Shuffled 2025-12

One fun benefit from writing this every week has been in finding other interesting newsletters—not so much through researching the stories behind political axings (though I definitely have found some that way) as from those with such impeccable taste as to link thiswards. The most recent of these is “Weak signals and other trends”, where Shuffled slotted very neatly into their section of “Hodgepodge discovery: Articles for curious minds and the polymaths”, alongside hungry judges, deorbiting, and the invention of background music. It’s another one of those newsletters where actual reading time is likely to be at least an order of magnitude greater than expected, because it links to so many other great stories, and now I’m realising I should probably have linked to it down at the bottom, rather than upfront here…

Anyway, as predicted last week¹ , this week saw the defenestration rate ratchet way back up again:

🇮🇸 Iceland: This week a story broke that recently-appointed cabinet member Ásthildur Lóa Thórsdóttir had had a romantic relationship with a 15-year-old boy, and had a son together, but she then refused him access to their child, while still demanding financial support from him. This happened over thirty years ago, and there’s a lot of she-says he-says over some of the details, but in most of the world this is still a story that would be hard to shrug off—even if you’re not the Minister of Education and Children’s Affairs—so she swiftly resigned, and has been replaced by Guðmundur Ingi Kristinsson.

🇵🇪 Peru: After ten months on the job as Interior Minister (which might sound short, but that’s the longest anyone has survived in the role since 2020; which might not sound like that long ago, except the position has changed hands an astonishing twenty times since then) Juan José Santiváñez has been censured by Congress for, basically, just being bad at the job, and blaming everything on everyone but himself. The continued rise in organised crime and extortion rackets has reached something of a tipping point with the post-gig assassination of Paul Flores, singer with the super-long-running cumbia band, Armonía 10, for failing to pay his protection dues, and with a state of emergency now declared, and the President considering reinstating the death penalty, retired police general Julio Diaz Zulueta is next to chew on the poison pill.

🇹🇳 Tunisia: President Kais Saied (who previously dissolved Parliament after it tried to repeal the decrees he had issued to take almost complete control) has sacked Prime Minister Kamel Maddouri, reportedly for differences in economic and financial vision—possibly due to, or at least exampled by, Maddouri asking the EU for more money whilst Saied has been talking about “self reliance” being a core policy. Sara Zaafarani Zenzri becomes the fourth new PM since the 2021 autocoup.

🇨🇴 Colombia: Last week’s edition was the first in a while that didn’t feature any Colombian cabinet changes, but that was a short-lived stability: this week Finance Minister Diego Guevara quit after only three months in office. The official line is simply that this happened after “a calm and friendly personal conversation” with President Gustavo Petro, but it’s generally believed to be because Petro vetoed Guevara’s attempt to bring the budget under control with spending cuts. He’s replaced by German Avila, a former M-19 guerrilla turned head of government-affiliated holding company Grupo Bicentenario.

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan: Amid ongoing disputes with OPEC over production quotas, Energy Minister Almasadam Sätqaliev has been shuffled over to heading up the country’s brand new Nuclear Energy Agency. Replacing him is Yerlan Akkenzhenov, last in the public eye when journalist Daniyar Adilbekov was sentenced to four and a half years in prison after accusing Akkenzhenov of corruption. Akkenzhenov strenuously denies this, natch.

🇳🇦 Namibia: It’s farewell to Nangolo Mbumba who took over as President when Hage Geingob died last year, but who also announced at the time he wouldn’t run in this year’s election, and, impressively, held to his word. Taking over is Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, formerly the country’s first female Vice President, who won well over twice as many votes as second-place Panduleni Itula, thus becoming the country’s first female President. Keeping with the theme, Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, formerly the country’s first female Prime Minister, has now shunted over to become the first female Speaker of Parliament, after NNN appointed Elijah Ngurare as her PM.

🇰🇷 South Korea: Back in December President Yoon Suk Yeol was swiftly impeached and criminally charged with insurrection, after a series of shenanigans culminating in his attempt to impose martial law. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo became the acting President, but less than two weeks later was in turn also impeached, largely for refusing to fill three vacant seats on the Constitutional Court who would decide on Yoon’s future. With both of the top slots vacated, Finance Minister Choi Sang-mok took over both roles while everyone worked out what was going to happen next. Choi in turn appointed two of the three missing judges, and this week the fuller court ruled that Han’s impeachment had been improper, reinstating him as Prime Minister, and acting President again. It’s possible that that may all change again soon: their ruling on Yoon’s impeachment is due on April 4th.

