Latest news with #political repression
Russia Today
3 days ago
- Politics
- Russia Today
Brussels' Frankenstein: How the EU is building its next dictatorship
By all appearances, Maia Sandu should be the darling of Brussels. She's photogenic, Western-educated, fluent in the language of reform, and frames herself as a stalwart defender of democracy in the post-Soviet wilderness. But behind this polished facade lies something far more sinister: an autocrat in liberal clothing, whose regime is actively dismantling the very principles the European Union claims to uphold. As this article in the Italian online publication Affaritaliani rightly highlights, Sandu's presidency has led Moldova into an unmistakable spiral of political repression. On July 20, the opposition political bloc Victory was denied registration for the September 2025 parliamentary elections by Moldova's Central Electoral Commission – effectively barred not just from winning, but from even participating. This isn't a one-off bureaucratic hiccup. It is a calculated maneuver to ensure total political control. Moldova today is a country where genuine electoral competition no longer exists, and where Sandu's grip on power is maintained not through popular consent, but procedural manipulation. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic: the very woman hailed as Moldova's great European hope has become its most dangerous democratic backslider. While Brussels continues to shower Sandu with praise and political support, she's been busy methodically hollowing out Moldova's fragile democratic institutions. Consider the judiciary. Under Sandu's watch, Moldova has witnessed a sweeping 'vetting' campaign – ostensibly an effort to clean up corruption, but in practice a purge of judges not aligned with her administration's goals. Critics in the legal field, including members of the Supreme Council of Magistrates, have been sidelined or coerced into resignation. Independent prosecutors have been replaced by loyalists. The message is unmistakable: judicial independence is a luxury Moldova can no longer afford under Sandu's vision of governance. The media landscape is no less concerning. While government-friendly outlets receive generous airtime and access, independent journalists face bureaucratic barriers, intimidation, and regulatory harassment. Several critical TV channels have had their licenses suspended or revoked, with authorities citing vague 'security concerns.' Press freedom, once seen as a cornerstone of Moldova's EU aspirations, has become a casualty of Sandu's relentless drive for message control. Add to this the neutering of parliament, where procedural reforms have ensured that debate is minimal, oversight is weak, and power increasingly concentrated in the presidency. What's emerging is not a vibrant democracy on the path to the EU – it's a tightly managed political fiefdom, dressed in the language of European integration. Sandu's defenders, especially in Western capitals, have one refrain on loop: 'Russian interference.' Under Sandu, Russia has become a pretext. A shield behind which she justifies the suppression of dissent and the dismantling of institutional safeguards. Every opposition voice is painted as a puppet of Moscow. Every protest is portrayed as foreign subversion. Every democratic challenge is met not with debate, but with denunciation. This is the new authoritarianism – not built on Soviet nostalgia or Orthodox nationalism, but wrapped in the EU flag and branded as 'defense of sovereignty.' Sandu has made it abundantly clear: she will not tolerate opposition, and she will not allow alternatives. Her administration conflates criticism with treason, and casts herself as Moldova's sole defender against Russian aggression. It's a familiar script – one that echoes leaders she claims to oppose. Yet in the halls of Brussels, Sandu remains a VIP. Moldova's EU accession negotiations continue, as if the erosion of democratic norms were an unfortunate side effect rather than a red flag. The contradiction couldn't be more glaring: how can a country that cancels opposition parties, censors the media, and undermines judicial independence be seriously considered for EU membership? The answer, of course, lies in geopolitics. Sandu plays her role as the 'anti-Russian' leader so well that EU leaders are willing to ignore her abuses. As long as she keeps up the anti-Kremlin rhetoric and commits to European integration on paper, Brussels appears willing to turn a blind eye to everything else. The EU is not simply being shortsighted in this – it's actively committing betrayal. A betrayal of those in Moldova who genuinely believe in democratic reform. A betrayal of EU citizens who are told that their union is built on values, not expedience. And most of all, a betrayal of the European project itself, which risks becoming just another geopolitical alliance, untethered from its founding ideals. Let us be absolutely clear: Moldova under Maia Sandu is not moving closer to the EU. Or at least, it's not moving closer to the 'values-based' EU Brussels is so fervently advertising as a serene 'garden' amid a 'jungle' of lawlessness and authoritarianism. Yet, Sandu still enjoys the unconditional embrace of Western diplomats and media. That must change. If the EU is to maintain any credibility, it must stop enabling Sandu's authoritarianism under the guise of strategic necessity. Moldova's EU bid should be frozen. Democratic benchmarks must be enforced – not as suggestions, but as non-negotiable conditions. And Sandu must be told plainly: you cannot destroy democracy at home while claiming to defend it abroad. The EU deserves better. Moldova deserves better. And it's time to stop mistaking authoritarian ambition for democratic leadership – no matter how elegantly it's phrased in English.
