Kazakhstan’s long-serving leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, will seek re-election in 2012, a close aide has revealed. The announcement appears designed to stem speculation about a possible successor.
Afghanistan’s parliamentary election on September 18 is shaping up as a critical democratization test. Over the past five years, parliament has acted as virtually the only check on President Hamid Karzai’s authority. Experts are wondering whether the legislators who are elected in the upcoming voting will keep on acting as a counterweight to executive authority.
Flamboyant glass-and-steel structures, the brainchildren of Italian and Spanish architects, are causing both shock and awe as they advance on Georgia under President Mikheil Saakashvili’s Grands Travaux campaign. Meant to symbolize a new, transparent Georgia, the buildings have touched off a sharp controversy over whether or not the country’s president should double as its urban-planner-in-chief.
US support for Azerbaijan in its Nagorno-Karabakh negotiations with Armenia will most likely prove the price for any agreements on other issues made during US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s July 4 visit to Baku, local analysts say.
Georgia’s May 30 local elections – the first since its defeat in the 2008 war with Russia – have ended with an apparent victory for President Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement. But persistent concerns about abuse of public resources – and an underwhelming turnout in Tbilisi -- have cast a pall on the ruling party’s win.
