Word: strongmanism
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...presidential election, but not the full extent of his defeat - and that sets the stage for a dramatic showdown with an opposition ready to take to the streets to claim its victory. Preliminary official results announced Tuesday put opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica eight points ahead of the Serb strongman, but deny him the 50 percent margin required to claim first-round victory. Opposition leaders scoff at the figures released by Milosevic's electoral commission, confidently claiming that independent officials monitoring the count at local ballot stations confirm that Kostunica won 55 percent of the vote. Reading Milosevic's call...
Stealing an election in Serbia isn't easy, even for a felon as seasoned as Slobodan Milosevic - and that makes the Serb strongman more likely to play for time, or even start another war somewhere as an excuse to hang on to power. As results poured in Monday from ballot boxes from all over what remains of Yugoslavia, the bitter winter of 1996-97 may be weighing heavily on Milosevic's mind. Weeks of massive street demonstrations in Belgrade had forced him, early in 1997, to concede city hall to the opposition party chosen by the voters...
...While the strongman has the backing of the military and the police, deploying them against half of the population would be untenable - it's a conscript army, after all, and the reason Milosevic actually bothers to hold elections at all is that he requires some measure of popular consent to rule. He may therefore opt for a runoff election, preferring to suppress some of his opponent's vote tally rather than inflate his own so that neither man registers more than 49 percent. Milosevic, also, is far from lacking in the requisite cynicism required to simply use opposition charges...
...fate, however, is why the generals made it clear to Fujimori that he had to go, and what their next move might be. Lima was awash Monday in rumors of coups and conspiracies, and it?s not hard to see why: New of the planned resignation of a strongman who had defied not only his own countrymen but also his most powerful backers in Washington and the wider Latin American community to steal an election just four months ago came as a bombshell - particularly since the apparent catalyst was the release on national TV of videotape showing Fujimori's shadowy...
...least there was plausible deniability on the handshake. Or so the White House thought, Thursday, after Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to shake hands with Fidel Castro. Hours after the inevitable had happened - the U.S. president and the Cuban strongman came face to face on their way out of a luncheon for world leaders hosted by Kofi Annan at the U.N. and held their first-ever conversation - U.S. officials were especially eager to ensure that nobody read any geopolitical meaning into the moment. "A chance encounter" initiated by Castro, said Secretary of State Albright, insisting that the conversation...