World Politics and Elections 2023

[Jubal]

For those places that don't have a separate thread.


We start the year with déjà vu news of the hard right storming the capitol - but this time we're in Brazil, where supporters of Bolsonaro have tried to attack the presidential and parliamentary buildings in Brasilia. Not yet clear what the outcomes will be.

[Jubal]

Petr Pavel has beaten Andrej Babis in the Czech republic for the presidency. It's not a powerful executive presidency or anything, but it's a pretty strong result for the much more pro-western of the two candidates.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64438955

[Jubal]

In Nigeria, despite a big showing from the Labour Party, previously a tiny party but now led by a popular defector from one of the two larger parties, Peter Obi, the ruling APC (a big tent party-of-power) seem to have held the presidency though with just 36% of the vote.  Obi's Labour Party have also made some gains in the Senate and House and by the looks of the BBC results readout may yet have deprived the APC of a majority. It will be interesting to see if they can continue building on this success. Tomorrow there is a large round of gubernatorial elections as well.

The agrarian-populist-rightwing party BBB seems to have done very well in Dutch regional elections, mostly at the expense of the far right but also at the expense of the governing coalition who apparently might now find it very difficult to get agriculture reforms (intended to reduce nitrate pollution) implemented.

In Estonia the right-liberal party of Kaja Kallas absolutely stormed their election last month, with far-right EKRE and Russian-minority party Center doing rather poorly. It looks like the Social Democrats and the liberal E200 are likely coalition partners.

In the Berlin local elections the CDU got a very impressive first place, at the expense of basically everyone else. It's hard to imagine big European cities in some other countries being run by conservatives - in the anglosphere we're very used to urban areas being bastions of the left nowadays. The CDU/CSU are also now well ahead in national polls, with Scholz's social democrats really rather struggling.

[Jubal]

Two key elections tomorrow!

Finland has the far right, centre right, and centre left in a tussle to be the lead party in the next government and see who will deal with Finland entering NATO. PM Sanna Marin is generally well thought of, I think, though the centre right are slightly higher in the polls.

Bulgaria has the centre-right GERB neck and neck with a bunch of anti-corruption parties in an alliance: it's been unstable politically for a while now, and I'm not sure this election will bring a stable government either. The next two parties down are the Turkish-minority liberals DPS, and the extreme-nationalist Revival, probably both unpalatable coalition partners for the two larger players.


Outside Europe: in Australia, the Liberal Party became the first opposition party to lose a by-election in over a century. Generally in a lot of the Anglosphere it seems like the suburbs have shifted sharply to support soft centrist centre-leftists (Biden, Albanese, Starmer). Unlike in the US, Australia's division of seats and territories doesn't give the right a big bonus for its rural seats. Unlike in the UK, fractures on the left damage the Australian Labor Party far less due to the Alternative Vote - I suspect the progressive parties in the UK would often do a bit better if there was a preference voting system, though I'd really like a proportional preference system like STV.

It looks like the Labour Party of Nigeria only won one governorship, Abia. Though there are some interesting posts on this blog by a Labour supporter about vote rigging in the presidential election.

[dubsartur]

So Erdogan did not lose in the first round of the presidential election, which is bad news for Turks, their eastern and southern neighbours, and the EU ... but Moldova is talking about leaving the Commonwealth of Independent States (one of the Russian puppet organizations).

[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]

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).

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.

[Jubal]

An end of August bunch of things:

The big Dutch election news is that Omtzigt is in with a new "New Social Contract" party, after looking like he wasn't going to be: a poll puts him in first, though that does pose him with some major political problems, especially in that he clearly wants to focus on constitutional, scrutiny, and social security issues, but if he's a likely Prime Minister he's going to need to outline positions on the environment and immigration that will make it harder (whatever he says) to hold on to the kaleidoscope of both left and right wing voters he seems to have picked up. He's probably mostly going to hurt the BBB and to a lesser extent the PVV, but he's also pulled small blocks of voters from just about every other party, so his voter base is generally very socially conservative but will include some social liberals. Apparently also the new VVD leader says she is willing to work with the PVV, which keeps the possibility of a big coalition of the right wing very much in play, though VVD might struggle if it doesn't end up running such a coalition.

In Slovakia, an english-language newspaper noted recently that the far-right Republika may have locked themselves out of government by pledging to leave NATO, something even the Orbanist "social democrat" Robert Fico isn't prepared to countenance. They're still polling in fourth, behind Hlas, Progressive Slovakia, and Fico's Smer who continue to lead the polls. Fico is offloading the full range of Orbanist attacks on Progressive Slovakia and on Slovak president Zuzanna Caputova, including claiming she's Orban funded, that corruption cases against his allies are politically motivated, et cetera.


In Central & South America, it looks like the left-wing anti-corruption candidate has clearly won in Guatemala though with pushback from the establishment, and that the progressive candidate won the first round of Ecuador's election (though in the latter case the right-wing vote was more split and I couldn't easily find any run-off polls). Ecuador does seem to have had some major referendums against mining in the rainforest regions which succeeded, which seems like good news from a climate perspective.

