Newsbook

CAN you write an Economist picture caption? The excellent standard of entries in our previous competitions suggests that many of you can: last time your suggestions again provided us with both a caption and a headline. Here's a new chance for you to see your idea in print.

The photograph above will accompany an article in the United States section in this week's issue. Disability benefits are crucial for many. Yet in America, the number of people claiming disability benefit for quite subjective ailments has skyrocketed. "Bad backs" are now a particularly common complaint.

As before, it's up to you to provide the caption: please leave your suggestions in the comments thread below. The captions should be as short and snappy as possible, and definitely no more than about 30 characters long. The most appropriate contribution will appear beneath the picture in this week's print edition, which is published on Friday morning. Entries close at midnight London time on Wednesday evening, so you've got a little more than 48 hours. The only reward is that the winner can then truthfully claim to have written (at least a few words) for The Economist. Over to you.

FOR Iran’s best-known dissidents, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the net has tightened with tortuous precision. First came calls that they be arrested for their prominent role in the country’s two-year-old pro-democracy movement, followed by physical attacks, media vilification, and, last month, the spectacle of hardline parliamentarians baying for their execution. By then, the pair had been prevented from leaving their homes, which had been daubed with abusive graffiti and, in Mr Mousavi’s case, sealed with a metal door. Now, according to their families, both have been quietly taken to jail.

The government refuses to confirm the incarcerations that demonstrators on March 2nd sought to denounce. Thousands took to the streets of Tehran and other towns under the cover of a festive shopping spree–the Persian new year falls on March 21st–only to demand freedom for Messrs Mousavi and Karroubi, and, in some cases, grisly retribution for the author of their misfortunes, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Motorists honked their support and the security forces responded as usual with tear-gas, baton-charges and arrests.

These echoed scenes of the protests that followed the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 and which restarted last month in emulation of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions. There was never any doubting Mr Khamenei’s hankering for revenge over the two men, both former loyalists who have turned against the regime, and his countervailing fear that to do so might spark a popular explosion. But the struggle for Iran’s future is turning out to be a drawn-out affair. It may be some time before the true impact of this latest escalation is felt.

The truth is that neither of the detained pair was ever iconic enough for his arrest either to signal the end of the movement or to prompt mass anger. Assuming, as seems likely, that the authorities are deliberately blurring the facts, and the pair are to be kept behind bars, a fresh struggle will now begin, out of view.

Both men will need all their obstinacy, of which they have proven reserves, to resist interrogators’ attempts to force them to make a recantation showing their treasonous intent and allegiance to Western powers. If they resist, news of their courage will seep out and their hold over the public will grow. If they crack, the movement may crack too.

DESPITE their cliff-hanger outcome, the provincial elections held in the Netherlands on Wednesday brought few surprises. The political landscape remains fractured, with the forces on the right narrowly ahead. But the results may point to a long-term polarisation of politics in the Netherlands, a country once renowned for its consensual model of decision-making.

In last June's parliamentary elections, a similarly scattered vote produced the first minority government in modern Dutch history, comprising the liberal VVD and the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDA), and propped up by Geert Wilders's far-right Freedom Party. This unwieldy set-up yields a majority of just one seat in the 150-member parliament.

In Wednesday's elections the Dutch were voting for members of the country’s 12 provincial councils. In late May, these bodies will elect the 75 members of the Senate, the upper house of the Dutch parliament, which is charged with approving government legislation.

Here the political mathematics get knotty. This week’s results suggest that the VVD, the CDA and the Freedom Party will fall one seat short of the 38 they need for a majority in the Senate. So the government is likely to seek extra support, either from the SGP, a hardline Calvinist party, or various right-leaning local parties in the provincial assemblies. Yet the opposition may also be able to build a Senate majority, enabling it to block legislation. So the fight for the votes in each council will continue until May.

Even if the government does prevail, many believe that Mark Rutte, the VVD prime minister, will struggle to implement anything much beyond his economic agenda, which includes some significant spending cuts. In particular, various controversial anti-immigration and anti-Muslim measures, such as a ban on face-covering Muslim garments, now look less likely to pass. This is because their main proponents, Mr Wilders's Freedom Party, performed worse than expected on Wednesday, slipping into fourth place. Mr Wilders's sharp edge has been somewhat blunted.

