The two White House hopefuls debated on ABC television on September 10, 2024, but their mentions of Latin America were mainly dedicated to the issue of migration. Credit: Michael Le Brecht II / ABC

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 24 2024 (IPS)

Migration, trade, the defence of democracy, the confrontation with China and the collapse of multilateralism are issues that shed more doubts than certainties on Latin America’s expectations of the imminent presidential elections in the United States.

Interest and tension have grown after dozens of polls and bookmakers have shown similar chances of victory for Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump, particularly in a few decisive states.“After Washington's retreat from the wars it got into in the Middle East, there is resistance among people to getting involved in the world's problems, which weakens the liberal democratic order”: Vilma Petrash.

Latin America has been treated by many US administrations as its ‘backyard’, but it is now commonplace that Washington’s international priority lies far from the region.

Nevertheless, “we should not underestimate the ways in which Democrats and Republicans are different”, warned Tullo Vigevani, former professor of international relations at Brazil’s Paulista State University.

“For example, their proposals and policies are very different on the environment, in general and in relation to Latin America; on renewable energy and biofuels – particularly in the case of Brazil – and regarding human rights and some authoritarian trends in the region”, Vigevani told IPS from Sao Paulo.

Even if some governments are more sympathetic to Harris or Trump, Vigevani believes that both Washington and the region’s capitals will seek understandings and a relationship as normal as possible, after the 5 November election.

Migrants in the Mexican border city of Tijuana approach the barrier that closes access to the United States. Credit: Alejandro Cartagena / IOM

Migration rules

Among the campaign issues, such as economy and employment, taxes, health, wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and the opposing personalities of both candidates, migration stands out, with Latin American countries being the main expellers of migrants to the United States.

“It is a sensitive issue for Americans, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents. It affects the immigrant population, the millions of refugees, and therefore the countries of Latin America,” Vilma Petrash, a Venezuelan professor of political science and international relations at Miami Dade College, told IPS.

Of the 336 million people living in the United States, 46.2 million were of foreign origin in 2022, according to the non-governmental Pew Research Center; 49% are already U.S. citizens, 24% are legal permanent residents, and the rest, more than 11 million people, are unauthorised immigrants, eight million of whom are from Latin American and Caribbean countries.

In fact, the United States is currently home to 65 million ‘Hispanics’, as Latin Americans are called in the country, according to different reports, and they have become a desired prize for the two candidates.

Trump, who pushed for the construction of a wall on the southern border during his presidency (2017-2021), now offers massive deportations of illegals – one million immediately, according to his vice-presidential candidate, James Vance -, and to contain irregular border immigration even by using the military.

They are “the enemy within”, Trump has said, and has stigmatised migrants: he said that criminals from Venezuela have left their country for the United States, “leaving Caracas as one of the safest cities in the world”, or that Haitians “are eating the pets” in the northern industrial state of Ohio.

Harris, who is the current vice-president and lead programmes with which president Joe Biden also tried to address causes of migration, such as poverty in Central America, has said that the immigration system “needs reform”, without going into details.

Whichever side wins, the controls will predictably increase, and Washington’s announcement that it will not renew in 2025 the temporary stay permits (parole), which allow Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans to enter and remain in the United States for two years, was a warning sign.

The US aircraft carrier USS Nimitz sails through the Arabian Gulf. Credit: US Army

The United States isolates itself

The migration issue shows the United States’ willingness to isolate itself, to withdraw, instead of taking a proactive approach, as a great global power, to solving problems in the region and the world.

According to Petrash, “after Washington’s retreat from the wars it got into in the Middle East, there is resistance among people to getting involved in the world’s problems, which weakens the liberal democratic order. Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policies are a case in point”.

The expert said from Miami, in the southeastern state of Florida, that there is also a lack of consensus over foreign policy, and in general over governance, to the point that a part of the population still, countering evidence, supports the version that it was Trump and not Biden who won the election four years ago.

While Biden has consistently supported Ukraine in the war against Russia, and Israel’s current military offensive in the Middle East, his political action in favour of democracy in Latin America has been weaker, and Harris would continue this, although with revisions, according to Petrash.

This is despite the certainty that, for example, among the alternatives for containing regional migration, in which the exodus of more than seven million Venezuelans in the last decade stands out, is to promote a solution to the democratic crisis in that country.

