Welcome back to another year in world poltics! 2024 will be a heavier duty year than 2023 for elections globally, and there's a lot of really major ones going on...
I think the first really notable election of 2024 might be Taiwan's presidency, which looks very tight between the one-china KMT and more Taiwan-independencey DPP candidates.
There's also UK and US elections which will be covered in their own threads, and an Indian general election where my expectation is that Modi will romp home again, but a big coalition of opposition parties aren't so far behind that a bad year for the BJP couldn't knock them out of power. Congress and its allies coming back into government would be a big deal if it happened, I think. We also have an election for the European parliament, which currently looks like it will mean a noticeable shift to the right (there's been speculation about the nationalist ECR becoming part of the Union's notional governing majority, perhaps replacing the Green/EFA, which would be a real change if it happened but we'll see). The right do need to maintain some of their current high polling to make that work though, and in Italy where they're in government and the Netherlands where they're trying to form one, they might not retain current numbers. At some point I think Austria is also up for elections, and Ireland could be though they might leave it to early 2025.
The DPP did win Taiwan's presidency! Though they lost control of parliament so that might create some issues for them. China are predictably not very happy about this turn of events.
In less democratic news, the Awami League won the Bangladeshi election by a landslide due to having suppressed the opposition very heavily.
Al Jazeera has a story on attempts to locate and identify people murdered by the secret police under Stalin https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/1/28/georgias-mass-graves-the-forensic-experts-uncovering-victims-of-stalins-purge
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
"A new global gender divide is emerging" - the political/ideological gap between young men and young women has been widening for the last 30 years, and widened rapidly in the last 10 years.
Why this has happened, and what the implications are, are pretty profound questions for democracy.
Quote from: psyanojim on January 28, 2024, 11:45:29 PM
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
"A new global gender divide is emerging" - the political/ideological gap between young men and young women has been widening for the last 30 years, and widened rapidly in the last 10 years.
Why this has happened, and what the implications are, are pretty profound questions for democracy.
That is really interesting: broadly speaking, I think the article's assessment of why this has happened rings fairly true. It doesn't surprise me per se that women of a younger generation are sharply to the left in a lot of countries: there's a clear sense of the right wing associating itself with curtailing fairly basic freedoms, and the things the right wing try and sell to women are often framed in quite anti-LGBT, "family values" ways which just don't land with a generation much of which a) has been brought up with a world that feels like it's lurching toward the apocalypse and don't feel like they can afford kids anyway and b) identifies as much more LGBT than their predecessors. Their offer to young men is a much more grimly effective one.
That said, much of that was true for people somewhat older than me, and the shift among people younger than me is clearly stark. I suspect there's also a big personalised content issue here: this is the TikTok generation, and algorithmic content really sharply focuses things into people's media bubbles. I don't know how one gets round that, really.
It's also worth noting that younger men are not wildly right wing on average, but I'd like to see the distribution for each gender not just the average: I would be unsurprised if young men actually had a double-peaked distribution, and that rather than younger men being more centrist which is what you might take from the graphs, some young men are far right and some young men are solidly on the left. The difference between those two possibilities is a very important one I suspect.
In election news, the far right got shut out of the second round of the Finnish presidential election: they came second in last year's parliament election but they've slumped backwards a few points since then and the presidency really requires cross-party support which they had approximately zilch of.
Quote from: Jubal on January 29, 2024, 11:50:53 AM
I suspect there's also a big personalised content issue here: this is the TikTok generation, and algorithmic content really sharply focuses things into people's media bubbles. I don't know how one gets round that, really.
Focussing on people who are not deeply in to corporate social media with content-promotion algorithms, like most of the young people I knew in Tirol, is a great start!
Some people take longer than others to learn that the Internet or social media are not real life, and some have to make big mistakes before they learn that the strategies which get attention online are self-destructive for achieving things offline (https://web.archive.org/web/20220905171036/http://vihart.com/social-media-systems-and-democracy/).
