Serious post-Brexit vibes here. I guess we really do repeat history. Pro-Brexiteers wanted one thing mainly, to be allowed to be openly racist like the good old days. Because everyone knows immigrants cause all the problems. They loudly proclaimed the people had spoken and the a glorious future awaited Britain. They told Project Fear to shut up.
Fast forward 7 years and now strangely you can't find anyone who voted for Brexit and even if you do, they bizarrely hate what it has done to the UK. And we are desperately trying to attract 'migrant' workers because it turns out their labour was keeping several sectors functioning.
So I guess, be careful what you wish for.
Yeah, it's how I see him, he's less "Trump" and more "Farage" also in the way he acts:
- He is a populist with a a few issues that do well, but are kind of terrible, for instance: Leave the EU, stop all immigration, adopt a "wait and see" on the environment. All these issues play well with a "return to how it was in the golden Past, when the milk-man stopped by for a chat, none of this modern woke nonsense"
- He is pretty charismatic in debates, always has a glib answer and is there for the Photo-op to ridicule.
- Spends most of his time being in the opposition, where he doesn't really have to think of better answers, just say "I would have solved this better"
- When he was in power, still somehow claimed to not be, because optics.
- Has now gotten what he wanted, this is the "And here's Brexit!" stage of Farage.
- We'll see if he screws it all up and will blame his opposition for thwarting his beautiful dream, as Farage has done with his "If only we had Brexited as I wanted, Harder!"
"He hasn't even done anything yet." is not a great argument when what people are talking about are policies that he ran on wanting to implement. He might not be able to implement all his crappy policies due to not having an outright majority, but that's not doing anything to convince me that his win is in any way a good thing. It also seems very unlikely that any government with PVV in it is going to compromised down on all their regressive positions.
It's also a really weird argument to levy at Wilders, who
1) Has been active in politics for decades, we know his platform.
2) Was a member of the government "Rutte 1" where he fulfilled the role of "general wise ass" and mostly sat on the sidelines making snide comments, cumulating in the fall of said government when he didn't like the austerity measures being proposed. (And yes, he was technically not part of the government, but explaining "gedoog-partijen" and what they are requires way to many paragraphs, in short, he was kind of like the Tea Party inside the Republican party, but then officially an independent party who's votes were needed to govern)
This guy is not some kind of random wildcard, he is, very much like Farage, someone who thrives being in the opposition and dumping on others, while sprouting anti-immigrant / anti-EU / anti-"woke" sound bytes. He loves sitting in the blinders going "Bullshit, won't work!" while contributing very little himself.
Gedoogsteun is worth explaining because we're heading towards that again and it is relevant for other European democracies as well.
Our House has 150 seats, a government is formed when someone can make an agreement between parties that represents 76 of those seats. The parties that are in that majority then deliver the ministers and prime minister to form Het Kabinet. The seats these ministers leave behind are filled with other people from their parties until either the House is back to 150 or when one of the ruling parties can not add more people*.
Now this agreement (Dutch: coalitieakkoord) can be as specific or vague as they want it to be, just as long as they can look the king in the face and say that they will be able to lead the country together.
When no majority can be found, a party or single person can agree with a coalitieakkoord, but not join Het Kabinet. That way they allow (gedogen) the other parties to rule. These are shaky foundations, obviously! There's hardly any risk for the gedoogpartner and when they feel like letting the government implode they can just do that.
It's also possible for one party to deliver all ministers and then find majorities for whatever votes come up in the House, but this has not been a realistic option in modern politics. It would be too easy to let a PM trip and every close call would lead to massive haggling between dodgy politicians.
--
* So this is a serious risk for Wilders and Omtzigt: you can only let people take a seat in the House when they were on your list of candidates who could receive votes. For instance: if you're a party of 4, but get enough votes to fill 5 seats you will only get 4 seats and that 5th one will be given to another party based on some funky maths. But what if you have 25 candidates, get 22 seats and then join a coalition in which you get to deliver 4 ministers? You pick those from your roster of 25, the seats get filled by the 3 candidates you have left over, but that one final seat remains empty. You just made the House smaller until the next election. If VVD refuses to join a coalition, but give gedoogsteun to Wilders, then he might be forced to deliver so many ministers he won't have enough candidates left to fill all his seats. It's just some idle conspiracy thinking of me, but I can just imagine this kind of scheming going on to hamstring Wilders in a way the random voter won't understand.
