Members of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi (Ours) hold a rally near Red Square in central Moscow to celebrate the overwhelming victory by President Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in parliamentary elections, Dec. 3.

Vladimir Putin’s victory in the Duma elections was widely foreseen, but the result has been grudgingly received in the West. The official election-observing worthies wagged their fingers: there were rumours of ballot-stuffing, or of intimidation in workplaces, and they complained that the Russian media had presented an almost uniformly glowing report of the Government for weeks before the elections.
No doubt there are elements of truth in this.
In the old Soviet days, elections were an excuse for a party--an event in some provincial, dead place.
Little old ladies turned out in great numbers, and voted fairly resolutely for the one-party candidate who was offering the tea and cakes.
The same still happens, and there was also, again from Soviet times, an element of the rotten borough about the election: people will vote for the boss or his candidate, much as vast estate-owners used to do in England.
But there is also a new feature in Russian political life, the emergence of a real public opinion, and no amount of criticism will sweep that away.
President Putin is popular, and from a Russian perspective, you can easily see why. Indeed, the outcome of his recent election more than slightly resembles General de Gaulle’s success in 1958.
Russia, like the France of that era, is emerging from a crisis that could have been deadly. In 1958 France was torn apart by the foul Algerian war.
It was attended by savagery of lesser degree but in the same class as we have seen over the past decade or so in Chechnya. The Government collapsed; de Gaulle took over; a referendum on the new constitution gave him 80 per cent of the vote, and the political parties he patronised took two thirds of it.
This is not very different from the figures attached to Mr Putin’s success, and even the figure for turnout--again, more than three fifths--do him some credit, because one chief feature of elections held in “newly emerging democracies“ has been profound apathy.
Russia has lost its empire, but it is still a country with a great many minorities, chiefly Turco-Tatar peoples. Putin seems, in other words, to have found some modus vivendi and somewhere like Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, nowadays is quite a prosperous place.
It’s not hard to understand President Putin’s popularity. Russia is, in parts, booming, and not just because of oil prices. It is making things, and in well-run towns like Archangel there is a level of wealth that is quite new. Even a Tory MP observing the elections, angry at being cold-shouldered, interspersed his criticism of Mr Putin with the remark that some of the housing estates he had seen might have been in Surrey.
More generally, the Russians feel at last that someone is standing up for them. In the days of Boris Yeltsin, their Government seemed to be clownish-- but, as Arthur Koestler remarked, “the face of a clown, seen close to, can seem sinister“.
It was an era when huge amounts of corrupt money went abroad, when Russian living standards became dismal, when anyone who could, emigrated. The country was treated with scant regard by foreigners--and there has been much resentment that the British gave asylum to characters whom the Russians saw as criminal.
Vladimir Putin has saved Russia from the turmoil of Ukraine or Georgia. As with de Gaulle, he has not been popular with many journalists (of whom de Gaulle incidentally imprisoned 300).
As with de Gaulle, he has proved that he can, in foreign affairs, be difficult, even a pain in the neck. But if Russians see him as the best hope, they should be understood.
Norman Stone
timesonline.co.uk

Kevin Rudd

Kevin Rudd has been swept into power after 6 percent of the voters swung to the Australian Labor Party.
With domestic issues dominating the contest, the Howard government’s unpopular industrial relations policies became the focus of discontent and a central argument for political change.
Rudd becomes prime minister after having cut many of his political teeth on foreign policy issues.
Foreign policy looms fairly large in how he will differentiate his government from its predecessor, including enhanced Asian engagement.
Rudd knows it will not be easy to promote Australia’s interests in stable great power relations at a time when the indexes of power in Asia are fundamentally changing.
The Sydney Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in September revealed much about the prism through which Rudd will view Asia’s security.
Not so important here is the well publicized fact that he addressed China’s Hu Jintao in Mandarin.
The more significant point is that, in the English portion of his address to China’s president, Rudd spoke of the United States as Australia’s “great friend and ally“ and China as Australia’s “great friend and partner.“
Getting Australia in the right position to cope with the evolving, and often competitive, relationship between the U.S. and China is Rudd’s primary foreign policy objective. Everything else is secondary.
Well known for his political and linguistic fluency in things Chinese, Rudd has had to demonstrate his U.S. alliance credentials.
On election night he devoted his first words on foreign policy to the argument that the U.S. alliance will be central to his government’s foreign policy.
This is doubly important because two of his government’s first acts in international politics will distance Australia from the Bush administration.
One is the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the U.S. isolated as the only industrialized country not to have done so.
The second is a negotiated withdrawal of Australia’s combat forces from Iraq.
These initiatives will be welcomed in those parts of Asia for which the Howard government’s approach to international security issues was too similar to Washington’s.
Rudd, however, believes that a strong U.S. presence in the region is crucial to a stable regional balance between the great powers. That means a policy of U.S. strategic engagement in Asia is central to Australia’s own approach to the region.
But that needs to occur in a way that does not require Canberra to concur with Washington on all issues.
Until the last 12 months in office, the Howard government had succeeded in maintaining brand differentiation from the U.S. by taking a more optimistic view of China’s rise.
But this distinction became muddied as the Australian election approached.
In March the Howard government made such a fuss of its new security declaration with Japan that Australia risked becoming too closely identified with one side of the major power divide in North Asia.
Soon afterward, a new Australian defense policy update gave comfort to China-skeptics in the Pentagon and in Tokyo with its warning that the Middle Kingdom’s military modernization could destabilize the region.
Rudd will not back out of the security declaration with Japan or the trilateral strategic dialogue that links the two countries with the U.S., but Canberra will display an even greater resistance to any ideas of a wider Asian alliance system that could be seen as an attempt to contain China.
This philosophy extends to the new Australian government’s approach to relations with India, singled out by Rudd as Asia’s second rising power.
If the Howard government was lukewarm on the idea of an Asian democratic quad involving Japan, the U.S., India and Australia, the Australian Labor Party leadership will be positively against the notion of dividing the region strategically on the basis of different political systems.
This will not necessarily be a problem in Australia-India relations given New Delhi’s ambivalence toward the quad concept.
But if he wishes to court India, Rudd may need to reconsider his opposition to Australian uranium sales to it.
Rudd also has at least one eye on Australia’s immediate neighborhood.
His visit to Bali to join climate-change discussions is an ideal opportunity to sell his new policy of Asian engagement in a strategically important country that occupies a neutral position in the U.S.-China and China-Japan great power relationships.
Rudd has indicated that his new government will be keen to deepen Australia’s relationship with Indonesia beyond the friendly atmospherics that Howard enjoyed with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

