Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Dec 30, 2008, 06:03AM

Democracy also in a recession

A rather depressing run down of countries that don't quite fit the vision Americans have held of the world for the past few decades.

A log way to go:

When Beijing was awarded this year's Summer Olympics, some of us imagined that the quadrennial pageant would induce China to liberalize. You might as well hope that Michael Phelps would give up swimming to become a shot putter. Among the government's actions leading up to the games, charged Human Rights Watch, were "massive forced evictions, a surge in the arrest, detention and harassment of critics, repeated violations of media freedom and increased political repression."

China won the battle for gold, capturing 51 first-place medals. It earned a less cherished honor when human rights activist Hu Jia, sentenced in April to 3 1/2 years for "incitment to subvert state power," was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European Parliament.

The Soviet Union, which made Andrei Sakharov famous as a political dissident, is no more, but Vladimir Putin keeps it alive in spirit. As required by the constitution, he stepped down as president at the end of his second term, but without ceding a sliver of power. Putin not only installed a protege as president, but became prime minister, an office that suddenly exhibited a power and importance that had gone unnoticed.

The former Soviet republic of Georgia had a presidential election of its own—"the first election where no one was 100 percent sure whether they were going to win or not," as one Georgian analyst marveled. The winner, Mikheil Saakashvili, should have had no such uncertainty about the outcome of the August war with Russia that he rashly helped to provoke.

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