World Politics and Elections 2025

[dubsartur]

British Columbia now has three populist right-wing parties in the legislature after MLAs pushed out of the official opposition formed their own parties (John Rustad's Conservatives, One BC, and Centre BC) and five parties in the legislature in all (with the NDP and the Greens).

Two MLAs in Alberta are trying to reestablish the Progressive Conservative Party because the governing United Conservative Party has a leader with a brain fried on right-wing podcasts.

I find it deeply shameful how Americans look at the corruption and downright evil of their two established parties, and the fecklessness and folly of the two minor parties, and say "welp, I guess there is nothing we can do" and not create a new party like adults. There are structural obstacles, but the USA went from about 30% of the adult population allowed to vote to 90% in 50 years (numbers are wild-ass guesses but see eg. Wikipedia). Women and Black Americans and Asian-Amercans and Native Americans all had to overcome massive obstacles to get the vote.

The new Liberal PM of Canada is a gullible authoritarian who says whatever he thinks will get him elected but people who read his book saw signs of the former.

[dubsartur]

BC Conservative leader John Rustad has accused some of the breakaway MLAs of trying to blackmail their former colleagues https://vancouversun.com/news/john-rusted-bc-conservative-mla-blackmail-accusations  He then walked back the exact accusation https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/rustad-blackmail-claim-opposition-caucus-1.7571750

[Jubal]

It probably says something about my circles that most Canadians I know are quite sour about Carney's government already, but it's actually if anything slightly increased its advantage over the Conservatives since the election. Are the Conservatives just in a horrible mess federally or something?


A bit of European poll watching lately:

• In the Netherlands, the likely centre coalition after the elections later this year remains VVD-PvdA/GL-D66-CDA, but the balance is shifting: the VVD have been dropping sharply in the polls and the CDA gaining, though it's unlikely to yield enough of a boost for the CDA to allow them to make a VVD-less government (and the CDA probably wouldn't want that anyway). A government of the right, however, now becomes further out of reach because the CDA and PVV won't work together.
• The Czech election looks like it'll result in an authoritarian coalition based around ANO, the big-tent populist party that left the liberal for the far-right block in the European parliament in the last few years. The post-communist-Eurosceptic Stacilo are possible coalition partners for them, as are the SPD, a more extreme far right Eurosceptic nationalist party. Between those three they will almost certainly have the 101 seats for the majority line, and it's very hard to see any of the other options working with any of them (the other three blocs likely to enter parliament being Europhile-conservative Stacilo, the localist Mayors & Independents bloc, and a Pirate/Green list.)
• Portugal now has a minority centre-right government, and seems to have avoided the Bulgaria problem by just having everyone agree to let them get on with it for now.
• Speaking of Bulgaria, the split in the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) has been the main set of shifts: the APS (Alliance for Rights and Freedoms) which split in a dispute over who led the DPS now seem to be kind of collapsing, after leaving the government over it having to negotiate for votes with their erstwhile colleagues and their reportedly very corrupt leader Peevski. Peevski has now replaced the APS in supporting the government.
• In Poland, the Third Way electoral alliance collapsed in June, which means there's now two small centre and two small left parties all of which might struggle to hit electoral thresholds, which is all quite bad news for the future.

[dubsartur]

It probably says something about my circles that most Canadians I know are quite sour about Carney's government already, but it's actually if anything slightly increased its advantage over the Conservatives since the election. Are the Conservatives just in a horrible mess federally or something?

I don't think anyone really likes Mark Carney.  He is a centrist neoliberal with a PhD in economics and a background in central banking.  But Pierre Polievre is a MAGA nutcase and the NDP have no leader at all (and said a lot of economically illiterate things during the last election: centrist economists have a lot of problems, but they are going to spend the next 50 years pointing to the second Trump administration to illustrate their lessons on the importance of free trade, an independent central bank, comparative advantage, etc etc etc.).  And Canada has no good options today and Carney is competent and can form and follow a strategy even if its a centrist neoliberal strategy.  We could do worse!

Trying to break a strike after 12 hours because people who can afford to take vacations by air are facing unexpected expenses is very neoliberal, but its not the worst thing a PM of Canada could do.

For my entire lifetime, Canadian elites were rewarded for integrating more closely with the USA and centralizing power within Canada eg. the dictatorship of the Prime Minister's Office and all the cozy little monopolies and oligopolies in different industries.  That path now leads to becoming something like the elite of Puerto Rico, but they don't know what else to do.  Just the fact that Canada may finally get free trade between provinces like is normal between countries tells you something.  Flailing like Carney embracing chatbots (but they are provided by US or Chinese companies, run on US cloud services, and embody the values of the US elite) or promising 5% defense spending (but will that include a stronger electrical grid and emergency response services; and wait, if climate change is a major security threat, why try to shove pipeline projects where people don't want them at RCMP gunpoint) show the extent of the confusion.

