Anniversary & loose ends

A double anniversary today: it’s exactly twelve years since the debut of this blog, and this is our 1,900th post. That’s about 158 posts a year, or almost 1.33 million words. Even if most of it is rubbish, there’s enough there that you should be able to find something you like.

And as a special bonus (at least for readers in metropolitan Australia), channel 9Gem is screening our namesake film, starring Pierce Brosnan and Sophie Marceau, at 8.30 this evening (Friday).

I’m not sure how much blogging there’ll be over the next couple of months, as I’m fairly busy with other things. Next week is our Christmas break, but we’ll be back before new year with the traditional review of the year’s outstanding electoral events (check out last year’s here).

Politics doesn’t always take holidays when you might like it to, and there’s been a lot happening in the world this month. To touch briefly on some of the topics I hope to be taking up in coming weeks:

• First, of course, is the Syrian revolution. I’ve rarely been as pleased to be wrong as I am about my post of a year and a half ago when I said “the war is over and the good guys lost.” There’s heaps of commentary around on the subject; this detailed piece from Michael Karadjis is hard to beat, although it’s a couple of weeks old now. Jeremy Bowen at the BBC has also been very good.
  
• The other big story has been Romania (see my previous report here). The pro-western forces duly won a parliamentary majority and, although divided between establishment and reformers, came together sufficiently to endorse reformist Elena Lasconi for president and to promise to form government together. But then the constitutional court annulled the presidential election due to Russian interference, and now the Social Democrats have deserted the alliance.
  
• Russian expansion is a big issue in other places as well – particularly Georgia, where pro-western protesters are in a trial of strength with their increasingly authoritarian government. Slovakia also seems headed for interesting times, and there are stirrings even in Russia’s protectorate of Abkhazia.
  
• The South Korean martial law saga is also continuing: president Yoon Suk-yeol has been impeached, and the constitutional court now has to decide whether to remove him from office. So far, his centre-right party has passed the test that the Republicans in the US so conspicuously failed, although there could be more twists in the tale yet.
  
• Speaking of the United States, the election results are final and it’s full steam ahead to certification by congress on 6 January (a date you might remember). Some of Donald Trump’s cabinet-level appointments have an uncertain path to confirmation, but in general resistance from congressional Republicans has been very limited.
  
• A range of other elections, some more democratic than others, have produced results. Ireland is especially worth a look (previewed here), with the government mostly defying the anti-incumbent trend that has marked this year.
  
• And we’re not the only ones with an anniversary: Argentina’s right-libertarian president, Javier Milei, has just celebrated a year in office. It’s been more successful than some people expected, but he remains an outlier in terms of far-right “populist” politics. This BBC report raises some interesting questions.
  
• Finally, this year’s human freedom index has just been released, containing as usual a wealth of detail on the state of freedom around the world (not good, but could be a lot worse) and offering food for thought about how the various sorts of freedom interrelate. Here’s my report on the 2020 release for comparison.

Thanks everyone for following along thus far, and very best wishes to all for the holiday season!