"He hasn't even done anything yet." is not a great argument when what people are talking about are policies that he ran on wanting to implement. He might not be able to implement all his crappy policies due to not having an outright majority, but that's not doing anything to convince me that his win is in any way a good thing. It also seems very unlikely that any government with PVV in it is going to compromised down on all their regressive positions.
It's also a really weird argument to levy at Wilders, who
1) Has been active in politics for decades, we know his platform.
2) Was a member of the government "Rutte 1" where he fulfilled the role of "general wise ass" and mostly sat on the sidelines making snide comments, cumulating in the fall of said government when he didn't like the austerity measures being proposed. (And yes, he was technically not part of the government, but explaining "gedoog-partijen" and what they are requires way to many paragraphs, in short, he was kind of like the Tea Party inside the Republican party, but then officially an independent party who's votes were needed to govern)
This guy is not some kind of random wildcard, he is, very much like Farage, someone who thrives being in the opposition and dumping on others, while sprouting anti-immigrant / anti-EU / anti-"woke" sound bytes. He loves sitting in the blinders going "Bullshit, won't work!" while contributing very little himself.
Gedoogsteun is worth explaining because we're heading towards that again and it is relevant for other European democracies as well.
Our House has 150 seats, a government is formed when someone can make an agreement between parties that represents 76 of those seats. The parties that are in that majority then deliver the ministers and prime minister to form Het Kabinet. The seats these ministers leave behind are filled with other people from their parties until either the House is back to 150 or when one of the ruling parties can not add more people*.
Now this agreement (Dutch: coalitieakkoord) can be as specific or vague as they want it to be, just as long as they can look the king in the face and say that they will be able to lead the country together.
When no majority can be found, a party or single person can agree with a coalitieakkoord, but not join Het Kabinet. That way they allow (gedogen) the other parties to rule. These are shaky foundations, obviously! There's hardly any risk for the gedoogpartner and when they feel like letting the government implode they can just do that.
It's also possible for one party to deliver all ministers and then find majorities for whatever votes come up in the House, but this has not been a realistic option in modern politics. It would be too easy to let a PM trip and every close call would lead to massive haggling between dodgy politicians.
--
* So this is a serious risk for Wilders and Omtzigt: you can only let people take a seat in the House when they were on your list of candidates who could receive votes. For instance: if you're a party of 4, but get enough votes to fill 5 seats you will only get 4 seats and that 5th one will be given to another party based on some funky maths. But what if you have 25 candidates, get 22 seats and then join a coalition in which you get to deliver 4 ministers? You pick those from your roster of 25, the seats get filled by the 3 candidates you have left over, but that one final seat remains empty. You just made the House smaller until the next election. If VVD refuses to join a coalition, but give gedoogsteun to Wilders, then he might be forced to deliver so many ministers he won't have enough candidates left to fill all his seats. It's just some idle conspiracy thinking of me, but I can just imagine this kind of scheming going on to hamstring Wilders in a way the random voter won't understand.
This is a really interesting read for someone who knows that various parlimentary systems are “different” but has little knowledge about them, thanks! If I may ask, in the situation where a party has fewer seated members than seats + minister slots awarded, can that party choose to trade away awarded minster seats to other members of the coalition in order to keep all their voting seats?
_
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Are those party lists public? Do we know how many names are in each party's list?
Yeah the lists are what you vote for.
Dutch ministers do not need to come out of the House. That is mostly traditional, but gets broken regularly.
The reason there is some risk for Wilders is that his list was 44 long and he's seating 37. That includes the senator suspected of fraud. And you can't have a house and senate seat at the same time.
This forces Wilders to pick ministers outside his inner circle pretty much.
And Wilders is a paranoid little dictator, who wants yes men who parrot him. Which doesn't work if you have to lead a department with say 20.000 bureaucrats.
All of that are ways this could go wrong, but I don't think it will matter much in the end.
"He hasn't even done anything yet." is not a great argument when what people are talking about are policies that he ran on wanting to implement. He might not be able to implement all his crappy policies due to not having an outright majority, but that's not doing anything to convince me that his win is in any way a good thing. It also seems very unlikely that any government with PVV in it is going to compromised down on all their regressive positions.
It's also a really weird argument to levy at Wilders, who
1) Has been active in politics for decades, we know his platform.
