Wednesday, September 17, 2014



Fiji votes

Fijians are heading to the polls today in the first elections since the 2006 coup. Good - Fiji deserves an elected government, not an unelected dictator. But the dictator is fighting hard to stop it. There's the weird ballot paper seemingly designed to frustrate voters, the disqualification of opposition candidates, and a pre-election media blackout which in practice applies only to the opposition. And of course, there's the ultimate threat: if voters don't rubberstamp the dictator, he'll just launch another coup.

The polls close at six, but full results could take up to a week. But hopefully we'll have an indication well before then of whether Fiji has voted to rid itself of its dictator, or entrench him.