News tidbits:
I did a back of the envelope analysis of roughly who the "newcomer" parties likely to get European Parliament seats but not currently aligned to a European Parliament faction might be: about a third of them are fascists, a third other conservatives, and the rest various other oddballs. That doesn't mean those will all go to the European Parliament's fascist
group, the ID (Identity and Democracy) faction, because the far right are pretty good at having bizarre arguments. I might write another blog post sometime soon as a some-way-out view of the race, which will mostly be there to point out that a) yes the far right are doing well but b) they can only get any power if not only the Conservatives but also the Liberals agree to shut out the left and c) that's not very likely. Anyway, blog post at https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2024/02/05/european-elections-2024-who-are-all-the-new-parties-anyway/
Other European electoral stuff
- The Law and Justice party in Poland have dropped below first place in polling averages for the first time in nearly a decade, which may indicate that their loss of media control is causing some electoral unwind.
- The authoritarian coalition in Slovakia are grumpy at each other because the senior partner Smer are and this is hampering the junior partner's campaign for the national presidency.
- The Dutch still don't have a government and it's still not clear when and if they're getting one.
- We should get in the next month or so some more idea of what new populist left entrants in the German-speaking world could do to national level politics (the satirical Beer Party in Austria is proposing to mount a serious General Election campaign, and the conservative-but-nominally-socialist Sandra Wagenknecht has formed her own party in Germany). Both are on maybe 6% in some polls at the moment.
In central America, Nayib Bukele has won an arguably unconstitutional second term to run El Salvador, where he seems to be genuinely popular due to enormous and rapid crackdowns on gangs, but also is increasingly authoritarian. I've seen talk of him being held up by the right internationally as a "tough on crime can work" exemplar.
Quote from: psyanojim on January 28, 2024, 11:45:29 PM
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
"A new global gender divide is emerging" - the political/ideological gap between young men and young women has been widening for the last 30 years, and widened rapidly in the last 10 years.
Why this has happened, and what the implications are, are pretty profound questions for democracy.
Didn't read cos paywall innit bruv, but is this reporting the results of a solid study? I'm always very sceptical about how accurate these kinda things are, although I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a widening gap is real. Though I suspect it would be the case that both young men and women have shifted to the left as a whole, but with women tending to shift further left than men rather than young men moving right.
But as usual I know nothing.
Quote from: Pentagathus on February 08, 2024, 03:29:21 PM
Quote from: psyanojim on January 28, 2024, 11:45:29 PM
https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998
"A new global gender divide is emerging" - the political/ideological gap between young men and young women has been widening for the last 30 years, and widened rapidly in the last 10 years.
Why this has happened, and what the implications are, are pretty profound questions for democracy.
Didn't read cos paywall innit bruv, but is this reporting the results of a solid study? I'm always very sceptical about how accurate these kinda things are, although I certainly wouldn't be surprised if a widening gap is real. Though I suspect it would be the case that both young men and women have shifted to the left as a whole, but with women tending to shift further left than men rather than young men moving right.
But as usual I know nothing.
I also can't see the article and I find that its best to ignore claims about broad cultural trends or differences. If they are true on average, you can't do anything about them, and they get in the way of understanding the individual unique man or woman or Ruritanian or Syldavian you are dealing with right now.
Like a lot of journalism, they are written for readers who want to pretend they are grand high poobah, when really readers have to persuade their strata council to trim those blackberries by the dog path before they tear their good running pants again. And the people they actually deal with in their community are not statistically representative of some national or global demographic.
QuoteI also can't see the article and I find that its best to ignore claims about broad cultural trends or differences. If they are true on average, you can't do anything about them, and they get in the way of understanding the individual unique man or woman or Ruritanian or Syldavian you are dealing with right now.
Like a lot of journalism, they are written for readers who want to pretend they are grand high poobah, when really readers have to persuade their strata council to trim those blackberries by the dog path before they tear their good running pants again. And the people they actually deal with in their community are not statistically representative of some national or global demographic.
Hmm, I think I broadly disagree with this: knowing what I should expect among a wider demographic does matter to me in terms of how I think about what I'm doing across a wide variety of areas, because I need to be prepared for what I'm doing and the world things are being thrown out into when writing, developing games, producing lectures, and so on to be going out into that world more generally. I don't just write things for a defined set of people I already know, nor do I expect that students and colleagues know and interact with the same set of people as me, so understanding more widely what's going on helps equip us to think about how creative or informative works might be received and helps us think about how we should produce them in light of that.