As a result of its policies and omissions, its polarised political confrontation and doubts about its electoral system, and the rise of isolationism, the United States “would have to regain the moral stature necessary to help stem democratic backsliding in the region”, says Petrash.

These setbacks are expressed in left-wing governments with authoritarian tendencies, such as those in Nicaragua and Venezuela, but also in sectors that have backed right-wing presidencies such as those of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) in Brazil and the current administrations of Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

Bolsonaro, Milei and Bukele have openly identified with Trump, whose sector harbours a far-right conservative current. For Petrash, this could favour a rapprochement with Latin American countries where there is a democratic backlash.

Unloading wind turbines from China at the port of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. It shows China’s penetration into the renewable energy sector in the Southern Cone, where it is already a major trading partner. Credit: Port of Bahía Blanca

China moves forward

Petrash points out that the United States’s international retreat was acute in Latin America, “its natural strategic zone”, after the failure of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative in 2005. “It abandoned its vision of free trade in the region and let China move forward with its enclaves,” she said.

China, “an economic, political and ideological rival, has sold itself as successful authoritarianism, and has taken advantage of Washington’s absences in Latin America to advance its quiet, pragmatic diplomacy,” says Petrash.

Trade between China and Latin America reached US$480 billion in 2023 after increasing 35-fold in 2000-2022, while the region’s total trade with the world increased four-fold, according to the  Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Nevertheless, trade with the Asian giant is still far from the region’s trade with the United States, which in the same year amounted to US$1.14 trillion.

Relations between Latin America and China “have grown and even strengthened in strategic areas such as new materials for energy production, lithium batteries -South America has large reserves of the mineral-, or artificial intelligence”, Vigevani states.

Certification of Brazilian meat for export. Brazil is the largest exporter of beef and poultry, and very active in the World Trade Organization. Credit: Abrafrigo

Brazil and Mexico

Meanwhile, Brazil is concerned about Washington’s disdain – which will be evident if Trump wins – for multilateral institutions, starting with the United Nations and the proposed renewal of its Security Council in order to make it effective.

For Vigevani, this distancing from multilateralism is illustrated by the blockade, which Washington has maintained since 2020, on the appointment of new members to the dispute settlement body of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), initiated by Trump and continued by Biden.

“Even if relations with Brazil and Latin America in general look normal, this United States refusal raises doubts for the future, because it is saying it is not interested in multilateral organisations,” said Vigevani.

In the case of a Trump victory, the Brazilian professor points out, there are also unanswered questions about what his war and peace policies will be.

An example is the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Trump has said that “ending this war quickly is in the best interest of the United States” and that he can achieve “a peace agreement in one day”, without offering further details, said Vigevani.

“It is important because, despite the war, Brazil has a strong relationship with Russia, and a very active participation in the Brics group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa),” Vigevani recalled.

According to Petrash, with Trump’s international policy, “the great power can be the bull in the china shop, and even more, the bull isolating itself in the china shop”.

At the other end of the region is Mexico, a partner of Canada and the United States in the trade agreement known as USMCA, which replaced in 2020 the North American Free Trade Agreement that has existed since 1994.

Along with maintaining the 3150-kilometre southern border of the United States, a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants who cross the region each year, Mexico faces the campaign promise from both Harris and Trump that they intend to revise the USMCA as soon as they reach the White House.

Trump is expected to introduce tariffs and protectionist barriers, for example on Mexican production involving Chinese parts or technologies, and Harris is expected to increase environmental and labour requirements that favour industries with United States labour.

Whichever side wins, “with the new American policy of bringing companies back to the United States or to its partners in the USMCA, possibly the biggest issue now is the end of globalisation and the return to a developmentalist nationalism”, summarised Vigevani.

Sri Lanka is gripped by election fever, but the impoverished majority fears that the presidential race will not ease their financial hardships. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Nov 28 2014 (IPS)

Priyantha Wakvitta is used to seeing his adopted city, Colombo, transform into a landscape of bright sparkling lights and window dressing towards the end of the year.

This year, he says, he is having a double dose of visual stimulation, with publicity materials for the January Presidential Election competing with Christmas décor at every turn.

Though the presidential race could shape up to be a close one, there is no competition over which event will take Colombo by storm: political propaganda is drowning out the festive mood on every street corner.

