Market-oriented and internationalist, it will be needed to serve in the post-election regime, and to draw defectors from the DPJ.
Any talk of a coalition would involve hard bargaining.Mr Hun Sen's appointments from within his party will be a more interesting guide to the character of his post-election regime.
Prior to the election, the regime seemed to be quite confident that the international community had become supportive, or at least understanding, of its unity and strength in the face of pressure on its nuclear program.
Karroubi later e-mailed me, "Since the very early days after the election, the regime aimed at confining me and controlling my links with my entourage and the members of my party.
Some opponents of Mr Lukashenka fear that a state of emergency will pre-empt a presidential election altogether.The regime's feistier foes talk valiantly about a "Yugoslav end" to Mr Lukashenka.
The reality is that citizens often lose interest, and keeping citizen engagement high after an election (or regime change) into the nitty-gritty of actual lawmaking is not easy.
A number of major cities have passed IRV, but its progress in more states and cities has been hindered by our inefficient election administration regime where equipment vendors think about profit first and the public interest second.
To this group of rogue military types, armchair revolutionaries and opportunists, the endgame is not elections, but regime change.
When in 2002 activists gathered the 10,000 signatures needed to ask the National Assembly to debate their request for multi-party elections, the regime responded with a counter-referendum in which 8m citizens were persuaded to vote for a constitutional amendment to declare socialism "irrevocable".
Six years ago, when popular protests started to hit the streets of Egypt as Hosni Mubarak's gang worked at rigging the 2005 parliamentary elections, the regime hit back – not just with the traditional Central Security conscripts – but with an innovation: militias of strong, trained, thugs.
Ostensibly, the piece was a response to the results of the previous week's local elections in the United Kingdom — a disaster for Cameron's Tories — but it was also a riposte to the European elections, the regime's defense of austerity that Cameron's government has pursued with steely will, and that the French and the Greeks had rejected, whether it is good for them or not.
