Shuffled 2025-13

It isn’t always easy to peek behind the curtains when there’s a political defenestration, but it’s always very pleasing when something seems slightly off in the gushing press-release about the latest shiny appointee, and finding the right question to tug on (often who isn’t mentioned) starts to make things clearer, and soon the “there doesn’t seem to be much of interest here” grows into something difficult to boil down to a single paragraph. This week has a couple of great examples of that, and I’d encourage you to follow the embedded links on some of these stories to get much more than the passing glimpse I can offer:

🇰🇪 Kenya: Last June the “Gen Z protests” against a controversial finance bill to introduce significant new taxes escalated to riots where both Parliament and Nairobi City Hall were set on fire, Barack Obama’s half-sister was tear-gassed by police during a live CNN interview, and at least 22 people died. President Ruto vetoed the bill the next day, initially saying he was very proud of young people exercising their democratic duty, but he also called the riots treasonous, and shortly afterwards the military was deployed domestically, and the abduction and disappearance of protesters started to escalate. Ruto initially dismissed the abductions as “fake news”, and has always claimed not to be involved, but earlier this year the Cabinet Secretary for Public Service, Justin Muturi, who had been Attorney General at the time, and whose own son had been abducted, publicly outed Ruto and the National Intelligence Service, and refused to attend cabinet meetings unless/until the abductions issue was on the agenda. Now Ruto has finally sacked him, triggering a mini-reshuffle where Aden Duale and Deborah Barasa also swap their Health and Environment roles with each other. Muturi is now also promising to spill the tea on Ruto’s corruption, so there may yet be more shenanigans ahead.

🇪🇨 Ecuador: Back in 2023, President Guillermo Lasso was facing impeachment, so he decided to invoke the “mutual death” mechanism that essentially reboots the country, by triggering new parliamentary and presidential elections. He then announced he wouldn’t be running, and Daniel Noboa ended up the new President with Veronica Abad as Vice-President. But these elections don’t start a full new cycle: everyone just serves out the remainder of their predecessor’s term. So now the regularly scheduled elections have arrived again, and following February’s first round, Noboa goes into the run-off with less than a 0.2% lead. According to the constitution, the Vice President officially takes over whilst the President is campaigning, but Noboa and Abad have been loggerheading since pretty much immediately after the last election, with her being exilede to Israel, suspended, reinstated again by the courts, exiled to Turkey, and then suspended again. Now, Noboa’s next move to avoid her taking over has been to replace her again, claiming insubordination, appointing Cynthia Gellibert as the interim VP—though it is unclear whether the National Assembly will recognise this.

🇮🇱 Israel: Stomping into the ongoing hornet’s minefield of by last year’s High Court ruling that ultra-Orthodox students would no longer be able to avoid military conscription, ultra-Orthodox cabinet minister Yitzchak Goldknopf was filmed at his nephew’s wedding dancing to an anti-enlistment song. Even with Netanyahu’s backing, the resulting uproar was a bit too much to weather, and so Goldknopf had little option but to resign from his position as Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office. However, as he didn’t also resign from his more senior position as Minister of Housing and Construction, this comes across rather sleight of fudge. The same day the ultra-far-right Avi Moaz also resigned from the government (yet again), this time railing against the deep state cabal who were “instilling a hyper-progressive, anti-Jewish and anti-national worldview into the education and legal system”. Several days later, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also resigned. Some reports read this one as exposing a deep rift in the coalition, but others had it as merely a procedural application of the Norwegian Law. Either way, he withdrew the resignation just before it was due to take effect.

🇬🇱 Greenland: In the recent election (called early to gauge everyone’s mood, because events), former opposition party, Demokraatit, won the largest number of seats, so got first dibs at forming a coalition. Teaming up with Inuit Ataqatigiit would have been enough for a majority, but in just over two weeks they got agreement not only with them, but formed a coalition of four out of the five parties representing in Parliament, representing 75% of the votes, with Jens-Frederik Nielsen as Prime Minister. The one party excluded? The more populist, US-friendly, Naleraq. (The most US-friendly, Qulleq, didn’t win a single seat.)

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea: At the end of January, just as the country was about to start celebrating the 50th anniversary of independence, Julius Chan, the “Last Man Standing” from that era, who had been the country’s first Finance Minister, and then three-time Prime Minister, died. Since 2007 he had been the governor of New Ireland Province, where he has now been succeeded by his nephew-cum-nemesis Walter Schnaubelt. This required Schnaubelt to resign as the Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation, triggering a mini-reshuffle, where that position has now been split in two, with Miki Kaeok moving from Finance to Transport, and Wake Goi from Mining to Civil Aviation. That left gaps at Finance and at Mining, so three-time former Finance Minister Rainbo Paita has been called back to the Cabinet—except this time, somewhat unexpectedly, as Mining Minister. The new Finance Minister is yet to be announced.