“[Politicians] are spending millions just to get their faces all over the city, while I am struggling to keep my family fed and my children in school." -- Priyantha Wakvitta, a 50-year-old bread seller in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo
Four days after the elections were announced on Nov. 21, at least 1,800 cutouts of the incumbent president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had been deployed within the limits of the Colombo Municipality, according to national election monitors with the Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE).

Head of the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), Rajapaksa has enjoyed massive support around the country for his role in decimating the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, thus bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil war in 2009.

But as the post-war years revealed themselves as a time of hardship of a very different nature – economic rather than political – his popularity has waned.

His main challenger in the presidential race, Maithripala Sirisena, was until recently the general secretary of Rajapaksa’s own political party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).

Last week Sirisena stepped out of government and into the role of Rajapaksa’s contender as the common opposition candidate.

The election is turning out to be a keen contest; already there have been eight defections from the ruling coalition’s United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), while the powerful nationalist party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya, once the government’s staunch ally, has declared its opposition to the Rajapaksas.

The poster campaign around the capital city and throughout the country is a bid to win hearts and minds, but the beaming cutouts of politicians have left people like Wakvitta at best annoyed, at worst disgusted.

“They are spending millions just to get their faces all over the city, while I am struggling to keep my family fed and my children in school,” said the 50-year-old father of two, originally from the southern district of Galle, but self employed in the capital for the last decade.

Wakvitta is an enterprising man. He runs his own small bakery in a Colombo suburb and makes a living by distributing bread to households. He used to make a profit of around 30,000 rupees, or roughly 250 dollars, a month. But that figure has been going down steadily over the last year.

He tried to branch out to a small vegetable business earlier this year, but burnt his hands and lost his 100,000-rupee investment, the equivalent of about 700 dollars, no small sum in a country where the average annual income is about 550,000 rupees or 4,100 dollars.

“People don’t have money, they are finding it hard to make ends meet,” Wakvitta said.

Though Sri Lanka has maintained an impressive economic growth rate of 7.5 percent and the Rajapaksa government has a string of high-profile infrastructure projects under its belt, including a new seaport and airport, low-income earners say they are struggling to survive.

The national poverty rate is 6.7 percent but most rural areas report higher figures. In Wakvitta’s native Galle District it is 9.9 percent, in the south-central district of Moneragala it is 20.8 percent and in Rathnapura, capital of the southwestern Sabaragamuwa Province, it is 10.4 percent, according to government data.

The problems the poor face are multi-faceted; while wages have remained static, basic commodities have quietly increased in price. Most significant among them has been the upward trend in the cost of rice, a dietary staple here.

Fueled by an 11-month drought that has caused a loss of almost a third of the planted area, the 2014 rice harvest is expected to be at least 20 percent less than last year’s four million metric tons, and a six-year low.

Rice prices have risen 33 percent according to the World Food Programme (WFP), and vegetable and fish prices have also shown periodic upward movement primarily due to inclement weather.

Token gestures or sound economic policies?

Cognizant of the hardships faced by the Sri Lankan masses, political parties across the spectrum frequently use the election run-up to promise the earth to the average voter – from subsidies to assistance packages – pledging to make life easier for those who form the majority of the electorate.

But Ajith Dissanayake, who is from the southern Galle District and makes a living from paddy cultivation, says that token gestures will not do.

“Election handouts will not work, there needs to be some kind of concerted plan to help the poor,” he told IPS.

In the northern regions of the country, where the population is still trying to shake off the residual nightmare of nearly 30 years of civil war, the situation is even worse.

The conflict ended in May 2009, and since then the government has injected over three billion dollars into the reconstruction effort in the Northern Province, largely for major infrastructure projects.

But the region is mired in abject poverty. The Mullaithivu District, which witnessed the last bloody battles in the protracted conflict between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE over five years ago, is the poorest in the nation, with a poverty ratio of 28.3 percent.

The adjoining Kilinochchi District has a recorded poverty headcount of 12.7 percent.

“It is very difficult, it is like we are fighting another conflict: this time with poverty,” said Thiyagarasa Chandirakumar, a 38-year-old disabled father of two from Oddusuddan, a small village located deep inside Mullaithivu.

He told IPS that despite new electrification programmes, many in his village are still waiting for the supply to light up their homes.

“Most of us don’t have the money to get new connections, we don’t even have money sometimes to take a bus,” explained Chandirakumar, who is confined to a wheelchair due to a wartime injury.

