Tag: Politician

The Politics of Twitter

Shifting sands or a tool that is here to stay? Photo courtesy of Rosaura Ochoa/flickr

Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign may still be the benchmark for the use of social media tools in politics, but some surprising new actors are embracing Twitter in particular in an effort to reach out to voters and citizens in a more personal and immediate way.

While leaders of ‘old Europe’ still seem quite reluctant to use the service (David Cameron, in his pre-prime minister days, once famously blurted out that “too many twits [it’s tweets, David] might make a twat”), politicians in South Asia are embracing the service as a means of reaching a very large number of citizens, very quickly.

Among them, Shashi Tharoor, the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and member of parliament, who tweets several times a day, even using his stream to respond to constituent concerns. He has also run into trouble for his tweets. Although this may have given his follower numbers a boost, the ability to reach and interact with 825,000+ followers in such a dynamic and instant way is a feat in itself and a potentially powerful tool for governance in an unwieldy country like India.

Why have leaders in the West not embraced this new form of instant interaction? Do they fear that they may say something unwise, even controversial on a service that is anything but forgiving in its immediacy, or do they fear the barrage of responses they may get to an unpopular comment? While Silvio Berlusconi’s PR people might have made a wise choice in keeping him from the service, it could prove powerful in narrowing the divide between the ‘rulers’ and the ‘ruled’ and in making politics more relevant to millions of politically apathetic young people.

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Security Council or Secretary-General?

Lula da Silva at the UN, courtesy of United Nations Photo/flickr

Brazil, particularly President Lula da Silva, is pursuing an active UN and foreign policy. According to The Times, Lula recently joked that he was “infected by the virus of peace.” Such ‘viruses’, however, do not infect people without giving them greater ambition. In the case of Brazil, the country seems to alternate between seeking a permanent seat in the UN Security Council on the one hand and pushing for Lula to become the next UN secretary-general in 2011 or 2015 on the other.

To get a better sense of Brazil’s rising ambitions, let’s review the latest victories in Brazilian diplomacy and other political activities:

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Sarkozy’s Bid to Bottle Up the Media

Television, courtesy of dailyinvention/flickr

Perhaps Nicolas Sarkozy has always been a political figure excessively focused on publicity, ratings and the attention of the media. Yet, as of late President Sarkozy has started to open up about his ambitions of becoming the puppeteer of the French media landscape, grasping for control of some of the most influential institutions of the French press.

In short, President Sarkozy tried to become the majority shareholder of Le Monde (a renowned newspaper), he changed the law in order to be able to appoint the director of France Télévisions (the publicly-owned syndicate who, among others, controls France 2 and France 3), and he might be able to exert direct influence on Agence France-Presse (the third largest news agency in the world) if the latter successfully turns into a public firm.

It seems legitimate to ask whether France is currently going through a similar process of centralization of media control as Italy under Berlusconi. Despite all the evidence suggesting that this is the case, the situation in France is still different. While major parts of Italian media remain under the direct control of Berlusconi, the French media is dominated by small parts of the French establishment instead. Unlike Berlusconi, Sarkozy is not (yet) a majority shareholder of any private media companies and as the Guardian notes, he relies on a powerful network of close friends who are instead.

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When Dictators Have ‘Image Problems’

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his wife, photo: Lawrence Jackson/wikicommons

You’re ranked the 14th worst dictator in the world; you preside over a country with a per capita GDP that is higher than that of Italy, but your people’s living standards are among the lowest in the world; your son is widely accused of spending his daddy’s (read: country’s) money on a USD 33 million private jet, a USD 35 million Malibu mansion, speedboats and a fleet of fast cars; and you win 96.7 percent of the vote in a presidential election, and then international observers publicly doubt the election’s credibility.

Well, if all that applies to you, you really have an image problem.

Luckily, there are professionals who can amend such glitches. We recently learned that former Clinton aide and DC lobbyist Lanny J Davis took on the noble task of recasting the image of Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (described above). And all that for the modest sum of USD 1 million.

Davis says that he only agreed to the contract because of Mr. Obiang’s promise to introduce a series of reforms. These include a more effective use of the country’s vast oil resources for the benefit of the people, social sector development, institutional reform, improved relations with human rights organizations and environmental conservation initiatives.

For years, the US government has been accused of soft-pedaling the record of this unusually corrupt and unscrupulous dictator, whom Condoleeza Rice in 2006 called “a good friend.” Also the Obama administration has been accused of looking the other way when it comes to corruption and human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea so as not to alienate this oil-rich African state. A significant amount of the country’s substantial oil resources is exported to the US, and the bulk of investment in the country’s oil industry comes from US-based oil companies.

True, you can hire DC lobbyists for almost anything these days. But the fact that Mr. Obiang hired Lanny Davis makes the story particularly controversial.

Davis is an old friend of both Hillary and Bill Clinton (they went to law school at Yale together), and he had worked on Hillary’s campaign. This naturally raises suspicions that the US State Department, and hence the Obama administration, doesn’t mind too much that Obiang’s image is getting a professional overhaul. After all, people may ask, couldn’t Hilary ask an old friend to perhaps find himself another client instead?

More disturbingly, Davis had been criticized in the past for touting himself as an ‘independent news analyst’ and devout Liberal; for speaking regularly on US television networks and writing op-eds in influential newspapers while his audience is often left in the dark about his clients.

Truly, Lanny Davis himself has an image problem. But unlike Obiang, he doesn’t seem to care.

Israel and the Bomb

Israeli President Shimon Peres
Photo: World Economic Forum/flickr

After years of speculation, journalists from the UK paper the Guardian and US historian Sasha Polakow-Suransky disclosed information that could prove what many had been suspecting for years: Israel has the bomb.

Polakow-Suransky came across a bundle of classified documents when conducting research in South Africa. These papers were handed over by the current South African ANC government but date back to the times of the Apartheid regime in 1975. The documents include a memo, meeting minutes, as well as an agreement between South Africa and Israel for the transfer of nuclear weapons to the Apartheid regime signed by Shimon Peres – the current president of Israel and then minister of defense.

If the authenticity of the documents is verified, this would be the first time the world has written proof about Israel being a nuclear power and the implications thereof are not yet sorted out.

What will happen to the current multilateral negations on nuclear non-proliferation and the specific case of Iran? Just in this month, Iran agreed to abandon its nuclear enrichment research program and to cooperate with Turkey. How will the Iranians now perceive the new development and the factual existence of a hostile nuclear power in the region? Moreover, how is Israel going to position itself once it can no longer deny to be in possession of nuclear weapons?

President Peres immediately denied any involvement of Israel and himself in negotiations on the exchange of nuclear weapons with the South African Apartheid regime. Nonetheless, Israeli government officials tried to block the South African government from handing out the respective documents to Mr. Polakow-Suransky, giving rise to the question why the Israelis care about these papers in the first place.

For further reading:
– The Guardian Article on “Israel’s Nuclear Weapons: Time to Come Clean”
– Israel-South Africa Agreement
– Letter from Shimon Peres from November 11, 1974
– Declassified memo from South African General RF Armstrong
– Minutes of third ISSA meeting from June 30, 1975
– Minutes of further ISSA meeting