I do see the basis of where you're coming from - it's obviously also useful to understand the very large differences between the general public and the people who are most likely to interact with anything I do! And it's important to get depth into one's data where possible. Nonetheless knowing e.g. "is it the case that young men are trending towards the centre, or being split between a demographic trending hard-conservative and a demographic trending left which is averaging out to the centre" is actually quite useful if one then wants to think about how to get through to or improve the lives of any of those people, a talk I'm
usually doing indirectly through policy activism or talking to other educators or talking to creators whose content these people consume, and so on and so forth. There are understandings of cultural shifts that one can't get by anecdote. And I think even for people who aren't doing what I'm doing, thinking about that re things like voting behaviour can also be worthwhile.
News!
- Prabowo Subianto, a right-wing populist former general with a bad history with human rights abuses (notably kidnap & torture of pro-democracy activists in the late 1990s) looks likely to win the Indonesian presidential election with Joko Widodo standing down. Whilst Subianto was Widodo's rival in 2014 and 2019 and is from a different political party, he nonetheless served as Widodo's defence minister and Widodo's son Gibran is now running as Subianto's running-mate, so the perception seems to be that the outgoing president favours Subianto over his own party's candidate, Ganjar Pranowo.
- In Pakistan, it looks like the third placed party has agreed to back the second placed one to form a government. The PTI, Imran Khan's party, came first though it was nominally banned so all the candidates ran as independents: they're making a lot of claims of election tampering, which may well be true, and certainly major internet outages were deliberately put in place on election day.
- The Dutch coalition talks have half broken down in a weird way with the centre-right populist Omtzigt walking out due to a financial dispute.
- There have been some major scandals in Hungary after prominent Fidesz politicians have resigned over decisions to grant clemency to an abuser at a state orphanage (and presumably to avoid backlash hitting Orban himself).
I've also been doing a bit more reading about the Indian elections. Whilst India's government is currently struggling with big farmers' protests, they don't seem to be struggling in the polls particularly. Essentially the BJP have a dominant lock on several large states in the north of India, most notably the enormous state of Utter Pradesh (which if it became its own country be the world's sixth most populous). Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh also strongly favour the BJP. The opposition coalition needs to make inroads into some of these big provinces to narrow the gap effectively, and probably to decisively flip the current swing states of Maharashtra and Bihar. The difference between state sizes is enormous: Mizoram only has a single parliamentary seat whereas UP has eighty. The opposition states are often smaller and further from the centre: in terms of seat totals, the strongest states for the main opposition INDIA coalition (the current iteration of Congress) are Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south.
Part of what India's struggling with is its electoral system: the relative unity of the BJP means that instead of scraping majorities they can pile up enormous ones just by consolidating the vote in a few of the bigger states. This is of course the fault of the British - it would be a better timeline if besides horrifical colonial injustices we hadn't also managed to export first-past-the-post, one of the actual worst electoral systems in existence by pretty much any metric you care to judge by. I do worry that India as a whole will increasingly become a more authoritarian BJP-locked state.
When the party-of-capital BC Liberals rebranded as BC United to avoid associations with centrist party-of-power federal Liberals in April 2023, something predictable happened: their support in the polls collapsed (https://338canada.com/bc/) in favour of the BC Conservatives. This put the leader of BC United in the situation of having to say on the record that voters are confusing the provincial and federal conservatives, which is plausible but not very respectful to low-information voters. Canadian parties have very small advertising and PR budgets so a rebranded party does not have many chances to communicate the new name between elections.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/12/27/Kevin-Falcon-BC-United-Not-Doomed/
Unfortunately BC United has gone full 'how can we reduce our emissions when China exists?' One factor which the Tyee interview leaves out is that most of the CO2 added to the atmosphere from the year 1 to 2000 was added by Europe and the North Atlantic plus Japan. So we got the benefits, and telling India and China that they have to stay poor because we used up the global carbon budget is not likely to be convincing.
Well today it looks like the secularist opposition in Turkey are having a good evening and that the AKP has failed in its aim to recapture the country's major cities in local elections. Erdogan was really gunning to take back Istanbul but according to this ticker (https://www.duvarenglish.com/live-turkeys-local-elections-results-news-64108), as of now (84% reporting) seems to be a full ten points behind there, with the CHP a point ahead of his AKP in the nationwide vote. For comparison, in 2019 the AKP were over ten points ahead of the CHP nationally, 41 to 29. Erdogan was looking pretty strong after last year's national elections but the economy has by all accounts been doing poorly.
