Analysis: Authoritarian leaders battle isolation, fickle allies

LONDON (Reuters) - Authoritarian leaders threatened by protest, international pressure or an inconvenient election result must master a complex strategic game to retain power.

Methods include control of food and fuel, repression and censorship. Isolation and fickle allies can prove a leader's undoing.

The ousting of Tunisian President Ben Ali shows how fast a grip on power can loosen. It is a lesson others -- Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo and aging rulers in Central Asia and the Gulf -- won't ignore.

"Tunisia was very striking in the way a power elite was swept away particularly fast and unexpectedly," said Jonathan Wood, global issues analyst at consultancy Control Risks. "There will be plenty of others who are watching very closely."

Throughout history, absolute rulers have sought to retain power by placating or cowing the populace while maintaining the loyalty of troops and managing internal and external alliances.

Tunisia's Ali now looks set to join the list of one-time leaders living out their lives in exile.

"Out of power, they are very sad," says Riccardo Orizio, an Italian journalist who has tracked down Uganda's Idi Amin, Central African Republic's Jean-Bedel Bokassa and Poland's Communist leader Wojciech Jaruzelski.

"All these dictators were fundamentally political animals. They were obsessed with power, getting in and exercising it."

Having interviewed the leaders in crumbling mansions or modest suburban homes a far cry from their one-time splendor, he believes many of them lost touch with the once finely honed political instincts that won them office.

"To be at the center of a society almost built around you as some of them were must be an incredible sensation," he said. "The temptation has to be there to listen only to the voices that agree with you... Put any Western liberal democratic politician in the same position and see how they react."

INFORMATION AGE

Authoritarian states are facing an information age. Control of the media is harder and protest can spread much faster.

Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, disseminated by WikiLeaks and then reposted and e-mailed, paint a picture of corruption and rights abuses. While websites such as Twitter can be blocked, experts say many users still find ways to access them.

"If you're trying to shut down mainstream media, it's quite easy -- you go after the printing presses, the television station," said London-based social media strategist Mark Hanson. "With social media that is much more difficult."

Experts say leaders will choose different routes to tackle this trend, from crackdowns to reform -- and possibly more online engagement by national leaders themselves. But they also have more traditional political levers to pull.

One of the most obvious -- although not the easiest -- is to deliver prosperity. It is no coincidence that leaders in Russia and Saudi Arabia tend to be seen as more secure during times when oil prices are rising.

In North Africa, where grain has been at the center of political power since the pharaohs, governments have increased imports and kept up subsidies since Tunisia's revolt.

GREAT GAME

Power dynamics vary sharply. In Russia and Central Asia, political power comes more from spy agencies than armies. In some states, fuel and food are politically sensitive. In others, tribal and ethnic divisions may hold the key to power.

For Gbagbo in Ivory Coast, staying in office requires keeping cocoa revenue flowing to pay troops.

The growing diplomatic and economic clout of China and other emerging powers also gives authoritarian leaders -- such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe -- new potential backers. Playing powerful states off against one another has long been a tactic.

Orizio says such support proved a mixed blessing for his exiled interviewees. With hindsight, he says they believe they were never masters of their own destiny.

"Almost all of them said that they felt used," he said. "They were a small wheel in the greater turn of history. The other powers -- the U.S., the Soviet Union -- used them when it was convenient and then things changed and they were abandoned."