Both Wakvitta and Chandirakumar have simple requests from the candidates standing for the highest office in the country: “Make sure our lives are better off than they were before,” Wakvitta said.

That request, however, is unlikely to be realised any time soon. News of the snap election, coupled with the surprise announcement this past week of a common opposition candidate, has thrown the country into a period of uncertainly, at least in the short term.

Two days after elections were announced, the Colombo Stock Market took a nose-dive, with the All Share Price Index falling by 2.3 percent on Monday, Nov. 24 – the worst slide since August 2013.

Analysts say that investors are likely to hold off for the time being, with long-term policy measures also taking a back seat to what promises to be a fierce contest.

“Investors – whether local or foreign – like certainty,” Anushka Wijesinha, an economist with the national think-tank the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.

“Policy and political certainty have been established fairly well over the last few years and any disruption to this would no doubt be viewed negatively by investors. So, the recent political developments will be watched closely,” he added.

Wijesinha also said that elections should be more about long term policies than about handouts aimed at wining votes.

“This calls for a shift from the heavy focus on subsidies, welfare payments, and other generous transfers for rural populations – which may help alleviate poverty in the short term – to improving skills, productivity and access to new economic opportunities, which help raise living standards on a more sustained basis,” he said.

Despite the end of the war ushering in renewed hopes of development, income disparities have stubbornly persisted. According to government data, the country’s richest 20 percent still enjoy close to half of the nation’s income, while the poorest 20 percent only share five percent of national wealth among them.

For those like Wakvitta and Chandirakumar, the future looks bleak, with or without elections. Both know for sure that in the short term nothing much will change for the better.

“Hopefully whoever becomes the next president will take the bold steps needed to help people like me,” Wakvitta said as he sped away on his motorbike, looking for his next customer.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Afghan election auditors at the Independent Electoral Commission in eastern Kabul. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
KABUL, Aug 20 2014 (IPS)

A knife fight late Tuesday among several auditors at the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) still inspecting the results of the presidential elections held in mid-June could be the stab in the back for what has been a painful election process.

The vote audit process was resumed following a three-hour delay on Wednesday, a commission official said.

Two months after Afghans voted in a second runoff for election of the country’s president, ballots are being recounted amid growing questions on who is really arbitrating the process."What we see is what we expected: an endless fight between the two sides as each ballot is disputed” – Thijs Berman, chief observer of the European Union

The four corrugated iron barracks east of Kabul that constitute the centre of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan in which the 22,828 ballot boxes are piled up, have become the Afghan insurgency´s main target.

In the June 14 runoff, presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai won 56.44 percent of the votes, while his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, received 43.56 percent, despite having been the most voted candidate in the first runoff on April 5.

The turnout was equally surprising: eight million out of 12 million voters, an unlikely figure given that most polling stations were reportedly empty on election day.

With Abdullah Abdullah’s allegations of massive fraud having put the electoral process on the brink of collapse, the two candidates were persuaded to agree to a full ballot recount.

In an audit that started mid-July, the ballot boxes are being examined by a team formed by auditors of both candidates and members of the IEC. Afghan as well as European Union observers are also on the spot in a process closely monitored by U.N. assistants.

“I have spent the last two weeks taking part in this massive farce,” Abdullah Abdullah´s auditor Munir Latifi told IPS. “The United Nations and the Independent Electoral Commission are working together so that Ghani takes the win but there´s nobody supporting us,” he said before returning to his seat.

Latifi has to discuss whether the handwritten “V”, “X” or a circle on each candidate´s tick box is repeated in several of the ballots, or if it is really “one person, one vote”. Boxes suspicious of fraud are put in quarantine and records are taken by hand in a notebook.

Resources may look scarce but Shazad Ayubee, a Pashtun from Paktiya in southeast Afghanistan and one of Ghani´s auditors, told IPS he was “a hundred percent” satisfied with the process, although “things would be smoother if Abdullah´s auditors didn´t struggle to delay the publication of the results by any means necessary.”

Similar handwriting among different ballots “doesn´t necessarily imply fraud,” he added. “In the most remote villages of Afghanistan almost everybody is illiterate. Families simply show up at the polling stations and the one who can write marks their ballots,” explained Ayubee during the lunch break.

The most suspicious ballot boxes are those that arrive unlocked, the ones that boast over the maximum of 600 ballots, or even random objects such as traditional felt hats or tobacco packets. Many auditors claim that full boxes arriving from Taliban-controlled areas should be systematically discarded because the Afghan armed opposition consistently prevents the population from taking part in elections.