The Slovak presidential election has gone to a second round: Pellegrini (parliament speaker, nationalist) versus Korcok (the internationalist candidate). Korcok unexpectedly beat Pellegrini in the first round, but Pellegrini can probably scoop up more far-right votes and I think he'll win round 2, solidifying the authoritarian nationalists' control in Slovakia.
A recent poll showed the ANC below 40% in South African polls, with the general election in May: their majority could be under threat if that plays out, though they'll probably hang onto it with a split opposition on those numbers.
In the Netherlands they're still trying to form a government, this time without Geert Wilders leading it but with the same set of parties, who still don't agree on the budget so that's all going to go swimmingly for them.
Pretty good long-form essay on why the Trudeau government in Canada is so unpopular https://thewalrus.ca/justin-trudeaus-last-stand/ Skips pipelines, the Tories' threats to end the carbon tax and defund the CBC, and the full scale of Canada's foreign policy problems in India, China, the USA (they have an election coming up and their own populists), and the Arab world (Canadian troops are in Syria and Iraq and the Canadian government has a position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)
Canada Post is in a rough financial situation (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-748-million-loss-2023-1.7193944) and is another traditional target for right-wing governments.
Three Indian citizens have been arrested in Canada and charged with the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar; police are investigating whether three other murders by gunfire were related https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/nijjar-killing-arrests-made-1.7192807
Edit: fourth arrest in Burnaby https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-police-announce-arrest-of-fourth-suspect-in-hardeep-singh-nijjar/
Mm, that is interesting. It seems a common malaise for many government leaders that they end up keeping too tight a surrounding circle which insulates them from critique. I'm not sure how one solves that problem: maybe it's just a good reason for changing leaders more often before they develop to that point. I was talking to a French-Canadian at a conference recently who was opining that it was as much long-running malaise as anything with the Trudeau government. Of course, they may end up ruing bitterly their failure to pass any sort of electoral reform: preference voting or PR would give them a fighting chance of staying leading a coalition even with the Tories on forty percent of the vote, but Canada seems to have inherited Britain's allergy to formal coalitions.
This blog is mostly thoughts on US politics, but it has a post on the Negev Bedouin, one of the groups in the former Mandate of Palestine which people outside the region rarely think about https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-invisible-occupation
Quote from: Jubal on May 05, 2024, 10:17:39 AM
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.
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.
Illia Ponomarenko on Ukraine's internal problems (birdsite IAPonomarenko/status/1791440191615307900 )
QuoteThere'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.
Some European news, as we approach the EU elections (early June):
The Dutch still don't know who's going to be Prime Minister because the obvious candidate has come down in a scandal, also the right-liberal VVD look like being kicked out of the European liberal party for working with the deeply anti-European PVV.
Also, even more darkly amusingly, the Identity and Democracy group in the European parliament, which is to say the most fascist of the formal groups, is blowing itself up on the cusp of the elections because the German fascists are increasingly too obviously Nazi for the French fascists. Being too Nazi for Marine le Pen is not something anyone should ever want to achieve, but turns out it's happened, and it does look like le Pen has actually ruled out sharing a group with the AfD after the election, which in turn will force the other ID parties like Lega, the PVV, the Austrian FPO, etc, to decide which part of the split they go down. Possibly the result is that le Pen goes to the ECR, since she's moved to a much more publicly anti-Russian stance to deflect her own past dealings with them whereas most of the rest of ID is more anti-Ukrainian.
We're also just a week away from South Africa's election: the ANC might just scrape a majority still, they've recovered a tiny bit of ground in the last few polls. The DA look a bit stuck, probably doesn't help that they've got a white leader which may blunt their reaching out to most of the rest of the country. The new MKP have clearly taken a chunk off the ANC based on Jacob Zuma's personal vote, but the radical EFF don't look like they've made much progress either: the ANC aren't being crushed, just losing bits off all sides to different political parties.