[Jubal]

Yes, the lack of fully open trade between bits of the same country does feel a bit weird from a European perspective. The UK has different laws by location with e.g. Scotland, but trade is basically fully open at least within Britain (NI has gotten a bit more complex since Brexit).

[Jubal]

Most of Western Europe and the Anglosphere - with the obvious exception - now recognises the state of Palestine.

It's really hard to say how big a deal or not this is in some ways, but I think it'll take us years to find out, especially as regards the way that Israel has burned most of its alliances.

[dubsartur]

Head of the BC Conservatives John Rustad survived a leadership review but participation is low and his party is a mess.  BC politics may settle in to the NDP as the sober party of university-educated managers and the BC Conservatives as the party of the people who watch too many online videos and listen to too many podcasts like the US Republicans. That would leave capital in a bind, because they liked having a party that would union-bash but otherwise governed in ways The Economist would approve of. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/09/24/Rustad-Survives-BC-Conservatives-Implode/

The BC Greens now have a 25-year-old leader whose only electoral experience is student politics. She pushes one regressive policy (free tuition for domestic students, people from rich families consume more education in Canada, and there are already large subsidies to low-income students, so that is like "free docking for yacht owners" or "no taxes on your first rental property"). https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/09/29/How-Zoomer-Became-Leader-BC-Green-Party/

[Jubal]

Recent world election stuff!

Trump's bullying seems to have paid off for Javier Milei, who has a much stronger parliamentary contingent as of the recent Argentinian election. How well that will go in the medium term for him I'm still not sure though.

The new Czech government still hasn't been formed and is currently in a mess because it turns out that the leader of one of the two far right parties being brought into Andrej Babiš' populist coalition is, shockingly, a massive racist. Weirdly it's the leader of the marginally less extreme right far right party who's turned out to be super racise, and the leader of the even more extreme right one is quarter Japanese and quarter Korean, but that's a curiosity of Czech far right politics which is often more about Euroscepticism, anti-immigrationism, and pro-Russian sentiment rather than being quite as ethnically driven as, say, the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian far right.

The Dutch go to the polls on Wednesday and it's not very clear what will happen at all really. The once dominant conservative VVD are likely to end up in fifth, the far right PVV in first but maybe a bit weaker than at the last election: the PvdA/GL alliance on the centre-left, the liberal D66, and the Christian Democrat CDA are all polling around 18-25 seats between them, and then there's various smaller parties. PvdA/GL/D66/CDA is the obvious core for a coalition, but they'd need VVD for a four (or five if you count the centre-left list as two) party government. A hard right coalition is very unlikely because the CDA won't work with the PVV (and the VVD would rather not either), and a right-to-center coalition of everyone from D66 going rightwards except the PVV would make the VVD happier but would be dead on arrival because it would mean the '66 (very environmentalist, very pro EU) working with blocks like JA21 (basically the PVV with marginally less incoherent personality cultism). And it probably wouldn't have a majority. A left-coalition without the VVD might be mathematically possible but the CDA wouldnt want to be the rightmost party in that coalition I expect.

Most likely outcome is probably that the VVD jettison their leader after the election and join a government of the centre, but we'll see.

[dubsartur]

There is talk of a general strike in Alberta after Premier Daniele Smith preemptively used the notwithstanding clause to force teachers back to work. I believe that would be a proportionate response.

One Federal Conservative MP has joined the Canadian Liberals but right now they don't have enough votes to pass a budget. People who have read all 500 pages say its a very odd document (cutting taxes on yachts and empty homes, lots of talk about liquid natural gas, carbon capture and storage, and Canada's AI future, talk about the need to speed up decisions on proposed construction projects but cutting the federal workforce). Another conservative MP will resign and Conservative head Pierre Poilievre is trying to delay that until after the budget vote.

[dubsartur]

I post this with the Canadian budget vote underway. The budget is a confidence motion so if it fails the governor general must call an election or give another party a chance to form a majority. A week ago the Liberal government lead by newbie to elected office Mark Carney was three votes short of a majority and has no public agreement with another party.  They got one Conservative MP to cross the aisle. They got Green Party head Elizabeth May to vote yes after returning to commitments to meet the Paris climate agreement (Canada has one of the highest emissions per capita in the world, and those emissions have risen rapidly since 1990). It seems unlikely that the Conservatives will vote yes, so the options are the NDP (7 seats), the Bloc (22 seats), and persuading one Conservative to vote yes.