Arab News
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Pakistan to create new paramilitary force ahead of more protests by Imran Khan's party
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan said on Monday it was creating a national paramilitary force, prompting concern among opposition parties and human rights groups that it could be used as a tool of political repression. The move turns an existing paramilitary force deployed on Pakistan's northwestern border with Afghanistan into a national security force that will be called the Federal Constabulary, State Minister for Interior Talal Chaudhry told a press conference in the eastern city of Faisalabad. Its new duties will include internal security, riot control and counter-terrorism, according to a copy of the amended law reported by the local Dunya News TV. The announcement came after Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan said it would stage nationwide protests starting on August 5, the second anniversary of his arrest. Several such protests since his August 2023 arrest have turned violent, in some cases paralysing the capital Islamabad for days. 'This will be a new force. This will be a stronger force. We need this force for internal security,' Chaudhry said, adding that President Asif Ali Zardari had already approved amendments in the law introducing changes in the paramilitary force. The new force replaces the Frontier Constabulary (FC), whose cadres were previously recruited only from tribes in the northwestern province, Chaudhry said. Training of the new force will bring it into line with other national law enforcement agencies, he added. Khan's party spokesperson Zulfikar Bukhari said the changes should be subject to parliamentary discussion. The new force 'should not be used as a gimmick to silence political opponents, as has been previously witnessed when the government applied such laws against a large number of the PTI leadership and supporters,' he said. His concern was echoed by Haris Khalique, secretary of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent body. 'We are alarmed by the changes being made to the security and law enforcement structure of the country without any debate in parliament,' Khalique said.
Al Jazeera
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Doom-loop politics can be defeated. Here is how
It might seem bizarre to speak of hope in these dark times. In Palestine, the horror of genocidal violence is coupled with the sickening acquiescence of Western powers to it. In Sudan, war rages, with the people of Darfur once again facing war crimes on a mass scale. While in the United States, the blitzkrieg advance of broligarchic authoritarianism has caught many by surprise and left devastation in its wake. Yet, hope there is. For, across the icy ground of political repression and reaction, the green shoots of possibility are poking through, with movements of various sorts pointing towards a paradigm shift that places people before profit and, in so doing, charts a pathway for progressives. The latest example is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Party's primary election for New York's mayoral race. Mamdani was successful because he focused on the economic difficulties faced by the poor and middle class and promised free, foundational basics, like public transport and childcare. Importantly, he proposed paying for all this by raising taxes on corporations and the rich. In the United Kingdom, after years in the wilderness, progressives of various sorts are rallying behind Zack Polanski's bid to lead the Green Party. After he announced his intention to contest the leadership seat, party membership jumped by 8 percent in the first month alone, as people embraced his call to rein in corporate power, tax the rich, and make sure that the state serves the 99 percent instead of the 1, now and in our climate-threatened future. In the Global South, similar trends are in evidence. In India, in the last election, the Congress party finally managed to stem the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's saffron tide by promising unconditional income support to each poor family alongside universal, cashless health insurance. This came after one of the world's largest basic income trials, conducted in Hyderabad, produced hugely exciting results that fed into Congress's thinking, with policies to be funded by more redistributive taxation. Likewise, in South Africa, the inheritors of the country's anti-apartheid struggle have built a nationwide movement to demand extension of what was initially an emergency relief grant during the COVID-19 pandemic into a permanent basic income designed to ensure economic security for all. Aside from increasing progressive taxation, one of the more exciting ideas to emerge from this struggle for economic justice has been to frame (and fund) the basic income as a 'rightful share' due to all citizens as their portion of the country's wealth. What unites all these various developments? To begin to make sense of them, we first need to remind ourselves that the two fundamental questions of all politics are simply who gets what and who decides. In our present global capitalist order, the (very) rich decide, and they allocate most of the wealth that exists to themselves. In turn, like rulers throughout the ages, they pit the have-nots against those who have even less, maintaining their dominance through divide-and-rule. At the heart of this strategy sits a foundational lie, which