More important in the long term may be the continuing crumbling of the the CDA. Once seen as the natural party of government in the Netherlands, on Wednesday it attracted support from just 14% of voters. Still reeling from the internal quarrels that followed its decision to participate in a government backed by Mr Wilders last year, it may not want to risk alienating its remaining voters by supporting laws that may be seen as anti-constitutional. Its ideological appeal was always vague. Now it is shedding voters both to Mr Wilders and to Mr Rutte's VVD.

The decline of the CDA could have far-reaching consequences. Its stabilising influence has been an important component of the consensual politics on which the Netherlands has long prided itself, and for which it was often admired by outsiders. As Mr Rutte suggested after the election, the country may be moving towards a system where big decisions are made by a small majority. This would be unknown territory not just for politicians, but for other participants of the once-famous “polder model,” such as trade unions and employer organisations.

This week's elections could also accelerate a transition towards Euroscepticism. Beset by polarised debate at home, the cabinet will not be inclined to compromise abroad. Accession to the European Union of the Balkan states (other than Croatia) or Turkey will be opposed. Further bail-outs of troubled euro-zone economies, such as Portugal, will be frowned upon. In the months to come the Netherlands' European partners may find themselves dealing with a country that looks increasingly unfamiliar.

GERMANY had been nervously bracing itself for its first post-September 11th attack by Islamist jihadis. Now it seems to have happened. Yesterday afternoon a man wielding a pistol opened fire on a busload of American troops at Frankfurt airport, killing two and severely wounding another pair. The suspect, Arif Arid Uka, a 21-year-old of Kosovo Albanian origin, was arrested after he ran into the terminal building. His gun reportedly jammed, which may have averted worse carnage.

Mr Uka appears to have succeeded where others failed. Although Germany has until now been spared Islamist violence, it has been a hub of terrorist activity and, in part because of its participation in the Afghanistan war, a frequent target of threats. The September 11th attacks in the United States were largely planned and executed by the members of the so-called “Hamburg cell.”

In 2007 police arrested the four-member “Sauerland Group” before they could launch their car bombs. They are said to have planned attacks on airports and on the American air base at Ramstein, a big logistics base for the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the destination of the soldiers killed yesterday. In 2006 two men planted suitcase bombs on trains leaving Cologne; they failed to explode.

Investigators have found evidence that Mr Uka had Islamist leanings, including a Facebook page that lists him as a fan of sites such as "Reign of Islam." News reports quote his uncle as saying that he had worked at the airport. The fear is that Mr Uka may be part of a cell that is planning further attacks. He has apparently confessed to the murders—one report said he was driven by anger about German involvement in Afghanistan—but says he acted alone.

Mr Uka's family hails from Mitrovica, a Kosovar town divided into an Albanian south and a Serb-controlled north, although many reports say he himself was born and raised in Germany.

Most Albanians, inside and outside Kosovo, are fanatically pro-American following the US-led NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 that led, eventually, to Kosovo's declaration of independence. There is a large statue of Bill Clinton in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The influence of the American ambassador on local politics there remains enormous.

The Kosovar government immediately issued a statement describing yesterday's attack as a “macabre act” carried out by an individual "acting against the tradition of the people of Kosovo, who will always and forever be grateful to the United States of America”. Zeri, a newspaper, headlined its story on the murder "Shame" while this morning’s edition of Koha Ditore says that the murders are a "stain" on Kosovo’s already-damaged reputation, a reference to recent allegations of election fraud and a grisly organ-harvesting scandal implicating the country's prime minister.

If Mr Uka was radicalised in Germany rather than in Kosovo, some may draw parallels with other cases, in particular the so-called Fort Dix plot. In 2009 three ethnic-Albanian brothers from Debar in western Macedonia were convicted in the US of being part of an Islamist plot to attack Fort Dix, an army base in New Jersey. The brothers, all in their twenties, had left Macedonia as children, and reports suggested that they had never been back.

