With Bush's approval rating at the lowest of any president since Jimmy Carter in 1979, Republican insiders are seeking solace in Nicolas Sarkozy's win. After all, France's new president was able to pull out a victory for the incumbent party despite Jacques Chirac, a similarly troubled and maligned leader. Here is Newt Gingrich summing it up on Face the Nation yesterday:

Nicolas Sarkozy is in the Chirac government. Chirac is at the end of 10 years, two terms. People are totally fed up with him, they're very tired. And yet Sarkozy has managed to become the candidate of change while Segolene Royal, the socialist opposition, has become the candidate of status quo."

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But who among the current Republican field can position himself as a Sarkozy? Toby Harnden, who writes for London's Telegraph, suspects that Sen. John McCain's campaign may be trying to mimic Sarkozy's playbook. I don't see him pulling it off. Where Sarkozy offered France radical solutions on the country's two most pressing issues—immigration and economic malaise—McCain has become the candidate of the status quo on the United States' most pressing problem, Iraq. Sarkozy is about to become France's first baby boom president. McCain, if elected, would become the United States' oldest commander in chief.

Rather than having a maverick of the Sarkozy type emerge from within the Republican field, I suspect we are instead more likely to see one splinter off from the party and go it alone. Two leading contenders for that role, Sen. Chuck Hagel and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, appear to at least be giving that option some consideration. They'd better hurry. Desperate to get behind any candidate who offers charisma and hope, many Republicans who might support a Hagel or Bloomberg are already defecting to Sen. Barak Obama's camp. And that should tell us everything we need to know about the likelihood of a radical of the Sarkozy vein emerging from the Republican primary.

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Democracy has had a rough run over the past year or so. Military interventions in Thailand and Bangladesh ended decades-long experiments with elected governments. In Lebanon and Ukraine, the "color revolutions" of 2004 have barely been able to hold back revisionists seeking to grab back the power of the state. Elections in Nigeria last week were a debacle, while earlier polls in the Congo were followed swiftly by a resumption of political violence. China cheerfully peddles its recipe for one-party state-sponsored growth with a side of brutality throughout Africa. Russia, meanwhile, increasingly doesn't even bother to pretend it's a democracy, while those who point that out have developed the disturbing habit of turning up dead.

Now Turkey may succumb to the anti-democratic tide as well. The mildly Islamist ruling party enjoys wide support, but not from the military or the traditional governing elite. An attempt by the government to move its candidate for the presidency through parliament met with widespread protests by secularists and an ominous veiled threat from the military to intervene if necessary to protect the separation of mosque and state. A court ruling against the government and a call for fresh elections have postponed a direct clash between the two sides. The conflict seems to pit modernity and secularism against democratic values, however—not an appetizing choice.

To get to the bottom of these developments, FP talked Turkey with Andrew Mango, a longtime scholar of the geopolitically crucial country. In this week's Seven Questions, he explains that the conflict has roots deep in Turkish culture and that neither side can claim a monopoly on democratic values. Sitting uncomfortably between the West and the Middle East, Turkey has long been a bridge between the two; its direction will have far-reaching implications for them both. Check it out.

As Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy jostle for position in the upcoming French presidential runoff, Sarkozy—generally thought of as pro-American—appears to be engaging in some ritualistic Yankee-bashing. He blasted the U.S. position on climate change in a recent interview. That's fair enough. But he also suggested that French forces may not be in Afghanistan for long if he's elected:

The long-term presence of French troops in that part of the world does not look definitive to me," he said in an interview with France-2 television.

That's quite troubling, particularly in light of the recent French withdrawal of special forces from the region. For the moment, I'm attributing Sarkozy's loose talk to the need to lure centrist voters skeptical of cooperation with the United States.

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This weekend is host to three elections: Nigeria, where ethno-religious violence and widespread accusations of fraud have marred the country's first attempt at a democratic rotation of power; France, where the gap between conservative Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Ségolène Royal has narrowed somewhat in recent days and many voters are still undecided; and ... what was that third country again?

Oh yeah, Syria.

Syria, an anachronistic Baathist regime ruled by an opthamologist, is holding "elections without politics" on Sunday and Monday, in the words of the Carnegie Endowment's Omayma Abdel Latif. You probably haven't heard much about Syria's parliamentary contests because, well, there isn't much to tell. One faction of the beleaguered opposition, as is typical in countries where politics are window-dressing for dictatorship, has had enough:

It is "pointless to take part in an election whose results are known in advance," said lawyer Hassan Abdel-Azim, spokesman for six banned parties operating under the umbrella National Democratic Rally (NDR).

