Shuffled 2025-11

It feels odd to say that nothing very much happened this week, but the conceit here is tightly drawn: only changes in who’s holding office qualify. Usually the stories of why such changes have happened make a useful filter, but this week the number of relevant events was very low, and most of them were fairly routine. It was tempting to try to sneak an extra day into the week, as almost as much happened on that eighth day as the previous seven combined, but you’re going to have to wait til next week for all that…

So what did happen this week?

🇧🇿 Belize: The recent election was a little more interesting than usual due to ongoing chaos in the United Democratic Party—the historically more dominant of the two parties that have controlled politics since independence, but whose support fell apart spectacularly at the previous election. That certainly wasn’t helped when their new leader, John Saldivar, was ousted after only three days when he got implicated for taking large wads of cash from Lev Dermen (leader of the Armenian mafia in Los Angeles, who was subsequently sentenced to 40 years in prison for billion-dollar fraud) in exchange for a passport. After that electoral wipeout they continued to disintegrate further, with their next leader, Patrick Faber, in turn being ousted, reinstated, and then ousted again over domestic abuse allegations. The subsequent leadership contest was then followed by an almost immediate attempt at a recall petition that quickly dissolved into even more chaos, leading to the party going into this year’s election with both Moses Barrow (better known internationally as rapper Shyne) and Tracy Panton each claiming to be the rightful leader, and Prime-Minister-to-be. In the end none of this really mattered, as the humiliating defeat of the 2020 election was re-enacted almost shot-for-shot: only two seats changed hands (one in each direction), leaving the PUP with their same overwhelming majority, and the UDP still stuck on only 5 seats, except now split between two warring factions. The new government formally took office this week, with lots of people being shuffled around in the Cabinet, but as every single MP of the winning party got a government position, the only real scope for disappointment was in which position.

🇫🇲 Micronesia: Avoiding all those party shenanigans completely, every candidate in the latest election was, as usual, an independent. Of the ten seats available, five were taken by incumbents running un-opposed, and three were fairly comfortable re-elections. Isaac Figir, the longest continuously serving Member of Congress retired and didn’t stand, so the only member to actually be unseated was Floor Leader Quincy Lawrence, who lost to Jermy W. Mudong. The real shenanigans though seem to have been in the simultaneous elections in Chuuk, the largest of the four federal states. Prior to the election the outgoing Senate failed to confirm the Governor’s new Electoral Commission, leaving competing groups each claiming the right to determine who the new Senators should be. This has descended into farce, with claims that the new group took control of lots of boxes of votes, refused access to them for security reasons, and then over the next few days brought most of them in one by one for counting, but declared and certified the winners without two of the boxes ever being opened. Best I can tell, there’s still been no resolution, but Chuukese news is pretty hard to come by. Most of this is from the latest edition of the Kaselehlie Press, but that’s only published fortnightly.

🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago: Keith Rowley became the first Prime Minister in the country’s history to step down voluntarily mid-term, claiming that he’d achieved everything he wanted, and now it was time for someone else. That someone else turned out to be Stuart Young, the former Energy Minister, who then, immediately on taking over, called an early election. Until then his new Cabinet remains pretty much the same as Rowley’s, with a few members swapping positions, but no-one disappearing other than Attorney General Vishnu Dhanpaul who had already announced his departure to become a judge on the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal.

🇨🇦 Canada: Back in January Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his pending resignation, after increased pressure from his party and a spat with Deputy PM and former ally Chrystia Freeland over how to handle the people who had moved in next door. The subsequent leadership election was won by former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, who becomes Prime Minister, despite not being, nor ever having been, a Member of Parliament, or indeed ever having held any elected office at all. As with Young, he also quickly called a new election, but he also made much more sweeping changes to the Cabinet, slimming it down significantly, demoting some previously senior ministers, and bringing in a few new faces.

🇬🇷 Greece: Back in January, we saw a new Speaker take office, as Konstantinos Tasoulas, the previous one, was highly likely to become the next President. That ended up going to four rounds of voting by MPs, but Tasoulas did eventually win, and took office this week. The ongoing protests over the handling of the 2023 train crash, which we last saw with the resignation of former Deputy Prime Minister Christos Triantopoulos a couple of weeks ago, also played in, with several parties refusing to participate in the Presidential vote in protest, and with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis also pushed into carrying out a reshuffle this week, despite facing down a no confidence vote. Amongst a handful of changes, most of which bring significantly younger politicians in key roles, Christos Dimas becomes the fifth Transport Minister since the crash, and Finance Minister Kostis Hatzidakis gets shunted across to being responsible for Economic Growth, and is replaced by former Digital Minister Kyriakos Pierrakakis.

🇸🇴 Somalia: Five new full ministers (including a new Minister of Defence), plus almost a dozen new deputy ministers, have been installed after a cabinet reshuffle, but if I thought Micronesia was a difficult place to get news from, Somalia is even worse, and I can find very little that goes beyond parroting an official press release, and certainly nothing with any useful context, background, commentary, opinion, insight, or even gossip. I can’t even tell whether most of these new appointees are the same as previous officeholders with similar names, or entirely new faces. As always, if anyone can point me to anything, I’ll be most grateful.

🇲🇩 Moldova: Economic Development Minister Dumitru Alaiba has resigned for reasons that are, yet again, entirely opaque. (Even Moldova Matters’ excellent weekly roundup can’t shed any light on this one.) He was very quickly replaced by Doina Nistor, who previously ran multiple USAID-funded projects, most recently the Future Technologies Project, which is presumably yet another casualty of events that continually make my “no US content” goal look more and more foolish every week.

Next week:

Looks like being a bumper edition again, with updates from Colombia, Estonia, Iceland, Israel, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Namibia, Peru, Philippines, Slovakia, Serbia, Tunisia, and more. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you know what to do…