Political Geography

Mexico
Federal Republic
President Enrique Pena Nieto

• He was the eldest of four sblings in a middle-class family; his father, Gilberto Enrique Pena del Mazo, was an engineer for the electric company and his mother, Maria del Socorro Nieto, a schoolteacher.
• Reports that he fathered two children in extramarital affairs while his wife Monica raised the couple's 3 children, plus the investigation into the sudden death of his wife at home in 2007, have prompted many to call him the Teflon candidate because trouble seems to slide off him.
• Two years later he announced his engagement to soap opera actor Angelica Rivera. Rivera becam his wise in a star-studded wedding ceremony two years ago and is now the first lady of Mexico.

China
Communist state
President XI Jinping

• Xi Jinping is the son of revolutionary veteran Xi Zhonxun, one of the Communist Party's founding fathers.
• He married folk singer Peng Liyuan, who also holds the rank of army general, in 1987. To many in China, Ms. Peng was better-known half of the couple before Xi Jinping became leader of the Communist Party.
• The couple have a daughter named Xi Mingze, who is studying at Harvard University in the US.

India
federal government
President Pranab Mukherjee

• He taught Political Science at the Vidiyanagar College, and worked as a journalist before entering politics.
• Mukherjee was rated as one of the best finance ministers of the world in 1984 and was adjudged the best parliament in 1997.
• He had a conflict with Rajiv Gandhi (who took over as Prime Minister from his mother Indira after she was assasinated in 1984) and started his own party - Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress.

Afghanistan
Islamic republic
President Hamid Karzai

• He emerged as a resistance leader under Taliban rule and worked to undermine the regime.
• He is well versed in several languages, including his native Peshto, Persian, Hindi, French and English
• Several times in 2001, Karzai warned the US that the Taliban were connected with al Qaeda and that there was a plot for an imminent attack on the US, but his warnings went unheeded

Germany
Federal republic
President Joachim Gauck/ Chancellor Angela Merkel

• Graduated from University of Leipzig in 1978 with a degree in physics and physical chemistry; earned a PhD in quantum chemistry from German Academy of Sciences in Berlin 1986.
• Has been Chancellor since November 2005
• Merkel has earned the top spot on the FORBES list of Most Powerful Women In The World for the past 10 years.

  


United Kingdom
Constitutional monarchy and Commonwealth realm
Prime Minister David Cameron/ Queen Elizabeth

• At the age of seven, the young Cameron packed off to Heatherdown, a highly exclusive preparatory school, which counted Princes Edward and Andrew among its pupils. Then, following in the family tradition, came Eton, Britain;s top private school.
• His first child, Ivan, who was born profoundly and needed round the clock care, died in February 2009.
• The experience of caring for Ivan and witnessing at first hand the deication of NHS hospital staff, is said by friends to have broadened Mr. Cameron's horizons. He had, friends say, led an almost charmed life to that point.
• Cameron is the youngest Prime Minister (43 when he took office) in over 200 years.
• Elizabeth became queen on February 6, 1952, and was crowned on June 2, 1953. Her reign has lasted 60 years- and counting...

 


France
Republic
President Francois Hollande

• Hollande has no previous experience in a national government position.
• The mother of his four children is Segolene Royal, with whom he shared a 30- year relationship.
• He was born in 1954 in the city of Rouen to an extreme-right physician father and progressive social worker mother. 

Brazil
Federal republic
President Dilma Rousseff

• she opposed Brazil's military dictatorship of the 1960s and the '70s, and served three years in prison, where she was repeatedly tortured.
• She has been divorced twice.
• She has a degree in economics, and now ruled the country with the eighth-biggest economy in the world.
• She underwent chemotherapy for lymphoma in 2009, and is now in remission.

Venezuela
federal republic
President Nicolas Maduro Moros

• Nicolas Maduro Moros worked as a bus driver before becoming politically active in the early 1990s.
• Maduro was introduced to Hugo Chavez in 1992, after Chavez and other disenchanted members of the military were imprisoned for an attempt co up and Maduro began campaigning for Chavez's release. (Chavez was released in 1994 and won election to the presidency four years later.)
• After President Chavez won a third term in October 2012, he selected Maduro to serve as vice president, serving as one of his closest advisers as well as loyal spokesman, until Chavez's death at 58 on March 5, 2013, from cancer.

Saudi Arabia
Monarchy
King and Prime Minister Abdallah bin Abd al-Aziz Saud

• He has fathered 22 children, the youngest when he was 79.
• He is worth approximately 21 billion dollars.
• He was appointed commander of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, a post he was still holding when he became king.
• In November 2007, King Abdullah visited Pope Benedict in the Apostolic Palac. He is the first Saudi monarch to visit the Pope. In March 2008, he called for a "brotherly and since dialouge between believers from all religions."
• In 2011 he granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, the biggest change in a decade for women in a puritanical kingdom that practices strict separation of the sexes, including banning women from driving (the only country in the world with such a ban).

Iran
Theocratic republic
President Hasan Fereidun Ruhani and Khamenei
    Khamenei

• In 1963, took part in street protests against the US-backed Shah of Iran. after the uprising was quashed, Khamenei was exiled. Kharmenei was imprisoned multiple times and, in 1975, was internally exiled to a remote region in southern Iran. 
• Was elected President of Iran in 1981 an re-elected in 1985. Became Iran's Supreme Leader in 1989.

   Ruhani

• Mr Rouhani has held several parliamentary posts, including deputy speaker and has also served on the Supreme National Security Council.
• Was elected President of Iran - June 2013
• He has been openly critical of the outgoing president, saying Mahmound Ahmadinejad's "careless, unclaculated and unstudied remarks" have cost the country dearly.

 

Israel
Parliamentary democracy
President Shimon Peres/ Prime Minister Binyaum Netanyahu
    Peres

• born in Belarus. To escape the persecution of Jews there, the family fled to Palestine in 1934.
• When Arab forces launched their attack on the new state of Israel in 1948, Peres was given the cheif responsibility for securing military equipment for Israel from abroad. 
• Later he organized Israel's nuclear program and is regarded as the father of Israel's atomic bomb.
• As Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres was in charge of the Israeli negotiations during peace talks with the Palestinians. In the autumn of 994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his own Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

   Netanyahu

• As a child and youth he lived with his family in the US in the years 1956-58 and again in 1963-67
• After his brother Jonathan (Yonni) was killed, in July 1976, in the course of the Entebbe Operation, of which he was on e of the commanders, Netanyahu returned to Israel ans started to advocate international cooperation in fighting terrorism.
• Quote: "There are those who say that is the Holocaust had not occurred, the State of Israel would have been established earlier, the Holocaust would not have occurred."