The attack may also bolster concerns in Germany that the country is failing to integrate its immigrants. Last October Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said that multiculturalism had "utterly failed" in Germany.

But there are no immediate signs of alarm. Many German newspapers did not make the attack their lead story this morning. The new interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, seems inclined to follow the cautious policy of his predecessor, Thomas de Maizière (who left the job today to become defence minister after the fall of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg). In his first day on the job Mr Friedrich has declined to raise the terrorist threat level.

HEDGE funds are often fatefully named. Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that had to be bailed out in 1998, had a notoriously short lifespan. More recently the Galleon Group, a large hedge fund named after an old-fashioned sort of sailing ship, has dramatically sunk. The boss of the fund, Raj Rajaratnam, and 21 other people have been charged in a sweeping insider-trading case that has allegedly led to at least $85m in illicit profits. 

On March 1st, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought charges against Rajat Gupta (pictured), the former boss of McKinsey, a consultancy. He is the highest profile corporate executive to be ensnared in the case so far, having served as a former board-member of Goldman Sachs, a bank, and, until yesterday, Procter & Gamble, a giant consumer-goods firm. 

Mr Gupta was an investor in Galleon and a friend of Mr Rajaratnam, which is why he tipped him off, on multiple occasions, according to the SEC. For example, after Mr Gupta found out about Warren Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs in 2008, he supposedly called Mr Rajaratnam, who bought 175,000 shares in Goldman. All told, Galleon raked in around $15m and avoided losses of around $3m thanks to Mr Gupta’s tips, the SEC alleges.

Mr Gupta fiercely denies the charges and vows to fight them. But the allegations will permanently tarnish his reputation, and may cause fallout at the companies he worked. McKinsey, for example, prides itself on advising bosses discreetly, and rarely even divulges its clients’ identities. This case against a former boss won’t be good for business. Goldman Sachs, already having settled a lawsuit with the SEC last year for allegedly duping clients into buying mortgage-backed securities without enough information, doesn’t need to give investors another excuse to question how information flows on Wall Street.

Mr Rajaratnam, who claims innocence despite the guilty pleas some of his colleagues have already put forward, is set to face trial on March 8th. With his day in court so soon, the timing of the SEC’s charges against Mr Gupta probably aren’t coincidental. The SEC may be trying to scare Mr Rajaratnam into a settlement while also bringing down the ultimate corporate insider. It’s one thing to topple a hedge fund manager, but it’s quite another to bring down a major figure in corporate America.

AS THE world debates how best to stem the violence in Libya, including the possibility of a military no-fly zone, we look back at our leader about Ronald Reagan's use of force in April 1986 after a Libyan-sponsored terrorist attack.

________________________________________________________________________

Appointment in Tripoli
The Economist, April 19th 1986

In bombing Libya, the United States killed sleeping women and children and opened a dangerous new period in which terrorism against Americans and West Europeans may, for a time, get worse rather than better. Most Europeans but very few Americans conclude that America was wrong to use its bombers against Libya. The United States did not choose the best instrument of force available to it. Aerial bombardment rarely serves a political end, and better options were available on the night of April 14th-15th. It is not foolish or weak-kneed to worry about what will come next. Nevertheless, the time had arrived to use some kind of force against Colonel Qaddafi. Unless this week's bombing causes him to stop sponsoring terrorists, the time will come when it will be right to use more force and, if necessary, to overthrow him.

The United States should have no illusions about the course on which it has set out. It will be precarious, frustrating and possibly unrewarding. Twenty-five years ago America was confident that its big army and air force, with all the shiniest technology, could defeat guerrilla insurrections. That confidence was smashed in Vietnam, and the United States spent several years afterwards believing that military force could solve nothing. Under Ronald Reagan it rediscovered on the tiny island of Grenada that armed clout sometimes achieves good things. But the United States and its European allies face in terrorism a threat that is even more intractable than the guerrillas of the 1960s.