2) Was a member of the government "Rutte 1" where he fulfilled the role of "general wise ass" and mostly sat on the sidelines making snide comments, cumulating in the fall of said government when he didn't like the austerity measures being proposed. (And yes, he was technically not part of the government, but explaining "gedoog-partijen" and what they are requires way to many paragraphs, in short, he was kind of like the Tea Party inside the Republican party, but then officially an independent party who's votes were needed to govern)
This guy is not some kind of random wildcard, he is, very much like Farage, someone who thrives being in the opposition and dumping on others, while sprouting anti-immigrant / anti-EU / anti-"woke" sound bytes. He loves sitting in the blinders going "Bullshit, won't work!" while contributing very little himself.
Gedoogsteun is worth explaining because we're heading towards that again and it is relevant for other European democracies as well.
Our House has 150 seats, a government is formed when someone can make an agreement between parties that represents 76 of those seats. The parties that are in that majority then deliver the ministers and prime minister to form Het Kabinet. The seats these ministers leave behind are filled with other people from their parties until either the House is back to 150 or when one of the ruling parties can not add more people*.
Now this agreement (Dutch: coalitieakkoord) can be as specific or vague as they want it to be, just as long as they can look the king in the face and say that they will be able to lead the country together.
When no majority can be found, a party or single person can agree with a coalitieakkoord, but not join Het Kabinet. That way they allow (gedogen) the other parties to rule. These are shaky foundations, obviously! There's hardly any risk for the gedoogpartner and when they feel like letting the government implode they can just do that.
It's also possible for one party to deliver all ministers and then find majorities for whatever votes come up in the House, but this has not been a realistic option in modern politics. It would be too easy to let a PM trip and every close call would lead to massive haggling between dodgy politicians.
--
* So this is a serious risk for Wilders and Omtzigt: you can only let people take a seat in the House when they were on your list of candidates who could receive votes. For instance: if you're a party of 4, but get enough votes to fill 5 seats you will only get 4 seats and that 5th one will be given to another party based on some funky maths. But what if you have 25 candidates, get 22 seats and then join a coalition in which you get to deliver 4 ministers? You pick those from your roster of 25, the seats get filled by the 3 candidates you have left over, but that one final seat remains empty. You just made the House smaller until the next election. If VVD refuses to join a coalition, but give gedoogsteun to Wilders, then he might be forced to deliver so many ministers he won't have enough candidates left to fill all his seats. It's just some idle conspiracy thinking of me, but I can just imagine this kind of scheming going on to hamstring Wilders in a way the random voter won't understand.
This is a really interesting read for someone who knows that various parlimentary systems are “different” but has little knowledge about them, thanks! If I may ask, in the situation where a party has fewer seated members than seats + minister slots awarded, can that party choose to trade away awarded minster seats to other members of the coalition in order to keep all their voting seats?
Yes. There's also some flexibility in how many ministers and Staatssecretarissen (vice ministers, essentially) you want in your Kabinet in total. Things will have to particularly weird for a smaller House to happen, but for a small party roster to get this many votes this is a serious concern.
Theres also the issue that the last lad on the list isn't usually a very serious candidate. We've had Olympic medalists, comedians, actresses and kickboxing champions on the lists this election. None of them really want to switch careers, they just wanedt to push a political party to more votes by way of name recognition.
Polish President Andrzej Duda (PiS) has given outgoing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (PiS) the first chance to try to form a government after last month's election. That's despite the ruling PiS party failing to win a majority.
PiS got the largest vote share, but are short of a majority and other parties don't want to go in coalition with them
The moment of truth will come, at the latest, in 14 days: Morawiecki must face a vote of confidence in parliament by December 11.
"The final act of political theater," summarized the internet platform Onet. "Government has no hope of vote of confidence," ran the headline in the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Opposition lawmaker Michal Szczerba called it a "waste of time."
A investigative report about how members of the AFD (still currently soaring in the polls) met with Neonazi groups to discuss large scale "remigrations" of minorities might've shaken something loose in the public discourse in Germany.
Several large demonstrations against the far right/AFD this week. Just in Munich today supposedly 250k people showed up.
Hopefully this is the actual start of some real opposition
For context, here is the most recent national German poll. Parties need at least 5% to get into parliament, so there would be only 4 parties making it in. Elections aren’t expected until fall 2025.
