Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza

World Politics and Elections 2023

<< < (2/8) > >>

Jubal:
Yes, the Turkish election result is pretty heartbreaking as someone who works on the region. I don't really understand Turkish politics well enough to know how central Erdogan is to the AKP's success, but it's very hard to see how the opposition win this election (and there seems to be an AKP parliamentary majority anyway).

The Thai election result was conversely rather spectacular and a big rejection of military rule, so we'll see how that goes.

In Georgia, the ruling party has withdrawn from the European social-democrat party as part of its move towards embracing Orban, and they seem to be having increasingly tight relations with the Kremlin, which won't be popular among the public in Georgia itself.

EDIT: Also the BBC has been dipping into investigations of the Nigerian election, which seems to have included some absolutely wild bits of fraud that are provable from the local tally sheets. https://www.bbc.com/news/65163713

dubsartur:

--- Quote from: Jubal on May 16, 2023, 10:27:50 AM ---Yes, the Turkish election result is pretty heartbreaking as someone who works on the region. I don't really understand Turkish politics well enough to know how central Erdogan is to the AKP's success, but it's very hard to see how the opposition win this election (and there seems to be an AKP parliamentary majority anyway).

--- End quote ---
Even in democracies, parties tend to crash at the next election when a leader resigns after more then ten years in power.  So I would expect that when Erdogan dies, loses an election so badly he can't cheat, or retires, the AKP in Turkey will have a crisis.  Five or ten more years of Erdogan would be bad.

One big problem with being a dictator behind an electoral front is that to hold power you have to do crimes, so you have to worry that the next guy has you prosecuted to make sure you are not a threat or please the people who were wronged.  People say that Xi in China was afraid of that when he decided to run for a third term.

Jubal:
It appears that Erdogan has won :( We kind of already knew that from the first round, but it's still very sad.

Jubal:
So, unexpected Dutch election later this year! I think from the minimal stuff I can find, anyone who thinks they know how it'll go is lying, especially because the amount of potential flux and voter church involved is unusually massive. The long serving Dutch PM, Rutte, basically seems to have forced the election on a point of nominal principle and then pissed off instead of fighting it which is frankly a wild political move. This basically leaves his party fighting an election on the back of a hard right-wing immigration policy proposal, but who will lead them and whether they'll stick to that is still unclear, and ironically it might well be a former asylum seeker, the Justice & Security minister Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius. How different a face for the VVD (nominally liberal but actually the main Dutch conservative party) she'd be in practice I don't know.

Some other parties worth immediately noting are the BBB, the big new right-farmer-populist-anti-environmentalist party, the GreenLeft/Social Democrat alliance on the left, the really far right PVV, the environmentalist Party of the Animals, and centre-left-liberal D66 whose disagreement over asylum with the VVD triggered the election: these are basically all the parties that have a reasonable shot of getting 10+ seats. The D66 did really well last time but their leader has resigned due to the amount of political abuse she was getting and they'll probably lose about 2/3 of their seats after being hurt as the party in a largely right-wing coalition with the most left-to-centre voting base (speaking as a member of Britain's Liberal Democrats, I am getting deja vu rather).

Then there's apparently the possibility that a very popular conservative independent, Pieter Omtzigt, might run his own populist anti-corruption/eurosceptic list and some polling has suggested he'd be the largest party in parliament if he did, largely by cratering BBB's support and pulling votes from the right more widely but scraping some voters up from the left too. Basically a LOT of voters seem pretty up for grabs right now. Also, tons of seats are with a plethora of smaller parties and finding a way to make them add up to a government is hellish.

The current centre-right coalition (VVD+D66+CU+CDU) which is basically one centrist party and three conservative ones, had 78 seats of 150 after the last election. It probably won't happen again for two reasons: the VVD+CDU versus CU+D66 split which caused this election to start with, and also the fact that this set of parties would now only combine for 45 seats (!), miles short of a majority. The D66 have lost a big chunk of support leftwards, the CDU and VVD have lost support rightwards. So what are the other options?

Working from a recent poll (Peil.nl, 15–16 Jul 2023), a conservative-far-right coalition prepared to push Rutte's asylum plan through could command up to 84 seats: that's with the VVD, PVV, BBB, JA21, FvD, BVNL, and CDA on board (and you could ditch one or two of the last four and still get a majority, but not any of the first three: the minimum on seats would be something like VVD+PVV+BBB+JA21+CDA). How functional would that be, though? Crucially, it only works if the BBB, largely a party of protest who have minimal experience, can work with the VVD, the party of dry, conservative government who they've been yelling at for years. Between them the two forces combine for fifty of the hypothetical bloc's seats. Then you also need all the scary pretty-much-fascist parties like the PVV in government, which is the kind of thing that might give the VVD some pause for thought given their voters tend to be the sorts of conservatives who like stability rather than ones who like the much more upset-the-apple-cart far right rhetoric of the more extreme right.

