Author Topic: World Politics and Elections 2024  (Read 1589 times)

dubsartur

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Re: World Politics and Elections 2024
« Reply #15 on: May 09, 2024, 04:39:55 PM »
Canada seems to have inherited Britain's allergy to formal coalitions.
Its another of those leftovers from the 19th century, where many Older and Wiser Heads act like Canada has a two-party system even though that has not been true since the NDP were founded in the 1950s (the Reform Party of Canada in 1987, Bloc Quebecois in 1991) and Canada's parliament has as many parties as most European countries.

Jubal

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Re: World Politics and Elections 2024
« Reply #16 on: May 16, 2024, 08:48:44 PM »
European political news: the headline bit is that Robert Fico, hard-authoritarian prime minister of Slovakia, has narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The trigger seems to have been his attempts to bring state media under closer government control. I've often wondered why more people don't get assassinated in politics: don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it would be a good thing, but I think one can point to a fair number of prominent cases where it's worked in achieving political goals from the assassin's perspective. I think the main explanation is that senior political actors are much more scared of eroding norms against assassination than they are of, say, going to war, because the latter only involves a bunch of other people getting shot rather than themselves. I do worry that in Slovakia the failed attempt will now be used as a pretext for cracking down on the opposition.

Georgia is in turmoil and with continual protests over its 'foreign agent' law. I'm really personally sad seeing the country becoming more authoritarian: the new legislation adds large invasive monitoring obligations on anyone who recieves significant funding or payments from abroad, and is generally mostly intended as an attack on civil society institutions.

Also the Dutch now have a government! It's not a very good government, and we're still not sure who's going to be prime minister, but the four right-wing parties who were involved in coalition talks now have a coalition agreement, perhaps in large part spurred by polls showing that if the country had another election the far-right PVV would do even better at the expense of their now coalition partners, such that said partners had a strong negotiating incentive. The parties evidently hate each other and there are clearly VVD and NSC members who hate working with the PVV in particular so we'll see how that goes.
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dubsartur

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Re: World Politics and Elections 2024
« Reply #17 on: May 19, 2024, 02:04:49 AM »
Illia Ponomarenko on Ukraine's internal problems (birdsite IAPonomarenko/status/1791440191615307900 )

Quote
There's one thing that one should keep in mind as he or she follows the developments in Ukraine.

The people of Ukraine are actually fighting two wars at the same time. Apart from the Russian invasion, the largest war of aggression in Europe since Adolf Hitler, there's another war -- a domestic war of our people against so many things that undermine us from within.

It's about corrupt officials, it's about incompetent and populistic decision-makers, it's about those who embezzle our money allocated on fortifications and defenses, it's about those who give exemptions from military conscription to sports-betting firms (with very murky tax records), and don't it to charity foundations providing the military with fast and vital aid.

It's also, for instance, about entire departments of the SBU security service spying on anti-corruption investigating journalists during the war with Russia.

It's a war against so many things that try to drag us back to what we used to be - a weak and corrupt informal Russian colony.

Just like the "military" war with the foreign invader, this internal war for saving this country from its own dark side has had its victories and setbacks.

Every time high-profile malpractice is exposed in the open, it is fought daily, triggering a scandal and a public uproar.

And these two wars are interconnected.

A favorable outcome of the war against Russia's aggression is not possible without significant victories in this domestic war of ours.

That's our life and the struggle for national survival in the last... ten years!

And I must say that sometimes I look through the news, I can't help but keep thinking about the fact that so many of those insolent pen-pushers in high cabinets don't deserve to even hold a candle to all our men and women who save this country every single day and do the impossible on the fronts of Russia's war.

The Ukrainian military also seems to have both aspects, with those who figured out how to fight Russia to a standstill since 2014 on one side, and the older school of Soviet-minded commanders on the other.  I suspect that is one reason why expanded conscription is controversial, nobody wants to die because someone embezzled the money for fortifications and the commanding officer is stuck on doing things the way his textbooks told him to do it.
« Last Edit: May 19, 2024, 02:18:26 AM by dubsartur »