"Yes but they are popular." is no reason for democracies not to legally shut down fascists.
Germany even has laws in place for that which other democracies in the EU don't...
I swear, there was a far right wing party in Europe a while back that explained in detail what they wanted to do if they got into power, and when they did, they started doing all those things!
Their leader even wrote a book about it, while sitting in jail.
"Yes but they are popular." is no reason for democracies not to legally shut down fascists.
Germany even has laws in place for that which other democracies in the EU don't...
Last time a party was actually banned was in 1956, the KPD, Communist party of Germany.
Last time it was tried was against the NPD in the oughts which was a debacle because there were so security service informers in the extreme right-wing party, even in higher positions that it wasn't clear how much the influence of the intelligence services was guiding parts of the party.
And now I guess lots of people are kinda afraid to try a ban
I don't really know how German politics work and what's up with the other parties.
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
I don't really know how German politics work and what's up with the other parties.
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
Option B is what we're at in Sweden at the moment, because power above all for the conservatives.
I don't really know how German politics work and what's up with the other parties.
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
Option B is what we're at in Sweden at the moment, because power above all for the conservatives.
Social Democrats aren't exactly guiltless in that department either. They haven't had a clear vision for their politics in something like two decades now, defining themselves less as "social democrats" and more as "the party that should rule Sweden".
Nobody is clear about what they want except SD (the racists, although they show what they want mostly through dogwhistling, but they've gotten bolder lately), V (the left party) and MP (The green party).
Problem with the V is that they haven't quite dealt with their legacy of communists and campists, and MP are kind of anti-science in their green policies. It's more about what they feel is good for the environment than what actually is good for the environment.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I don't really know how German politics work and what's up with the other parties.
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
Option B is what we're at in Sweden at the moment, because power above all for the conservatives.
Social Democrats aren't exactly guiltless in that department either. They haven't had a clear vision for their politics in something like two decades now, defining themselves less as "social democrats" and more as "the party that should rule Sweden".
Nobody is clear about what they want except SD (the racists, although they show what they want mostly through dogwhistling, but they've gotten bolder lately), V (the left party) and MP (The green party).
Problem with the V is that they haven't quite dealt with their legacy of communists and campists, and MP are kind of anti-science in their green policies. It's more about what they feel is good for the environment than what actually is good for the environment.
I don't understand how every global green party seems to have the exact same curse.
I don't really know how German politics work and what's up with the other parties.
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
Option B is what we're at in Sweden at the moment, because power above all for the conservatives.
Social Democrats aren't exactly guiltless in that department either. They haven't had a clear vision for their politics in something like two decades now, defining themselves less as "social democrats" and more as "the party that should rule Sweden".
Nobody is clear about what they want except SD (the racists, although they show what they want mostly through dogwhistling, but they've gotten bolder lately), V (the left party) and MP (The green party).
Problem with the V is that they haven't quite dealt with their legacy of communists and campists, and MP are kind of anti-science in their green policies. It's more about what they feel is good for the environment than what actually is good for the environment.
I don't understand how every global green party seems to have the exact same curse.
Because that's exactly the kind of person that tends to join the Green Party rather then more established more powerful parties I imagine.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Yeah, S is definitely still cruising on the inertia of having been the major party for however many decades up until the 90s.
That's not great... I think Likud and Labor in Israel are what you can end up with when long-time dominant parties lose their focus and end up with a "But we're $MAJOR_PARTY, what are you going to do, vote for a third party? (wait, what do you mean that we're a PR/Ranked Choice/etc. system?)"
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Yeah, S is definitely still cruising on the inertia of having been the major party for however many decades up until the 90s.
That's not great... I think Likud and Labor in Israel are what you can end up with when long-time dominant parties lose their focus and end up with a "But we're $MAJOR_PARTY, what are you going to do, vote for a third party? (wait, what do you mean that we're a PR/Ranked Choice/etc. system?)"
No, Likud is what happens in a system where only coalitions can govern and you just desperately want to hold on to power no matter who you end up in bed with.
Major parties that win off inertia tend to just get lazy and corrupt.
Yeah, S is definitely still cruising on the inertia of having been the major party for however many decades up until the 90s.
That's not great... I think Likud and Labor in Israel are what you can end up with when long-time dominant parties lose their focus and end up with a "But we're $MAJOR_PARTY, what are you going to do, vote for a third party? (wait, what do you mean that we're a PR/Ranked Choice/etc. system?)"
