The first major political incident after the July 8 Indonesian presidential election were two co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks on Jakarta’s Marriot and Ritz Carlton luxury hotels on July 17, which killed seven people, including six foreigners. These were the first suicide bomb attacks in almost five years.

On August 20, Afghanistan will conduct its second presidential election under the US-led occupation. Current Afghan President Hamid Karzai is the clear frontrunner in the election, despite a December Gallup poll having found that only 10% of Afghans supported Karzai’s government.

Rallies and other public shows of support have remained weak for the three candidates and their running mates in the weeks leading up to the July 8 Indonesian presidential election. Two of the rival candidates head the current government – incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his vice-president, Jusuf Kalla.

Three tickets have been nominated for the Indonesian presidential elections on July 9. The official campaign period for the presidential elections starts in the first week of June.

On April 26, left-wing Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa was re-elected with the support of 52% of the country’s 10.5 million voters, under a new constitution approved last September by 65% of voters. Correa easily trounced his closest rival, former president Lucio Gutierrez, who scored only 28.4%.

The Indonesian General Elections Commission has not yet completed counting all the votes in the April 9 elections to the national parliament and scores of local assemblies. However, some things have become clear. There was a very high level of voter abstention, a phenomenon already evident in many elections for provincial governors during 2007-08.

If you conducted a random survey asking people what “democracy” means, probably the most frequent answer you would receive would be “government by the people” or “the people rule”. That’s not a bad answer; it’s the meaning of the Greek words from which “democracy” comes. Ancient Greece, particularly Athens, offers the best-known examples of early democracy.

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The official election campaigning period for the Indonesian national, provincial and district legislatures started on March 1 and will last until April 5. There is supposed to be a three-day period of non-campaigning immediately before the April 9 elections. Some 100,000 candidates from 44 parties are standing for seats in national, provincial and district legislatures.

Both the ALP and the recently amalgamated Liberal National Party (LNP) tried to present themselves as offering “change” in the state election on March 21. But pro-capitalist politics as usual is what remains in the wash-up. With Labor retaining government despite a 4% swing against it, Labor leader Anna Bligh became the first woman in Australia to be elected a state premier.

San Salvador – As voting centres across El Salvador closed at 5 pm on March 15, the streets around the San Salvador headquarters of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) filled with supporters determined to defend and to celebrate the party’s first presidential election victory. Chants of “Si, podemos!” (Yes, we could!

Six weeks after the formal cessation on January 18 of Israel’s 22-day war on the 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza, Israel continues to carry out sporadic airstrikes on the small coastal region.

Elections for the two houses of Indonesia’s national parliament and the provincial parliaments will take place on April 9, at a time of growing dissatisfaction with the parliamentary parties. These elections will be followed in July by what will likely be the first of two rounds to elect a president and vice-president.

Salvadorans will vote for a new president on March 15. For the last 12 months, former independent journalist Mauricio Funes has held a double-digit lead over his rival, Rodrigo Avila, a former chief of the national police.

[The following article was written in response to an article by Kelik Ismunanto, a leader of Papernas (National Liberation Unity Party) titled “Indonesia: Tracing a path towards parliament” that was published in the December 3 issue of Green Left Weekly.

On February 15 some 6.3 million Venezuelans, 54.86% of voters, approved a constitutional amendment that allows all public officials to be re-elected more than once, thus enabling Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez to stand in the next presidential election in 2012.

East Timor has passed through the first year of “stability” since the failed assassination attempts in February 2008 on East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao.

Caracas – Elections of state governors and local mayors were held across Venezuela on November 23. Candidates of President Hugo Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won 5.7 million votes, 1.4 million more votes than supported Chavez in the December 2007 constitutional referendum.

San Francisco – As has been widely noted, the election of an African-American as president of the United States is an historic event. This is true irrespective of the politics and perspectives of Barack Obama. That a black family will occupy the White House, which was built by black slaves, is a powerful symbol.

San Francisco, October 31 – In the final days of the US presidential election campaign, Republican candidate John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin have repeatedly charged that Democrat candidate Barack Obama is a “socialist”. While this assertion is ridiculous, it does bring the issue of socialism into the mainstream of US political discourse.

George Bush

As the sun sets on an American empire sliding into recession, it is time to pay tribute to the enduring efforts of George Bush whose end of term rapidly approaches. Is he the greatest simpleton out of America to ever lurch across the world stage, or insane war criminal that has made America number one rogue state in his axis of evil jingoism?

San Francisco, September 25 – Today there are spontaneous demonstrations occurring on Wall Street and over 200 other places across the country denouncing the plan to bail out the Wall Street financiers to the tune of US$700 billion. One journalist sent out an email proposing such demonstrations and then support for it exploded on the internet.

On August 10, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and his vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, secured a resounding victory in an opposition party-initiated recall referendum with a popular vote of 67.4%, an increase of 14 percentage points on the vote that brought Morales to office in December 2005.

San Francisco – The nomination of Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is historic. He is the first African American presidential candidate of one of the two major capitalist parties. He may win the election and become the first black president, something inconceivable even only two years ago.

On September 6, Western Australians will be voting in a state election to determine which of the two big-business parties can best manage WA’s resources export boom for the big end of town. WA Premier Alan Carpenter called an early state election on August 7, just one day after WA Liberal Party leader Troy Buswell resigned.