2020 Elections: What's Happened Since? 🇹🇼 🇵🇪 🇨🇲 🇮🇪 🇦🇿 🇮🇷
Part 1 of What's Happened Since? in Taiwan, Peru, Cameroon, Ireland, Azerbaijan and Iran since elections were held in January and February?
Hello! Welcome to another edition of Inside The Newsroom where today we’ll look at what’s happened in six countries since each held an election earlier this year. We’ll visit Taiwan which is offering people from Hong Kong and Macau asylum amid China’s new security law, to Peru whose Covid-19 situation is deteriorating by the day, to Cameroon whose civil war continues to cost precious lives, to Ireland where two former civil-war rivals are now in government together, to Azerbaijan where people have taken to the streets to call for war with Armenia, and to Iran who continues to be singled out in the Middle East. Look out for Part 2 on Togo, Israel, Slovakia, Tajikistan and South Korea next week. Until then, enjoy… 🤓
2020 Elections So Far
August: Belarus and Sri Lanka 🇧🇾🇱🇰
July: Mongolia, Iceland🇲🇳🇮🇸, Croatia, Dominican Republic🇭🇷🇩🇴 andSyria, North Macedonia🇸🇾🇲🇰
June: Serbia, Kiribati and Malawi🇷🇸🇰🇮🇲🇼
May: Burundi 🇧🇮 and Suriname🇸🇷
April: South Korea🇰🇷
March: Israel, Slovakia and Tajikistan🇮🇱🇸🇰🇹🇯
February: Cameroon, Ireland, Azerbaijan🇨🇲🇮🇪🇦🇿 and Iran, Togo🇮🇷🇹🇬
Job Corner
Deadlines this week include at CBC, ITV, Newsquest, Open Democracy and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism…
Sharing Is Caring
Newsletters are fun. I love writing them. But they take a bloody long time to put together. I estimate each election round-up takes around 10 hours to write. So how about a cheeky share to show your appreciation? Please and thank you. 🙏
Taiwan
What happened: Pro-democracy president Tsai Ing-Wen was re-elected for a second term in January, after winning 57 percent of the vote. The first and only female president is a staunch supporter of freedom and less ties with China, which sees Taiwan as a breakaway province of which will eventually be part of the mainland once again. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party now has its largest following in its 34-year history and a growing mandate to continue its efforts to become a separate nation.
What’s happened since:
On Monday Tsai’s government said it would increase scrutiny of mainland Chinese citizens who are residents of Hong Kong and Macau, and who want to move to Taiwan to ensure they don’t engage in espionage or other illegal activities. The island nation has witnessed the mass protests that have taken place in Hong Kong over the past couple years over its desire of also becoming free from the Chinese Communist Party. But the new national security law imposed on Hong Kong, which essentially outlaws any dissent against the authorities, led Taiwan to open an office in Hong Kong to help people escape the turmoil and seek asylum. Taiwan also recently purchased 66 F-16 jets from the U.S., a move China has long protested.
Peru
What happened: President Martin Vizcarra dissolved parliament and called for a snap election over frustration with opposition to his corruption reforms by the right-wing Popular Force party, which previously held 73 of the 130 legislative seats. The results from January’s election were historic, as support for Popular Force crumbled and the party lost 58 seats. Peru’s parliament is now made up of nine parties, each with at least nine seats, but they’ll do it all over again in April’s election.
What’s happened since:
Unlike Taiwan, which managed to limit the spread of Covid-19 to just 484 cases — 20 cases per million people — the situation in Peru has never been worse, with more than 10,000 cases being recorded in a single day for the first time since the pandemic started. Peru has now recorded more than half a million cases in total at a rate of around 17,000 cases per million people. On Friday the government announced its economy had contracted by 18 percent in June compared with the previous year, the fourth straight month of decline.
To add to the chaos, at least 1,200 people have disappeared since March, including hundreds of women and young girls. Peru has long had a domestic violence problem, according to Human Rights Watch, and it’s thought that lockdown measures have exacerbated the problem. Elsewhere, the country has seen a spike in the number of infected children being admitted to intensive care.
