We're back, the year is a clusterfumble already, here goes.
Some previews of the year...
The most significant global elections this year are, I think, likely to be the following:
- In Hungary, Viktor Orban faces his harshest political test yet: if he wins, the EU will probably have to conclude that there's no shifting him short of kicking the country out somehow, but if he loses it'll mean Putinist right-isolationism suddenly loses its biggest eastern European anchor at the very moment when it seems poised for big western European gains in 2027
- In Brazil, the question is whether Lula can hold off the resurgent far right-wing and retain control. At some point, the sharp polarisation in the country might collapse and allow centrists through, but right now it doesn't show much sign of subsiding.
- In the USA, the midterms will probably stall out the Republican legislative agenda unless Trump really gear-shifts to heightened authoritarianism in the coming months. If Trump's popularity really crashes through the floor then there are more potential downsides for him in the form of increased investigations.
- The elections in Israel could be the last ditch attempt for Netanyahu to save his career and stay out of jail - again, potentially this is a crossroads, because I think Netanyahu with another term will manage to judicially/legally secure his position against all the corruption stuff. Excepting two pollsters that consistently give much higher Likud scores than everyone else, most polling suggests that the Israeli Arab parties are likely to hold the balance of power (which I think makes Netanyahu toast if it happens). Sadly all of this is not especially likely to help the Palestinians who have been the most significant victims of Netanyahu's political maneuvering, given that the opposition bloc is currently being very much led by hard-right Naftali Bennett's list.
Other elections of note:
- Sweden looks poised to shift back left: the major right-wing parties are doing similarly to the last election, but the two smaller moderate parties in the "Tido" right-wing bloc, the Liberals and Christian Democrats, have lost support and might both fall out of parliament.
- In Slovenia, the green-liberal leadership of Robert Golob is in trouble, and he's seriously lagging behind the hard right in the polls. He's still a solid second, though, and neither of those two parties will form a government alone. The very large number of other parties and 4% threshold might create a real mess, with only the Social Democrats on 6-8% completely reliably reaching the four percent margin. The Democrats, a centre-right anti-corruption party, Christian Democratic N.Si, anti-vax Resni.ca, extreme right SNS, and a left-green combination list are all in with a shot at the threshold, but it's unlikely all of those will get represented.
- In Nepal, we'll find out what the new political order looks like after last year's Gen Z fuelled revolution. I don't think anyone's done any polling, the old political parties are mostly socialist and communist variants as far as I can tell but the sorts of figures the protestors wanted in charge may not be running in them. We'll find out!
- In Armenia, my suspicion is that the conservative right will once again fail to actually unseat Pashinyan's centrist government. Pashinyan is not popular by any stretch of the imagination, but his opponents don't really have a good geopolitical answer that isn't "fight wars we'll obviously lose" or "cuddle up to Russia at a time when Russia doesn't have the resources to support Armenia". I suspect a competitive centre option could unseat Pashinyan, but one doesn't seem to be emerging right now.
- In New Zealand it might be a pretty tight race between the right and left blocs, the Labor party is leading several recent polls but the Maori party is doing quite badly which may mean they don't get the allies they need to govern.
- The Danish experiment with a centre government is likely to end as all the centre parties in it have lost support since the last election. Current polling suggests a blue-bloc government of the right is most likely, though whether the centre-right and hard right could work together well isn't totally clear. The election certainly isn't over either - not all polls show the right-bloc ahead, and if the Moderates stay in parliament and hold the balance of power they might seek to force another grand coalition into being.
Meanwhile, uh, the president of Venezuela got kidnapped by the Americans, who also have government thugs invading their cities and are threatening to end NATO, burn all their alliances, and invade Denmark? The Ukraine war looks as far away from ending as ever, and Iran's government is also shooting its citizens and being told off for it, ironically, by the Americans.
Some guesses for how the year will go globally:
- Elections: I think the Democrats will win the House but not the Senate in the midterms, I think Tisza will win the Hungarian elections in reality but that Orban will finally stoop to actual ballot-stuffing and rig it.
- Economy: I think there's an economic crash sometime in 2026, not sure of what severity but the AI market readjusting is going to be painful.
- Events: I think the Iranian government won't fall in the end, this ends up being more Iran's Tianamen Square than a regime collapse. I think ultimately Trump won't invade Greenland, and won't put boots on the ground in a large way in Venezuela, though neither would be wildly surprising if it happened. I suspect there'll still be a military front-line in Ukraine in December.