The need for action

 Americans would be wrong to conclude that force and more force will, by itself, suppress terrorism. A combination of political and economic pressure, better police work and attempts to ease the conflicts that help to generate terrorism are also needed to contain it. But it has to be understood, especially in a week of sickening television shots of the victims of American bombs, why military force must be one of the instruments in the fight against terrorism. Two reasons, one present and one prospective, justify an extreme course of action against Colonel Qaddafi. The present one is that, in attacking Libya, the United States was defending itself. America's existence, of course, is not threatened by anything that the colonel could do, even in his wildest dreams. But a government's first duty is to protect the lives of its citizens, and the evidence has damningly piled up over the years that Mr Qaddafi has paid for, housed, trained and directed terrorists whose business is to murder Americans (and Europeans). Proof of Libya's complicity in the latest terrorist attack, the bombing on April 5th of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by American soldiers, has convinced even some habitual sceptics. The colonel shows no true remorse over any of this—indeed, Mr Reagan and Mrs Thatcher claim that more terrorist attacks backed by him were in the works—and the United States has ample grounds for trying to stop him from going any farther.

Many people wonder why sanctions short of military force would not do. The answer is that the United States has tried all of them, and they have done no good. Had it been joined in its efforts by European governments, it might have been less inclined to go for the bombing that most of them deplored this week. The bland measures belatedly adopted by the EEC’s foreign ministers a few hours before America attacked were a tiny move in the right direction, but it is hard to believe that a man of Mr Qaddafi's passion and sincerity would be deflected by diplomatic reproofs. Some critics of America's bombing claim that it will encourage him to further wildness. So it might. But to do nothing—to accept failure—certainly would. To doubt that is to misunderstand the nature of modern terrorism and the minds of its perpetrators.

The prospective reason for using force against Mr Qaddafi is that before this century is over the rush of technology will probably deliver into the hands of some minuscule powers conventional weapons of frightening power, and quite possibly nuclear weapons as well. The West and Russia can live with their armed competition with each other. Neither can tolerate a world in which Qaddafis can give a few terrorists the power to wipe out whole cities and countries that do not concede their demands. The physical safety of the West ten years from now depends on its setting clear rules today which tell state backers of terrorism that they will be stopped.

Colonel Qaddafi is not the only, and perhaps not even the biggest, present backer of terrorism. The Syrian and Iranian governments are formidable competitors for that title. But Mr Qaddafi has made an example of himself. The Americans are justified in making an example of him too. Their purpose should not be revenge, however vengeful they may feel; it is to persuade Colonel Qaddafi to change his ways.

Better behaviour by Libya is not out of the question. Colonel Qaddafi is not the "mad dog" that President Reagan has described. He is deeply committed to certain principles and to his means of achieving them. That does not make him irrational or impervious to pressure. Two of his own children were injured, and an adopted daughter is said to have been killed. The thought of being killed or overthrown must grow in his mind when he sees that people are trying to achieve those things. The thought of what his actions are bringing down upon Libya must nag at his countrymen and (more to the point) his soldiers. The bombing may at first strengthen the colonel's grip. The longer-term calculation of his army officers, the only Libyans whose say about a change of policy or of leader might matter, could move towards a different conclusion.

Prepare the next steps

 The odds are, at least for a while, against a coup. The stories on Wednesday of internal risings against him seemed to stem from wild anti-aircraft fire and surprised newsmen's wishful thinking. America and Western Europe should therefore be aware that this week's events—including the range of attacks on Thursday from Heathrow to Lebanon—could be a prelude to even nastier ones. What should the West be ready to do?

If Libya does respond with more terrorism, the next step up the military ladder would be a blockade of Libya's oil-exporting ports, probably by mining them. This is a bigger and in many ways riskier military operation than the bombing America carried out this week: apart from anything else, it would need to go on for a long time and would involve interfering with neutral (eg, Soviet) rights of passage. It would, however, be less likely than the bombing was to kill civilians, and for that reason would have this week been preferable to the bombing raids. The blockade would need to last until the colonel condemned terrorism without reservation, and handed over some known terrorists to Western governments.

