Moldova — Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin failed on Wednesday to secure the parliament’s election of a compliant ally as his successor who would have allowed him to continue running the country behind the scenes.
Voronin’s plan to win parliamentary support for fellow Communist Zinaida Greceanii came unstuck when opposition parties torpedoed the ballot with a boycott that denied her, by just one vote, the required tally of votes for election.
The outcome triggers new parliamentary elections, though Voronin took no immediate steps to dissolve the chamber.

India’s ruling Congress party looked set to take an unexpectedly decisive general election victory as the 400 million-plus votes cast during the month-long election were counted this morning.
The party defied exit polls and analysts’ predictions, which had indicated a much closer result. With more than 70% of the vote counted the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was set to take more than 250 seats and the opposition alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) forecast to take 160.

A conservative businessman has been elected president of Panama, promising to guide the country through the world economic crisis and an expansion of the Panama Canal.
Ricardo Martinelli swept to victory on Sunday, his business experience swaying voters worried by the global recession that has stunted Panama’s economic growth.
Martinelli, 57, representing the opposition Alliance for Change, won 61 per cent of the votes, against 37 per cent for Balbina Herrera of the ruling centre-left Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD).

Idle building cranes and empty shop windows reminded Icelandic voters of their country’s economic calamity Saturday as they voted for a new Parliament.
Opinion surveys and interviews with voters suggest they plan to turn to the left and punish the pro-business leaders who brought the country to ruin.
The economic crisis gripping this volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic just south of the Arctic Circle has emerged as the key issue.

Voters in Indonesia are preparing to elect a new national parliament, in a vote that will shape how the world’s third largest democracy responds to the challenges of the global economic crisis.
About 171 million Indonesians are eligible to vote, with more than 13,000 candidates competing for 132 seats in the upper house of parliament and 560 seats in the lower house.
The election is only the third democratic vote since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998 and will help decide the field of contenders for presidential elections scheduled …

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, not seen in public for nearly three years, has been for a walk in Havana.
Mr Chavez, who visited Cuba a week ago, said in comments carried by Venezuelan state TV that Mr Castro had seemed in “very, very good” shape.
Media in Cuba have neither reported nor confirmed Mr Chavez’s tale.
Mr Castro, 82, has not made a public appearance since undergoing gastric surgery in July 2006.

The president of Latvia plans to name on Thursday a new prime minister who will have to deal with a deepening economic crisis and try to reassure investors the country will stick to painful budget cuts.
The pressure on the small Baltic nation to form a new government quickly increased after ratings agency Standard & Poor’s on Tuesday gave a junk debt rating to Latvia, only the second EU nation to go below investment grade after Romania.
“We are planning Thursday (to name a new prime minister),” said the spokeswoman for President …

Posters showing sinister black crows pecking away at a map of Switzerland have added controversy to Sunday’s referendum on whether to extend the country’s free movement agreement with European Union.
The stark imagery has been used by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, or Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), in a repeat of the controversial racial imagery that made it Switzerland’s largest political grouping during elections last year.
The latest SVP poster echoes its Oct 2008 campaign image which played on popular resentment of immigrants by showing a group of white sheep kicking a …

CHANCELLOR ANGELA Merkel’s September re-election hopes have improved after the strong performance of her preferred coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), in a weekend poll.
That vote left Dr Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) certain to retain power – with FDP support – in the western state of Hesse, home to financial capital Frankfurt, after a year of political deadlock.

President-elect Barack Obama is riding a powerful wave of optimism into the White House, with Americans confident he can turn the economy around but prepared to give him years to deal with the crush of problems he faces starting Tuesday, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.
While hopes for the new president are extraordinarily high, the poll found, expectations for what Mr. Obama will actually be able to accomplish appear to have been tempered by the scale of the nation’s problems at home and abroad.