But Ayubee says he knows the reason behind the unexpected turn out in Taliban strongholds: “Unlike Pakistani or Uzbek Taliban, the Afghan Taliban told people to vote for Ghani because he is a Pashtun – a majority of the Afghan insurgents belong to that ethnic group. Everyone knows that Ghani will defend their interests much better than a Tajik like Abdullah Abdullah.”

Mid-morning, Noor Mohammad Noor, spokesman for the IEC, appears in the press room opposite the barracks and starts his speech with a “sincere commitment to democracy” as opposed to “unfounded rumours and lies over the development of the audit.”

The IEC spokesman describes a “joint effort of 220 IEC workers, 305 auditors for Abdullah, 306 for Ghani and 1014 international observers.”

Asked by IPS whether the auditors are skilled in graphology, Mohammad showed no sign of hesitation: “This is a process under the close guidance of the United Nations, which displays 50 advisors on a daily basis. Besides, it´s the United Nations which has the last word over the ballots.”

Final decision

Speaking to IPS by phone from his office in Brussels, Thijs Berman, chief observer of the European Union, told IPS that it was “too early” to take stock of the process. “What we see is what we expected: an endless fight between the two sides as each ballot is disputed.”

Commenting on the fact that the United Nations was acting both as adviser for the electoral process and as arbitrator in the recount, Berman said that “in countries like Spain or Holland we would have relied on a fully external body but in the case of Afghanistan we are dealing with very young institutions that do not yet have a significant credibility.”

“I agree that the U.N. role can be criticised, but what is the alternative,” he asked before reiterating that the E.U. delegation is determined to conduct its work “even in the case that the United Nations does not fulfil its part.”

Despite repeated calls and emails from IPS, the U.N. spokesman only agreed to respond to a questionnaire sent via e-mail. Jeff Fischer, senior international expert on elections and head of the U.N. Independent Electoral Commission advisory team, labelled the scale and scope of the audit as “unprecedented in the history of the United Nations.”

He stressed that all the auditors had received training on IEC procedures and invalidation and recount criteria before they could start working as advisors.

Regarding rumours concerning alleged U.N. backing for the Pashtun candidate, Fischer was blunt: “Final decisions as to whether votes are valid or invalid are taken by the IEC Board of Commissioners.”

Confusion over who has the last word in the audit grows while pressure from the outside strives to break the poll deadlock.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has recently warned that the alliance will be forced to take a decision regarding the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan unless the new Afghan president signs the security agreements.

According to Rasmussen, the NATO summit scheduled for September 4-5 in Wales would be “very close” to a deadline for taking that decision.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The announcement this week of the personality chosen by Turkey’s opposition parties to run for the office of the President of the Republic has taken the majority of the Turks by surprise.

Following tight and discrete negotiations, the Republic People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) have appointed the 70-year-old former Secretary General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu, as their joint candidate for the country’s highest political office.

Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu. Credit: www.kremlin.ru

With 56 Muslim member states, the OIC is the largest international organisation after the United Nations. Its headquarters are in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

For the first time in the Turkish republic’s history, the presidential elections – which are scheduled for 10 August 2014, with a second ballot two weeks later in the event of a tie – will be held by direct popular vote, instead of traditional election by members of parliament.

The nomination of Ihsanoglu has finally endowed the opposition with a plausible representative to the contest. However, members of the CHP and MHP have not yet expressed enthusiasm for the choice, because Ihsanoglu’s doctrine seems to be incompatible with the parties’ historical role in local politics.

The emergence of Ihsanoglu as a challenger to their own candidate is also bad news for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which had speculated that the march towards the presidential palace would have been uneventful.

The AKP had said a week earlier that the name of their nominee would be announced just before the July 3 deadline for candidate registrations. AKP’s leaders may now have to show their card earlier than they hoped.“Political forces should not put pressure on religion. Similarly, pressure should not be put on politics through religion” – Ehmeleddin Ihsanoglu [presidential candidate for Turkey’s opposition parties], commenting on Turkey’s status as a secular state

The general public and observers, local as well as international, were until the beginning of this week convinced that current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would be the man to seek and obtain the presidential position, against a cosmetic competitor from the opposition, running for the sake of democratic practices. IPS has leaned that such certainty is now being called into question.

