Indonesia’s disasters – October’s tsunami and eruption, the killing of suspected terrorists in Sumatra – get more media attention than its democratic elections. Yet these marked the direct re-election of the president last year and a cautious step away from Islamising agendas, re-affirming the country’s historic balance of secularism with Islam

Russia’s post-Soviet elites of wealth and bureaucracy did a quiet deal with Putin long ago: we’ll keep your governing structure stable if you keep us in the money. And that’s how the country functions, even if it is storing up problems for the future