Seventeen years after Vladimir Putin first became president, his grip on Russia is stronger than ever. The West, which still sees Russia in post-Soviet terms, sometimes ranks him as his country’s most powerful leader since Stalin. Russians are increasingly looking to an earlier period of history. Both liberal reformers and conservative traditionalists in Moscow are talking about Mr Putin as a 21st-century tsar.
A 38-nation Pew Research Center survey finds there are reasons for calm as well as concern when it comes to democracy’s future. More than half in each of the nations polled consider representative democracy a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. Yet, in all countries, pro-democracy attitudes coexist, to varying degrees, with openness to nondemocratic forms of governance, including rule by experts, a strong leader or the military.
The man once tipped to become President Xi Jinping’s successor, Guangdong party boss Hu Chunhua, is likely to become a vice-premier in March but his prospects of inclusion in the Communist Party’s top echelon of power, the Politburo Standing Committee, are fading, sources have told the South China Morning Post.
As Donald Trump’s White House spirals deeper into crisis, the rest of the world seems to be giving up on America’s new president. A survey by Pew Research Centre showed that respondents in 22 out of 36 countries trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin more than Trump when it comes to handling global affairs. And that includes American allies like Germany, France and Japan. (Donald Trump edged out Putin in the UK, India and Israel.)
Through rounds of reshuffles and a relentless war on corruption that has felled more than 200 senior officials, Xi has managed to place loyalists or associates of close allies in key positions in central and provincial government and powerful party departments. Many are now poised to be elevated to the Central Committee and some to the Politburo.
Are we living through an era that resembles the 1930s, when authoritarian leaders were on the march, democratic leaders failed to stand up to them, the international system buckled, and the world was dragged into war? Or are we living through something more like the late 1970s, when America, recovering from its long engagement in a losing war and pulling itself out of a prolonged economic slump, began to take the course corrections that allowed it to embark on a period of national recovery and reassert its international ascendancy?
The U.S. traditionally takes point in the search for common approaches to the big global issues of the day at G-20 summits. Not this time. When world leaders meet in Hamburg on Friday, China and Germany will move in to usurp the U.S.’s role.
It is not bad if the myths about the omnipotence of Mr. Modi scare bureaucrats into reporting to work at 9 a.m. or deter a potentially corrupt minister or a bureaucrat… If the myths about Mr. Modi get investments in the economy, deter the corrupt, prompt the lazy and enthuse the government, they aren’t particularly bad.
For months now, protestors have gathered in the capitals of many developing nations—Turkey, Ukraine, Thailand, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Cambodia, among others—in demonstrations united by some key features.