[Jubal]

It feels quite an unusual approach to be trying to peel off singular MPs rather than just trying to do a deal with the NDP on something or other: the comfort of having a vote or two to spare is pretty valuable in minority governance!

[dubsartur]

Two NDP and two Conservative MPs abstained which looks like it might have been an agreement to treat both parties as having the same dignity. That gave a majority of 170 to 168. Its not great that the government is so fragile. I don't know how much experience Carney has in collaborative negotiation as opposed to getting to yes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory/federal-budget-vote-2025-9.6981042

A longform piece on Mark Carney kept returning to phrases like imperious, arrogant, and thin-skinned https://macleans.ca/politics/mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ And despite the best efforts of past Prime Ministers, Canada is not a dictatorship like a corporation, and a minority government certainly is not.

I don't see Canadians talking about how Carney is losing interest in climate change and getting excited by spicy autocomplete at the same time figures like Bill Gates are losing interest in one and getting excited by the other.  Carney is not as rich (most online sources guess his net worth in the millions) but he belongs to the international executive-financial class. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/election-2025-leaders-assets-1.7499198 Some Canadians compare him to Michael Bloomberg the elderly exec and former mayor of NYC, but Bloomberg has hundreds of billions of dollars.

In the provincial capital of British Columbia, a riding association of the Conservative party of British Columbia (second largest party in the legislature, up from barely existing two years ago) dissolved itself. The former head has now been elected leader of the Christian Heritage Party of BC rather than join One BC, the hard right/anti-Rustad splinter of the BC Conservatives, or Centre BC, similar but without any MLAs. https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/unhappy-with-rustad-bc-conservatives-in-esquimalt-colwood-dissolve-riding-association-11480605

[dubsartur]

Chrystia Freeland, onetime frontrunner for the Liberal leadership and now a backbench MP, plans to move to Oxford to work for the Rhodes Trust. Her riding association has no comment on how she will square this with being MP in Toronto until the next election circa 2029 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/freeland-uk-rhodes-trust-9.6986521

She is married to a NYT journalist because of course she is, the Anglo-American oligarchy works that way.  Back when she was being positioned to replace Justin Trudeau, I don't remember the CBC laying out all her connections to concentrated power. This is also a sign that Mark Carney has trouble working with some people who are powerful in the Liberal Party of Canada. We also saw the Canadian oligarchs talking out loud when they called for people with tenure at Ivy-league universities in the USA to be brought to Canada (rather than the thousands of adjuncts and postdocs who could do just as good work given the same resources).

[Jubal]

She is married to a NYT journalist because of course she is, the Anglo-American oligarchy works that way.  Back when she was being positioned to replace Justin Trudeau, I don't remember the CBC laying out all her connections to concentrated power.

I genuinely wonder sometimes if there's room out there for basically a data news site that just focuses on doing social network analysis of powerful people and their connections.

(Though that said, given something as big-hitting as 538 eventually got killed off, it does feel like data journalism in general seems to be a weaker sector than one might expect in the modern world.)

Europe, I think, has pretty similar issues re trying to attract tenured professors from the US rather than precarious academics who can get things done.

[dubsartur]

She is married to a NYT journalist because of course she is, the Anglo-American oligarchy works that way.  Back when she was being positioned to replace Justin Trudeau, I don't remember the CBC laying out all her connections to concentrated power.

I genuinely wonder sometimes if there's room out there for basically a data news site that just focuses on doing social network analysis of powerful people and their connections.

(Though that said, given something as big-hitting as 538 eventually got killed off, it does feel like data journalism in general seems to be a weaker sector than one might expect in the modern world.)

Europe, I think, has pretty similar issues re trying to attract tenured professors from the US rather than precarious academics who can get things done.

I recently saw this study of journalists in Canada who are married to or the children of journalists https://www.readthemaple.com/breaking-down-family-connections-in-canadian-journalism/ I think this one on social media figures is more about online social networks than who has coffee together or goes to the same Pilates and by the way did you hear about my nephew who is having a hard time getting into his chosen field https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news-creators-influencers/2025/mapping-news-creators-and-influencers-social-and-video-networks You cannot at the same time protect people who reach the top 10% of income and influence in their field from ever leaving it, and help people who are struggling.  Every bad year that someone has requires a good year to balance that, and someone at the top has to drop down to make room.

Edit: Americans talk about elite impunity, the phenomenon where with sufficient wealth and clout you can do almost anything and face no serious consequences. Canada is not like that but it has a lot of cozy and not terribly competent or hard-working people with more money and influence than the average Canadian.

Edit Edit: foreigners might want to refresh themselves on Michael Ignatieff for how this works on the professional-managerial center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ignatieff Its a bit different for righties like Stephen Harper.