And that is all you need to know about election #3. 

Women workers are today’s proletariat ... There’s an unacceptable gap between golden parachutes and private pension plans [of executives] and the salaries being paid to workers.”

-Ségolène Royal, Socialist candidate for president in France, Financial Times, April 19, 2007, at a Carrefour-owned store in central Paris

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The march of democracy has hit yet another road bump. Hopes had been that presidential elections in tiny Timor-Leste would help the country move on from widespread violence and disorder that had broken out last year. Sadly, that looks not to be the case. Five opposition parties are disputing the results and the party leading at the polls has made accusations of "manipulation"—before any results have even been announced. Heavy United Nations support and the sign-off of the EU on the fairness of the process have not put these concerns to rest. More violence before a likely run-off election is possible.

The importance of the elections go far beyond the well-being of the country's estimated one million inhabitants, most of them desperately poor. In 1999, when the territory then known as East Timor voted to secede from Indonesia, it was seen as a test case for the ability of the international community to help along political and economic development. The U.N. ran the place as a fiefdom for three years and maintained a peacekeeping contingent there through 2005. Whatever lessons it tried to teach obviously didn't take. Now, the U.N. is back, albeit in a supporting role and with the help of Australian troops. And still, there seems to be no obvious path to political stability or even the beginnings of economic development.

It's a sobering thought that the best of intentions and the support of the entire international community have not been enough to help a country with a population roughly the same size as San Diego's. 

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If you're reading the papers this week, you know that there's a constitutional crisis brewing in Pakistan. But Egypt, too? As Blake mentioned in the brief this morning, Egypt is due to hold a nationwide referendum on a series of constitutional amendments on Monday. The amendments were only finalized days ago, leaving Egyptians less than a week to make up their minds about the future of their political system.

Marc Lynch puts it this way:

Amnesty International has described the changes as "the biggest threat to Egyptian democracy since emergency laws passed after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat by Islamist extremists in 1981." That's exactly right.  Except these aren't emergency laws: this revises the Constitution itself .... Mubarak is about to do exactly what he always accuses Islamists of secretly planning: win an election and then use his majority to abolish democracy.

Mubarak's blatant power grab would have been far less likely had it not been for Iraq. In the current FP cover story Who Wins in Iraq?, Middle East expert Marina Ottaway crowns Arab dictators some of the biggest beneficiaries of the war. With the United States in no mood to press for democratic reforms in the region, Middle East strongmen are resting easy. And none is sleeping more soundly than Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Case in point: Just last week, Bush thanked Mubarak for all his efforts in bringing freedom to Iraq.

Americans have long been knocked for taking too superficial an approach to their politics. Saturday Night Live's caricatures of presidents and presidential candidates have been especially influential in defining their identities for the public. The French, though, have gone one step further, and turned to puppets.

Les Guignols de l'info ("News Puppets" in English), a puppet-based political satire airing on French TV station Canal+, has been popular for years. But how it aims its latex-clad barbs may now have an outsized effect on the contest between presidential candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal. Fully half of the French electorate believes the show will have an "important" effect on the outcome of the election, according to a recent poll.

The show ridicules everyone, but like American satires such as the Daily Show, it can't avoid appearing hostile to the conservatives currently in power. If Socialist candidate Royal eventually prevails, she may have more than the usual number of stagehands and behind-the-scenes manipulators to thank. Most politicians are in debt to figurative puppet-masters; she may find herself beholden to the real thing.

As the world's eyes focus on Baghdad, problems in other parts of the world have a stubborn way of plodding along, whether or not anyone takes notice. In Bangladesh, a fragile democracy of nearly 150 million souls, caretaker president Iajuddin Ahmed has just resigned as "chief adviser" in the face of a general strike and growing protests.  Our Thursday Video takes you to the streets of Dhaka, where violence between police and protesters is getting increasingly out of control:

Demonstrations by the opposition Awami League have thrown much of the country into chaos; the League claims that the outgoing government of the Bangladesh National Party has rigged a general election due in two weeks. The UN and the EU have both left, claiming that the deteriorating situation make it impossible to hold a free and fair vote as scheduled. A state of emergency had been declared by President Ahmed last night. 