Source: Worldometers 👇
Cameroon
What happened:
In an election marred by violence, and twice postponed in 2017, the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC) won 139 of the 167 seats available, a decrease of nine from 2013. Elections were cancelled for 13 other seats in the country’s troubled anglophone regions and are due to be held at a later date. The largest opposition party, the Social Democratic Front, won just five seats after claiming 18 last time. The Cameroon Renaissance Movement party boycotted the latest attempt to vote.
What’s happened since:
Unfortunately not much has changed since February and the country remains entangled in a bloody war since 2016 between the government and separatist groups who want an independent nation. Not even Covid-19, which has infected more than 18,000 people in the country, has stopped the attacks, and in fact they’ve become even more gruesome. A series of beheadings, torture and civilian bombings has led the U.S. Embassy in Cameroon to raise concern.
The country is grappling with an increase in killings and violence from the Cameroonian military in Anglophone regions in the north west of the country. Cameroon is made up of a French-speaking majority (80%) and an English-speaking minority (20%) (aka the Anglophone region). Both trace their language and culture back to the French or the British, who divided the country up in 1919 under the London Declaration. Once the country finally gained its full independence in 1960, the French regions united into the Republic of Cameroon, but Britain’s colonies split between Cameroon and neighboring Nigeria, and have felt neglected ever since.
Credit: Reuters 👇
Ireland
What happened:
Sinn Féin, the main left-wing party in the country, shocked their way to second-place in terms of number of seats with 37, a rise of 15 from the previous election. That left Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil with 35 and 38 seats, respectively, as they were punished by voters for their handling of Brexit in the Fine Gael-led minority government. The new hung parliament set up months of negotiations to form a new coalition government.
What’s happened since:
Brexit lurks in the background as the UK continues to negotiate a trade deal with the EU that will impact Ireland significantly before the transition period ends on December 31. Meanwhile, the country is battling to contain a mini second Covid-19 wave after its peak of around 1,500 new daily cases in April. In June coalition talks finally ended and saw Micheál Martin, leader of Fianna Fáil, installed as the new prime minister. Martin will lead a three-party coalition consisting of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party. It’ll be the first time Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, former civil war enemies, have served in government together.
Azerbaijan
What happened:
Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev called a snap election over frustration that his economic reforms hadn’t progressed as fast as planned. Aliyev had hoped that elder members of his New Azerbaijan Party, loyal to his father Heydar Aliyev who served as president until his death in 2003, would be forced out by voters in favour of younger candidates loyal to himself. But the result didn’t go his way as 87 members of the 125-seat chamber retained their seats, resulting in little change at all. International observers mostly agreed that the election failed to meet democratic standards.
What’s happened since:
Aliyev’s economic reforms have slipped down the priority list in recent months as Azerbaijan inches closer to all-out war with its western neighbor Armenia. Sixteen people were killed along the border in July in the worst outbreak between the two since their Four Day War in 2016, which was followed by mass protests in Azerbaijan calling for the government to declare war. Tensions have remained high since both countries left the Soviet Union, and the dispute has centered around the mountains of Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that has been under control by ethnic Armenian forces since the war ended in 1994. Just this week Azerbaijan shot down an Armenian drone which could be a precursor to further bloody conflict.
Iran
What happened:
Iran’s election took place when the country had just 61 cases, a figure that now stands at 348,000 and shows few signs of slowing down. At the time of the vote schools, universities and cultural centers in 14 provinces were shut down, which contributed to just a 43 percent voter turnout, the lowest since the country became an Islamic republic in 1979. In the nation’s capital Tehran, 75 percent of voters chose not to vote in protest of deteriorating economic conditions and the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger airplane, which for days Iran denied but later confessed to. Hardline conservatives won 230 of the 290-seat chamber.
What’s happened since:
Tensions remain sky-high between Iran and the U.S. – last month Iran fired missiles at a mock U.S. Navy ship in the Straight of Hormuz, in a drill that led two U.S. bases in the Gulf to go on heightened alert. Then last week Iranian forces boarded a Liberian oil tanker in international waters in the Gulf of Oman. And just a day later, the U.S. seized more than one million barrels of Iranian oil that was headed for Venezuela, which violated economic sanctions that have brought the Iranian economy to its knees. Across most of the Middle East, Iran continues to be estranged by other Arab nations, most recently by the U.A.E. whose historic diplomatic deal with Israel last week threatens to squeeze Iran even further. That’s it for this week, keep an eye out for Part 2 next week…