The CHP is the party founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who established the Turkish Republic. Its followers are generally referred to as ‘Kemalists’ and aspire to a socialist, pro-western society. Ataturk is widely revered to the present day as the father of the nation.

The MHP was founded in 1965 on an ultra-nationalist and pan-Turkish doctrine, which contemplates the unification of all Turkic ethnic groups in the Caucasus and the Middle East under Ankara’s rule. It has a record of anti-leftist and anti-Kurdish activities.

Both parties support the secular state, as designed by Ataturk and his successors, although in certain periods MHP has had radical Islamists amongst its members and MPs. Ultra-nationalism and activist Islam have often coexisted in the Turkish political universe.

This is where the controversy with Ihsanoglu’s appointment begins.

Ihsanoglu’s appointment in 2003 as Secretary-General of OIC was proposed and sponsored by Erdogan’s government.  In his ten-year tenure as the organisation’s head, he has cultivated an image of a discrete, but committed, Islamist whose vision of Turkey’s future as a secular society is unknown.

In reality, most CHP voters had never heard of Ihsanoglu until this week. Those who did believe he belongs to those among the AKP followers who would like to progressively erase Ataturk’s memory from public life.

Although his manners and interpersonal skills project him as a smooth transnational diplomat with a broad world-view, his persistent lobbying for a decade of U.S. and European governments to pass legislation that would limit freedom of expression by their respective citizens in issues relating to Muslim immigrants, on the grounds of fighting ‘Islamophobia’, has made an increasing number of CHP cadres reluctant to welcome his nomination.

In a meeting with CHP executives on June 18, the party’s former chairman, Deniz Baikal, expressed his reservations on the rationality of the decision, but asked them to support any presidential candidate that the current leadership of CHP would confirm.

In an attempt to reassure his critics, in an interview with the daily Cumhurriyet on June 18, Ihsanoglu said that “Ataturk has a special place in the hearts of the Turkish nation” but that he “should neither be consecrated nor rejected.”

Commenting on Turkey’s status as a secular state, he stressed that “political forces should not put pressure on religion. Similarly, pressure should not be put on politics through religion.”

In past presidential elections, the CHP and the MHP have always presented separate candidates. In the municipal elections of March 2014 they changed their electoral strategy and presented a single candidate in Ankara. The experiment was positive, with their common representative losing the contest by only a few dozen votes.

This strategy may be more rewarding in the presidential elections. Taking as a basis the national results of March, an AKP candidate is likely to receive 43 to 44 percent of the total votes in the first round, while the CHP/MHP joint ticket is likely to secure 44 to 45 percent. The winner, however, needs 50 percent plus one vote in order to claim victory.

With the two pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy (BDP) and People’s Democratic (HDP) parties also planning to present a common candidate, it is unlikely that a winner will be proclaimed after the first round. The BDP and the HDP received an aggregate of 6.28 percent of the votes in the March elections. A merger of the two formations is likely to occur later in June.

This factor confers upon the pro-Kurdish parties the power of king-makers in the second round of the elections. The AKP has understood this for some time and has tried to lure Kurdish voters through a process of political resolution of the 30-year-long armed conflict between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the state. No tangible results have been obtained so far, however.

The BDP and the HDP are aware of their bargaining weight ahead of the elections and will try to extract a maximum of concessions from AKP and CHP/MHP. These include, but are not limited to civic freedoms for the Kurds, equal citizen rights with those enjoyed by the Turks, autonomous-region status for the south east of Turkey, amnesty for PKK fighters who live in exile, and freeing PKK’s founder Abdullah Ocalan, who has been sentenced to life imprisonment and is kept in solitary confinement on Imrali island.

CHP and MHP leaders have already shown moderate support for the reconciliation process between PKK and the state, but they will have a hard time to persuade their respective members on Kurdish autonomy and Ocalan’s future status.

Still, the direction and eventual outcome of the August elections lies on one key factor only: who will be the AKP candidate?

If Erdogan puts his name forward, the game is over for all other aspirants to the throne, according to the most seasoned local analysts. The Prime Minister’s personality attracts followers by the millions, in spite of the flawed policies of his government and corruption allegations about his close entourage since December last year.

But Erdogan, who has so far not commented on Ihsanoglu’s nomination, seems to be prudently weighing all the implications of his candidacy. These are directly related to his political future and to the future of his party.