Beyond a blockade, if that did not work in making Colonel Qaddafi lay down his terrorist weapon, would lie an invasion and overthrow, of Libya's government. Even that would not get rid of terrorism. Terror in the modern sense—the murder of people who have no personal connection with the political grievance behind it—is not merely a phenomenon of the Middle East, though that is its chief arena. It has its roots there in the legitimate complaints of Palestinian Arabs, though it has produced many another, twisted, flower. The question of Palestine is not, it seems, about to be settled. Even if it were, there would still be people willing for other reasons, half-rational or wholly irrational, to take advantage of the technologies that make random murder so dramatic and practicable, and there would be governments willing to back them.

Even those who shrink from punitive measures against such governments accept the humdrum need for better airport security, intelligence about terrorists, control over Libya's embassies and the like. Saving lives is always better than avenging them. But the terrorist war of the late twentieth century has passed the stage where defence on its own is enough.

A VERY thoughtful analysis of our special report on food this week in Poverty and Power, a blog run by Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam GB.  (An outstanding blog, by the way. Bookmark it now).

Mr Green gives the report “top marks on biology, botany, chemistry, ecology and the other natural sciences”; and zero marks on the “humanities – people, power and politics”. There’s nothing in the report, he says, on who does the farming (smallholders or large commercial farms); nothing on how they exercise influence over their governments and large food processing and distribution companies; and nothing on trade (as he rightly says, an “odd absence” for The Economist). “The bottom line for The Economist,” he concludes, “is that all that tricky power and politics stuff is just too difficult.”

The basic characterisation of the report is absolutely fair (though I don’t agree with the conclusion). So let me explain why the report takes the approach it does, and then respond to some of Mr Green’s specific points.

The report sets out to answer the question how will the world feed 9 billion in 2050? To do that, it concentrates on the basic constraints on food supplies – land, water and so on - and asks how they might be overcome. The report is only secondarily concerned with politics, policies and trade. This is not the only way of looking at the food business. One could look at other questions, such as why are a billion people hungry? Why are prices rising? Or one could say – as Mr Green does – that prices and other incentives influence how basic constraints are dealt with, and since these things are influenced by politics and policies, the distinction between constraints on the one hand and politics on the other is artificial.

All true. But in looking at the question of feeding 9 billion, the most useful thing The Economist can do is lay out some of the basics: land, water, climate, seed technology, etc. This seems justified in itself: farmers start with these things. It seems helpful because public debate on such matters is sometimes rather confused: the debate on GM technology, for instance, rarely makes a distinction between using genes from a different organism (GMOs) and changing – hopefully improving – the existing genetic base of plants through marker-assisted breeding. I thought such an approach would add to the sum total of human knowledge because there is already quite a lot about trade, small holders versus large farms and so on. I’m certainly not saying these things don’t matter. But even in 14 pages, you have to make choices. Above all – and I was surprised by this – there really is a problem of declining yield growth. Yields are growing more slowly than population for the first time in over 30 years. This seems a big deal and deserves more attention than it usually gets.

So the report concentrates on the “what” of food (what’s gone wrong; what needs to be done), rather than the “how” (how to do it). Obviously these aren’t contradictory approaches. But starting with the “what” seems justified because it is the prior question.

So much for the basic approach. Let me turn to a few of the holes in the argument that Mr Green points out. Because the problem of boosting yields is such a big one, it seems to me one can make too much of the trade-offs between small and large farmers. These do exist but because the problem of failing yields is so large, I suspect we will need better productivity from both large and small farmers. Neither can do it alone. Which will dominate will vary from place to place. Two of the great successes in agriculture have been Brazil and Vietnam. Brazilian farming is dominated by large commercial exporters; Vietnam’s by smallholders who also export. I’m agnostic about whether large or small farms matter most, though I suspect that in practice people will want to leave farming so consolidation of plots is inevitable.

On gender, Mr Green is right: because women do most of the farming in many developing countries, sexual discrimination in things such as credit policies is a big problem. Getting rid of  it is desirable in itself and would boost output.

