World Politics and Elections 2024

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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

[psyanojim]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Pentagathus]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

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.

[dubsartur]

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 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.

[Jubal]

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, 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.

[dubsartur]

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 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/

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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