No, Likud is what happens in a system where only coalitions can govern and you just desperately want to hold on to power no matter who you end up in bed with.
Major parties that win off inertia tend to just get lazy and corrupt.
Sweden is also a country where only coalitions can govern. Which is why KD+M+L (rightwing parties) are all nominally in bed with SD (far-right party), while S is flirting with anyone that's more left than M and SD. That means obviously V and MP, but also L (Used to be social-liberal center. Some part of it still is on the local level. Neoliberals on the national level after they kicked out the social-liberals from party leadership) and C (Center. Rural party, also known as the "nja" party. Nja is swedish for No-yes/Maybe/Indecisive/Yes-with-reservations).
P.S: C always hoped to be the swingvote party, but ever since SD became a major power they've been irrelevant. Not large enough to tip the scales either way.
Fiendishrabbit on
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I don't really know how German politics work and what's up with the other parties.
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
I feel like I've seen this play out before. When Germany's (former?) main-left party, the SPD, went more centrist (thanks, Schröder) starting in the late 90s; there were disaffected leftists who started splitting off. I'll spare us the flowchart, but over time they started cooperating more and more with the successor party of East Germany's socialists and eventual merged into The Left (Die Linke), which I will use as the umbrella term The Left* for these groups even going backward before The Left's actual founding.
At first, the SPD was unwilling to work with The Left* and of course it was rejected by the other parties. There were concerns about xenophobia, whether The Left* was committed to the constitutional order, etc. This even led to the SPD and the main-right party, the CDU, forming the grand coalition in 2005 because of the strong showing of The Left*. Over the years, The Left (now the actual party) has moderated and professionalized and become an acceptable, if unfavored, coalition partner for the SPD.
During the time of the Grand Coalition, the CDU on the other hand also started tacking to the center (thanks, Merkel). It literally adopted the motto Die Mitte (the center). Various disaffected groups on the right formed up into the AfD. The CDU says there is a "firewall" and they won't form a coalition with them. We'll see...
Re: Greens
The German green party is currently probably the most reasonable center left party in Germany. Better at least than the directionless social democrats.
The Left meanwhile has more or less imploded, and a new splinter party around one of the let's more controversial, to be kind, personalities has just formed.
On the right there might happen something similar maybe? Hints that a more far right, CDU affiliated group around former head of the domestic intelligence service and huge racist Maaßen might establish their own splinter group.
From the outside, the German Greens anti-nuclear stance and their dumbass supporters on the matter are not what I would call "reasonable".
It's a legacy position of almost all Green parties, but honestly not that stupid nowadays. When it comes to cost and environmental impact of construction, renewables are orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficient if the question is decommissioning and replacing old fossil fuel plants. Things are not perhaps as clear with new base load power plants but nuclear is still not necessarily the answer - but this is more of a climate change thread response perhaps.
Still. Going cold turkey on nuclear power wasn't the greatest choice. Then going "What the hell are we going to do without this nuclear power?" and deciding "Hmm. Russia has lots of cheap natural gas, right?". Not a great choice either.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Weren't the German Greens quite recently fighting not against new nuclear power, which is at least somewhat defensible given the timeframes involved and renewable development, but even against delaying the shutdown of existing nuclear power?
Weren't the German Greens quite recently fighting not against new nuclear power, which is at least somewhat defensible given the timeframes involved and renewable development, but even against delaying the shutdown of existing nuclear power?
It's a bit of a mess.
The tendencies are: old people are ok with coal, younger people aren't, greens don't like nuclear.
The party (or rather, the party and the "youth" political organisation) is at odds with itself.
In an ideal world, it'd be 100% renewables but with the wannabe Chancellor in the south blocking anything that remotely looks like a turbine and the special coal interests in the north, some greens are expressing a positive attitude towards nuclear as long as it bumps coal off the board.
Still. Going cold turkey on nuclear power wasn't the greatest choice. Then going "What the hell are we going to do without this nuclear power?" and deciding "Hmm. Russia has lots of cheap natural gas, right?". Not a great choice either.
Cheap natural gas was already way earlier and the CDU and SPD.
Getting out of Nuclear was also the Merkel 2 cabinet, so CDU and SPD.
