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This week, Namibians voted for a new president and Parliament in the country’s sixth general election since independence in 1990.The South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo) has won every single one of those elections

Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe are all governed by the liberation movement that ushered in their independence, whereas in South Africa the party that helped to end apartheid is still in charge

Even the least popular among them, Zimbabwe’s Zanu-PF, was returned to power with a parliamentary majority of 52.35%

How do we recognise government attempts to deform a liberal democracy so as to get their way? As Putin, Erdogan and a host of others have demonstrated, there must be 50 ways to lose your constitution as any kind of constraint on incumbents exercising raw power as they wish. Perhaps the majority party calls the legislature to consider new laws at 5.30am (without informing the opposition). Or perhaps the opposition is notified but opposing MPs are intimidated by an induced deadline crisis and media blackguarding in every lobby. Perhaps a president suspends the legislature for a lengthy period and governs alone using decree powers supposedly reserved for an emergency, as many a Latin American banana republic did before the transition from authoritarian rule.

All the ‘British constitution’ texts have long reiterated the same message. The lack of codification of the UK’s constitution presented no substantial dangers, but instead gifted the country with a set of legal and constitutional arrangements that could easily flex and adapt for changing times and situations. The UK would have none of the irresolvable legacy problems of written constitutions gone obsolescent, such as the USA’s current enduring problems over the Second Amendment on the carrying of firearms. A great deal of faith was also placed in British elites’ developed respect for Parliament, for public opinion and for legality.

Theresa May’s government demonstrated not an elite responsiveness to MPs after 2017, but instead an increasingly frenzied exploitation of a host of parliamentary micro-institutions to bulldoze the May-Whitehall compromise Brexit deal through a reluctant Commons where government policies had no majority. This was the curtain raiser for the Johnson government’s more grand-scale effort to unilaterally rework the UK constitution so as to give the PM ‘governance by decree’ powers.

for numerous reasons, mobilizational authority is currently undermining and challenging representational authority in new ways

Liberal modernity takes potentially controversial questions of truth and justice and hands them over to a small group of specialists to deal with so that the rest of us can live in peace. From the time of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes onwards, the basic compact is that liberal citizens trade shared meaning for security, including prosperity. But for the same reason, there is always a potential vulnerability here that surfaces periodically, as we’re witnessing today.

Nothing fuels populism as effectively as the sense of public corruption: the notion that this suspension of private interests is a sham. Today, especially in the age of leaks, social media, systematic scandals and tabloid intrusion, it seems intuitively obvious to many people that public life is a game being played by insiders.

A more fruitful comparison emerges from the obvious fact that Biden seeks to trace a middle path between Donald Trump’s far-right nationalism and Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism. Long before the notion of a “Third Way” was appropriated by British Labour Party leader Tony Blair in the 1990s, this was a staple talking point of a specific strand of continental European conservatism, which sought to distinguish itself from both fascism on the far-right and revolutionary socialism on the far-left during the interwar and immediate postwar years: the political tradition of Christian democracy.

This is the family of political parties that came to power in most continental European countries in the aftermath of World War II under the leadership of such figures as Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, and Robert Schuman. But it also remains prominent today in Germany under the chancellorship of Angela Merkel and in the European Union’s Parliament and Commission, with Ursula Von der Leyen at the helm.

Biden’s two main political rivals at the moment are routinely thought of in reference to European political traditions—social democracy in the case of Sanders and far-right nationalism in the case of Trump. It’s time to do the same for Biden. The Democratic front-runner’s political ideology isn’t a watered-down version of his rivals’ or even his predecessors’. It is best understood as approximating a distinct European tradition

Analysis of results by the Electoral Reform Society shows the Conservatives would have won 77 fewer seats under the regional list proportional representation method of voting. While Labour would have won 10 more seats and the Greens another 11, the Liberal Democrats would have been the biggest beneficiaries by taking 59 more seats.

“No government should be able to win a big majority on a minority of the vote,” Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “Something is very clearly wrong.” He added: “Westminster’s voting system is warping our politics beyond recognition and we’re all paying the price. “Under proportional voting systems, seats would more closely match votes, and we could end the scourge of millions feeling unrepresented and ignored.”

More than 860,000 people voted for the Greens and just over 640,0000 cast their ballots for the Brexit Party. But the Greens will only have one MP in Caroline Lucas, while Nigel Farage’s party did not win a single seat.

Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.

this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.

The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.

Rather than tangible economic grievance, decades of cross-national empirical research show that feelings and perceptions of sociocultural threat are the principal drivers of surging authoritarian sentiment among the electorate and the demagoguery that rises up to service it.