Capital have been trying to line up BC United (formerly the BC Liberals, the established center-right party) and BC Conservatives (until recently a few disgruntled people with PO boxes and rented rooms) as one movement to defeat the centrist BC NDP. The populist wing of the Canadian conservative movement is not having it. Part of the problem is that without an election, nobody can know whether the Conservatives can become the dominant party on the right (and whether you can do that while letting capital fell all the trees, mine all the minerals, harvest all the fish, move money in and out of the province without too many questions, and hammer the public-sector unions which is what capital wants in a provincial conservative party). https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-united-no-merger-1.7214326
So, it looks pretty clear that the ANC has lost its parliamentary majority in South Africa for almost the first time in my lifetime (the first democratic election was about two months after I was born so technically the National Party still had its "majority" of the Apartheid white electorate at that point). The biggest shift seems to be that the new MK party of former president Jacob Zuma topped the vote in KwaZulu-Natal, almost entirely at the ANC's expense, and thus coming third in the election and knocking the ANC's vote from the mid fifties to mid forties percent.
I don't get the impression that an anti-ANC coalition is possible: the EFF and MK are far further from the DA than the ANC is from either. If there's a formal agreement my tentative expectation would be that the DA and ANC will form a grand coalition or at least a supply and confidence deal. The ANC, on the basis of these results, don't need to feel too threatened by the DA who haven't really pushed forward out of their heartland (and their white/mixed-race voter demographic). The ANC would need fewer policy concessions to deal with the MKs but there's probably too much personal bad blood there, and the EFF are probably too radical and are also a mistrusted ANC offshoot.
Right, two more elections to report on!
In Mexico, the left-populists won the presidential election again, giving the country its first female president who is also a climate scientist so on balance that seems like probably a good thing? I get the sense she's a bit more focused on the left and less on the populist side than her predecessor so I'm feeling reasonably hopeful.
Over in India, the NDA have a majority but Modi's BJP don't on their own without the rest of the NDA. That means a much bigger role for coalition partners, who are now needed for government but who haven't always been Modi fans. The two key ones are the Telugu Desam Party from Andhra Pradesh and the Janata Dal (United) party whose base is in Bihar and the Northeast. The JD-U allied with the BJP in the 1990s, broke the alliance in 2013-14 to work against Modi, returned to the NDA in 2017, left in 2022 and returned in January of this year. The TDP likewise haven't always been firmly in the NDA's fold, allying with Congress in the 2018 Telangana elections though they've leaned more to the BJP's side of the fence.
There's also the possibility that Modi will try to attract other parts of Congress' INDIA alliance over to pad his majority: the smaller and regional parties of Indian politics seem quite willing to switch around which major party they work with, and now some of them have an exceptional opportunity to gain concessions from national government. That might mean more pork-barrelling, though it does also mean that things like constitutional amendments are out of the question. Modi's grand rhetoric of aiming for 400 seats looks very silly now, and it's nice to see that his spittingly nationalist campaign didn't actually deliver the goods he'd hoped.
And so the European Elections happened. Far too much to run through but my own takeaways: the far right did well, the greens and liberals did badly, but in both cases not as disastrously as might have been expected earlier in the year. The liberal Renew were, despite a harsh loss of seats, actually not turfed out from their position as the third party, which had been repeatedly floated as a likely scenario. That wouldn't even have happened if the AfD hadn't been kicked out of the group (an action that may have repercussions in terms of leading to the far right being even more splintered at a European level). The results basically make a continuation of the standard grand coalition (Conservatives-Social Democrats-Liberals, possibly with Greens) almost inevitable: the liberals and left won't work with the nationalists and the conservatives really don't have a good way to bring even the marginally-less-wingnut ECR nationalists into the fold.
There were also parliamentary elections in Belgium, where the Flemish far right had been expecting to become the largest single party and rather planning on it, but were actually held in second place by the centre-right who will almost certainly lead the next government. Prime Minister De Croo's left-liberal coalition has clearly lost, with the centre-right Reform Movement and centrist Les Engagés doing very well at the expense of the Socialists, the liberals and especially the Greens in Wallonia, so I'd guess the new govt to be much more right-leaning.
You could get the slenderest of majorities for a centre-right-leaning coalition as follows:
N-Va (Flemish Nationalist-Conservatives) 24
Reform Movement (Walloon Conservatives) 20
CD&V (Flemish Christian Democrat Conservatives) 11
Les Engagés (Walloon Centrists) 14
Open VLD (Flemish Centre-Liberals) 7
Though the Open VLD may want to sit out after a bruising election and having led the last government, and getting them, LE, or anyone to their left in would require some serious concessions from N-Va.
