World Politics and Elections 2023

[Jubal]

The next few days have a couple of large elections: the Argentine presidency and the Dutch parliament.

Argentina I think is currently looking like it'll narrowly go to the hard-right, a man called Javier Milei who can be basically described as what would happen if a 1970s drug addict powdered the brains of Liz Truss, Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro, and snorted them all off a chainsaw whilst already high on LSD. I don't think this will go very well for Argentina, but as the country is in a wild hyperinflation mess already a lot of people are prepared to take gambles it seems.

In the Netherlands, Omtzigt has said he doesn't really want to work with either the centre left or far right, a combination that makes any coalition mathematically extremely difficult to form, so he'll probably have to walk back at least one of those after the election. His NSC are neck and neck with the VVD for first place on around 18% each, with the Lab-Grn alliance a couple of points behind, the hard-right PVV on about 13%, BBB and D66 on the five or six mark, and everyone else in the 2-4 range. Everyone else here adds up to ten or eleven parties, some of which will probably end up in government somehow.

Mathematically right now, something like VVD+NSC+BBB+CDA+CU would equal 47% for a right-but-not-that-extreme-right government, but that still leaves a gap and BBB probably can't sit along with D66 in a government given their environmental policies. I half wonder if the Socialist Party, being more socially conservative than much of the rest of the left, might be tempted into such a coalition (though they've ruled out working with the VVD). It'd be very unwieldy though.

Also with the very large voter churn that gives a much much higher than usual chance that the polls will miss late movement. My expectation is that they'll be mostly right, but that the bigger lists might do marginally better than expected as undecided voters break for one of the larger options.

[Jubal]

Some election results!

Javier Milei is the president-elect of Argentina! I still think his policies are going to make a bad situation worse, but 55% of Argentines disagree with me. However, Milei only has about 38 seats of the 257 in Parliament: he can get things through as long as the centre-right Juntos por el Cambio votes with him (they have a bit under a hundred seats now, so enough for ca 130 combined), but what are they prepared (or not) to sign off on? And those parties put together don't add up to a Senate majority. So that's going to be a mess.

Speaking of messes, the hard right PVV are now the largest party in the Dutch parliament, and we await negotiations to see exactly how the new government will collapse. It's totally unclear who can form one right now, a right-wing coalition led by the PVV is very much on the table but both the VVD and NSC would have to be in it and both are clearly wary (indeed the NSC ruled it out before the election but we'll see what that translates to now). If a PVV led VVD backed government functions at all it could also end up being a model for e.g. Austria next year where the equivalent FPO-OVP option might happen. In a sense it ought to be easy for the PVV to govern, if they just jettison some of the more nuts stuff and get on with vaguely boring government bits and being nasty to migrants in whatever ways their coalition partners will sign off on... but I'm not sure they're competent enough to do that.

The tricky challenge for the VVD and NSC in particular, really, is to work out how to make Wilders' failure a matter of his fault not looking like their stitch-up.

[dubsartur]

At no point anywhere did I suggest that everyone must do their own research on all topics and discard all other sources of verification. I really don't understand such a binary and extreme way of looking at things.

For my own part I have trouble associating "binary" or "extreme" with any of my opinions.  But the collapse of trusted networks of synthesis and verification is something I have been thinking hard about for ten years or so.  I still don't understand what your preferred solution is.

The fact that the US government is now accusing the Indian government of plotting assassinations on US and Canadian soil is a big deal. Edit: an Indian citizen in Czechia was arrested for extradition and prosecution in the USA https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-charges-connection-foiled-plot-assassinate-us-citizen-new-york

[Jubal]

The Dutch do not look terribly like forming a coalition right now - the VVD would give confidence & supply but don't want to be in the cabinet, the NSC don't even want to give confidence & supply until there is some clarification over what's going on.

I worry that this will drive more voters to the PVV in the short term or harden their vote: if there's a feeling that "old-school" politicians haven't given them enough chance to form a coalition then that might give them a certain anti-politics edge. It might also push other voters away from the right if there's a feeling that the right wing are too divided to govern without some kind of centre-left anchor, however.

Milei's Argentina has announced that in contrast to the previous government's policy it won't be joining the BRICS group of major developing economies.

[dubsartur]

Milei's Argentina has announced that in contrast to the previous government's policy it won't be joining the BRICS group of major developing economies.

It fascinates me that the "Brazil Russia India and China"-s became BRICS and added South Africa, then became a formal group as opposed to an investor's shorthand for "large low-income countries with high economic growth."  People are strange.  Of course Russia never kept up the "growth" part and Brazil has difficulties too.  Per capita, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world in 1910 but it fell behind.

[dubsartur]

Wikipedia has what seems like a good article on the dispute between Guayana and Venuzuela about the Esequiba or Essequeba region.  When Guiana became independent in 1966, the UK, Guiana, and Venuzuela signed a treaty that they should really settle who owned this territory someday.  Nobody ever seems to have asked the indigenous people.  The excuse for the current crisis is that Guyana sold Exxon rights to drill for offshore oil.  I don't know anywhere with an article which is less prone to vandalism by nationalists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guayana_Esequiba

[Jubal]

Yeah, Wikipedia's "it should sound neutral" is a really awkward way to try and produce neutrality but I'm not sure that the result is always vastly worse than a lot of actual newsrooms come up with and Wiki often provides more detail. Which is probably more a comment on how bad everything else is, but it's grimly interesting in any case.