When politicians install relatives as successors,turning a party into a quasi-dynasty or political family business COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | Among her final acts as chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel requested that her colleagues endorse the two people handpicked by Donald Trump to replace her. Following loud cheering, …
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When anti-democratic parties are small, a ban doesn’t seem worth it but is impossible when large COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | What should democracies do about parties that use elections and other democratic means to destroy democracy itself? One well-established, but not universally accepted, answer is to ban the party before …
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COMMENT | Jan-Werner Mueller | More than two months after the decisive victory of pro-democracy parties in Poland’s general election, opposition leader Donald Tusk has finally been sworn in as prime minister. Initially, Mateusz Morawiecki, his predecessor from the right-wing populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, had been reappointed by President Andrzej Duda, beholden to PiS, under the …
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The world is not moving “back” toward some regimes familiar from the past, nor moving by “accident’ COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | It seems that 2023 will be another dismal year for democracy. There have been several coups in Africa. Tunisia long touted as the Arab Spring’s one democratic success story …
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Why the climate emergency requires serious democratic ideals to avoid it becoming a disaster COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | This summer with its record temperatures, deadly floods, and raging wildfires, which in Canada alone destroyed the equivalent of all the trees in Germany might have felt like a final warning: without …
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No business model has emerged as a replacement for advertising revenue, but alternatives exist COMMENT | JAN – WERNER MUELLER | “All politics is local,” proclaims an old American saying. That might partly explain why democratic politics is going so badly especially, but not only, in the United States. For local government …
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A parliamentary space should help citizens comprehend who stands for what in political conflicts COMMENT | JAN- WERNER MUELLER | Is there an ideal design for parliament buildings and legislative chambers? The question seems abstract, but it comes up surprisingly often as a very concrete challenge. It arose in the 1990s, …
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All fascists are nationalists who promise national rebirth but not all nationalists are fascists COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | Almost exactly a century after Fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome and ascent to the Italian premiership, a politician whose party descends from the original Fascists, Giorgia Meloni, has …
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They cry fraud because they base on the claim that they, and only they, represent `the real people’ COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | In the run-up to Brazil’s presidential election next month, President Jair Bolsonaro is crafting his own version of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie”: the claim …
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Why plenty of observers are confident that workers who feel ignored will become a far-right constituency COMMENT | JAN-WERNER MUELLER | A few victories by center-left parties in large countries hardly makes for an international trend. Nonetheless, wins by the U.S. Democrats in 2020 and the German Social Democrats …
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The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price