There's no scenario where you have green parties agreeing that nuclear power is needed as the cleanest way to keep the industry running at its current overproducing environmentally disastrous rate.
That second part is the most important one.
The exact composition of industrial, economic and political powers that walked us into our current +2° reality (and is planning for +6°) is telling you that they would totes be zero-emitting- if only the greens didn't force them to choose between emissions and growth.
Be honest enough to quote that entire message back and not just the cherry picked part about nuclear power.plants.
Once you can see that nuclear power plants as part of the industrial economy those guys want would have ended green energy investments, the question is if you should choose between NPPs and wind power, or if t he people living next to those NPPs should have that choice.
Well then, it took a long time but Sweden actually managed to make its way into NATO after all the Turkish and Hungarian objections. As a reminder, Finland applied at the same time and got in 4 April 2023.
Current Socialist government party PS is only in second place with 28.7%, First place is conservative AD with 29.5%. far right extremist CHEGA doubled their numbers from the 2022 election to over 18%.
PS and AD both said they won't go into a coalition with CHEGA. PS and AD coalition is also not that likely.
This all leaves quite a bitter aftertast mostly because:
In Portugal, early elections took place on March 10, 2024, following the resignation of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa and the subsequent dissolution of Parliament. Costa resigned in November 2023 due to corruption investigations by the Portuguese public prosecutor's office against him and those around him. A few weeks later it emerged that the socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa was the victim of a "name mix-up" by the Portuguese public prosecutor's office, because the Economy Minister António Costa Silva was being investigated. Political observers tend to speak of a coup in this context, as the corruption investigations against all suspects collapsed due to a lack of evidence. However, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa from the opposition center-right party PSD, which was merged into the electoral alliance Aliança Democrática (AD), had already called new elections and dissolved parliament. He was not forced to take this step because he could also have asked the PS, which was elected with an absolute majority in 2022, to form a new government.
ChanusHarbinger of the Spicy Rooster ApocalypseThe Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered Userregular
gee why does "fascist party gains significant share of seats, other parties say they won't work with them but no one can form a coalition without them" sound so familiar
Allegedly a voice of reason.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
See? You can do a lot worse than Garland! A name mixup fucking Christ.
So Dutch govt still not formed, the 4 main parties trying to negotiate their way into a far-right government have agreed that none of their leaders can become prime minister. Essentially they're now on the lookout for a right-wing Messiah to appear out of the desertpolder, unburdened by scandals.
Posts
Yeah, it's how I see him, he's less "Trump" and more "Farage" also in the way he acts:
- He is a populist with a a few issues that do well, but are kind of terrible, for instance: Leave the EU, stop all immigration, adopt a "wait and see" on the environment. All these issues play well with a "return to how it was in the golden Past, when the milk-man stopped by for a chat, none of this modern woke nonsense"
- He is pretty charismatic in debates, always has a glib answer and is there for the Photo-op to ridicule.
- Spends most of his time being in the opposition, where he doesn't really have to think of better answers, just say "I would have solved this better"
- When he was in power, still somehow claimed to not be, because optics.
- Has now gotten what he wanted, this is the "And here's Brexit!" stage of Farage.
- We'll see if he screws it all up and will blame his opposition for thwarting his beautiful dream, as Farage has done with his "If only we had Brexited as I wanted, Harder!"
Gedoogsteun is worth explaining because we're heading towards that again and it is relevant for other European democracies as well.
Our House has 150 seats, a government is formed when someone can make an agreement between parties that represents 76 of those seats. The parties that are in that majority then deliver the ministers and prime minister to form Het Kabinet. The seats these ministers leave behind are filled with other people from their parties until either the House is back to 150 or when one of the ruling parties can not add more people*.
Now this agreement (Dutch: coalitieakkoord) can be as specific or vague as they want it to be, just as long as they can look the king in the face and say that they will be able to lead the country together.
When no majority can be found, a party or single person can agree with a coalitieakkoord, but not join Het Kabinet. That way they allow (gedogen) the other parties to rule. These are shaky foundations, obviously! There's hardly any risk for the gedoogpartner and when they feel like letting the government implode they can just do that.
It's also possible for one party to deliver all ministers and then find majorities for whatever votes come up in the House, but this has not been a realistic option in modern politics. It would be too easy to let a PM trip and every close call would lead to massive haggling between dodgy politicians.
