Word: fractious
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...order to win, Gantt needed a heavy turnout of blacks, who make up 19% of the state's electorate and normally vote Democratic. That he got. But Gantt also needed at least 40% of North Carolina's whites. There he fell short by five points. The fractious campaign produced a huge vote in white precincts and an overall total of 52% to 48% in Helms' favor. The margin, like the strategy, was almost identical to Helms' three previous victories...
That is unlikely to happen. The King's popularity is at an all-time high, primarily because he refuses to take a hard line against Saddam, whom Jordanians respect for standing up to the U.S. and Israel. Even Jordan's normally fractious trade unions have put their differences aside and pledged to take cuts in wages to support what they call Saddam's "just Arab cause." A highly placed Jordanian official warns that the longer the U.S. stays in the gulf, "the bigger hero Saddam Hussein will become." He says that despite Iraq's aggression, Jordanians feel that the preservation...
...Stanislav Shatalin, a member of the group of Gorbachev advisers who make up the Presidential Council. The decision to join forces with Yeltsin was a masterstroke. By siding with the maverick Russian leader, who enjoys widespread popular support, Gorbachev improved his chances of pushing through reforms in an increasingly fractious country...
...June balloting the U.D.F. had won only 144 seats, compared with the Socialists' 211. But Zhelev, 55, a philosopher turned politician and longtime anticommunist, managed to hold his own fractious movement together at a time when the rifts in the Socialist Party were growing wider daily. In the end, he won the presidency with the help of votes from reformers within the Socialist Party. The new President will have the power to call fresh parliamentary elections...
Neither centuries under Turkish and Austro-Hungarian domination nor more than four decades of communist rule have obliterated the ethnic passions that made the Balkans a synonym for fractious politics. Now, with the communist world crumbling, new instability may follow the glum quiet of the Pax Sovietica. The peril exists side by side with the opportunity for healthy change, but the current political ferment of Eastern Europe is an inherently volatile mix in which old demons -- belligerent nationalism and demagogic populism -- could win out as easily as liberal democracy...