World Leaders Survivor - Final Bracket 7 (COMPLETE)

[Blue Rectangle]

Kirchner

[Platypus]

BRTD-I don't think it's hate for Kirchner; he got this far, didn't he?

[Hatman 🍁]

RESULTS:
Nestor Kirchner   8
Manmohan Singh   1
Ricardo Lagos   3


Néstor Kirchner, President of Argentina is hereby eliminated



WORLD LEADERS SURVIVOR FINAL

INSTRUCTIONS: VOTE FOR WHO YOU WANT TO WIN, NOT WHO YOU WANT ELIMINATED

[Hatman 🍁]

Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India



Dr. Manmohan Singh is the fourteenth, and current, Prime Minister of India. He was born on 26 September 1932, Gah, West Punjab (now in Pakistan) and is member of the left-of-centre Indian National Congress party. A Sikh by faith, Singh was sworn in on May 22, 2004.

A rather low-key politician, Manmohan Singh enjoys a "squeaky clean" image and was advisor to opposition chief Sonia Gandhi throughout the election campaign in 2004 and their time in the opposition. He was awarded the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award in 2002. Singh's elevation to the most important national office came when Sonia Gandhi herself refused to take the top job, in view of the massive opposition she could have faced on account of her Italian antecedents. Although many critics and opposition leaders routinely criticize Gandhi as being the real power, or indeed a de-facto ruler, Singh is held in high esteem, and regard, all over the country and the world.

Singh has been married since 1958; he and his wife have three daughters.

Economic Reforms

Singh is regarded as the architect of India's original economic reform programme. His policies of economic liberalization, serving in his capacity as Finance Minister under the government of Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s, brought the country back from a looming economic bankruptcy. Now the country is enjoying record economic growth on the foundations laid by him. Singh is an economist by training, and has formerly served in the International Monetary Fund. He was educated at Nuffield College, Oxford, St John's College, Cambridge and Punjab University; he holds a doctorate in economics from Oxford.

Although his economic policies - which included the reduction of several redundant socialist policies - were widely popular, especially among the middle class, Singh lost his seat to the Lok Sabha from South Delhi in 1999. He was also a member of the Rajya Sabha from Assam since 1991 and the upper house leader of the opposition from 1998 - 2004 when India was governed by the right-of-center Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

Although an economic modernization plan presented by Singh was rejected by the Congress Party, which avowed itself to socialism, the reforms he introduced are regarded as primarily responsible for the present economic boom the country enjoys, and considered irreversible in face of the real progress achieved.

Ascent to Power

Dr. Manmohan Singh, an economic bureaucrat, was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in the late 1980s. In 1991, he was asked to head the Finance Ministry by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, who was aware of an acute economic crisis due to decades of stagnant socialist policies and a government riddled by fractious alliances, corruption and imcompetence. The crisis was so bad that the Government was about to mortgage its gold reserves to the Bank of England to obtain the cash reserves to run the country. All this while more than 400 million people starved and struggled in poverty and miserable living conditions.

Achieving an economic turn-around in two years, Dr. Singh was hailed as a hero, although the Rao administration was unpopular thanks to scandals, its parliamentary status as a minority government, and religious violence all over the country. Although its dissolution in 1996 marked the end of Rao's political career, Dr. Singh exited without bruises.

Dr. Singh stayed with the Congress Party despite continuous marginalization and defeats in the elections of 1996, 1998 and 1999. He did not join the rebels in a major split which occurred in 1999, when many major Congress leaders objected to Sonia Gandhi's rise as Congress President and Leader of the Opposition. Being touted as the Congress choice for the PM's job, she became a target for nationalists who objected to her Italian birth. It seemed that a party which turned to old links to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a foreigner for political leadership had no future or potential to look forward to. But Singh continued as a prominent leader, rising in confidence and helping to revamp the party's platform and organization.

The Congress alliance won a surprisingly high number of seats in the Parliamentary elections of 2004, owing to a nationwide disenchantment of millions of poorer citizens with the BJP's focus on the surging middle-class, and also its dismal record in handling religious tensions. The Left Front decided to support a Congress alliance government from outside in order to keep the "communal forces" out of power. Sonia Gandhi was elected leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party and was expected to become the Prime Minister but in a surprise move, declined to accept the post and instead nominated Dr. Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister. There were protests within the Congress about her refusal but eventually people accepted her decision and the allies too accepted her choice. Singh secured the nomination for prime minister on May 19, 2004 when President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam officially asked him to form a government. Although most expected him to head the Finance Ministry himself, he did not do so. His political mentor Sonia Gandhi retains absolute control over the MPs and organization of the Congress Party.

