Category Archives: Governments and parties

Battle Royal

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A long time ago, in a year already far away, some commenters were mentionning a recent poll showing that Ségolène Royal was now leading the race to become the socialist party nominee for the 2007 French presidential election. One salient finding of the poll was that she was supported by a plurality of both French voters (36%) and socialist sympathizers (48%).

At this point, even casual observers of the French political scene would to tempted to ask : just who the hell is this Ségolène Royal I have never heard of? Well, I’m glad you asked and I was preparing to bore you with a clumsily written and long-winded summary about the race for the Socialist party nomination and Ms Royal’s short but happy political carreer. But I’ve just found that Doug Ireland has already done it, albeit in a clear way, complete with color pictures, snarky criticism of the French press and the inevitable comparison to Hillary Clinton. So go read him and come back if you really want to know my opinion about Segolène Royal’s chances.
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The End of the Dolce Vita?

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Are the good times and the good life still going to continue to roll in the Italy of the twenty first century? This is the core question the Economist’s Europe editor John Peet asks in the latest Economist Survey: Italy, Addio, Dolce Vita. As Peet says:

Italy is approaching a crunch. Rather like Venice in the 18th century, it has coasted for too long on the back of its past success. Again like Venice, it has lost many of the economic advantages which underpinned that success. For Venice, it was a near-monopoly on trade with the East that paid for the creation of its beautiful palaces and churches; today’s Italy has benefited hugely from a combination of low-cost labour and a switch of workers away from low-productivity farming (and the south) into manufacturing (mostly in the north). But such good things invariably come to an end.

Italy badly needed a dose of pro-market reforms, liberalisation, privatisation, deregulation and a shake-up of the public administration, all of which Mr Berlusconi had promised. He even pledged to cut taxes. A majority of Italian voters, backed by much of Italian business, were willing to overlook both his legal entanglements and his conflicts of interest and give him a chance to reform the country. But as the next election approaches, very little of what he promised has been delivered, so many of his erstwhile supporters are feeling disillusioned.
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Fischer’s gain, America’s loss?

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Michael Moore gives us a thoughtful article about Joschka Fischer (and some priceless Fischer anecdotes) in Slate today. Before going any farther I should make clear that I refer not to the notoriously fat filmmaker but to Michael Scott Moore, an American novelist living in Berlin. Of his fatness or otherwise I am entirely ignorant.

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Is something happening?

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As we have been able to witness with unfortunate regularity lately, not every election helps move politics forward. Fortunately, some still do.

While Sunday’s regional election in the Austrian state of Steiermark, which was widely expected to be the decisive reason behind the Austrian government’s determination that the treaty opening EU accession talks with Turkey – which were supposed to start with a (now postponed) signing ceremonyat 5pm CET today – explicitly include the option of a non-standard membership or so-called privileged partnership, did not help to overcome the impasse, the by-election in Dresden seems to have shifted the balance of power in the race for the German Chancellory to the extent that Chancellor Schröder told RTL television – before attending a meeting of the SPD’s steering committee this afternoon – that (my translation, German from Spiegel Online) -

“… this is not about me. It’s about my party’s entitlement to lead, and only the party leadership can decide about it. I will accept whichever decision will be made. I don’t want to impede the development of the reform process which I have started or the formation of a stable government for Germany.”

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The Italian Government Has A New Crisis

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Germany isn’t the only EU country where serious ongoing economic problems are leading to political gridlock. Italy’s situation is no better, and arguably worse. This ‘worse’ aspect was pushed into the headlines yesterday by the resignation of Economy Minister Domenico Siniscalco. This is sending shock waves throughout the entire Italian political system. It still isn’t clear at the time of writing whether the Berlusconi government can survive, especially given the gravity of the underlying problem which is the need to make severe budget cuts when Italy is in a prolonged recession and elections loom sometime next spring.

Essentially Siniscalco quit because of continuing government infighting over the 2006 budget and over the administration�s failure to force the resignation of Bank of Italy Governor Antonio Fazio following the scandal produced by accusations that he showed bias against Dutch bank ABN AMRO during a takeover battle for the Italian Banca Antonveneta SpA.
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Catastrophic success?