If he is elected president of his country, he will have to step down from the chair of AKP and also leave the Prime Minister’s job to someone else. Under the current Constitution, the Prime Minister is the head of the executive, while the president’s role is ceremonial.

Erdogan’s goal is to vest the presidency with full executive powers. This would require a new or revised Constitution, the process towards which will take time and face strong resistance from the other parties and even from certain MPs of AKP.

The possibility of a presidential, rather than parliamentary, regime is also likely to discourage other AKP leaders from accepting the role of prime minister, because it will consist of merely executing decisions made by Erdogan.

In the event that Erdogan announces his intention to run for president, the forthcoming elections will be no longer a contest between two men, but a vote for choosing between regime change and status quo.

Turkish media close to Hizmet, an Islamist movement formerly supporting AKP but critical of the party’s leadership since the end of 2013, have also expressed support for Ihsanoglu. The number of voters loyal to Hizmet is unknown, but estimates evaluate their influence to be 3-8 percent of the total. They come from the educated middle class, including judges and civil servants.

The CHP/MHP leadership is speculating on Erdogan’s participation. If the majority of citizens remain attached to the parliamentary regime and to the separation of powers, Ihsanoglu seems to have the right profile to represent them.

Moreover, he reassures the Islamist part of the electorate, he is not an immediate threat to the secularists, and he has the know-how and network of powerful personalities around the world to restore Turkey’s image as a balanced and neutral regional power.

While still the OIC Secretary-General, Ihsanoglu fell apart with Erdogan, with the latter and his inner circle in the government accusing the organisation as ‘incompetent’ and with a Turkish minister asking for Ihsanoglu’s resignation from the OIC.

The dispute was over OIC’s silence in respect to Egypt’s July 3, 2013 ‘revolution’ which removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

These abilities confirm Ihsanoglu as a °politically correct° future president for Washington and Riyadh, which have been increasingly concerned with Turkey’s recent foreign policy in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

The Muslim Brotherhood has its own army of the young that will not easily be defeated. Credit: Hisham Allam/IPS

By Baher Kamal
CAIRO, Jun 2 2014 (IPS)

Unconsciously or not, most mainstream media and foreign correspondents here have been echoing Muslim Brotherhood voices by depicting Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, as the general who led the July 2013 “military coup” against the “legitimately elected” Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi.
In doing so, they omit some key facts:

– that over 30 million Egyptians took to the streets exactly a year ago to press for the “impeachment” of Morsi. Morsi was elected by slightly more than 13 million voters. The Egyptian Constitution clearly states that sovereignty resides in the people.

– that Morsi’s rival in 2012 presidential elections was general Ahmad Shafik, a senior commander in the Egyptian Air Force who later served as Prime Minister from 31 January 2011 to 3 March 2011. Shafik was considered as former President Hosni Mubarak’s strong man.

– that the vast majority of political parties, including the Islamic radical Salafi Party Al Nour, and the former Vice-President responsible for International Relations, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, had held several meetings with the by then Defence Minister Al Sisi to agree on immediate action aimed at the impeachment of Morsi.“Regardless of who has now become the fifth top leader of Egypt in slightly more than three years, Egyptian citizens appear to have little hopes that their harsh daily living conditions will be alleviated”

The call for the impeachment of Morsi was motivated by widespread popular frustration: put simply, 13 million Egyptians elected Morsi in May 2012 as the representative of “charitable men of faith” – the Muslim Brotherhood – who would rescue millions of people from poverty, but who instead transformed his position into a platform for a systematic “Islamisation” of all state institutions while neglecting the pressing needs of the Egyptian population.

Another often neglected fact is that in Egypt there is much more than generals and “troglodytes” – as a number of local political analysts often call the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned for most of the time since it was created in 1928.

Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Al Sisi won the three-day presidential elections (May 26-28) with a majority close to 97 percent. His rival, socialist Hamedin Sabbahi, obtained a mere 3 percent of the vote.

However, and regardless of who has now become the fifth top leader of Egypt in slightly more than three years, Egyptian citizens appear to have little hopes that their harsh daily living conditions will be alleviated any time soon, or even in the medium term.

The five men who have led Egypt in the last three years are: Hosni Mubarak who was ousted in February 2011; Field Marshal Mohamed Al-Tantawi, who ruled as chair of the Supreme Military Council between February 2011 and June 2012; Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, who took office in June 2012 and was deposed in July 2013; provisional president Adly Mansour (July 2013-June 2014); and now the elected Al Sisi.