Finally, in France President Macron has decided people just weren't voting enough this year and has called parliamentary elections in what I presume is a "put up or shut up" attempt to the far right, who now have an exceptionally good shot at building a strong parliamentary faction if not a government. I guess maybe he's trying to let them into parliamentary majority on the grounds that at the presidential election they'll then have an incumbency disadvantage? Not sure.
Unexpectedly, and despite the far right RN winning the first round, it appears that the New Popular Front, the broad left-alliance, have won the second round of the French parliamentary elections after they and the centrist Ensemble bloc stood down a lot of second-round candidates to help one another. The RN might be knocked back hard enough to be in third place, which is very unexpected news and a massive underperformance for a party that believed it was out to win a majority.
Getting a functional government together may still be difficult, that said: there's little else in common between the left of the NPF and the right of Ensemble. But hopefully something can be pulled together that will help things going forward.
Georgia and Bulgaria both have elections approaching in late October.
I'm not sure if Bulgaria has any way of getting out of its usual political deadlock, though the DPS (Movement for Rights and Freedoms) has split in two which may change... something, somehow?
In Georgia it's possibly the most critical election since independence: it's a very "everyone against the Georgian Dream government" election, with the government itself and four opposition alliances likely to get over the 5% threshold for entry into parliament. It also looks like international voting registration has surged since 2020, so that will likely be bad for the government. If Georgian Dream gets under 40% of the vote they've probably lost - they're probably going to cheat at least somewhat, but how badly is unclear so far.
Well, Georgia is in the middle of a mass round of protests that are turning violent in places and could become a revolution.
Meanwhile we've had two weirdly normal elections: Iceland is going to get a new government probably mixing some left and right wing parties but without any of the ones from the outgoing (also mixed) government, mostly notable for both the likely incoming left and right parties being more pro-EU than their predecessors. Iceland going into the EU might be meaningful both in that it changes the power balance to the centre (it doesn't have a significant far-right party) but more so because it might push Norway towards acession rather than it being left with only it and Liechtenstein in EFTA.
Ireland meanwhile is probably also going to get a centreish government on much the model of the last one with the two big centre-right parties and perhaps whichever small left party draws the short straw (the Social Democrats or Labour). The exact totals will matter and the tail ends of counts are still ongoing.
So everywhere has tried to pack its clusterportugalery into December:
- Government collapse in France
- Cancelled Presidential election due to Russian interference and ensuing minor constitutional crisis in Romania
- Attempted coup in South Korea where lawmakers had to vault over fences to break into parliament and countermand the president's martial law orders
- Georgia is still a mess and the government are increasingly moving towards martial law there
- The Syrian civil war suddenly ended (except ongoing conflicts between Turkish-backed rebels in the west and the majority-Kurdish communal-socialist Rojavan forces in the east, and except ongoing bombing by Israel just in case) when the rebels noticed all Assad's allies were distracted and just rolled over the regime in the space of a week.
I'm probably forgetting at least one huge news item. It's all been a lot. Ghana had a pretty normal election and looks like it'll have a peaceful transfer of power, so good for them?
The news today is that South Korea's government party might now be willing to impeach the president, after blocking the first impeachment vote in the hope that he'd just do the decent thing and resign. We're kinda still waiting to see what'll come of all the other stuff.
The German SPD (rot, natürlich) - FDP (gelb) - Grüne coalition has collapsed too leading to an election for Bundestag in February 2025.
I wonder how you say DESCENDE DESCENDE PER SECULA DAMNANDE! in Korean? https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/henry4-to-g7a.asp
The BC NDP and Greens have reached the latest totally-not-a-coalition which gives them a two-vote majority including the speaker. They released it as a scan not as marked-up text because we live in Romulus' crap not Plato's republic https://news.gov.bc.ca/files/Agreement%20in%20Principle.pdf Given that the second previous election was triggered by the NDP tearing up a confidence and supply agreement with the Greens because they were ahead in the polls its likely to be awkward.
