With barely more than a month under her belt as a professional politician, Yingluck Shinawatra stood poised Monday to become Thailand's first woman prime minister after her Pheu Thai party scored a resounding victory in Sunday's national elections. Riding a well-oiled political machine and benefiting from the popularity of her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, who was deposed as prime minister in a 2006 military coup, Yingluck and her party won an apparent majority in parliament according to unofficial ...

Hope is Africa's rarest commodity. Yet buried though it is amid the despair that haunts the continent, there is more optimism today than in decades. Francisco Mucavele found hope last September when an armored steel Casspir rolled over the hill and began to blow up the land mines contaminating Mozambique's rich soil. Olga Haptemariam acquired it in Eritrea's war-scarred port city of Massawa when she laid down 2,000 birr for a license to open a building-supply store. The villagers of ...

John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the most famous practitioners of the high-minded guessing game known as economics, once noted that in the dismal science, "the majority is always wrong." How else to explain the fact that so many economists upgraded their growth forecasts for the American economy at the end of last year, often to well above 3%, when the numbers so far this year have come in below 2%? The plunge is due to many things, from higher food ...

In theory, the countdown to Turkey's June 12 elections ought to be a quiet affair. There's little doubt over who will win — polls show incumbent Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan poised to win a third term with a comfortable 42% to 48% of the vote. Yet, every day brings news of more violence on the campaign trail. A retired teacher died Monday after riot police tear-gassed an anti-Erdogan rally; a day later in the capital, Ankara, ...

On April 5, a little-known Russian Senator and diplomat, Mikhail Margelov, published an article called "The Arab World Is Changing," in which he argued that Russia is well-placed to act as mediator in the war in Libya, but it should think hard about the political risks. "We have too much going on in our own country," he wrote. "We have elections coming up." Two months on, the junior diplomat is starting to look prophetic. With the war at ...

Two political earthquakes have shaken Spanish life in the past week. First were the massive sit-ins that had tens of thousands of citizens camping out in the public squares of major cities in protest of the country's capsized economy and unresponsive political class. The second came Sunday night, May 22, when voters in regional and municipal elections delivered a sound drubbing to the governing Socialist Party . Now, in Monday's harsh light, no one seems sure whether ...

On the one-year anniversary of a bloody confrontation between Red Shirt protesters and Thai government security forces that left scores dead and Bangkok in flames, the opposition Pheu Thai party listed 10 Red Shirt leaders among its candidates for parliament in national elections scheduled for July 3. But the controversy over Red Shirt leaders running for office was overshadowed by the party's choice for its lead candidate: Yingluck Shinawatra, who Pheu Thai hopes will become Thailand's first ...

With the announcement of national elections on July 3, Thailand's Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has placed his fate in the hands of the voters, and put the country's developing democracy to what may prove to be a perilous test. At 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, parliament was officially dissolved after 30 months under Abhisit which were marked by bloody protests, economic crisis and deepening social and political polarization. The elections will be Thailand's second since a bloodless military ...

One year ago, British voters made history by forcing rival politicians into the first coalition government since the end of World War II. And they celebrated the first anniversary of that event on Friday by delivering verdicts in a series of elections that could yet tear that same coalition government apart. A day earlier, on a "super Thursday" of polls, there were elections for all 279 local administrations outside London and for the devolved ...

Elections in Singapore rarely surprise. The ruling People's Action Party , created in 1954 by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father, has won every general election since 1959. And though it's facing an unprecedented challenge for 82 out of 87 parliamentary seats in May 7's upcoming poll, the scattered state of Singapore's political opposition makes it virtually certain the ruling party will once again retain its majority. Still, as this week's election nears, there is ...