Tag Archives: European Union

International Elections — Round 2

Earlier this month, I posted about international elections — specifically India, South Africa, and the U.K.  At that time, I overlooked two elections, and one of those two elections has triggered another election which is taking place today.

So we start with the elections for the European Parliament.  It is easy to overlook the elections for the European Parliament.  There are no truly Europe-wide parties.  Instead, the national parties align themselves into blocks in the European Parliament with block membership being somewhat fluid.  More importantly, many of the major decisions are made by the Council of Ministers (i.e. the representatives of the national government) with a consensus required for action.  As a result, the election tends to produce a large protest vote against the individual national governments with the opposition parties doing well with voters not paying much attention to the issues that Parliament does have to decide.  More significantly, none of the blocks has anything close to a majority of seats. There were weird country-specific shuffles with unaffiliated members now being the second largest group in the European Parliament behind a block that is generally center-right.

However, the main impact of the election was in France.  Heading into the election the two of the largest parties in France were tied.  However, there was a big swing between the (minority) government center-left party and the ultra-nationalist party which ended up with over 35% of the French seats.  Which moves us to the new election. Continue Reading...

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Foreign Elections — Spring/Summer 2019

The next two months will see several elections in our allies/major democracies. 

This weekend is the election in Spain for both houses of their parliament.  In Spain, the lower house is elected by proportional representation on a provincial basis.  While there is a nominal 3% threshold in each province, the (fifty) provinces range from one seat (in which whomever finishes first gets the seat) to thirty-six seats (in which case the threshold makes a real difference as it would take slightly over 2.7% to win a seat).  In the Senate, most of the provinces get four seats.  While voters directly elect most of the members of the Senate, the catch is that voters have one vote less than the number of seats (i.e. three votes in a province with four seats) which translates into the largest party getting three seats and the second-place party getting one seat.  The regional parliaments also get to appoint the remaining fifty-eight members of the Senate.  For this election, there are five national parties (ranging from two Democratic Socialist parties to a Trumpian nationalist party) and several regional parties. 

There are three things to look at in the results from Spain.  First, is there a natural majority for either of the two main blocs (the two Democratic Socialist parties vs. the two center-right party)?  Second, how does the Trumpian (Vox) party perform?  Third, how do the regional parties (which want increased local autonomy/independence) perform?  From the traditional American foreign policy, we would prefer a result that creates a strong functional government capable of being a partner with us.  Russia (and our current administration) would prefer a divided election result with strong performances by Vox and the regional parties pulling Spain further away from NATO and the European Union and potentially splitting Spain (one of the larger European countries) into several separate countries focused on their grievances with each other rather than building a strong Europe. Continue Reading...

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Brexit — Referendums and Legislation

Over the past several months, like many outside the United Kingdom, I have observed the chaos that has been the process of negotiating and ratifying the terms of the agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union over the terms of the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union (a.k.a. Brexit).  While it is easy as an outsider to have my own opinions about what is in the best interest of the U.K. and the rest of the world in terms of the ultimate outcome, the subject of this post is mostly about what lessons that we can draw from this chaos for our own politics.

The first lesson of Brexit is the difference between the Brexit referendum and the typical referendum in the U.S.  In the U.S., a referendum is typically a vote on a legislative-type proposal.  In other words, we are being asked to approve (or reject) a specific statute or constitutional provision or tax or bond.  By contrast, the Brexit referendum were about two concepts — staying in the European Union or leaving the European Union with the terms of continued membership or departure to be defined at a later date.  While there are always problems with voting on a specific proposal (no proposal is ever perfect and a referendum is essentially a take-it-or-leave-it vote in which you can’t just approve the good parts), a vote on a concept leaves it to the future to put meat on the idea. 

The U.K. is now dealing with the problem of defining what Brexit really means.  And that requires reading the tea leaves of what the slim majority that supported Brexit really wanted.  And, in such circumstances, the final version may differ significantly from what voters thought they were approving in the original referendum. Continue Reading...