🇦🇼 Aruba: Last September, the Estates (parliament) saw some shenanigans when RAIZ, the junior party in the governing coalition, nominated one of their own members for Speaker, who was then promptly elected will support from the opposition over the incumbent from the lead party (MEP). Claiming betrayal, the Prime Minister dissolved the government. The resulting elections in December saw the MEP relegated to second place, but the former-opposition, now-seat-leading Aruban People’s Party (AVP) short of a majority, leading to months of coalition negotiations. This week the new government was finally sworn in, with the AVP teaming up with the new FUTURO party, led, rather confusingly, by Geoffrey Wever and Gerlien Croes (the previous Prime Minister being Evelyn Wever-Croes.)

🇿🇲 Zambia: This week’s “all I know is what’s in the tersely-written press release” award goes to the removal of Gary Nkombo as Minister of Local Government and Regional Development. The teasing “read more” link just goes to a PDF version of the same text (except this time with a signature and an official stamp!), and any news stories about this pretty much just regurgitate the press release verbatim or, at best, so lightly edited that it’s clear they have no further information either. Only the Lusaka Times seems willing to dig a little deeper, but ultimately they don’t really get anywhere further than concluding that there must be some deeper reason, but they don’t know what it is.

🇸🇪 Sweden: The reasons behind the resignation of Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg aren’t much clearer. The official line was that this was due to the high cost of a ministerial position on her personal life, but both the Party Secretary of the Liberals and their Chief of Staff also resigned with her, and Party Leader Johan Pehrson has refused to be drawn on the details, saying that he won’t discuss the conversations he’s had, and the press should talk to everyone directly. Former Party Secretary Nina Larsson has now taken over as Minister.

🇳🇪 Niger: Abdourahmane Tchiani, the country’s de facto leader since the military coup in 2023, has dejurified himself into the official President through a new transition charter. This is supposedly only for a five-year period, though it does say up-front that the “five” part may be flexible, depending on the country’s security status, so place your bets now.

🇩🇯 Djibouti: After almost twenty years as Foreign Minister, Mahamoud Ali Youssouf has been elected (on the seventh round of voting!) as the chief executive of the African Union. Replacing him domestically is former Ambassador to Kuwait, Abdoulkader Houssein Omar.

🇨🇱 Chile: In what appears to be a fairly routine machinery-of-government change, rather than any devious machinations or shenanigans, the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security has been split into the Ministry of the Interior and (surprise!) the Ministry of Public Security. Álvaro Elizalde remains in place as the Interior Minister, while Luis Cordero Vega, who was previously the Undersecretary, takes over as the new Public Security Minister.

🇸🇲 San Marino: April 1^st brings the bi-annual handover of the duumvirate. The new Heads of State are Italo Righi from the right, and Denise Bronzetti from the left. Readers’ homework for next week is to imagine what your country would be like if political opponents were made co-leaders, but only for six months at a time. People have been laughing at the Sammarinese system for hundreds of years, but in these interesting times, maybe we should all be looking more closely at some of the alternative models out there (or out there political models² ).

Deaths in office:

We’ve had very few deaths of sitting government ministers so far this year, but this week saw two:

• 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia: the very-long-serving Minister of State, Motleb bin Abdullah Al-Nafisah

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland: the Drugs and Alcohol Minister, Christina McKelvie

Follow-ups:

🇵🇼 Palau: As we saw back in January, after his re-election as President, Surangel S. Whipps Jr. kept his previous Cabinet pretty much intact—other than needing to accommodate the new Vice President, who gets elected separately. However, everyone still needed to be reconfirmed by the Senate, and this time around they ended up rejecting the re-appointments of Finance Minister Kaleb Udui Jr.¹ and Education Minister Dale Jenkins. Rather than jumping through the hoops of proposing new candidates who might make it through the confirmation process, the President has decided to instead leave those positions officially vacant, and simply appoint Jenkins and Udui as Special Assistants, who can then “advise” on matters relating to those ministries though without formal authority over them. (Somehow this feels something that may return in a future edition…)

🇸🇾 Syria: Back at the start of February, we saw Ahmed al-Sharaa officially installed as the transitional President. This week he unveiled his new ethnically- and religiously-mixed transitional Cabinet, which includes minorities and one woman (anything close to gender parity is presumably a looooong ways away; even a single female minister is a lot more than many expected). Whether these steps will be enough to get anyone to further lift sanctions is still the eight hundred billion dollar question.

Next week:

Usually by this stage I can easily reel off a list of at least seven or eight countries that will be featured in next week’s newsletter. But either I’m overlooking a lot of what’s going on everywhere, or we’re in for the shortest missive yet. There are lots of countries where news filters out to the rest of the world much more slowly than from others (especially so when much of the media everywhere seems to be suffering from an every-increasingly unhealthy hyperfocus), so I still have a while to hunt down the stories I need, but I’m going to have to leave you on bated tenterhooks for now on just where they might be from.

1  In researching this I came across a reference to the Senate being rather upset a couple of years ago when he tried to launch an official stablecoin without their approval. I have no idea whether that was a factor here, and much as I’d love to get lost down that rabbit-hole, news-density from Palau is a little too meagre. Pointers, as always, very welcome.

2  No, Andorra, sit down.