Elections in Asia
Monday, May 25, 2009 at 3:12AM ARTICLE: Iran's Election Turns on President's 'Truths', By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, May 23, 2009
ARTICLE: Indian Politics Grows Younger, By Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post, May 23, 2009
A couple of election pieces on Iran (upcoming presidential) and India (just-had parliamentary).
I don't find much to be optimistic about with Ahmadinejad: he's running the same promise-everything-to-everyone populist economic pitch coupled with his I'm-the-only-candidate-who-will-stand-up-to-America foreign policy shtick. In comparison, the other two main rivals do sound vague, as the article notes. So the question will be, whether or not people are fed up with Ahmadinejad's poor economic performance.
On the Indian election, it's interesting to see as much as a quarter of the new parliament being under 45. Rajiv Ghandhi's economic reforms start, as I remember, in the early 1990s, so someone who's 40 now would have just been coming out of college then, meaning we're starting to see the rise of a political class raised within the globalization paradigm. And that will change things.
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