In a modern, multicultural society, certain citizens simply become overwhelmed by growing complexity and rapid change. These individuals fear a loss of their social order, status, and familiar way of life. Whether rational or not, this trepidation provokes intolerance of threats to the collective order, in which they are unusually invested.

About a third of the population in Western countries is predisposed to authoritarianism, which is about 50 percent heritable. Authoritarians have an inherent preference for oneness and sameness; they favor obedience and conformity and value strong leaders and social homogeneity over freedom and diversity

At the interview in London, only she and another northern girl, a farmer’s daughter from Sunderland, took the time to chat to the secretary. It turned out that the secretary was part of the selection panel, and it was the two northerners who won the fellowships.

“Populism provides a narrative for people who have lost their identities that were tied to meaningful work,” she said. “When people lose that then they’re looking for something. There’s a feeling they’ve been robbed and deprived of a golden age, and they want that back and populist politics feeds upon that, and provides scapegoats for losing it.”

“Liberal democracy hasn’t been delivering,” she argued. “If I go back to my home town, it’s still no better than it was when I was growing up in terms of opportunity. The shops are boarded up in the main street. Nothing new is coming in. There’s just no kind of sense of optimism. And when I visit my relatives here in the US in Wisconsin and other places, there’s a lot of sense of: the rest of the world is kind of moving on and leaving us behind. People see that as being closely associated with liberal democracy.”

between 2015 and 2017 support for Britain’s main parties became much more predicated on issues of culture and identity, reflecting a radical change in how parties attract voters. This shift may lead to a restructuring of the UK party system and the end of traditional party allegiances

Is the country once again experiencing the kind of left-right schism that we saw during the first 25 years after World War II with a choice for voters between a left-wing Labour Party and a right-wing Conservative Party and very little else?

political competition in Britain is defined by two underlying dimensions: one economic dimension, which corresponds to the economic notion of left versus right, and one cultural dimension. This cultural dimension incorporates a range of social issues such as equal opportunities for minorities and the desirability (or not) of the death penalty, as well as a number of issues closely related to globalisation, such as immigration, foreign aid and European integration. This dimension, sometimes referred to as “open” versus “closed”, pits patriotic, Eurosceptic social conservatives against cosmopolitan liberals and by 2017 seemed to be stronger and more coherent in terms of ordering voters’ political orientations than the economic dimension. This suggests that the economic conflict between capital and labour that defined political competition in the 20th century is giving way to a new sort of conflict based on culture and identity.

What makes democracy resilient is its acceptance that we the people, and by extension our governments, are imperfect. The separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary are there to keep the debate continuous, rights protected, and imperfect governments honest as they pursue their current mandate. In totalitarian systems, by contrast, the governing regime justifies itself by a supposedly ‘scientific’ blueprint. The law is reduced to an instrument for the fulfilment of that blueprint.

Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, successive governments of New Right and New Left have attempted to implement an asserted science of government based on the radical, free-market neoclassical economics of the Virginia and Chicago Schools: neoliberalism

Its dominant idea: that markets are always more efficient; the private is morally and functionally superior to the public

no other populism is likely to dismantle the very country it claims to be saving. The end of the United Kingdom is a probable outcome of the hardline Brexit towards which Boris Johnson is steering the country like a demented racing driver. Brexit would also very significantly weaken both the European Union and the transatlantic alliance.

for one of the world’s oldest, most stable parliamentary democracies, what has happened in Westminster is shocking. The Conservative party, a centre-right broad church for at least a century, has become the Revolutionary Conservative party

Many people around the world have been laughing at the House of Commons, with its antiquated procedures and theatrical Speaker. Actually, the Westminster parliament is doing us Britons proud. Over the last couple of years, those green leather benches have seen great speeches, deep emotion and courage, with members putting the national interest before personal and party advantage. Now parliament has stopped the populist bullies in their tracks, swiftly passing a law that obliges the government to ask for an article 50 extension if no deal has been agreed with the EU and approved by MPs by 19 October. Were Johnson to refuse to do so, as he is currently threatening, then he would have broken the law and could, ultimately, be sent to prison.

American democracy faces not one, but three distinct and connected crises

an ongoing assault on democratic norms and values

a sense of displacement, dislocation, and despair among large numbers of Americans

For three weeks Sisi’s image has been trashed by an insider turned whistleblower whose videos from self-exile in Spain have gripped and paralysed Egypt in turn. 

Mohamed Ali is, by his own admission, no hero. One of only 10 contractors the army uses, he is corrupt. He also only left Egypt with his family and fortune because his bills had not been paid. Ali is no human rights campaigner. 

"Now you say we are very poor, we must be hungry. Do you get hungry? You spend billions that are spilt on the ground. Your men squander millions. I am not telling a secret. You are a bunch of thieves."