is repeated ad infinitum by the corporate misinformation architecture. The lie is: there is not enough to go around, because we live in a world of scarcity. From this awful premise stems the violent division of the world into 'us' and 'them', the line between one and the other determining who will and will not have access to what is needed to live a decent life. From there, it is a short step to the disciplinary notion of 'deservingness', which adds the veneer of moral justification to otherwise uncomfortable exclusions. The contemporary rise of the far right is little more than an expression of these foundational tensions. When people struggle en masse to make ends meet, they demand more, and when they do, those who control the purse strings as well as the narrative double down on the story that in a world of scarcity, people can only have more if some other, 'less deserving', people have none. In this historical tragedy, the far right plays a treacherous role, protecting the rich and powerful from discontent by sowing division among the dispossessed. While the centre-left – long the hapless accomplice – plays that of the useful idiot, unquestioning in its acceptance of the founding myth of scarcity and thus condemned to forever attempt the impossible: treating the symptoms of inequality without ever addressing its underlying cause. The alternative to this doom-loop politics is obvious when you stop to think about it, and it is what distinguishes each of the exciting examples noted above. The first step is a clear, confident affirmation of what most of us intuitively know to be true – that abundant wealth exists in our world. Indeed, the numbers make clear that there is more than enough to go around. The issue, of course, is just that this wealth is poorly distributed, with the top 1 percent controlling more than 95 percent of the rest of humanity, with many corporations richer than countries, and with those trends only set to worsen as the hyper-elite write the rules and rig the political game. The second, most vital, step is to put the question of distribution back at the centre of politics. If common people struggle to make ends meet in spite of abundant wealth, then it is only because some have too much while most do not have enough. This is exactly what progressives in the US, the UK, India, and South Africa have been doing, evidently to great effect. And this should be no surprise – the data shows again and again that equality is popular, voters like fairness, and overwhelmingly people support limits to extreme wealth. The third step is to frame progressive demands as policies that meet people's basic needs. What unites free childcare, healthcare, and transport? Quite simply, each of these straightforward measures will disproportionately benefit the poor, working majority and will do so precisely because they represent unavoidable everyday expenses that constrain common people's spending power. By the same token, basic income is attractive both because it is simple and because it offers the promise of foundational economic security for the majority who presently lack it. Yet what also unites these policy proposals and the platforms they have come to represent is that they are all in important ways unconditional. It is difficult to overstate how radical this is: almost every aspect of global social policy is conditional in one sense or another. The guaranteed provision of foundational basics to all without exclusion goes against the very idea of scarcity and its craven companion, deservingness. What it says is that we all deserve because we are all human, and because of that, we shall use the resources that exist to make sure that we all have at least the basics that make up for a decent life. In this radical message, hope abounds. Our task now is to nurture it and help it to grow. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Al Jazeera
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
There is hope
It might seem bizarre to speak of hope in these dark times. In Palestine, the horror of genocidal violence is coupled with the sickening acquiescence of Western powers to it. In Sudan, war rages, with the people of Darfur once again facing war crimes on a mass scale. While in the United States, the blitzkrieg advance of broligarchic authoritarianism has caught many by surprise and left devastation in its wake. Yet, hope there is. For, across the icy ground of political repression and reaction, the green shoots of possibility are poking through, with movements of various sorts pointing towards a paradigm shift that places people before profit and, in so doing, charts a pathway for progressives. The latest example is the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic Party's primary election for New York's mayoral race. Mamdani was successful because he focused on the economic difficulties faced by the poor and middle class and promised free, foundational basics, like public transport and childcare. Importantly, he proposed paying for all this by raising taxes on corporations and the rich. In the United Kingdom, after years in the wilderness, progressives of various sorts are rallying behind Zack Polanski's bid to lead the Green Party. After he announced his intention to contest the leadership seat, party membership jumped by 8 percent in the first month alone, as people embraced his call to rein in corporate power, tax the rich, and make sure that the state serves the 99 percent instead of the 1, now and in our climate-threatened