It's terminology. I guess they'd be called so today, yes. They wouldn't be called like that a few hundred years ago when the term democracy first became public. The word democracy actually has a very interesting history. At the time of the founding of the United States of America, the founding fathers were actually motivated in crafting the constitution of the republic by fears of democracy breaking out. The resulting constitution also never mentioned the word democracy in it.
The Netherlands isn't a republic and republic basically just means "not a monarchy".
A republic means a state with representative democracy. (Not strictly necessarily representative, but it's hard to even imagine a State system with full democracy.)
You can be a democracy without being a republic and a republic without being a democracy.
Exactly, because a republic isn't very democratic. What I'm saying is that representative democracy is barely democratic at all. Especially when using systems like majority rule. In most representative democracies today, the general public is barely if at all participating in the government of public affairs. I'm purposefully using the original meaning of the word democracy: government by the people or the people governing themselves. If the only way we can govern is by checking a box on a ballot twice a decade and that resulting in anywhere between 1 and 250 people having full authority over an entire country, I would not call that governing at all. And it shows that in most republics, policy enacted by their governments rarely represent what people actually want and care about.
Does he have any effective political power?
Sure, but that only works up to a certain point. When they are ignored, voters will get even more annoyed and he might grow towards next election and become impossible to ignore. The same is happening with Vlaams Belang in Vlaanderen.
Just having allies sell oil for dollars instead of some other currency already helps the US a lot. It's called seigniorage, the more people use the US dollar, the more they can print without feeling much inflation. The whole gulf war was fought to ensure those countries traded oil in US dollar.
In the last year or two, several countries have traded oil for another currency for the first time in ages. Which is big. With Iran sponsoring Palestine a lot, they might have similar ideas. The Arabs of all people understand the oppressive tactics of the US and their currency.
But how many civilians are they going to revive?
Hamas is not really a government at all though. They barely have any support in Gaza. Many years ago some election was held but there was only Hamas to choose from basically. I wouldn't call Hamas in any way representing anyone else but themselves, and not the Palestinian people. Maybe more rather their Arab sponsors.
Yeah I went to check and Wikipedia is linking the wayback machine's version of the guardian article. Fair enough.
Wait what? In the Netherlands the king forms a coalition? Or is it like in Belgium where the king appoints someone to try make a coalition and if he can't then appoints someone else. Usually party heads of the parties in decreasing order of number of votes ๐ I guess the only real power the Belgian king has is censoring a party from initiating coalition talks.