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* So this is a serious risk for Wilders and Omtzigt: you can only let people take a seat in the House when they were on your list of candidates who could receive votes. For instance: if you're a party of 4, but get enough votes to fill 5 seats you will only get 4 seats and that 5th one will be given to another party based on some funky maths. But what if you have 25 candidates, get 22 seats and then join a coalition in which you get to deliver 4 ministers? You pick those from your roster of 25, the seats get filled by the 3 candidates you have left over, but that one final seat remains empty. You just made the House smaller until the next election. If VVD refuses to join a coalition, but give gedoogsteun to Wilders, then he might be forced to deliver so many ministers he won't have enough candidates left to fill all his seats. It's just some idle conspiracy thinking of me, but I can just imagine this kind of scheming going on to hamstring Wilders in a way the random voter won't understand.
This is a really interesting read for someone who knows that various parlimentary systems are “different” but has little knowledge about them, thanks! If I may ask, in the situation where a party has fewer seated members than seats + minister slots awarded, can that party choose to trade away awarded minster seats to other members of the coalition in order to keep all their voting seats?
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Dutch ministers do not need to come out of the House. That is mostly traditional, but gets broken regularly.
The reason there is some risk for Wilders is that his list was 44 long and he's seating 37. That includes the senator suspected of fraud. And you can't have a house and senate seat at the same time.
This forces Wilders to pick ministers outside his inner circle pretty much.
And Wilders is a paranoid little dictator, who wants yes men who parrot him. Which doesn't work if you have to lead a department with say 20.000 bureaucrats.
All of that are ways this could go wrong, but I don't think it will matter much in the end.
Yes. There's also some flexibility in how many ministers and Staatssecretarissen (vice ministers, essentially) you want in your Kabinet in total. Things will have to particularly weird for a smaller House to happen, but for a small party roster to get this many votes this is a serious concern.
Theres also the issue that the last lad on the list isn't usually a very serious candidate. We've had Olympic medalists, comedians, actresses and kickboxing champions on the lists this election. None of them really want to switch careers, they just wanedt to push a political party to more votes by way of name recognition.
https://www.dw.com/en/poland-president-gives-pis-first-shot-at-forming-government/a-67323312
PiS got the largest vote share, but are short of a majority and other parties don't want to go in coalition with them
https://www.dw.com/en/poland-is-mateusz-morawieckis-new-government-doomed-to-failure/a-67577624
Several large demonstrations against the far right/AFD this week. Just in Munich today supposedly 250k people showed up.
Hopefully this is the actual start of some real opposition
Germany even has laws in place for that which other democracies in the EU don't...
Their leader even wrote a book about it, while sitting in jail.
WoW
Dear Satan.....
Last time a party was actually banned was in 1956, the KPD, Communist party of Germany.
Last time it was tried was against the NPD in the oughts which was a debacle because there were so security service informers in the extreme right-wing party, even in higher positions that it wasn't clear how much the influence of the intelligence services was guiding parts of the party.
And now I guess lots of people are kinda afraid to try a ban
Is AfD going to be alone, a concentrated blight that the rest of the parties try to ignore, or is one or more of the other parties that make it into parliament likely to try to play nice with fascists for power and dunk the country into the shit?
Option B is what we're at in Sweden at the moment, because power above all for the conservatives.
Social Democrats aren't exactly guiltless in that department either. They haven't had a clear vision for their politics in something like two decades now, defining themselves less as "social democrats" and more as "the party that should rule Sweden".
Nobody is clear about what they want except SD (the racists, although they show what they want mostly through dogwhistling, but they've gotten bolder lately), V (the left party) and MP (The green party).
Problem with the V is that they haven't quite dealt with their legacy of communists and campists, and MP are kind of anti-science in their green policies. It's more about what they feel is good for the environment than what actually is good for the environment.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I don't understand how every global green party seems to have the exact same curse.
Because that's exactly the kind of person that tends to join the Green Party rather then more established more powerful parties I imagine.
That's not great... I think Likud and Labor in Israel are what you can end up with when long-time dominant parties lose their focus and end up with a "But we're $MAJOR_PARTY, what are you going to do, vote for a third party? (wait, what do you mean that we're a PR/Ranked Choice/etc. system?)"
No, Likud is what happens in a system where only coalitions can govern and you just desperately want to hold on to power no matter who you end up in bed with.
Major parties that win off inertia tend to just get lazy and corrupt.
