When Sen. Lamar Alexander spoke Monday at President Obama’s inauguration, he threw some healthy context into his praise of the U.S. practice of peacefully transferring power between leaders. “There is no mob, no coup, no insurrection,” he said. It’s a point so obvious, so taken for granted, that it’s almost an anachronism.
These countries are the most at risk of a coup, according to a statistical model. Click to enlarge. (Max Fisher/The Washington Post)
But a number of the world’s governments are still at risk of a coup. A few hours before the inauguration, it looked like one of them could be Eritrea, an East African country whose government is so authoritarian and cruel that it’s often compared to North Korea’s. Dissident soldiers seized the country’s state-run TV station, often a first step in a coup, forcing anchors to call for the release of all political prisoners (there are several thousand) before the broadcast abruptly ended. It turns out that, according to Reuters, the soldiers were likely just “low- to mid-ranking soldiers who sought a change in the constitution rather than a coup.”