Conversely, the implication of the above is that the left are some way off forming a government. The GL/PVdA alliance added to the D66, Party of the Animals, pro-EU Volt, Socialist Party, and minority-focused left parties DENK and B1J1 gets you to 58 seats, well short of 75 for a government.

Then there's the "Bulgaria option", in which basically there's a left bloc, an old conservative bloc, and a populist bloc who cannot work with one another at all, leading to a repetitive run of elections, which honestly might not be out of the question here. I've not seen much in the way of parties setting out red lines for coalitions but it feels like it would not take many (especially from the BBB who are the kind of party who would totally throw out a random badly thought out red line just by gaffeing it into existence in an interview) to basically make a government mathematically impossible.

My divinations are minimal here, but I think how a lot of the new party leaders (especially of the VVD and D66) perform and which direction they want to pull their parties in might be important, and what Omtzigt does may also matter though turning up with no pre-existing political infrastructure to an election is often a pretty good way in politics to badly underperform once the real punches start getting thrown electorally. If Omtzigt did run a list he'd risk a lot of problems with who he could put on it, whether they'd manage to keep message discipline, etc. I also think BBB might do relatively poorly in the election campaign: their leader Caroline van der Plas is apparently not polling super well on who people actually want to be Prime Minister, so if that seems a serious prospect it might scare centre-right voters back to the VVD to get a safer pair of hands.


But we have more elections! Spain is coming up sooner, that looks fairly clear-cut in that the right look set to win. Podemos seem to have been replaced by another left-party but I'm not sure how much difference that makes.

And then there's Slovakia, where the question at the moment is which of the two wildly corrupt social democratic parties will come first in the election. The hope should probably be that Voice - Social Democracy wins rather than Direction - Social Democracy, in that "Voice" is just corrupt and slightly conservative on social issues whereas "Direction" is corrupt and actively immensely racist and opposed to helping Ukraine defeat Russia. Given they split from each other it's also not clear if they can work together, or who can work with them, but a coalition will definitely be needed. Currently just behind them are Progressive Slovakia, the liberal party, whose major selling point is probably being not obviously corrupt or racist. Then there's a mess of small centre right and far right parties, many of which might not make the 5% threshold, but which whoever wins will probably need to work with to some extent. I think the optimum plausible coalition might be Voice + Progressive + Ordinary People + Christian Democrats, which would be 42% of the vote between them (and with 40-45% going to the other parties above the threshold, that might juuuust be enough). But I also doubt Ordinary People, a centre-right anti-corruption party, would work with Voice.

Jubal:
I rescind my earlier statement about the Spanish election looking clear cut, it looks about as not clear cut as elections in Spain ever have. Far right and Socialists both lost seats to centre-right but the socialists made up for those losses by taking seats from the further left and from the regionalist parties: the centre-right/far-right assumed coalition doesn't have a majority, the left doesn't really have a majority either because there's a Jackson Pollock painting of tiny regionalist parties in the middle some of who will be very very hard to bring into a coalition with the left but won't work with the right either. I don't think Spain really does grand coalitions in its politics, so probably we're going to have yet another Spanish election later this year.

Also the other elections continue to shift: in Slovak polling the liberals have overtaken Hlas to be running in second place, and Ordinary People are running on a joint list and are now polling badly enough that it might fall below the 7% threshold (which would probably be bad news/make it harder to pull an anti-Fico coalition together). As much as 25% of the vote could go to parties falling below the parliamentary thresholds, which feels like a lot - a very fractured political environment with a 5% threshold does cause certain issues.

Meanwhile the main Dutch news is that Labour and the Green Left have more properly launched their joint list, and veteran politician Frans Timmermans has given up his European-level climate change job to run to lead it. They're currently polling in the lead as a joint list, at 18%, so Timmermans has a reasonable chance of leading the largest single party post-election. But he'd probably need the VVD on-side to govern, the BBB are very unlikely to work with someone whose whole brand is European level environmental regulation. Also Omtzigt has been making noises about not running his own list or joining anyone else's, which may remove a source of uncertainty.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page