Sweden is also a country where only coalitions can govern. Which is why KD+M+L (rightwing parties) are all nominally in bed with SD (far-right party), while S is flirting with anyone that's more left than M and SD. That means obviously V and MP, but also L (Used to be social-liberal center. Some part of it still is on the local level. Neoliberals on the national level after they kicked out the social-liberals from party leadership) and C (Center. Rural party, also known as the "nja" party. Nja is swedish for No-yes/Maybe/Indecisive/Yes-with-reservations).
P.S: C always hoped to be the swingvote party, but ever since SD became a major power they've been irrelevant. Not large enough to tip the scales either way.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I feel like I've seen this play out before. When Germany's (former?) main-left party, the SPD, went more centrist (thanks, Schröder) starting in the late 90s; there were disaffected leftists who started splitting off. I'll spare us the flowchart, but over time they started cooperating more and more with the successor party of East Germany's socialists and eventual merged into The Left (Die Linke), which I will use as the umbrella term The Left* for these groups even going backward before The Left's actual founding.
At first, the SPD was unwilling to work with The Left* and of course it was rejected by the other parties. There were concerns about xenophobia, whether The Left* was committed to the constitutional order, etc. This even led to the SPD and the main-right party, the CDU, forming the grand coalition in 2005 because of the strong showing of The Left*. Over the years, The Left (now the actual party) has moderated and professionalized and become an acceptable, if unfavored, coalition partner for the SPD.
During the time of the Grand Coalition, the CDU on the other hand also started tacking to the center (thanks, Merkel). It literally adopted the motto Die Mitte (the center). Various disaffected groups on the right formed up into the AfD. The CDU says there is a "firewall" and they won't form a coalition with them. We'll see...
The German green party is currently probably the most reasonable center left party in Germany. Better at least than the directionless social democrats.
The Left meanwhile has more or less imploded, and a new splinter party around one of the let's more controversial, to be kind, personalities has just formed.
On the right there might happen something similar maybe? Hints that a more far right, CDU affiliated group around former head of the domestic intelligence service and huge racist Maaßen might establish their own splinter group.
It's a legacy position of almost all Green parties, but honestly not that stupid nowadays. When it comes to cost and environmental impact of construction, renewables are orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficient if the question is decommissioning and replacing old fossil fuel plants. Things are not perhaps as clear with new base load power plants but nuclear is still not necessarily the answer - but this is more of a climate change thread response perhaps.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
It's a bit of a mess.
The tendencies are: old people are ok with coal, younger people aren't, greens don't like nuclear.
The party (or rather, the party and the "youth" political organisation) is at odds with itself.
In an ideal world, it'd be 100% renewables but with the wannabe Chancellor in the south blocking anything that remotely looks like a turbine and the special coal interests in the north, some greens are expressing a positive attitude towards nuclear as long as it bumps coal off the board.
Cheap natural gas was already way earlier and the CDU and SPD.
Getting out of Nuclear was also the Merkel 2 cabinet, so CDU and SPD.
That second part is the most important one.
The exact composition of industrial, economic and political powers that walked us into our current +2° reality (and is planning for +6°) is telling you that they would totes be zero-emitting- if only the greens didn't force them to choose between emissions and growth.
Be honest enough to quote that entire message back and not just the cherry picked part about nuclear power.plants.
Once you can see that nuclear power plants as part of the industrial economy those guys want would have ended green energy investments, the question is if you should choose between NPPs and wind power, or if t he people living next to those NPPs should have that choice.
Associated Press: Sweden officially joins NATO, ending decades of post-World War II neutrality
Current Socialist government party PS is only in second place with 28.7%, First place is conservative AD with 29.5%. far right extremist CHEGA doubled their numbers from the 2022 election to over 18%.
PS and AD both said they won't go into a coalition with CHEGA. PS and AD coalition is also not that likely.
This all leaves quite a bitter aftertast mostly because: google translation from https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1454942/umfrage/ergebnis-der-parlamentswahl-in-portugal-2024/
Socialists got really fucked over
So small blessings: no prime minister Wilders.
Erdogan and his AKP lost the communal elections in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmit and quite a few other areas.
The CHP actually got about 1% more votes that the AKP, for the first time in 35 years
https://www.dw.com/en/turkish-opposition-surges-in-local-polls-blow-to-erdogan/a-68709807