[Jubal]

Autumn election season is upon us in Europe! Slovakia goes to vote this weekend, then German regional elections and Luxembourg on Oct 8, Poland on Oct 15, and the Netherlands later on Nov 22.

In Slovakia, Progressive Slovakia has narrowed the gap with Smer very significantly, though probably not enough to win. The conservative pro-European Olan'o look like they will get into parliament, and two parties (social conservative Sme Rodina and the pro-EU conservative Democrats) are hovering on 4% with the threshold at 5. It looks tight between blocs, with Hlas struggling a bit as the probable swing party, needing to stomach a far more pro-European stance if they go with PS and the far right if they go with Fico's likely collection of allies. It could be a very messy government formation process if the results look much like the polls.

The German elections in Hesse and Bavaria look clear-cut with the centre-right CDU/CSU respectively remaining dominant in both states, the centre-left doing a few points worse and the far right a few points better than previously. Luxembourg looks like it'll remain stable, its main centre-right party looked to be doing quite badly a year ago but have recovered to about where they were at the time of the last election: the centre-left and centrist coalition government are on track for pretty much the same number of seats, 31, as they had last time (it's a 60 seat chamber). If they fall short, however, the Pirate party is doing quite well and may be a possible addition to a centre-left coalition, so it's likely to be tricky for the Conservatives to form a government unless they can offer the Liberals, Greens or Social Democrats something really good to prise them out of the centre-left bloc.

The Polish government maintains a solid but not insurmountable lead in the polls: the Polish far-right are falling back a little which may be offsetting the government losing a few votes to the main centrist opposition bloc. A hung parliament isn't out of the question, but the opposition will probably struggle to do well enough to prevent Law and Justice remaining in power.

[dubsartur]

Its impressive that you have energy and resources to follow national politics in so many countries. 

Do many European countries have fall elections?  Why would that be?

Edit: meanwhile the Azerbaijanis have forced between a quarter and half of the remaining population of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh to flee after blockading flows of food, fuel, and medicine into the region.  My understanding is that because none of Armenia's neighbours is aligned with both Armenia and the Atlantic democracies, its easy to say 'ethnic cleansing is bad' but hard to suggest what to do.  Some people blame sinister Russians for maintaining 'frozen conflicts' that they can heat up whenever clients get too independent, but General Sir Rupert Smith wrote a whole book about how the UK military is not very good at permanently resolving conflicts either.

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I think it's more that very few have midsummer elections or midwinter elections: either suppress turnout rather, midwinter is cold and people won't come out to the polls, and midsummer more people are away, on holidays, disengaged from the news, etc. Also with the political calendar, politicians don't want to cancel their own holidays or push their activists out to fight an election campaign in too much heat or snow. So spring/autumn are more traditional campaign times I think in the large majority of northern hemisphere countries.

I think with me following lots of politics it's a bit of an obsessiveness thing - I like following graphs, and it's a way to consume politics that feels like a setup that I can work through in my head and doesn't lead to me spiralling into terror or guilt-tripping myself into exhausting myself with the really big (and to be honest, more important) problems in the actual public policy arena.

[Jubal]

Some updates!

Slovakia is now in coalition talks mode - which direction the country goes depends heavily on Hlas, the smaller and more pro-European social-democratic party. The expectation is that they form a coalition with Robert Fico's Smer, but that would require the nationalist SNS who Hlas explicitly don't want to work with and whose MP list includes some very fascist fascists. Or it would include someone else like the KDH, but the KDH have said they definitely don't want to work with Smer. Peter Pellegrini, the Hlas leader, is probably closer to Smer but would require some real concessions to make it clear that it's worth Hlas being its own party. There's even a possibility Pellegrini will become Prime Minister instead of the more divisive Fico, though this arrangement would still leave Fico with more power as the major coalition partner. If those talks break down, Hlas could also talk to the opposition, we'll see.

Luxembourg's coalition narrowly lost its majority: apparently it's likely that rather than trying to bring the Pirates into government, things will switch over to a centre-right led government with the Social Democrats or Liberals as minority partner. Would not expect huge changes to result from this. The flow of votes between centre-left and right was actually very small: the Greens lost five seats, one of which went to a small right-wing party, but the Liberals gained two, the Social Democrats one, and the Pirates another.

Germany's local elections were horrible for the centre-left/current coalition and pretty good for the hard right and populists, exactly as one would expect from the national polls. It's a bit hard to know what to do about parties like the AfD and FPO at the moment: the slight tightening of finances due to the Ukraine war, plus the transition aches for greener transport, are really biting governments across the centre of the continent.

Poland and the Netherlands are next: my expectation is that PiS will hang on in Poland, possibly in coalition with far-right Konf but I can't see the Civic Coalition pushing them right out of power. I think this election might solidify PiS into much more of an Orbanist party, too: winning will justify their bizarre attacks on the opposition and let them finish consolidating various bits of state capture. In the Netherlands, all bets are off and the polls could still move, I think any government has to contain Omtzigt's New Social Contract and a grand coalition of VVD/NSC/Centre-Left or a right-coalition of some kind are all possible.