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Texas Republican Accused of Threatening to 'Put a Bullet' in Head of Democratic Colleague Common Dreams Protesters lined the balconies and floor of the rotunda in the Texas state Capitol Building on Monday as their chants flooded both the House and Senate chambers on the final day of the legislative session. (Photo: Ricardo B. Brazziell/American Statesman). and more »

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Texas Republican Accused of Threatening to 'Put a Bullet' in Head of Democratic Colleague - Common Dreams

The fearful era in which we live is not conducive to defending democratic standards or extending democracy's reach across the globe. The latest edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index reflects the situation in 2015, a year in which democracy was tested in the face of war, terrorism, mass migration and other crises, and, in some cases, suffered serious setbacks. In our age of anxiety, the first casualty of fear and insecurity is often freedom.

The Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide. Almost one-half of the worlds countries can be considered to be democracies, but, in our index, the number of full democracies is low, at only 20 countries.

To find out how the anxious mood of our times is currently impacting democracy across the globe, download the free report, Democracy Index 2015: Democracy in an age of anxiety

The Economist Intelligence Unit helps business leaders prepare for opportunity, empowering them to act with confidence when making strategic decisions. We are renowned for our comprehensive global coverage and use the best analytical minds to examine markets, countries and industries with a level of insight you cannot find elsewhere. Uncompromising integrity, relentless rigour and precise communication underpin everything we do. We are meticulous with every analysis, every study, every projection and every commentary that carries the EIU brand. Our reputation for trusted business intelligence depends on it. Crystallise your thinking and see greater possibilities with business intelligence from the EIUthe most assured way to prepare for opportunity.

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Democracy Index 2015: Democracy in an age of anxiety

It began as a road rage incident between the president and opposition leader of Zambia, a southern African country once seen as a beacon of democracy.

Two political convoys were speeding along a perilously narrow rural road on April 8 when the opposition leader, Hakainde Hichilema, refused to pull off to let President Edgar Lungus caravan roar past a move that landed him in jail facing treason charges and a possible death sentence.

Observers of African politics see Hichilemas arrest as part of a troubling trend in several nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Video of the roadway incident shows the two convoys headed in the same direction, the presidential train of vehicles in the rear. As Lungus convoy tries to pass, police vehicles with lights flashing and sirens blaring occasionally dart toward Hichilemas convoy, apparently trying to intimidate his convoy to move over.

Hichilemas convoy refuses to budge, but Lungus convoy squeezes past anyway as Hichilema supporters shout invective.

On Friday, Hichilemas case was adjourned for 15 days and he remains jailed, with no bail allowed in treason cases.

Zambia is a member of the small club of African countries that have seen two democratic transfers of power, a sign of strengthening democracy. But under Lungu, his vocal critics say, progress has been whittled away. Media and political freedoms are under attack and the independence of the Constitutional Court has been compromised, they charge.

Another opposition leader, Chilufya Tayali, was arrested last month for a Facebook post attacking police over Hichilemas arrest. Others were detained for trying to visit Hichilema in prison, after authorities banned anyone from seeing him.

Even Zambias revered elder statesman founding President Kenneth Kaunda was turned away when he tried to visit. South African opposition leader Mmusi Maimane was denied entry to Zambia on Thursday.

Zambias backslide is worrying because it demonstrates how swiftly fragile democratic gains that took decades to cement can be destroyed. The African Union, the continental leadership body, has proved strong on protecting leaders from coups, but weak on presidents who undermine democratic institutions, like the media and courts, or overturn constitutional term limits, according to critics.

Even some African Union figures have expressed concern about presidents who cling to power for decades. In December, outgoing African Union commissioner for political affairs, Aisha Abdullahi, said the group needed to dig beyond the surface of regular elections and remain engaged on what happens before, during and after elections.

She added, There is also a worrying trend on the continent where incumbents harass opponents in the lead-up to and during elections, and use other practices such as manipulation of electoral timetables to disadvantage the opposition.

Sub-Saharan Africa, with 50 countries and just under a billion people, is one of the worst regions for democracy globally. In 2016, just 12% of countries in the region were ranked as free by Freedom House, a pro-democracy watchdog, compared with 20% in 2014.

After democratic advances in the 1990s and early 2000s, many countries in Africa have regressed in recent years, according to Freedom Houses report on sub-Saharan Africa. Heres a look at other nations and how they are attempting to quash dissent.