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Foreign Elections — French Edition

On Sunday, French voters will go to the polls in the first round of their presidential election.  There are several key differences between the U.S. and France.  First, the French have more than two main political parties.  Out of the eleven candidates running, at least five represent significant political groupings.  Second, the French president is elected by popular vote.  Third, if no candidate gets a majority of the popular vote (likely based on current polls), there will be a run-off.  Fourth, the center of French politics is significantly further to the left than U.S. politics.  While folks try to put things in U.S. terms, the best way to view it is that the top five is like Donald Trump, John Kasich,  Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and someone to the left of Bernie Sanders, and even the Donald Trump candidate is more liberal on fiscal issues than President Trump.

Of course, what is the same is the existence of the National Front — an organization that Donald Trump loves.  As it’s name implies, the National Front is a xenophobic party opposed to French membership in the European Union and the Islamic influence in France.  It is also pro-Putin.  The National Front typically polls somewhere in the teens.  While this has historically been enough for the National Front to contend for run-off slots (both in Presidential and Parliamentary elections), the National Front is so far out of the mainstream of French politics that it normally loses most of those run-off elections (it only holds two seats in the outgoing French Parliament.)  In this election, the National Front is (again) running Marine Le Pen — daughter of the founder of the National Front and its leader since dear old dad retired.

There are some signs that the far right nationalist views of the National Front are making gains in France.  There is a symbiotic relationship between ultranationalist candidates like Le Pen and Trump on the one side and Islamic fundamentalist terror groups like ISIS.  Each terror attack make the law and order and anti-Islam messages of the ultranationalist sound like the only option that voters have if they want security.  However, that very anti-Islam message feeds into discrimination against Muslims who are native-born citizens.  Young Muslims feeling rejected by their own country then turn to leaders who call for a return to an era when Islam was dominant and promote violence as a means to that end.  When these young people follow through on that call and engage in acts of terror, the cycle begins again.   Given a spate of terror incidents on the eve of the election, the National Front may pick up an extra couple of percent in the first round of the election.

Fortunately, the French run-off system is likely to protect us from the global disaster that a Le Pen presidency is unlikely to happen.  Her polling is around 5-10 percent higher than the norm for the National Front in the past.  In a five-way race that might be good enough for a top two finish, but right now the fifth place candidate is starting to slip back, and there may be four candidates (including Le Pen) who finish between 20 percent and 25 percent.  Any two of the four could make the run-off.

The best chance for Le Pen to win, surprisingly, comes if the moderate-conservative candidate makes the run-off against her.  And the reason is the same as one of the reasons why Trump is in the White House.  The current candidate of the conservatives — Francois Fillon — has been the subject of an ongoing investigation.  In his case, the allegations is he hired his wife to “work” in his legislative office.  Allegedly, his wife didn’t really do any work in the office and this was merely a means to get a second paycheck from his legislative position.  At times, polling about potential runoffs have shown a close race between Le Pen and Fillon.  As in the Clinton-Trump race, those numbers are just close enough that Le Pen could theoretically close the gap in the two weeks between the first round and the run-off.  (Against the other candidates, Le Pen trails by about 30 percent.)

The French elections (which besides the presidential run-off will also include two rounds of legislative elections) is the second European election this year that will see how strong the ultra-right nationalists are around the globe.  Earlier, the Dutch elections ended in a good showing but still not a win for their equivalent of Donald Trump.  Later this year, Germany will also hold elections and the German equivalent of Trump and Le Pen is hoping to win seats in the German Bundestag for the first time ever.  Fortunately, the Brexit vote last year seems to mark the highwater mark for this wave in the UK.  With the issue in the UK now being how to leave — rather than whether to leave — the European Union, the surprise election called by the current government, while potentially seeing more mainstream conservatives in Parliament, is unlikely to result in any substantial seat for the far right.

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Britain, Europe, and the Presidential Election

There is no constitutional mechanism for a federal referendum in the United States.  The federal government has only limited authority over elections, and that limited authority does not give the federal government the ability to put legislation to a national referendum.  That is not the case in other countries.  In recent years, the United Kingdom has put major constitutional issues to a referendum.  This Thursday will see the latest of these referendums in which the issue is whether the United Kingdom will stay in the European Union.

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