Suffragio

Making world politics less foreign

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Suffragio reads behind the lines of this weekend's fascinating interview with former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to try to understand what a Clinton administration would mean for US foreign policy.

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There was never any doubt that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would ultimately win Turkey's first direct presidential election. But the real question is whether the ruling Justice and Development Party and the Turkish electorate in parliamentary elections that must be held in the next ten months will empower Erdoğan's push for a strong presidential system.

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There's more to Cameroon and to this week's White House Africa summit than Chantal Biya's hair.

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If you care about the environment or climate change or carbon trading, you'll want to take a moment to learn how Australia's prime minister Tony Abbott won a vote to make his country the first to repeal a carbon trading scheme.

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It is never too early to learn about Brazil's October general election -- and whether president Dilma Rousseff can hold off competition from Aécio Neves on the right and Eduardo Campos and his running mate, Marina Silva, on the left.

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After a weekend in the bizarro remnants of North American France -- Saint Pierre et Miquelon -- I try to explain why France still financially supports an artificially self-sustaining community of 6,000 people off the coast of Newfoundland.

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Everything you ever wanted to know about Argentina's default -- its background, its odd travels through the global financial system, New York courts, Ghanian ports and the US Supreme Court. And, of course, what it all means for the Argentine economy, the future of sovereign debt, Latin America and Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. 

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The August 10 presidential election in Turkey isn't about whether the country will become a presidential state or a parliamentary state, or an Islamist state or a secular state, but whether it will simply become an Erdoğan state.

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In the middle of an international crisis involving Russia and Europe, and a struggle for Ukraine's very future, nearly every politician in the country, including its newly inaugurated president Petro Poroshenko, is suddenly shifting to maneuver for campaign season in what are executed to be snap parliamentary elections this autumn after the resignation of prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. That might backfire. In more than one way. 

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After two decades of brutal civil war, it's no wonder that people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia don't trust health officials in the current Ebola outbreak, now the deadliest in history, which represents west Africa's most striking governance crisis since the end of those civil wars in the early 2000s.

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Though Honduras's president Juan Orlando Hernández was right last week when he argued in Washington that US demand for illicit drugs ultimately fuels his country's violence, he conveniently neglected the nexus between US military funding and the corruption and impunity that characterizes his administration and Honduran governance generally. 

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In a country where president Pierre Nkurunziza has increasingly restricted political and press freedom are increasingly restricted to the point of limits on jogging and church worship, Burundi has now set a timetable for its impending 2015 political crisis.

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Though it may be more smoke than fire, Hungary's controversial prime minister Viktor Orbán argued that his country should transform into an 'illiberal state,' which would bring him on a collision course with EU leaders and the incoming European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

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Jokowi won Indonesia's presidency on the strength of support from relatively poorer, older and rural voters -- that's counterintuitive in light of his reputation as the younger candidate of change and reform.

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In order to understand the current crisis over unaccompanied minors from Central America, it's important to understand how US foreign policy has undermined democracy, the rule of law and stability in Central America for decades.

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Pedro Sánchez, young new leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party wants to follow in the footsteps of Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero‬, but he'll first have to give ‪Spain‬'s electorate a reason to trust the ‪PSOE‬ again in the face of ‪Podemos‬, a powerful new group giving voice to Spain's ‪indignados‬.

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Indonesia officially has a new president in Jakarta governor Joko Widodo.

Final results show that Jokowi won the July 9 election by a margin of more than 6% over nationalist rival Prabowo Subianto.

So what's next? Expect big changes in Indonesia's second-largest party, Golkar, and the return of two familiar faces to the heart of Indonesian governance in former president Megawati Sukarnoputri and incoming vice president Jusuf Kalla.

But Jokowi's 'reform' agenda largely remains a mystery.