nationalism – plus, covering all of those demonstrations gives the press less time to “follow the money” as Putin’s team slowly re-nationalizes the energy sector.
The alternative explanation is that Rodina has overstepped the mandate given it by the Kremlin and become too popular for its own good (in fact, people have been talking about this possibility since the beginning of 2005). This interpretation would also see their removal from the elections tomorrow as a cynical move to get rid of a no-longer-necessary political opponent. Or, to put it differently, as I’ve seen written in comments on a Russian blog, Rodina has gone the way that Nashi and other Kremlin “projects” will go if they get too popular or go off-message – thrown out after being used like “society’s condoms.”
Either way, this whole affair is nothing to cheer about. If this were really an unexpected effort to fight racism in Russia, the LDPR would have been removed from the election as well, since they have aired campaign ads only marginally less offensive than Rodina’s. But the LDPR is the loyal opposition and is thus non-threatening to the Kremlin, so they were not touched.
Kirk H. Sowell added these pithy words on 04 Dec 05 at 2:16 amI agree with Sonagi’s basic point but for different reasons. The primary reason that incumbent reelection rates are so high is redistricting. Districts are drawn so as to protect incumbents of both parties. In any given Conressional election, only 30-35 of the 435 seats are genuinely considered competitive. And even in some of those, there is an incumbent with a slight advantage.
I do not believe that money is the problem. In fact, it is important that political parties be able to receive unrestricted amounts of money from individuals and organizations – as long as it is of domestic origin and publicly declared – because only parties have an interest in supporting candidates who opposed incumbents. Local businesses are usually afraid to do so where beating the incumbent is not likely. I believe that campaign finance “reform” in the McCain-Feingold mold is basically incumbent protection, because incumbents have other advantages like name recognition and would be happy to do without the money if they could disarm potential opponents.
And while parties do promote partisanship, which is not a good thing, they also promote political accountability, since it helps relatively uninformed voters match policies with candidates. And accountability is always a good thing in the political context.
Kirk H. Sowell added these pithy words on 04 Dec 05 at 2:31 amI have just clicked on Dan’s links and although most may not read them, I wanted to say that I strongly disagree with the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood should be allowed to compete electorally. One need only look at the Palestinian and Jordanian branches of the Muslim Brotherhood – Hamas and the Islamic Action Front, respecively, to see how dangerous this is.
Same ideology, different countries. Both are pro-terrorist. Hamas, of couse, is almost daily attempting to kill Israelis and set up a terror state in Gaza. The IAF in Jordan has been essentially the non-military wing of al-Qaeda in Jordan. It was they who campiagned for the release of Islamists like Zarqawi back in 1998, knowing full well what he wanted to do, and they openly supported a Jordanian soldier who murdered Israeli schoolgirls for allegedly laughing at him (this is the 1997 Daqamseh case). They, like Hamas, have rejected peace with Israel on any terms. The will accept nothing less than Israel’s annihilation. Yet it is important to emphasize that the IAF has been legal for over a decade in Jordan, and that Hamas is now politically activite.
The idea that the Muslim Brotherhood “will go back to terrorism” is flawed because they only gave it up tactically, and with regard to their fellow Muslims and the Egyptian government. They have disavowed the use of violence to gain power. They have never given up support for terrorism.
There is actually a genuinely moderate Islamist group in Egypt, and it is called hizb al-wasat, the Center Party. They have come close to being allowed full legality, but they don’t have the support the MB has. We need to distance ourself from Mubarak, whose rule is a gift to the MB, and support the development of civil society and democratic groups, including real moderate Islamists like Wasat. But allowing the MB to take power is not a good idea.