Mr Green takes me to task for saying “Pushing up supplies may be easier than solving the distributional problem” and says this is a complete cop-out. Maybe. But the sentiment is supposed to be a straightforward statement of fact. It will be easier to provide extra food to the have-nots by growing more, than by switching it from the haves by transforming distribution systems. Damaging trade barriers have persisted for decades. We can’t stop the biofuels lunacy. I’m certainly not against boosting producer organisations or tackling vested interests that skew government decision-making (The Economist has been railing against trade distortions for 150 years). But I fear that, unless we boost yields of staple crops, the current spike in food prices won’t be a spike at all but will turn into an endlessly sustained period of high and rising prices.

IT ISN'T always cause for worry when billions are being splashed on property deals. Two big commercial-property transactions have been announced this week. On February 28th Ventas, an American real-estate investment trust (REIT) specialising in health-care facilities and housing for the elderly, agreed to buy Nationwide Health Properties (NHP) for $7.4 billion. And today Centro Properties Group, a debt-laden Australian group, announced a major restructuring plan, the centrepiece of which is the $9.4 billion sale to Blackstone of its portfolio of American shopping malls. 

The two deals are very different. The Ventas-NHP tie-up, paid for in Ventas shares, is about old-fashioned consolidation. There are lots of listed REITs and little happening in the way of new development. The deal follows other acquisitions by Ventas and will create the country’s largest health-care REIT, helping to diversify the combined group’s assets and reducing Ventas’s leverage. Inexorable demographic forces underpin the sector’s growth prospects: the baby boomers are starting to retire and America’s 85-plus age group is growing at three times the national average. 

The Centro deal is about escapology rather than strategy, the cycle rather than structural change. As well as offloading its American assets, the Australian group has reached agreement with its senior creditors to extinguish its debt in return for almost all of its Australian assets, too. If the restructuring goes ahead as planned, about $100m will be left over for Centro’s shareholders and junior creditors. 

The sale of the group’s portfolio of 588 strip malls in America is nonetheless an important moment in the commercial-property recovery. To date, institutional investors have been channelling money into high-grade, or “prime”, assets in America’s big, international cities, where demand is always stronger. The next stage in the industry’s recovery will be for that money to start flowing into secondary assets like Centro’s malls, whose anchor tenants are supermarkets and discount stores. 

That point has not yet arrived. But Blackstone is the type of opportunistic investor, on the prowl for buildings where it sees the potential for capital gains, which acts as a bridge between the distressed owners of today and the institutional investors of tomorrow. This is not the first investment it has made in shopping centres since the crisis but it is the biggest, and it had to fight off competition to land the assets. If the Ventas purchase is a reflection of American ageing, the Centro sale is a bet on the strength of American consumers. 

ANOTHER Friday, another Tahrir Square, this time in Baghdad. At the end of last week, several thousand people came for a day of shouting and chanting. But things turned nasty when the demonstrators tried to push down a blast-wall barrier onto a bridge leading out of the square into the heavily-guarded Green Zone which houses Iraq's parliament and its ministers. As parts of the wall collapsed, riot police sprang into action. Later they used  water cannons, gas and live ammunition on protesters, said eye-witnesses.

The protest may have been small but the authorities were determinted to quash it. The prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, gave a stern speech saying that Saddamist and al-Qaeda factions would try to take over—or attack—any protests. Security officials predicted bombs. Clerics, who are close to or part of many political factions, urged their followers to stay away. Journalists filming the demonstrations were arrested and a curfew banning vehicles was imposed across the city. Everything closed down. The city was silent except for children playing in the streets unusually empty of cars, and a few hundred people—mainly young men—who walked miles from the suburbs to the square, waving banners. Largely secular, they were a mix of graduates and working class, all with the same grievances: not enough electricity and clean water, no jobs, corrupt politicians who wasted eight months on full pay forming a government. Iraq’s democracy, they said, was not worth much unless their elected representatives worked harder.

The "day of rage", organised like others in the Middle East on social networking websites, spread across the country, with bloody consequences. Around a dozen people were killed in clashes between police and protesters in Mosul, Kirkuk, Fallujah and even near the usually peaceful Kurdish city of Sulimaniyah. A number of government buildings went up in flames, and various politicians stepped down, notably the governor of the oil-rich southern city of Basra.