Why does this matter? As a country made up of mostly moderate Muslims, Bangladesh is an important counterweight to more politically repressive regimes elsewhere in the Islamic world. Countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Turkey, when their political systems work, show that democracy and Islam are not mutually exclusive. They also preclude the emergence of religiously-based terrorist groups by better channeling dissent. The success or failure of democracy in places like Bangladesh could reverberate in other countries, like nearby Pakistan and distant Iraq, that occupy more real estate on newspaper front pages.

Turkmenistan's democracy is in good hands:

The government of the one-party state named a slate of candidates for the presidential ballot. But the chief of Turkmenistan’s elections office pledged his allegiance to the interim president, Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov (pronounced Gur-ban-GOOLY Berdy-moo-kha-MED-off).

Murad Kariyev, the elections chief, said he will "do everything to make him (Berdymukhamedov) president because he is a worthy successor."

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Friday's elections for Iran's local councils and Assembly of Experts were widely reported as a "setback" for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And they were. But a more appropriate way to view them, says blogger Jonathan Edelstein, is as a crisis averted for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

As Edelstein, a lawyer in New York with a knack for analyzing Middle East politics, explains, Ahmadinejad's faction was hoping to take control of the Assembly in order to install Ayatollah Mohammed Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi as the new Supreme Leader. With Yazdi in charge, Ahmadinejad would be free from the shackles Khamenei has placed on him in the realm of foreign policy.

So, what did Khamenei do to ward off this threat? Same thing he does every time: Reject candidates he doesn't like. The Council of Guardians, which Khamenei controls, has the power under Iran's constitution to disqualify any candidate. In Edelstein's words, "they made it a foregone conclusion that the presidential faction would lose."

Edelstein concludes that outside of Tehran, where the Iranian President has never been loved, we just don't know whether Ahmadinejad is losing popularity on the street or not. What we do know is that an anti-Ahmadinejad alliance has formed between conservatives and reformists, at least temporarily. And that makes Ayatollah Khamenei sleep easier at night.

All of you out there obsessed with 2008 know that there's been some rampant speculation about when Barack Obama's first major political gaffe is going to hit the wires and take a little bit of the freshman senator's sheen away. Well, it may have just happened. Here's the story:

Tony Rezko, a Chicago political insider indicted this year on influence-peddling (charges unrelated to Obama), sold the senator a sliver of yard adjacent to his South Side home in June 2005.

After news of the deal broke last month in the Chicago Tribune, Obama said he had erred by creating the appearance that Rezko had done him a favor by selling him a portion of the lot....

"There's no doubt that this was a mistake on my part. 'Boneheaded' would be accurate," Obama said in a telephone interview Friday. "There's no doubt I should have seen some red flags in terms of me purchasing a piece of property from him."

Obama recently donated to charity $11,500 that Rezko had contributed to his federal campaign account.

I will say this: If this minor hiccup is the worst the senator has to offer, get those Obama '08 shirts ready.

The presidential elections in Venezuela are closing in as citizens take to the polls in just four days. Incumbent Hugo Chávez is widely expected to be victorious. The BBC is running a great photo journal about life in the Jose Felix Ribas barrio of Caracas - one of Latin America's largest shantytowns. It is a compelling look into the lives of Chávez's core supporters, and why his policies and rhetroic appeal so much to them.

Following the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, terrorism expert Loretta Napoleoni filed a compelling ForeignPolicy.com exclusive disputing the contention by U.S. intelligence that his successor as leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq was Abu Hamza al-Muhajir (aka Abu Ayyub al Masri and at right). She wrote,

... Zarqawi's death has given rise to a new round of propaganda, this time over his successor. U.S. military leaders, under pressure to demonstrate both that they know the identity of Zarqawi's heir and that the link between the insurgency and al Qaeda remains strong, are once again skillfully spinning the facts.

Whoever Muhajir may be, he has reportedly released a message today celebrating the defeat of Republicans in the U.S. elections. The CIA is currently verifying the authenticity of the tape, which taunts the beleaguered administration,

We call on the lame duck [Bush] not to hurry his escape the way the defense secretary did... we haven't had enough of your blood yet... We will not rest from our Jihad until we are under the olive trees of Rumieh and we have blown up the filthiest house — which is called the White House.