His appointment is notable as it comes 20 years after India witnessed significant tensions between the Indian central government and the Punjabi Sikh community. After Congress Party Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the mother-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, ordered central government troops to storm the Golden Temple (the holiest site in Sikhism) in Amritsar, Punjab to quell a separatist movement, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. The result was a tremendous nationwide crisis in which many innocent Sikhs were murdered in riots.

Singh has been Prime Minister for little over a year, and his remains a fairly popular government. His image is of an intellectual, a political leader of integrity (a common public perception denounces virtually every other as corrupt and tainted), compassionate and attentive to common people. Although legislative achievements have been few and the Congress-led alliance is routinely hampered by conflicts and scandals, Singh's administration has focused on reducing the fiscal deficit, providing debt-relief to poor farmers, extending social programs and advancing the pro-industry economic and tax policies that have launched the country on its major economic expansion course since 2002. Being a Sikh from a secular-socialist party, Singh has been the image of the Congress campaign to defuse religious tensions and conflicts and bolster political support from minorities like Muslims, Christians, and of course, Sikhs.

The Prime Minister's foreign policy has been to continue the new peace process with Pakistan initiated by his predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee. Exchange visits by top leaders from both countries have highlighted this year, as has reduced terrorism and increased prosperity in the state of Kashmir. The peace process has also been used by the government to build stronger relations with the United States, China and European nations.

But the Government suffered a setback when it lost the support of a key ally, Russia, for its bid for a permanent membership to the U.N. Security Council with veto privileges. Plans to expand the Council and reform the U.N. did not empower the nation's role as an Asian leader, although foreign leaders and its own hail it as the next Asian economic and strategic giant.

[Hatman 🍁]

Ricardo Lagos, President of Chile



Ricardo Froilán Lagos Escobar (born March 2, 1938) is a Socialist politician and the president of Chile since 2000. He won the presidential election of 1999 by a narrow margin in a runoff over Independent Democratic Union (UDI) candidate Joaquín Lavín.

Early life

Lagos was born in Santiago, Chile. He was the only child of Froilán Lagos Sepúlveda (who died when he was eight years old) and Emma Escobar Morales (who passed away in April 2005 at age 108). He attended primary school at Liceo Manuel de Salas and high school at the Instituto Nacional.

Political race

During the 1980s, Lagos assumed a fundamental role in the fight for the recovery of democracy. In addition to being one of the leaders of the Socialist Party of Chile, he became President of the Democratic Alliance, a force that grouped the majority of the democratic parties opposing the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. In 1983, he decided to leave his position as international civil employee in the United Nations. In December of that year, he became president of the Democratic Alliance. In 1987, as the president of the Committee of the Left for Free Elections, he called on all citizens and parties to enroll in the electoral registries to vote "no" in a 1988 national plebiscite on the question as to whether Pinochet should be allowed to remain president of Chile.

Lagos became the undisputed leader of Pinochet's opponents after appearing in the political television show De Cara al País where he indicated that "with the triumph of No, the country will prevent General Pinochet from being 25 years in power." Lagos then looked directly into the camera and accusingly raised his index finger to say directly to all viewers: "General Pinochet has not been honest with the country. I will remind you, General Pinochet, that on the day of the 1980 plebiscite you said that President Pinochet would not be a candidate in 1989. And now, you promise the country another eight years of tortures, murders, and human rights violations. It seems to me inadmissible that a Chilean can have so much hunger for power. You intend to stay in power for 25 years..."

After the triumph of the No alternative and the subsequent resignation of Pinochet, Lagos declined to be a candidate for the presidency in spite of being the main leader of the opposition. Instead, he supported Patricio Aylwin's candidancy and ran for a seat in the Senate for the Santiago-West district. On December 11, 1989, the day of the elections, he obtained the district's second majority. Nevertheless, he did not win a seat because his alliance's list did not double the vote of the second most voted list; this being a requisite in the Chilean electoral system created by Pinochet.

In 1990, Lagos was named Minister of Education by President Patricio Aylwin. In this position, he initiated reform aimed at increasing equality in access and improving education levels. In June 1993, he pushed for the notion of using primary elections in order to select the Concertación coalition's candidate for the following presidential election. He lost this primary to Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, who went on to become President of Chile. In 1994, Frei himself named Lagos Minister of Public Works. In this role, he developed an innovating system of road concessions, integrated the private sector in the construction of works and its later operation. During the Frei administration, he continued to be a leader of opinion and was a sure option for the following presidential election. His status was later ratified by his appointment as one of the members of the Committee of Twelve Distinguished Members of the Socialist International, which he shared with such personalities as Felipe González and Gro Harlem Brundtland. This committee was set up to process proposals for the renovation of the Social-Democratic thought for the 21st century.