🇷🇸 Serbia: Last November, the main canopy of the railway station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. This has been widely blamed on corruption, and even after several ministerial resignations, multiple arrests, and the formal indictments of thirteen officials, including the Construction Minister, mass protests have continued to escalate, with hundreds of thousands attending. Increasingly under pressure, Prime Minister Miloš Vučević announced his resignation in January, but it took until this week for the process to play out, and the government to officially fall. Of course this doesn’t mean that anyone is actually out of office yet; everyone still continues in a caretaker role until a new government can be formed, which may require new elections.

🇨🇼 Curaçao: As per normal procedure, the entire government resigned just before the election. The usual process is that they all stay in office in a caretaker role until a new coalition can be formed and sworn in: a process that can take some time (almost three months last time around.) This time, however, for the first time ever, a single party (current Prime Minister Gilmar Pisas’s Movementu Futuro Kòrsou) won an outright majority in the election, which means there may not need to be any coalition talks. However, as there’s a separation between the executive and the legislature, there is some speculation that the party won’t be able to find enough suitable members to fill all the cabinet seats and all their parliamentary seats, and that this may not be as quick a process as initially thought.

🇯🇲 Jamaica: Audrey Marks, previously the ambassador to the US, was appointed to the Senate, and several days later swiftly also appointed to the Cabinet, responsible for efficiency, innovation, and digital transformation. Delano Seiveright, another recently appointed Senator, was also made the junior Transport Minister at the same time. Best I can tell both of these posts have been empty since at least October last year, so there are no corresponding ousters.

Follow-ups

🇸🇰 Slovakia: A few weeks ago, we watched Fico decide to re-”balance” the awkward 7-7-3 party split in the Cabinet by taking the Tourism and Sports ministry away from one of the coalition partners and giving it to his own party; this week the second half of the manoeuvre was completed by likewise snarfing the Ministry of Investments and Regional Development from the other coalition party. Now Smer have a much more satisfying² majority of 9-6-2.

🇪🇪 Estonia: That week also saw Estonia attempt to resolve the problems in its three-way coalition through the alternative method of simply booting out the Social Democrats. This week the two remaining parties agreed their new agenda, and formed a new government. Many of the ministers remained in place, but Yoko Alender and Signe Riisalo lost out, returning to their parliament seats instead. One other unexpected beneficiary of this latest round of musical chairs was 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022 Eurovision hopeful Stig Rästa, who was so low on the party list that he’d moved to Sweden after the 2023 election, only to find himself now suddenly called to parliament as all the higher-placed candidates rejected the position.

🇵🇭 Philippines: That same week, Paul Mercado also became acting ICT minister, after Ivan Uy resigned amongst rumours that the President was getting fed up with his jet-set lifestyle. This week the non-acting replacement was announced: former UnionDigital Bank president and CEO Henry Rhoel Aguda. Stories about Aguda having been axed from the bank after heavy losses that necessitated a €25MM additional infusion of cash have since disappeared from the internet, so were presumably entirely unfounded.

🇰🇼 Kuwait: Also back in week 10, we saw Electricity Minister Mahmoud Boushehri resigning and being replaced by Dr. Noura Al-Mashaan as acting minister. This week Sabeeh Al-Mukhaizeem has been appointed as the full Minister.

🇮🇱 Israel: Finally getting to go a little further back, all the way to the end of January, Ben Gvir’s far-right Jewish Power party had left the government in protest at the ceasefire agreement with Hamas. Well, breaking the ceasefire didn’t only get Netanyahu out of having to testify in his corruption trial, it also paved the way for Ben Gvir (plus Amichai Eliyahu and Yitzhak Wasserlauf) to return to the Cabinet, despite the Attorney General’s earlier advice that this would not be legally permissible.

Next week:

Aruba, Greenland, Kenya, Niger, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Sweden, Syria, and more. If you reading this and haven’t subscribed already, this is your cue…

1  You’ll be astonished by the one weird trick I’ve discovered that makes such predictions amazingly easy.

2  To them. Others’ mileage may vary.