Michel Suleiman

Lebanon has decided to accept the country’s army chief, General Michel Suleiman, as a candidate for the presidency.
In Lebanon, an army chief has to spend two years away from politics before he can be elected president. Therefore, the Lebanese parliament, deadlocked for months and oblivious of the constitutionally ordained deadlines, has made a compromise and may now amend the Constitution to let the army chief be president.
The man who vacated the presidential post in October was also a general, but General Lahoud violated the Constitution when he refused to hand over to the prime minister after his term expired.
Many in Pakistan will disapprove of this state of affairs. Lebanon is a democracy based on a complex system of representation.
But with the decline of Arab nationalism and the rise of religion in the region, the confessional balance between the Christian-Shia-Sunni Arabs living in the country has given way to violence.
The Shia majority in the country was backward at the inception of the state and was not given its true representation in parliament.
And the Muslims were divided into Shia and Sunni by the “formula“ of power-sharing handed down by the colonial powers.
The president has to be chosen from among the Christian community, the Sunnis get the premiership and the Shias get the post of speaker of parliament.
General Suleiman became army chief in 1998, a year earlier than our General Musharraf and is now about to begin his presidential term in the same year as our own general is going to start his second.
General Suleiman will retire before becoming president; General Musharraf kept his uniform on while functioning as president after a referendum. In both cases, a functioning “democracy“ came under pressure for various reasons not identical in the two countries.
In Lebanon, communities are in conflict with a lot of interference from outside. Because of the rise of militancy, society there has seen a lot of violence that reduced the country to civil war-like conditions, complete with assassinations of one another’s leaders.
Without going too much into the detail of how Lebanon is divided and is completely at the mercy of influences coming in from the neighbourhood, and how the 1975-90 civil war allowed Syria to occupy a part of it, one can simply state that the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a Sunni, is backed by the US and Saudi Arabia. After the civil war, an invasion of the country by Israel last year has further queered the pitch for any social contract among the communities living in Lebanon on the nature of democracy itself.
In Bangladesh, a democratic system was working until now, although there were difficulties experienced at the hands of two personality-dominated parties which just couldn’t tolerate each other in power.
So the world had to accept a military coup in Dhaka after decades of political instability and corruption that comes in when everyone becomes convinced that nothing will finally work.
Bangladesh’s Constitution was better suited to democracy than Pakistan’s and there was even a provision in it of a neutral government on the eve of each new election. Unlike Pakistan, Bangladesh had no centre-province tensions, and there was no provincial sub-nationalism because there are no provinces in unicameral Bangladesh.
Yet, there was unceasing violence. Like Lebanon, the parties tried to kill each other’s leaders. There was religious violence too which had gone to Bangladesh from Pakistan through the jihadi militias.
Pakistan shared some of the features of Lebanon and Bangladesh. Its two mainstream political parties misbehaved with each other and didn’t mind when their opponents were dismissed from government. In fact, there is evidence that they appealed to the army to topple the opponent’s government.
In addition to this polarisation, which also exists in both Lebanon and Bangladesh, there was religious violence too. The sectarian side of it unfolded in Pakistan thanks to the relocated sectarian conflict in the Persian Gulf region, Pakistan secretly fighting on the side of Saudi Arabia.
Now comes the point from where Pakistan is different. A new kind of conflict in Lebanon and Bangladesh seems to have just begun. In Pakistan, a general has retired and made way for elections.
DAILYSTAR.CO.PK