future. In the Global South, similar trends are in evidence. In India, in the last election, the Congress party finally managed to stem the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's saffron tide by promising unconditional income support to each poor family alongside universal, cashless health insurance. This came after one of the world's largest basic income trials, conducted in Hyderabad, produced hugely exciting results that fed into Congress's thinking, with policies to be funded by more redistributive taxation. Likewise, in South Africa, the inheritors of the country's anti-apartheid struggle have built a nationwide movement to demand extension of what was initially an emergency relief grant during the COVID-19 pandemic into a permanent basic income designed to ensure economic security for all. Aside from increasing progressive taxation, one of the more exciting ideas to emerge from this struggle for economic justice has been to frame (and fund) the basic income as a 'rightful share' due to all citizens as their portion of the country's wealth. What unites all these various developments? To begin to make sense of them, we first need to remind ourselves that the two fundamental questions of all politics are simply who gets what and who decides. In our present global capitalist order, the (very) rich decide, and they allocate most of the wealth that exists to themselves. In turn, like rulers throughout the ages, they pit the have-nots against those who have even less, maintaining their dominance through divide-and-rule. At the heart of this strategy sits a foundational lie, which is repeated ad infinitum by the corporate misinformation architecture. The lie is: there is not enough to go around, because we live in a world of scarcity. From this awful premise stems the violent division of the world into 'us' and 'them', the line between one and the other determining who will and will not have access to what is needed to live a decent life. From there, it is a short step to the disciplinary notion of 'deservingness', which adds the veneer of moral justification to otherwise uncomfortable exclusions. The contemporary rise of the far right is little more than an expression of these foundational tensions. When people struggle en masse to make ends meet, they demand more, and when they do, those who control the purse strings as well as the narrative double down on the story that in a world of scarcity, people can only have more if some other, 'less deserving', people have none. In this historical tragedy, the far right plays a treacherous role, protecting the rich and powerful from discontent by sowing division among the dispossessed. While the centre-left – long the hapless accomplice – plays that of the useful idiot, unquestioning in its acceptance of the founding myth of scarcity and thus condemned to forever attempt the impossible: treating the symptoms of inequality without ever addressing its underlying cause. The alternative to this doom-loop politics is obvious when you stop to think about it, and it is what distinguishes each of the exciting examples noted above. The first step is a clear, confident affirmation of what most of us intuitively know to be true – that abundant wealth exists in our world. Indeed, the numbers make clear that there is more than enough to go around. The issue, of course, is just that this wealth is poorly distributed, with the top 1 percent controlling more than 95 percent of the rest of humanity, with many corporations richer than countries, and with those trends only set to worsen as the hyper-elite write the rules and rig the political game. The second, most vital, step is to put the question of distribution back at the centre of politics. If common people struggle to make ends meet in spite of abundant wealth, then it is only because some have too much while most do not have enough. This is exactly what progressives in the US, the UK, India, and South Africa have been doing, evidently to great effect. And this should be no surprise – the data shows again and again that equality is popular, voters like fairness, and overwhelmingly people support limits to extreme wealth. The third step is to frame progressive demands as policies that meet people's basic needs. What unites free childcare, healthcare, and transport? Quite simply, each of these straightforward measures will disproportionately benefit the poor, working majority and will do so precisely because they represent unavoidable everyday expenses that constrain common people's spending power. By the same token, basic income is attractive both because it is simple and because it offers the promise of foundational economic security for the majority who presently lack it. Yet what also unites these policy proposals and the platforms they have come to represent is that they are all in important ways unconditional. It is difficult to overstate how radical this is: almost every aspect of global social policy is conditional in one sense or another. The guaranteed provision of foundational basics to all without exclusion goes against the very idea of scarcity and its craven companion, deservingness. What it says is that we all deserve because we are all human, and because of that, we shall use the resources that exist to make sure that we all have at least the basics that make up for a decent life. In this radical message, hope abounds. Our task now is to nurture it and help it to grow. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