For posting an opinion on Facebook, you can be charged with terrorism and jailed.

Ethiopias Federal High Court on Thursday sentenced an activist and former opposition party spokesman, Yonatan Tesfaye, to six years and three months in jail after Facebook posts about protests in the Oromia region in 2015.

After a violent crackdown on the protests, Tesfaye posted that the government was using force against the people instead of using peaceful discussion with the public.

Another opposition leader, Merera Gudina, and more than 20 other opposition figures and activists have been jailed and face terrorism charges over the protests in Oromia.

Ethiopias longtime muzzling of dissent has had a devastating effect on opposition members and human rights defenders who are completely prevented from exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, Amnesty Internationals Michelle Kagari said last year, after opposition figures were beaten and forced to appear in court wearing only their underpants.

The Congolese government arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists, journalists and musicians in March 2015, including Fred Bauma and Yves Makwambala, who had launched a youth activist movement called Filimbi.

They have since been released from prison, but Bauma and Makwambala still face charges of terrorism and insurrection.

Protests erupted last fall when it became clear that President Joseph Kabila, whose term was to end in December, had no intention of leaving the presidency. Kabilas government banned opposition protests, and 66 people were killed in a violent crackdown on protests in September.

Kabila still holds on to power by repeatedly failing to organize elections a policy opponents call glissement, or sliding.

Ugandan academic and activist Stella Nyanzi was arrested and jailed last month for describing President Yoweri Museveni on her Facebook page as a pair of buttocks and his wife as empty-brained. She was released on bail after an international outcry by human rights defenders, but faces two charges of cyberharassment.

Prosecutors are demanding that Nyanzi, a feminist academic and writer, undergo psychiatric tests to evaluate her sanity.

Museveni, who has ruled Uganda since 1986, insists his people want him to stay in power. He claims the opposition is made up of wolves ready to tear Uganda apart should he leave.

Opposition figures were repeatedly arrested in the lead-up to elections last year in which Museveni won another five-year term, his fifth.

Opposition leader Kizza Besigye, who came in second in the election, was arrested and charged with treason after rejecting the result, claiming fraud and calling on supporters to protest.

In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame has quietly steamrolled all opposition figures over the last decade.

A two-term presidential limit has been ditched and Kagame will face little opposition when he runs for a third seven-year term in August.

As soon as Rwandan businesswoman Diane Rwigara announced in May her intention to run against him, photographs of her sprawled on a couch in the nude appeared on the Internet. Her campaign was quickly in ruins.

Another Kagame opponent has ended up in prison. Opposition leader Victoire Ingabire was barred from running in elections in 2010. She was arrested that year and sentenced to 15 years in jail for terrorism, genocidal revisionism and provoking divisionism.

Some government opponents have vanished without explanation.

In March last year, opposition activist Illuminee Iragena disappeared as she was on her way to work as a hospital nurse. Amnesty International believes that Iragena was tortured and died in custody, based on information from sources close to the case.

If she is in detention, her whereabouts should be immediately revealed and she should be charged or released. If she has died, the circumstances of her death must be promptly and thoroughly investigated and the authorities should make public the outcome of any such investigation, said Sarah Jackson of Amnesty International in March.

There have been a number of recent cases of disappearances and this sets a worrying stage for the upcoming presidential elections in August. The failure of the authorities to provide answers contributes to the chilling environment for the political opposition in Rwanda, she said.

Another opposition figure, Jean Damascene Munyeshyaka, disappeared on June 27, 2014, and has not been heard from since.

On New Years Day that year, one of Kagames harshest critics, Patrick Karegeya, was found strangled in a South African hotel room. His killers were never tracked down.

Other dissidents have been attacked, and Rwandan authorities have been accused of hunting down dissidents and trying to assassinate them. Rwandan authorities reject the claims.

In a recent interview with Francophone Africa news site Jeune Afrique, Kagame rejected criticism of his government. Too many givers of lessons, too many arrogant Westerners drunk on their own values claim to define on our behalf what freedom means to us. They consistently label us as not free, he said.

Burundi has been mired in violent conflict since President Pierre Nkurunziza defied the constitutional limit on a third term in office, despite widespread opposition in 2015. He took office swearing his opponents would be crushed by God after an election criticized by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department.

More than 210 people, many of them young men from opposition neighborhoods, disappeared between October and January, according to the United Nations. Amnesty International reported that dozens were shot to death by security forces in a crackdown in December. In January, 22 bodies were found.