The widespread scepticism among Egyptian citizens is based on their own experience, which shows that none of the previous four mandatories and half a dozen of governments they have had since they launched their massive popular revolution in January 2011 has been able to deal with their urgent needs.

Moreover, the two candidates to Egyptian presidency in May this year delivered big promises that ordinary people doubted they could ever deliver. In this, both of them behaved in a “business as usual” manner, just like in most Western electoral campaigns.

Therefore, and again regardless of who won and now takes office, and independently of the outcome of the summer/autumn parliamentary elections, the daily life of most of Egypt’s 94 million people is anything but easy.

Some facts help put the situation in perspective:

– Nearly 40 percent of Egyptians live in poverty or extreme poverty.

– Unemployment has jumped to over 13 percent, according to official mid -2013 data, with more than 3.2 million Egyptians now out of the job market, compared with 2.5 million in the same period in 2010. Egypt’s economically active population amounts to 23.7 million workers.

– Domestic public debt amount to nearly 200 billion dollars, according to governmental figures for July 2013. Meanwhile, foreign public debt reached around 39 billion dollars last year.

– Egypt’s foreign currency reserves were estimated in mid-2013 at some 19 billion dollars, compared with 33 billion in January 2011, and national currency rates have fallen by about 20 percent, implying a growing devaluation of the national currency – the Egyptian pound.

– Inflation has been steadily increasing by a monthly average close to 1 percent, with an annual rate estimated at more than 11.5 percent.

– The national budget deficit now exceeds 280 billion dollars, compared with 194 billion dollars in 2013.

– Slum inhabitants are estimated at more than six million Egyptians, with garbage collection and drug trafficking among their major sources of income.

– The Sinai peninsula has become a “nerve centre” of terrorism, with militants and mercenaries, both Egyptians and foreigners, reportedly armed with weapons provided by the Hamas Islamic movement in Gaza, Libyan arms traffickers and Turkish organisations, according to the findings of the Egyptian judiciary system. Most terrorist organisations active in both Sinai and other regions are believed to be linked to Al Qaeda.

All this is compounded by a number of features of the daily lives of Egyptians – hundreds of civilians have been victims of terrorist attacks, brutal killings and explosions, university students have been abducted and young women have been raped.

Since its president Morsi was ousted on July 3 last year, the Muslim Brotherhood has launched a systematic series of attacks everywhere in Egypt, according to national security services.

Related terrorist organisations, such as Beit Al Maqdas and Ajnad Misr, have been perpetrating violent, deadly operations against both civilians and military forces.

Meanwhile, former influential figures of Mubarak’s regime (which ruled Egypt from October 1981-to February 2011) have systematically taken their fortunes abroad, and are said to have funded professional criminals to destabilise the country with the hope that major chaos will return them to power.

An estimated total of over 200 billion dollars (equivalent to the national domestic debt) is reported to be lying in bank accounts in “fiscal havens” around the world. Mubarak’s family fortune has been estimated to amount at over 70 billion dollars and Egypt has been trying to recover these funds.

The first wave of massive popular revolution in January 2011, which ousted Mubarak, paved the way for dozens and dozens of opposition newspapers and tens of national and satellite TV networks.

With the exception of just a half a dozen of them, most of them have fallen into gossip-oriented practices, often with improvised commentators, all leading to a deeper, insane public opinion confusion.

Parallel to all these national hurdles, Egypt also faces huge challenges abroad. One of these is the risk that vital water supplies will dramatically decrease due to Ethiopia’s ‘Grand Renaissance’ dam, currently under construction on the Blue Nile. Some Egyptian experts have already started warning against the risk of a “dangerous water hunger” one decade from now.

Another challenge is represented by the unlimited funds reportedly provided by Qatar to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has resulted in the freezing of relations between the two countries.

This also led three Gulf countries – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates – to withdraw their ambassadors in Qatar on March 5, 2014, due to what they consider as flagrant intrusion in the internal affairs of another Arab state.

To complete the picture, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has found a “safe haven” in Libya, according to both Egyptian and Libyan sources, who say that some of the weapons used by the Muslim Brotherhood for its terrorist attacks come from Libya, where there are up to 25 million weapons, according to authoritative Libyan politicians.

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