On Friday, Iranians will vote for their next president. The race has essentially boiled down to a choice between a centrist and a hardline conservative—the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani, and Ibrahim Raisi, the custodian of the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashad. A clear choice appears to be emerging. Read Here – The Atlantic
…because Khamenei personifies the establishment, it is not his endorsement that matters, but that of respected antiestablishment figures who despite their political marginalisation still have unmatched reach within Iran’s society. Currently, that person is Khatami, who has managed to make use of social media to circumvent the government’s media blackout of him dating back to […]
Months of post-mortems of Clinton’s loss to Trump overshadow one of the simplest explanations: It’s important to convince voters that you are not corrupt. Macron also benefited from voters who refused to give Le Pen a free pass on her party’s history of racism and xenophobia the way Americans let Trump get away with his inflammatory […]
After years of careful preparation and months of campaigning, Emmanuel Macron and his allies are about to take control of the euro area’s second-biggest economy. Typically associates from the elite French schools where the new president studied, or his time in government under outgoing President Francois Hollande, Team Macron were first dismissed as fantasists and […]
Where was Barack Obama on the day that Republicans in the House of Representatives dealt a potentially mortal wound to the Affordable Care Act, his signature domestic achievement? In France—at least, on French Twitter, where a video of Obama endorsing Emmanuel Macron for President was pinned* to the top of Macron’s page. Read Here – The New […]
The last time a French Presidential election was anywhere near this wild was in 2002. Jacques Chirac, the center-right President, was supposed to face Lionel Jospin, the center-left Prime Minister. (The two men had been sharing power in a “cohabitation” government.) The extreme-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father, an eyepatch-wearing former paratrooper and gleeful racist, […]
It will soon be three years since Narendra Modi took over as Prime Minister in May 2014; his politics has been simply brilliant, making him by far the strongest Prime Minister India has produced since Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. After two stumbles in Delhi and Bihar, he has corrected his politics to be a […]
Iranians have not seen as robust an economic recovery as many had expected to follow the JCPOA’s implementation. A morass of U.S. sanctions unrelated to the nuclear program has discouraged major international banks from investing in the country and made many companies wary of expanding into Iran. Read Here – Defense One
In the years before the 2016 election, cable news was approaching a demographic cliff and an existential crisis. Average primetime viewership on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC had declined by about a third between 2008 and 2014…But in 2015, Donald Trump descended an escalator, a slow-motion meteorite crashing into the earth with biosphere-altering potential. Read […]
The PPP under Asif Ali Zardari has lost its founding ideals. From Bhutto to Zardari, it has been a long and tragic story of the once the most powerful political force in the country falling into decay. Read Here – Dawn
looking beyond borders 