Wiki on the election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_British_Columbia_general_election
For a year and a half Ottawa politics have been a Mexican standoff: everyone wants Justin Trudeau out of office but he refuses to step down as Liberal leader and his MLAs don't have the cojones to make him, and the NDP finally got one of their major policy goals (public dental care) and want time for it to settle in before the Tories get a chance to cancel it. Because Trudeau broke his promise to implement proportional representation, 43% of votes for the Tories will give them a solid majority which they last had for one term under Stephen Harper.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has just said that he would vote no on future confidence votes so the election will probably be much sooner than October 2025 (in principle as early as February, no later than two months after the March budget is due). The Tories and Bloc Quebecois have already been voting against confidence motions.
Harper got out of the same situation by proroguing parliament on dubious grounds and breaking up their coalition during the pause. Trudeau could try but the opposition are quite confident that the Liberal party would be knocked to second or third place in an election.
There is talk of changing LIberal leaders, which would be good for the party's MPs but seems unlikely to change the outcome in more than a few ridings.
I'm sort of surprised Trudeau isn't rolling the dice, u-turning again and just trying to push for a voting system change. It would be very obviously self serving on his part, but the NDP couldn't reasonably vote against which would give the move some political cover. I mean I don't think he necessarily has the gas in the tank or the imagination to do it now and he's probably out of time, but I feel like it would be the correct play in his situation.
Quote from: Jubal on December 20, 2024, 11:16:30 PMI'm sort of surprised Trudeau isn't rolling the dice, u-turning again and just trying to push for a voting system change. It would be very obviously self serving on his part, but the NDP couldn't reasonably vote against which would give the move some political cover. I mean I don't think he necessarily has the gas in the tank or the imagination to do it now and he's probably out of time, but I feel like it would be the correct play in his situation.
Proportional representation would move the Liberal PARTY from 47 seats to 64 seats in the next election (they won 160 last election), but not make a majority of the country think Justin Trudeau in particular should remain PM. And if he thought what was good for the party or the country was different from what was good for him, he would have announced his resignation in summer 2023.
Electoral reform also requires brokering between urban and rural Canadians, and Anglo Canadians and Quebecois, and neither is the PM's strength.
Quote from: dubsartur on December 21, 2024, 06:19:40 PMAnd if he thought what was good for the party or the country was different from what was good for him, he would have announced his resignation in summer 2023.
Yeah, this is so often the problem with a certain sort of politician :/
Elsewhere, it looks like Bayrou's new government in France may be doomed before it's even formed, and the potential Austrian governing parties are struggling to work out how to cut the country's deficit (the left want wealth taxes, the right do not).
Iceland has a new progressive-leaning government led by social democrat Kristrún Frostadóttir, which is aiming for an EU referendum on entry by 2027 - as noted earlier this might ultimately also poke Norway to join if it passes. The other parties are the centre-right Liberal Reform and the centre-liberal People's Party.
Ireland meanwhile looks like it's going to shift right, with right-leaning independents instead of the Green Party propping up the main FG/FF centre-right coalition bloc. I also saw reporting recently that Ireland may be hitting energy usage issues (https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/ireland-embraced-data-centers-that-the-ai-boom-needs-now-theyre-consuming-too-much-of-its-energy/ar-AA1w9GLA) because it's gone in too heavily on AI data centres, so they may be in for a rough time if there's an AI bubble collapse in the next year or two.
With this talk about changing leaders, a biography that foreigners should probably read is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Campbell
Electoral reform would be a very good thing and the PM could have easily implemented it during his first term.
If you are interested in electoral reform in Canada a good site is https://www.fairvote.ca/
A demonstration of the biggest issue with proportional representation is the riding of Timmins-James Bay: one of two ridings in Ontario with about the same size as the United Kingdom and a population under 100,000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timmins%E2%80%94James_Bay_(federal_electoral_district) But ranked ballots like in Australia would just cement the monopoly on power of the Liberals and Conservatives.
If one wants to compromise on that sort of thing, you can use single transferrable vote (much like Ireland) but with some carve-outs where rather than 3-5 member seats the most outlying areas are allowed to be one-seat AV seats. This reduces proportionality a bit and tends to favour the parties that represent those areas, but it does provide them with local representation. The UK already has carve-outs for its most remote areas on other areas like constituency size: Orkney & Shetland numerically should be added to part of the mainland but is legally allowed not to be because it'd make it impossible for anyone to cover the whole area as an MP.