We have had some elections! None of my "big four" yet but still some interesting results:
In Nepal, the new government is run by Balendra Shah, an engineer turned rapper turned politician who's run as an anti-corruption, somewhat nationalist figure. Exactly what his politics will look like beyond that is unclear.
In Slovenia, the Freedom Movement of Robert Golob (and this I did not expect) managed to close the gap and very narrowly come first in the election. The campaign ended up mired in allegations of foul play - the right alleged the left-liberal government were corrupt, the government pointed out that the right had basically engaged a private spying firm with links to Mossad to attack them. The hard-conservative SDS, the main opposition, is trying to challenge some aspects of the election result but this seems unlikely to succeed.
As expected neither major party is close to a majority, and the government has lost its majority, such that there are basically four options: a right-government where the SDS manages to negotiate with the two moderate conservative parties and resni ca to lock the left out, a centre-right government of the two moderate conservative parties, one left party, and the Freedom Movement, or a centre-left government of the left and Freedom Movement plus one right-wing party. Or new elections, which is the fourth option. My current expectation is that option three (probably Demokrati/Freedom Movement/SocDems/Left-Greens), followed by option four as that government might not last a full term, would be the most likely thing. The way Jansa is talking it doesn't sound like he's keen on running a four party coalition and the Democrats might not enjoy working with resni ca because the latter are total wingnuts and the former are running largely on a platform of Not Being Total Wingnuts. The centre-right option (NSi/Democrats/Freedom/SocDems) might be more stable but would also force more concessions out of Golob who has basically governed from the left thus far.
In Denmark, the Moderates and Social Democrats recovered in large part due to a small rally-round-the-flag bump over Trump's Greenland threats. This wasn't enough to secure a red-bloc win and put the SDs back in a prime position, but it does appear to have been enough to secure a situation where the Moderates hold the balance of power. The coalition I imagine they'll be pushing for could be something like Social Democrats and Radikale Venstre from the left bloc, Moderates anchoring in the middle, and Venstre and the Liberal Alliance from the right bloc, which would be a messy coalition but is probably the most centre option possible (despite their name Radikale are actually fluffy centre-left liberals).
There have also been a range of interesting more local elections. In France the socialists managed to hold off the far right in a bunch of places, and potential centre-right presidential frontrunner Philippe manage to win the mayoralty of Le Havre which he'd said was a prerequisite to him running for the presidency. In Australia, the Labor party absolutely flattened all comers in the South Australia election, much of the focus was on hard-right One Nation eating big chunks of the "primary" first-round vote but in practice it doesn't make much difference in Australia's electoral system if the two-party preferences lean very heavily towards Labor which they're continuing to do. And in Germany the state of Rhineland-Palatinate went pretty badly for the Social Democrats, but with the CDU winning the election overall. And in Italy reforms to weaken the judiciary's power have been rejected, a defeat for the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni.
In total, if there's a picture so far it feels like it might be one of just enough voters in Europe going "eep maybe let's not have more of this Trump nonsense" - the Iran war and Greenland crisis might have helped persuade a small but critical mass of voters that actually the far right mantra of isolationism is a bit of a sham if the far right globally are suddenly going to start cheering on mass bombing campaigns.
The first of my "big four" nominations has happened, and Orban is gone and has actually conceded, which honestly I didn't expect. Like Poland, Hungary will now be ruled by the centre-right: unlike Poland, Peter Magyar has achieved a two thirds majority which will enable him to uproot far more of what Orban did than Tusk has achieved with the damage from PiS.
Magyar's victory speech has very much hit better notes than I expected too - very full bore on the "we're cleaning house, we're getting back to the heart of Europe" type stuff.
The Bulgarian election was conversely won by Rumen Radev, who is not dissimilar to someone like Robert Fico in that he thinks of himself as centre-left but is still mentally dominated by a certain pro-Russian, or at least not sufficiently anti-Russian to bother saving Ukraine, mentality. He'll also be able to form a majority, leading to the first full term government in Bulgaria in quite some time.
It looks like Golob has failed to form a government in Slovenia, meaning that Janesz Jansa once again gets a chance, though requiring the resni.ca wingnut party for his coalition is going to make his life an enormous headache.
Danish government negotiations are still ongoing, it looks like the right are desperate to not be in another centre government so, very reluctantly, the Moderates are having to negotiate with the left.
So overall, Europe now has more post-communist Russophile authoritarians in power than it did a year or so ago - Fico, Radev, Babis and Jansa - but without Orban, the heart of that movement has been somewhat knocked out, and none of the remaining four are naturally likely to headbutt with the EU repeatedly in the way Orban made a whole thing out of doing. Radev and Jansa are pragmatists in a way that Orban was not.
