India has a new, elected leader:
Opposition candidate Narendra Modi will be the next prime minister of India, with counting trends showing the pro-business Hindu nationalist and his party headed for the most resounding election victory the country has seen in 30 years. ...
India's election was the world's largest ever. Staggered over five weeks, a record of more than 500 million ballots were cast from the Himalayas in the north to the tropical south, with voters braving blistering heat for a record 66 percent turnout.
That a country as large as India can manage the logistics of a nationwide election shows that there is no excuse for China to avoid democracy (well, other than the fact that the communist rulers know they have a good gig going and don't want to lose the gravy train they're on). India should have spent the last two months loudly broadcasting the election process into China.
But sadly, Communist-run China isn't the only country that could use a lesson on democracy. Thais unhappy with their elections want to wreck Thailand's democracy to get their people into power:
Months of political protests in the capital continue. The royalist and nationalist politicians and parties (yellow shirts) that lost the national elections in 2011 have failed after numerous attempts to take power until recently when the royalist Constitutional Court ruled that the elected premier to resign and installed a temporary premier until elections could be held. The red shirts see all this is another illegal ploy by the royalists to thwart the will of the people and have retained power because red shirt politicians still control a majority of the seats in parliament and have the right to appoint a temporary prime minister. Red shirts also point out that Constitutional Court first declared the February 2nd elections (which the elected prime minister called to show that she still had majority support) invalid because some voting places were blocked by mobs of yellow shirt protestors. It’s generally agreed that this court decision was absurd and the populists demand that the recently deposed populist prime minister be reinstated or that new elections be held as soon as possible. While the elected prime minister was accused of corruption, her supporters point out that these legal moves by the royalists are dishonest and just another form of corruption.
Sadly, for most of the world, the facade of pretend democracy is just another means to put your own thugs into power. And if you can't rig that, you just use another means to win.
Democracy means you accept defeat, have trust in rule of law to protect you in the minority, and gear up to win the next election rather than seek extra-legal means to sit in the Oval Office. That's what we do here, despite great unhappiness by some for the sitting president (and this applies to the last one, too).
And that's what India did. So congratulations to India for carrying out what should be a fairly simple concept--electing your own leaders--but which is actually difficult to practice with any regularity.
UPDATE: Just having to say this is a bad sign:
The U.S. is "reasonably confident" Thailand's military won't launch a coup, a senior defense official said Tuesday, although analysts warned the nation's political crisis could trigger armed conflict.
Well, a reasonably bad sign, anyway.