Brexit is causing far-right views on immigration and identity to be drawn into the mainstream, a report has warned. Research by Hope Not Hate found that Britain’s departure from the EU has fuelled discussions of loyalty, elitism and patriotism, “drawing people who might have otherwise have been attracted to the far right back into the mainstream right”.

anti-Muslim prejudice, demeaning rhetoric on migrants and refugees and notions of a ‘cultural war’ against social liberalism

partly as a consequence of politicians co-opting far-right narratives to gain support and partly because of the newer far right engaging in wider issues

Many political scientists like political behavior to fall into neat boxes, whether those be typologies cleanly defining terms or spreadsheets in which every row contains a discrete observation. They recognize that there’s always phenomena that won’t fit, cleanly, but those can be the basis of future research—or relegated to the “error term,” the leftover bin for the facts that theory doesn’t explain.

When the implicit definition of democracy is democracy with American characteristics, the exceptions don’t even register as exceptions—until some event so far out of the comfort zone of mostly white, upper middle-class academics forces us to confront them as if they were brand new.

A federal union with authoritarian states cannot but be at least partly authoritarian itself

“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …” This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished.

American liberals and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit—that we accept as ordinary—in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.

A little over 173,000 people voted for Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party in April, giving it five Knesset seats. In September, the number of people who voted for the party shot up to 310,000. So, after just 3½ months of campaigning, it gained 137,000 new voters and grew to eight seats. These eight seats make it impossible for either bloc — right or left — to form a narrow majority government. That's why, on Oct. 3, the very day that the new Knesset was sworn in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated a meeting with Liberman. He wanted to convince the Yisrael Beitenu leader to join the new government that he was trying to form

It seems like Liberman succeeded in selling voters on his formula for change, specifically in matters of religion and state. That is something that most people support, particularly in the political center. What Liberman also offered them was a realistic way to make it happen. He proposed bringing two main parties — the Likud and Blue and White — together, given that there are so few ideological differences between them. Doing this would seem to be the most natural thing in the world. The problem is that the Blue and White party rejects Netanyahu, because of his pending criminal cases, while the Likud insists on bringing its right-wing, ultra-Orthodox bloc along with it.

He wants to see a new government made up of the Likud, Blue and White, and his Yisrael Beitenu party only, thereby forcing Netanyahu to sever his sacred alliance with the ultra-Orthodox. In this way, Liberman could advance the changes that he promised. When, about two weeks before the election, the Blue and White party realized that Liberman is stealing many of their votes because of this position, they also started talking about a secular, liberal government. Liberman now claims that this was why he did not have an even bigger victory.

“We are victims of a campaign of arrests because we are an organization that has invested and contributed a lot to Hirak,” a member of RAJ’s executive board told Al-Monitor, speaking on the condition of anonymity following Fersaoui’s arrest. “Yet, RAJ is not the only target of these arbitrary arrests, but rather the civil society as a whole.”

an upsurge of repression against prominent leaders and other activists with Hirak, including large-scale arbitrary arrests

escalation is taking place two months before presidential elections called for Dec. 12 by the interim president, Abdelkader Bensalah, and pushed for by the army.

marginalised neighbourhoods like Cite Ettadhamen have become a key political battleground ahead of the country's presidential runoff on Sunday. In the hope of securing the votes of Tunisia's poor, candidates Kais Saied, 61 and Nabil Karoui, 56, have offered a vision of employment, education, healthcare and improved infrastructure

Amid a field of 26 candidates featuring a number of political heavyweights, the two self-styled political outsiders surprised the country by finishing in first and second place in last month's first round

Saied, a law professor who has kept a low profile throughout the campaign and whose supporters see as embodying anti-elitism, ran without the backing of a party and won 18.4 percent nationally

The rise of authoritarian right-wing governments has tended to be viewed as a phenomenon confined to the countries on Europe’s eastern ‘peripheries’. This view is derived from an assumption that political authoritarianism is spreading westwards from eastern Europe, potentially destabilising the political democracies in the west. This account is erroneous in two ways

Once in power the right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland began to dismantle many of the checks and balances of the liberal democratic system. This has included such things as gaining control of the courts (including the Constitutional Court), politicising the public media, and partially reducing the independent functioning of NGOs. Simultaneously they have adopted a nationalist ideology, replete with hostility towards groups such as refugees and the LGBT community. The governments of Fidesz and the Law and Justice Party have partly allied with and contained far-right parties and movements, adopting many of their policies and rhetoric.

Fidesz (partly due to Hungary’s electoral system) has had a constitutional majority in parliament, allowing it to push its reform programme further than its counterparts in Poland