In 1999, Lagos resigned as minister in order to begin his presidential campaign. In the primaries, he defeated senator Andrés Zaldívar, of the Christian Democratic Party to become the Concertación's sole presidential candidate. In the first round of the presidential election in December of the same year, he defeated right-wing candidate Joaquín Lavín, by only 30,000 votes. Since he failed to obtain an absolute majority, as is required to be elected President, a presidential runoff was subsequently held in January 2000 for the first time ever in Chile. Winning 51.3 percent of the vote, Lagos became the new President of Chile.

During the first year of his term in office, Lagos had to confront a high level of unemployment, generated by the political instability of the region, in a process that began to revert during end of 2003. In spite of this, Lagos enjoyed great popular support, bordering on 55%, according to diverse opinion polls. The policy of proximity with people was pronounced in the opening of the doors of the Palacio de La Moneda, that had remained closed since the 1973 coup d'etat.

Since 2002, his government has had to face suspicions of political corruption, due to the prosecution of one of his ministers, Carlos Cruz, and of other civil employees of the Public Works Ministry, in the denominated MOP-GATE case. Gloria Ana Chévesich, the judge in charge of this case, discovered that ministers, undersecretaries and other officials of exclusive confidence of the President, received additional payments to their regular remuneration: the so-called "extra payments". This irregularity was acknowledged by Lagos, who specified that the practice had also developed during the governments of Frei Ruiz-Tagle and Aylwin. The official position of the government consisted of not acknowledging the criminal nature in these practices and establishing a legal reform that increased the pay of ministers and undersecretaries of the government, a matter that was approved in its legislative proceeding.


During 2004, Lagos has had to face a series of tensions in his relation with other South American countries, caused by the recurring Bolivian aspiration for access to the sea. This situation was linked with the power crisis taking place in Argentina, who supplies Chile with natural gas. In bilateral meetings between Bolivian President Carlos Mesa and Argentine President Néstor Kirchner, the former agreed to the sale of Bolivian gas to Argentina under the condition that "not a single gas molecule be sold to Chile". Additionally, the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, has supported in various instances the Bolivian sea claim, causing a diplomatic impasse between Chile and Venezuela. The tension between both governments had dissipated during July 2004.

Lagos' presidency has been characterized by such achievements as the signing of Free Trade Agreements (with the European Community, the United States and South Korea), the great road works, the creation of an unemployment insurance, the bills to reform the health system, the program Chile Barrio, the increase of compulsory schooling to 12 years, the creation of a cultural institution (National Council of the Arts and the Culture) and the approval of the first divorce law.

On November 28, 2004, the day before the Valech Report was released, President Lagos announced to the Chilean public that the government would provide compensation to approximately 28,000 victims of torture under the Pinochet military regime. Of the 35,868 who testified before the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, about 28,000 accounts were regarded as legitimate.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I was originally going to vote for Singh as I said above but now after reading the bios, I'm going to vote for Lagos.

I tried to vote off Lagos due to knowing he was one of those free marketers in a left wing party, but since Singh is actually the same as well, Lagos wins out due to his work against Pinochet.

Got to way, Singh was my original pick to win the whole thing, but I never expected him to face Lagos in the final. Talk about a dark horse.

But yeah. I vote for Richardo Lagos.

[nini2287]

I vote Singh.  BTW, my mom saw Yuschenko in a hotel the other day.

[Huckleberry Finn]

The leader of the world's biggest democracy is a natural winner.

So I vote Singh.

[jimrtex]

Singh

[minionofmidas]

Lagos

[Platypus]

Lagos.

Size isn't everything

[Platypus]

I should just say, these are two of the best leaders in the world. We, as a forum, have done a damn fine job getting them here. If I wanted to pick a leader of the world or something, these two would be right up near the top of my list.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Lagos

[Middle-aged Europe]

Ricardo Lagos

[minionofmidas]

Btw, only reason I didn't vote Singh the round before was I didn't want the final to be Chile vs Argentina; that sounded too damn strange.

[Emsworth]

Manmohan Singh

[WMS]

Good choices, but since I have to pick just one...

Singh.

[Blue Rectangle]

Manmohan Singh

[Gustaf]

Singh - just to anger the lefties.

[Max Power]

Singh

[Jake]

Singh

[© tweed]

Lagos

[GMantis]

Ricardo Lagos

[Speed of Sound]

Singh

[MaC]

Lagos