Mr Maliki released a conciliatory statement promising to look into the demands of the people. Protesters said they would be back on the streets soon. When demonstations began in Tunisia, ministers said Iraq was immune to such unrest because it was already a democracy. They may have underestimated Iraqi anger about their government. As one old man in Tahrir Square said, "we did vote for them, but they’re gangsters."

NO IRISH election has produced a result as far-reaching. In a landmark election on Friday, the centre-right Fine Gael transformed the political landscape by displacing Fianna Fail as Ireland's largest party. When parliament reconvenes on March 9th, Fine Gael seems likely to form a coalition with the centre-left Labour Party, which also performed strongly at the polls, almost doubling its seats. Although the seat count has not yet concluded, such a government would enjoy the largest parliamentary majority in Ireland's history.

Since 1932 Fianna Fail, a centrist nationalist party founded by Eamon de Valera, has been Ireland’s natural party of government. It has been in office for three out of every four years since, and continously since 1997 (with a number of coalition partners). But on Friday Ireland's voters, enraged by a government that had taken the economy on a rollercoaster ride that culminated, last November, in an €85 billion ($115 billion) rescue by the European Union and the IMF, exacted their revenge.

Overnight a political giant was turned into a pygmy; Fianna Fail lost three quarters of its seats and finished behind Fine Gael and Labour. The party won just one seat in the capital, Dublin. Many ministers, including the prime minister, Brian Cowen, did not seek re-election; others lost their seats. Fianna Fail's erstwhile coalition partner, the Green Party, which had triggered last week's early election by quitting government in January, was completely wiped out.

The scale of Fianna Fail’s defeat raises questions over its future as a political force. The party finds itself unrepresented in over half the country’s 43 constituencies, and without a single woman member of parliament. This leaves it poorly equipped to lead the opposition benches, where it will find itself in competition with Sinn Fein. That party, formerly considered fringe, has greatly increased its parliamentary representation, and bolstered its presence with the election of its president, Gerry Adams.

Fine Gael's success marks a triumph for its underestimated leader, Enda Kenny. In 2002 Mr Kenny, Ireland’s longest-serving parliamentarian, took over the leadership of a party in some disarray. Eight months ago Mr Kenny defeated a challenge to his leadership. Back then the party was lagging behind Labour in the polls. It is now a handful of seats short of an overall parliamentary majority and Mr Kenny is prime minister-elect.

If Fine Gael and Labour are to form a parliamentary alliance they must first narrow the policy differences that sharply divided them in the election campaign. Seeking to maximise their prospective electoral gains, the parties disagreed on tax, public spending and how quickly the budget deficit should be reduced.

But time is not on their side. After March 9th the new government will face a stern test at an EU summit on March 24th-25th. There, Ireland may come under pressure from Germany and France to raise its low corporate-tax rate in exchange for an easing of the terms of the EU element of the bail-out package. During the campaign one of the few issues that united all Ireland's parties was that the rate, seen as vital in securing foreign investment, should be left untouched. For the new government, there will be no political honeymoon.

In a  guest post, a Middle East editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister organisation, examines the way in which dictators choose whether or not to use violence to stay in power.

Violence only works if it is overwhelming. Up to a critical point, civilian losses embolden protesters who will rally against the injustices they see in the loss of their comrades. If the losses are massive, and pass that point, protesters are likely to realise that the state means business and is here to stay. This was the case in 1991; as soon as Saddam Hussein was allowed to use helicopter gunships, he did. The magnitude of destruction was stratospheric and anybody seen as being remotely sympathetic to the uprising was punished. Even palm trees were destroyed (10m in Basra alone), and the Marshes were drained, ostensibly to stop rebel fighters from seeking refuge there, but undoubtedly also to punish the people seen by the state as being complicit in the uprising by destroying their livelihoods.