And in other parts of the world, Modi's BJP has taken control of West Bengal by a large margin, one of the biggest states that had hitherto eluded them, so that's broadly bad news for anyone who wants to see a more democratic and less Hindu-nationalist India. In general these elections were bad for incumbents, Tamil Nadu got a new actor-turned-politician as its leader and Congress took power from the communists in Kerala.
Summer has passed and we're now heading into the real contest stretch of the year. But first a look back at the last few months.
I was very much right about Armenia, where despite Pashinyan's weak approval he took an absolute majority of the vote home. He continues to press for a more Europhile path in Armenian politics, though with the irony that he therefore also has a similar "peace party" rhetoric to his more authoritarian neighbouring administration in Georgia. I think the Europhile path is probably Armenia's best realistic outcome, but we'll see how it goes.
In Kazakhstan, the new Ó˜dilet party won a large majority, replacing the previous ruling party, Amanat, which largely rolled itself into it. In the last half-decade Kazakhstan has undergone a transition of power from Nursultan Nazarbayev to his successor Kassym-Jomart Tokayev: the Kazakh election this year was the first to a unicameral Kurultai rather than the previous bicameral system of a Majlis lower chamber and a Senate. The result probably suggests that the overall power balance hasn't changed a great deal: most of the opposition parties that won parliamentary seats are also explicitly pro-Tokayev, the only possible exception being the Nationwide Social Democratic Party, which differs on a number of issues like being against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In Peru, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of extreme right wing former dictator Alberto Fujimori, was narrowly elected president. Whilst one shouldn't judge a child by their parents, Keiko has explicitly run on her father's credentials, which include systematic bribery campaigns, running death squads, and forced sterilisation of as many as two hundred thousand people from indigenous communities. So that's, you know, probably really bad news.
We've also had a few referendums, notably Switzerland deciding not to write themselves an economic suicide pact by adopting a legal absolute population cap, and Iceland deciding that fishing rights were more important than any other part of economic security and voting against closer EU ties. The biggest shift for the bloc though is likely to be Canada pursuing an increasingly close relationship.
Internally the EU has big problems on the horizon though. Germany is seeing the AfD on the march, with them recently having topped the polls by a wide margin in Saxony-Anhalt. They're currently failing to form a government though - likely trying not to, as they'd prefer to stay in opposition than govern from a weak position with only one eurosceptic-left party as potential partners. France has not had any elections but is likely to be an even bigger problem next year, with the National Rally solidly ahead in all polls of likely presidential match-ups that I've seen. Far right success in either country could start destabilising the international bloc. Germany has two more elections coming up this week, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a generally social democrat state traditionally with a strong tourist industry but where the AfD are also likely to narrowly top the polls, and in Berlin, where the AfD may well also advance but the real question is how efficiently Die Linke dismantle the social democratic vote and break through on the western side of the city.
That said, it's not all been going the way of the right wing lately either. Sweden did not see quite as strong a result for the left bloc as had been expected, but not because people surged on the far right: the Sweden Democrats, the most right-wing parliamentary party, were quite unexpectedly the biggest losers of the election and lost 11 seats. The more moderate right-bloc parties, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, actually made gains despite polls having predicted that the Liberals would crash out of parliament. The Social Democrats did quite poorly, but probably mostly lost those votes to the Greens and Left compared to expectations. The biggest difference in the result compared to earlier polling had been that the Liberals reasonably comfortably got into parliament: if they'd stayed below the threshold that would have deprived the right-block of a chunk of votes entirely. In any case, the left bloc have now clearly won the election, and will form the next government.
Looking forward, we have the German states this weekend, and then Latvia, which looks like it will have one of the smaller green-agrarian-conservative parties in the governing coalition beating the largest of the green-agrarian-conservative parties in the governing coalition and probably forming some new coalition along similar lines. Brazil is then the next of my initial "big four" - it's looking like it will come down to an extremely tight second round between Lula da Silva and Flavio Bolsonaro.
In October we'll also have a Bulgarian presidential election where PM Rumen Radev will probably consolidate his power by having his former vice president Iliana Iotova elected in her own right. There's also Serbia, where the Student List will make an attempt to topple pro-Russian authoritarian leader Alexander Vucic, having grown out of a youth anti-corruption movement in the last two years.
Then it's the heavy hitters in late October and November - Israel and then the US midterms, though there's also New Zealand which may get a new party in its parliament, and a possible Palestinian legislative election for the first time since 2005. And more Swiss referendums. There will always be more Swiss referendums.