Two sides have formed in the run-up to Kenya’s March election. The first, under the Jubilee Alliance, is an alliance between presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and his running-mate William Ruto, two experienced political leaders who are also suspects to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity conducted in Kenya’s previous election period. The second main side vying for election is a partnership between presidential hopeful Raila Odinga and his running-mate Kalonzo Musyoka, under the CORD Alliance (Coalition for Reforms and Democracy). This clash of titans has three possible outcomes

The single most important event to influence Kenya’s political landscape over the next five years will be the general election to be held on 4 March 2013. Most importantly, the election will mark the stepping down of Kibaki, who has reached the end of his two term limit and not shown any unwillingness to relinquish power. In accordance with the new constitution, a presidential candidate must receive a solid majority of votes if he or she is to win office in the first round. Otherwise, voting enters a second round where the two most popular candidates face a run-off at the polls.

Social democracy seems perpetually at a crossroads. But today, more than a hundred years after the first of the parties affiliated to the Second International won a plurality in a parliamentary election (in Finland in 1907; Anderson, 1992, 307), social democrats may finally be running out of rope. All the main European social democratic parties are facing a crisis, registering at long last endlessly postponed questions about their fundamental purpose.

Much has been written about how the media misreported the Israeli elections and I want to briefly dispel two particular misconceptions. 1) The majority of Israelis did not vote against Benjamin Netanyahu. Polls indicate quite clearly that a majority of Israelis wanted to see Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Many voters, though, were opposed to the newly created alliance between his Likud Party and former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beyiteinu Party.

This morning, in his much anticipated speech on the European Union, David Cameron announced that he would seek to renegotiate the terms of the UK’s membership of the EU and then offer an in/out referendum to the British public. It was the sort of ‘announcement’ only possible in politics – something we’ve more or less known was coming for months, the details of which were released the night before.

Having, until now, benefited from the tacit support of the existing political elite, Britain’s pro-European lobby has had less incentive to create a formal political movement. However, if the anti-European jungle drums continue to beat louder, it seems only a matter of time before the pro-Europeans organise, perhaps in advance of the June 2014 European elections.

UPDATE: In the final week, the Czech presidential race opened up. Jan Fischer performed poorly in the debates, while the Czech Republic’s aristocratic foreign minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, picked up support from two sources: those who disliked both Zeman and Fischer, and those from the centre-right who started to doubt Fischer’s viability in a run-off against Zeman.

The Italian left, heirs to the strongest communist party in Western Europe and a powerful Catholic political tradition, is struggling to adjust its values and political agenda to the new needs and constrains of the modern globalised world. As the Democratic Party seems set to win Italy’s general elections next year, and thus take control of the third largest economy of the Eurozone, such ideological adjustment is now particularly urgent.