The need for a patronised inner coterie: Iraq taught us that magnitude of destruction has to be immense. Muammar Qaddafi's rhetoric suggests he understands this and is willing to follow through. This will depend on the willingness of the army to follow his directives. Saddam did not have the army, but he did have a series of concentric circles of supporters loyal to him because of the patronage he extended them (special-forces units and tribes). He had tied their interests to his survival so successfully that they could not risk defecting. In the same way that Mr Qaddafi has turned to foreigh mercenaries, Saddam Hussein could also rely on his own foreign legion, the Mojahid-e-Khalq organisation whose divisions were used to fight both against the Kurds and the Shia down south (Mariam Rajavi, one of the group's leaders, famously said "take the Kurds under your tanks and save your bullets for the Islamic Guard").

The need for a scapegoat. Iraqis in 1991, even the Shia, did not trust Iran. According to Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi academic in his book, "Cruelty and Silence", agents from the Iraqi state began to post pictures of Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, across the south. This allowed Saddam to frame the uprising as one orchestrated by Iran, not disgruntled Iraqis with real grievance against the regime. This idea gained traction and was key to maintaining support among the "White Provinces", the mainly Sunni areas to the north and west of the country that feared that an Iranian-style regime would replace Saddam, and that the new system would be inherently hostile to their community. These provinces remained loyal and formed the mainstay of Saddam's support base throughout the uprising.

Supporters of the monarchy in Bahrain are painting the unrest as a Shia uprising to try to retain support of the country's Sunni community (despite leading Sunni opposition MPs, including Munira Fakhro of Wa'ad, coming out in support of the protest movements). Similar tactics, but with an ethnic dimension, have been used in Jordan; King Abdullah sacked the Palestinian-born prime minister and replaced him with a Jordanian replacement. Part of the reason for the move is likely to play on the Palestinian/Jordanian rift within society and to shore up his Jordanian support base who are uneasy about Palestinian representation in the government.

The will to maintain power vs. the desire to pander to international public opinion: Libya went through years of sanctions and was an international pariah for decades. Mr Qaddafi would probably like to nurture friendly ties with Europe and the wider international community, but he will not do this at the expense of his own survival. Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's former president, crumbled under international pressure. This was part of the reason he could not use overwhelming force to maintain his grip (the apparent defection of the army played a part too). Mr Qaddafi, like Saddam Hussein, probably cares less about external pressure because the damage has been done. He may feel he can go it alone, as he has in the past.

IT LOOKS like there will be no surprises from Ireland's general election, which took place yesterday. Counting began this morning, and, because of the complex proportional-voting system the country uses, the full results may not be announced until tomorrow. But an exit poll confirms what all observers expected: the opposition Fine Gael will top the vote, and its leader Enda Kenny (pictured) will become Ireland's next taoiseach (prime minister). Turnout appears to have been strong.

Voters who have been through one of the most devastating economic crashes in Ireland's history have taken their revenge on Fianna Fail, which has been in office since 1997 (with various coalition partners). According to the exit poll, the party's vote share fell to 15%—quite a drop for a party that took 42% of votes in the last election, in 2007. It may be all but wiped out in Dublin.

Fianna Fail has won more seats than the other parties at every general election since 1932. It has been in power for three out of every four years. How the party responds to this reverse will be one of the interesting sub-plots in Irish politics over the coming months and years.

As for Mr Kenny, few will envy his position. One of his first tasks will be to find a coalition partner, as the party's predicted 36% vote share will not be enough to allow it to govern alone. The most likely candidate is Eamon Gilmore's Labour Party, generally seen as Fine Gael's traditional partner. But the two parties did not exactly campaign in harmony, and differences over taxation and spending may make their alliance a fractious one.

Yet the biggest challenge for the new government will be how to satisfy Irish voters' craving for a renegotiation of what they see as an unfair bail-out foisted on it by the European Union and the IMF in November. Mr Kenny and Mr Gilmore both campaigned on pledges to improve the terms of the European element of the deal. Voters will be watching keenly to see if those pledges can be made good. The word from Brussels appears to be that they should not get their hopes up.

A full report will follow on Monday.

(Photo credit: EPP)