85% and 15%: A Tale of Two Votes

85%. That's the estimated voter turnout in Sunday's French presidential elections, that resulted in a first round that saw Nicolas Sarkozy, on the right, receiving over 30% of the vote, and Ségolène Royal, on the left, picking up almost 26%. The two candidates will face each other in a run-off vote in two weeks time, offering French voters their first true choice of candidates in 12 years.

While the other losing Leftist candidates have announced their support of Royal, initial polling gives Sarkozy a solid 54%-46% lead against the Socialist Party candidate. What remains to be seen is whether the "Anyone but Sarkozy" sentiment will be enough to stir an upset for Royal. Centrist candidate, François Bayrou, who received over 18% of the vote, holds the keys to l'Elysée. Bayrou ran a campaign that painted Sarkozy, as others did, as a scary choice for France, yet exit polls indicate that his supporters will split down the middle for the two remaining candidates. If Bayrou publicly declares a preference for a candidate that should seal the deal. At this point it may be Royal's only hope to become France's first woman president.

15%. That's what observers in Nigeria's presidential elections believe was the turnout due to voter apathy, confusion, violence and organizational flaws. Candidates and monitors have called for the results to be tossed out and a new election to be held.

I wonder if the folks at Sound Politics will bother to latch onto this result, as they did with the Ukrainian election a couple of years ago. Somehow I doubt they care about an election in Africa, although as the world's 8th largest exporter of oil, we should all be concerned that these historical elections, the first of their kind in Nigeria, might be tainted by events and election problems. It seems that so much of the world's oil resides in countries with unstable governments, and we could do with one less of those these days thank you very much.

Cross-posted at On The Road To 2008.

The World Bank Needs to Free Itself

If there is one lesson that we should draw from the current troubles at the World Bank, it is that this supposedly multilateral institution should put an end to its 40 year-old custom of having its president be a political appointee of the U.S. President. Why is it a good idea for the world's pre-eminent international development organization to be consistently led by individuals who have little or no international development credentials? Generally the person appointed to be the World Bank President is either someone that might otherwise be awarded a plum ambassadorship such as France (usually because of a good record of funding campaigns) OR someone that needs to be put out to pasture in a dignified way (McNamara and Wolfowitz). Either way, it is not such a good deal for the world's poor or for the thousands of World Bank employees who have decades of development experience and expertise and who must then follow the lead of a person with almost no development qualifications. No wonder all the NGOs are chronically annoyed with the World Bank.

And this isn't the first time, by the way, that the institution has been led by an architect of a failed war. In the 1970s, the World Bank was led by none other than Robert McNamara of Vietnam War fame. The difference is that McNamara used the role to begin his long slow personal rehabilitation back to being a thinking, functioning individual (this came to its full fruition when he admitted his mistakes in "The Fog of War") and amazingly this made him a better World Bank President than Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz has not learned anything from failure, has brought his wrong-headed zeal with him to the World Bank, and is still trying to promote neo-con ideals in his new role. For example, he is obsessed with trying to open a large World Bank office in Baghdad, but he can't even get anyone to take the job of Country Director. After all, what suicidal fool would want to be Wolfowitz's man in Baghdad right now? Even at $300,000 a year with a 100%+ post allowance, no one will take that job. And yet Wolfowitz believes!

Now is the time for the Board of Directors of the World Bank to do its job and resolve to end the practice of allowing the World Bank President to be appointed by the President of the United States. Instead the World Bank President should be chosen through a vote participated in by the Finance Ministers of major donor countries AND of major borrowing countries. This would create a more effective result and would free the World Bank from its current status as a faux multilateral institution.

Multilateralism should be brought back or brought for the first time

I think it's safe to say that the world's love affair with lazily allowing one country (and its five best friends) to lord it over the place should come to an end soon and a true multilateralism should replace the system of superpowers and empires and hyperpowers. Obviously the US doesn't have the capacity to run the world, as much as some Americans would like it to. I believe that even more Americans would like the US to relinquish its vast, self-acquired, overseas responsibilities. The Europeans would like this too, though most don't seem to understand that the current level of wealth in Europe makes Europe like a huge pot of gold stuck in the middle of a bazaar full of poor people, and thus that if the US stops protecting Europe, then they will need to be able to protect themselves.

There is no heir apparent to the US in terms of world supremacy, and that should be viewed as an opportunity. Why do this planet's countries need one from amongst them to be the leader? They shouldn't. Strangely enough the only countries that understand this seem to be the most dysfunctional and least free ones. That should not be the case. It should be that the countries that do allow tolerance and freedom, and there are about a 30 of them (including most of the G-8), should be taking the lead in promoting a true multilateral ethos for the world with trade and security rationales to go with it. We aren't getting that from the WTO or the UN or NATO, those organizations only provide the semblance of multilateralism. The EU has created multilateralism within its borders, but then that is also what the US did when it formed itself, so that doesn't really address the question of the world outside of the US and the EU, i.e. most of the world.

I don't know the way forward on this, because it needs to be a peaceful one and one that respects individual freedoms. But I do know that both the US and Europe will tire of our burdens, and we should protect our futures through more true cooperation with everybody outside of the US/EU/Australia/NZ continuum. What currently masquerades as multilateral cooperation is simply us using our economic might (and the guns that back it up) to make the others do what they're told. A simple look at world demographic trends shows that we cannot sustain that. Let's think it over a bit....