Most opposition figures have fled the country, while many others who opposed Nkurunzizas third term have been arrested or killed. A U.N. report last September verified 564 executions mainly of journalists, activists and opposition supporters and detailed torture and rape of government opponents.

The presidents spokesman, Willy Nyamitwe, said the U.N. investigators were lazy and the report was biased and based on flying rumors and gossip.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

@RobynDixon_LAT

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The day road rage led to a treason charge in Zambia, as democracy falters in Africa - Los Angeles Times

Its so easy! Trump constantly said during his 2016 election campaign. And, indeed, his particular idea of democracy may sound simple: the people rule. But that populist cry from both the left and the right has driven some of the more unsettling elections of our times.

As the masses protest against elites,calling them too intellectual, too liberal, too neoliberal, too cosmopolitan, too whatever, candidates such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen imbue themselves with the authority of the people and declare themselves the representatives of the 99 percent.

But modern democracy has always been connected to the interests of these so-called elites. As the American historian Edmund S. Morgan writes in his book Inventing the People (1989), Sober thought may tell us that all governments are of the people, that all profess to be for the people, and that none can literally be by the people.

Germanic tribes in their forests and the Greeks in their city-states may have voted collectively on public policy. Being few enough to fit into a public square, they could communally process their problems.

Such plebiscites are not possible today. There are too many people, and our problems are too complex.

Adrian Sulc/Wikimedia

That makes representative democracy, in which citizens elect people whose job is to manage diverse interests, the most effective form of government. It works not in spite of but because of restrictions such as the separation of powers and checks and balances.

Since the Enlightenment, elites have helped develop the system many voters seem to take for granted today. Theyve done so for pragmatic, political, idealistic or self-interested reasons, seeking to promote, install, defend and reform democratic ideas and practices or represent citizens in parliaments.

Around 1800, this class of people began to gain more influence in the U.S. and in Europe, as they realized how important it was for the state to win over citizens.

After an electoral turnout of five percent in 1813, French clerks assumed that no one would object to abolishing the right to vote. In a young United States, political parties lured unwilling citizens to the polls with threats, money or alcohol.

By the early 19th century, though, reformers in Prussia and elsewhere were already launching a top-down effort to herald voting as a privilege to spark the public spirit. In journals and flyers, educated people intensely debated the ideas of equality and participation, urging people to vote and warning against demagogues.

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These elites also called for expanding the right to vote and for protecting free polling. Over the course of the early 19th century, municipal ordinances introduced across Prussia ultimately gave suffrage to almost three percent of the population (this was quite a lot back then, on par with Americas four percent enfranchisement).

In the 19th century, elections also served as a governance tool. Each vote was as a census in miniature. Over decades, those who went to the polls were registered, their lands valued, their tax burden defined. Men became accomplices of the state apparatus through the simple act of voting.

Educated, newspaper-reading elites may have been abstractly debating the parliament and the right of co-determination back then, but most people still struggled with problems such as hunger and scarcity.

Lacking the resources for cultivating participatory ideals, they expressed their needs through protest, leading to Europes 1848 revolutions.

Napoleon III, emperor of France from 1852 to 1870, who was quite an expert in public relations, realized that the gem of popular approval would look great in his imperial crown. So he set up elections as a spectacle, handpicking candidates and forcing his subjects to vote for them.

German Journal Hermann Luders

Around 1870, the US, Germany and several other countries enacted universal male suffrage. Again, this was mostly driven by elites interested in deepening democratic practice.

But it was not universally popular. The U.S. had just finished a bloody civil war in 1867 when its government extended the right to vote to all male citizens. Most white people fiercely opposed this move, and they said so at referendum, even in the supposedly more enlightened North.

It was an elite bloc inside the Republican Party that pushed for military enforcement to defend the right to vote for black citizens in the south.

As in other elite-driven enfranchisement efforts, motivations here were mixed: one of the Republicans goal surely was to be reelected. Still, their efforts helped usher in the short period of relative black empowerment known as Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877.

Likewise, Germans have their elites to thank for getting the right to vote in 1867. Otto von Bismarck, like other statesman of his era, saw universal (male) suffrage as a cornerstone of nation-building and believed that a strong centralised state would help him apply German egalitarian aspirations to all citizens.

