Uncharted Democracy

2010-04-28 (수) 12:00:00

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The conservative Tea Party movement in the United States, marked by a growing anger at what its mostly white and well-to-do members perceive as the Obama government’s intrusion into their private lives, is not the only rising political phenomenon of 2010.

In Britain, there is Cleggmania.

After Nick Clegg’s strong performance in a televised debate on April 15 with the Conservative David Cameron and Labour’s Gordon Brown, Robert Mackey wrote on The Times’s Lede blog, there is a real possibility that the electorate might just abandon the two major parties for Mr. Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in the May 6 election for prime minister.

Labour and Conservative supporters first said Mr. Clegg’s performance was irrelevant, since his chances of winning were slim . By April 19, though, one poll put his approval rating at 72 percent, more than 50 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival; another showed his party picking up 10 points; and a third suggested that the electorate was now split roughly in three .

“We are in uncharted territory,” John Curtice, a professor of politics at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, told the International Herald Tribune. “We have never had this kind of polling during an election campaign. There has never been this kind of surge to the Liberal Democrats.”

Iraq, a nation with no history of democratic institutions, is also headed for uncharted territory. A hand recount of 2.5 million Baghdad ballots from the March 7 election was ordered on April 19. The results showed the largely secular party of former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi winning 91 seats in Parliament, compared with 89 for the current prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Mr. Allawi, a Shiite who won a majority of Sunni votes, has warned that violence could erupt if his victory is nullified. A winning candidate in his alliance, Haidar al-Mullah, told The Times that if the results were changed, the country would “find itself in a legitimate crisis.”

Perhaps Mr. Maliki needs to take some lessons in electoral politics from Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has ruled for 30 years and routinely captures close to 90 percent of the votes.

But even Mr. Mubarak, who has not announced whether he will run for a sixth term as president in 2011, is facing a challenge, The Times reported.

A group of academics and young activists have asked Mohamed El- Baradei, the former international nuclear nonproliferation enforcer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to make a run for president. But the Egyptian Constitution prevents him or anyone else who is not a member of any party to run as an independent candidate.

And in preparation for parliamentary elections in May, the Egyptian police arrested about 300 members of the government’s only viable political threat, the Muslim Brotherhood, in March. The Brotherhood is officially outlawed but has always been tolerated; the arrests show the government’s determination to limit a strong political opposition, human rights groups and analysts told The Times.

“The current regime has been in power for 30 years, rigging elections and doing what it wants to do without regard for any pressures or what anyone has to say,” Salama Ahmed Salama, who is in charge of the editorial board of an independent newspaper, Shorouk, said. “I am not at all optimistic.”

TOM BRADY