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In one of his many excellent pieces in the run-up to the German election, Alex mentioned the phenomenon of ‘overhang mandates’. These are extra parliamentary seats that a party gains by winning more seats via one of German’s two electoral methods than by the other. This might seem odd enough. What’s even odder is that a party could lose a seat if too many people vote for it.

German electoral law is complex. In a comment to one of Tobias’s posts, Florian recommended the wahlrecht.de website as a good primer on how it works. He also mentioned examples of some of the electoral weirdnesses explained by wahlrecht.de. For example, did you know (asks Florian) that, under certain circumstances, a vote can have ‘negative weight’ — can reduce the parliamentary representation of the party for which it is cast?

Well, it can. And this conundrum is worth looking at closely, because right now it is more than a mere electoral curiosity. There is one electoral district in Germany, Dresden I, that has not yet voted. (Those who’ve been paying a perhaps unhealthy level of attention to the German elections will know that the death of a neonazi candidate has forced the delay of the election.) And in Dresden I, there is a very real chance that a local triumph of the CDU could cause the party to lose a seat in the national parliament. The reason? It’s those overhang mandates that Alex kept mentioning.

Excellent as wahlrecht.de is, it’s in German. Below the fold, then, is a summary explanation of how the CDU could lose a seat by gaining votes. For those who read German and are interested in that sort of thing, there are links to the relevant passages of the BWahlG (German Federal Electoral Act).

In the mean time, we should note that the possible ‘negative weight’ of CDU votes in Dresden I, though perverse and undemocratic, would not affect the overall results in Germany. Even if the CDU are ‘catastrophically successful’ in Dresden I, the Union will still have more seats than the SPD, albeit with a lead of only 2 rather than 3 MPs. The really perverse thing that could come out of the Dresden special election is this: CDU and SPD wind up with an equal number of seats. As the Spiegel explains, however, this is mathematically a possibility, but in real-world terms exceedingly unlikely. To achieve this result, the SPD would need to poll 91% of voters in the district, and every single eligible voter would have to vote.

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Where to find the German election results

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In a comment to Tobias’s post below, Guerby complains that he/she/they can’t find the election results.

Well, then, look here. Updated every ten minutes. Since my last post, the Union have widened their lead over SPD to a full percentage point; but FDP are back down to single digits. All just changes round the margin, though; and the SPD seem to have done better out of the ‘overhang mandates’ than have the Union.

No dramatic changes likely between now and the official results, then.

Apparently 粗大塵 does not mean what I, judging by the context, had thought it means

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I’ve been harshing on the Union and their little dog Toto the FDP pretty nastily throughout the campaign.1 Surely, though, I should spare a thought for Die Linke.

It’s easy to fail to pay the ‘Left Party’ the attention they deserve, mostly because nobody is likely to form a coalition with them. But still it should be noted: they did very well in this election. They should receive the congratulations they deserve.

Congratulations, then, wendebeschädigte East German communists: you polled surprisingly well, once you put yourselves under a West German carpetbagger.

And congratulations, Oskar Lafontaine. Many years ago you were the only major German political leader willing to speak the truth about the cost of unification. What a way you’ve come since then, finishing your career by becoming the first West German head of the SED.
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The results begin to harden

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Those numbers are starting to gel. There’s been movement, as one would expect, but mostly on the right-hand side of the decimal point. SPD look to have polled very slightly better, the Union very slightly worse than it seemed an hour ago. (But NB: Hessia is still uncertain.)

Schröder has just spoken. On the one hand, he ruled out Red/Green/Even Redder once again. On the other, he stated that he’d be continuing as chancellor. If he’s not merely spouting shite, that can mean only one thing: Red/Yellow/Green, the ‘Ampel‘. One wonders whether he already had a deal sewn up with Guido.

The Union have actually done worse than they did under Stoiber in the previous elections. The first post-election casualty, then, is likely to be Angela Merkel. There will be no shortage of CDU knives out for her now. Her career is probably over. And that’s a real pity; she’s far the best of the lot of them.