Citizens, for their part, found voting more attractive because it would help define their nation-state and establish them as equals. Foundational national pride motivated men to go to the polls, to pay taxes, even to die as soldiers.

Obviously, elites did not act as a unified bloc in expanding voting rights in the U.S. and Germany, and many upper class citizens resisted these changes.

For Americans, race has always been a cleavage among white people, regardless of class. When malicious voting restrictions quickly disenfranchised African Americans in the 1890s, their introduction was thanks in no small part to elites who had embraced new racist thought with vigor.

Some of these were likely the same educated liberals who helped introduce polling booths and secret ballots to contribute to the ideal of a free and fair election. Deepening democracy was and remains a meandering, contradictory process.

Alfred R Waud/Wikimedia

People were also more educated and generally better off than they had been 50 years earlier, giving them time and the wherewithal to read newspapers and engage in politics. This, too, is part of democracys complex history: without education and relative prosperity, its hard to effectively exercise the vote.

Recent events such as the Brexit vote and President Donald Trumps win have demonstrated the appeal of a foreshortened, populist understanding of democracy. History tells us that this notion democracy as unchecked people power is a myth. And in the sprawling modern world, it is now an impossibility.

Democracy, when it works, has always been in part an elite project.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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We Can Hate 'Elites' But They Helped Build Modern Democracy - HuffPost

The political leader of the Movement for Economic Empowerment (MOVEE), Dr. J. Mills Jones has said that democracy as a form of government does not have meaning when those who are governed are hungry.

As a result he said Liberians must not choose their leaders out of fear in October elections because they now have the capacity to select new leaders with track record to be able to build a new nation for the betterment of the country and the people.

Speaking at the Christian Literature Crusader Church Leaders Summit at the Trumpet Baptist Central Church in Ganta, Nimba County recently, he said Liberians should not be complacent with the decisions they will make to ensure that the capacity to build a new nation is not undermined.

Dr. Jones, defending his partys theme of hope, said Liberia is still a land of possibilities that can only be realized if the people vote into office the right leadership to break away from the past.

He made reference to the theme of the summit, Leading in a time of transition, and said for the church, transition is a constant challenge, growing out of humanitys continuous march on the highway of modernity.

One could argue that the day the church settles down in the sea of stability will be the beginning of an existential stretch to the church as an institution and more importantly as a place of hope to sound the gospel of Jesus Christ to all peoples, Dr. Jones said.

He said the same is true for the state because the leadership of a nation must not only be prepared to deal with the challenges of change but must also be agents of change.

Dr. Jones quoted the late reggae king Bob Marley and challenged Liberians to emancipate their minds from mental slavery, because no one would do it for us. He said it is about time Liberians break with the past and do things that would reflect how long Liberia has been an independent country.

By July this year, he said, Liberia will be 170 years old as a sovereign nation, adding that he regrets that Liberias age does not positively reflect on the countrys development, because it is a historical fact that the country lacks visionary leaders, which has held it back.

This is one of the enduring lessons of history and it is a lesson that the people of Liberia must accept and acknowledge because it is the scarcity of visionary leadership over the long period of our history that has led to the sorry state of our country today, he said.

Speaking to the Christian community, Dr. Jones took consolation in the Bible, and though he did not give the specific quotation, he said a nation without vision is a recipe for the destruction of that nation.

Probing the conscience of his listeners on why Liberians have become so immune to development as compared to neighboring countries, Dr. Jones said: it is good leadership that gives vision to a nation and this is why I continue to say and to make the argument that leadership matters.

He explained MOVEEs determination to make a difference and to ensure social cohesion, economic development and the enjoyment of peace and stability, if elected.

Dr. Jones returned to the subject of tribal politics and admitted to his audience that he came from a humble background, and said MOVEE understands that our people in the towns, cities, and villages are interested in a countryman but want to get out of poverty, and poverty has no tribe. Therefore, we offer not divisive politics but vibrant and visionary leadership with a track record.

I hear people say that this is a time for the so-called countryman to become president, but only a dull man can come up with such for a change. This is a talk that will lead us down the road to nowhere, he said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jones warned Liberians about those politicians who show up at every election not because they want to change the conditions of Liberians but to change their own conditions. They are the politicians who have started to sell the future of Liberia to outsiders. MOVEE has been constantly empowering the businesspeople, farmers and others, because democracy doesnt mean much when the people are hungry.

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'Democracy Meaningless When The People Are Hungry' - Liberian Daily Observer