It’s always nice to see a good man or lady being rewarded for their commitment to public service by being reelected in a free and fair election, and today we’re blessed to have two such occurrences to celebrate. Lucky us!
First, in Sudan, President Omar al-Bashir was returned to office for another five year term with a big groundswell of support, winning 94.5% of the vote. It seems to me that anything over 90% is a sure sign that not only is your democracy working perfectly, but your president must really be super popular! Bashir has already been in office for 26 years, so you know he’s beloved by his people and has lots of important experience running Sudan. Oh, sure, you’ll have naysayers calling the election a “political charade,” or saying that Bashir failed “to create a free, fair and conducive elections environment,” or being even being rude enough to point out that Bashir is “the only sitting head of state facing genocide charges at the international criminal court.” But who needs those Debbie Downers? The people of Sudan have spoken, or at least been spoken for, and isn’t that all that matters! Congratulations, President Bashir!
For our second case in point, take Kazakhstan (…please! Ha ha, I kid, please don’t cart me off to prison like you do with your political opposition). President Nursultan Nazarbayev just won his fifth election since Kazakhstan became independent in 1991, this time with a whopping 97.7% of the vote! The Kazakh people must really love this guy! Oh sure, he ran virtually unopposed (it’s hard for your opposition to field a candidate when the most prominent opposition figures are either in one of your prisons or objectively worse than you are), but so what? The truest test of a democracy’s strength is how it survives the absence of democracy, don’t you think? Well, that sounds like it might be true, anyway. Like President Bashir, I’m sure President Nazarbayev will get nitpicked by busybodies for, say, Kazakhstan’s “poor human rights record” or the fact that it “has never held an election judged to be free or fair by the West,” but screw that noise.
You know who likes Kazakhstan? Cool dudes, like UK Prime Minister David Cameron and former UK Prime Minister Bloodlust McBombsalot Tony Blair, that’s who! Cameron cut a massive trade deal with Kazakhstan in 2013, and was so impressed with the Central Asian republic’s commitment to human rights that, when reporters asked him about it, he essentially said “Get the fuck off my back about it, OK? There’s a lot of money on the table here” (though to be fair to Cameron, it’s clear that human rights in general isn’t really his thing). As for Blair, well, he’s not about to do PR for just any dictator president for life. You need to show a real commitment to paying Tony Blair a shitload of money being way nicer to people, or something like that, if you want the Blair Treatment (NOTE: this is the post-PM version of “the Blair Treatment,” where he lets you pay him lots of money to lobby for you, and not the version that he used when he was PM, which involved doing war on you). So congrats to President Nazarbayev and his important British pals!
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
