As I write, Nick hasn’t updated last night’s post on the UK election, but it’s a good summary. Enjoy.
Some tidbits:
It looks like campaigning vigorously against the war in Iraq is worth about a 4 percent swing in Britain. Who’s Old Europe now?
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Her Majesties’ subjects have spoken again. It’s just that we don’t know yet what exactly they have said. Well, a majority among them will have probably sighed a little in the booth and then more or less resignedly or enthusiastically ticked off the box next to their local Labour candidate, thus likely ensuring Blairs “historic” second and a half term in office. Earlier, Exit polls predicted a reduced Labour majority of 66 seats.
But because we want to know all this in detail, it is worth mentioning again on top of the page that afoe’s Nick Barlow is blogging the election night over at “What you can get away with” as well as on the 2005 UK General election blog. Here’s why he thinks it’s worth staying up:
“Conservatives take back Putney on a 6.5% swing, Labour hold Newcastle Central but have an 11% swing to the Liberal Democrats. There?s not going to be anything even resembling a uniform national swing tonight, so this could be a long night.”
If that’s still not enough information for the true election junkies among you, then check the list of election bloggers compiled by Chicken Yoghurt. Oh, and before I forget it, the BBC does also offer extensive election coverage including an automatically updating scorecard.
After several months of ‘phony war’, the worst-kept secret in British politics was finally revealed today – the next UK General Election will take place on May 5th, just four weeks away.
I’ll try and find the time to post on Fistful during the campaign if none of my colleagues manage it, but I’m also posting on a new blog during the election campaign where we’ll be trying to provide (from Monday), daily roundups of blog coverage of the election, which will hopefully be a good resource for people looking for election reports.
As I end my two weeks here as a guest blogger, with events turning dramatic in Kyrgyzstan, the revolution that didn’t happen is fizzling out in Moldova. (See today’s RFE/RL Newsline, which unusually has no less than five stories from the forgotten republic.)
Those few of you who have been following the story may recall that the ruling Communist Party won the recent elections with 56 seats out of 101 in the parliament. However, President Vladimir Voronin will require 61 votes to get re-elected by the parliament on 4 April. The leaders of the two opposition factions who between them won the other 45 parliamentary seats pledged that they would boycott the vote, thus ensuring that no president would be elected and triggering new parliamentary elections.
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As many Fistful readers will be aware, it’s widely expected that there’ll be a General Election in the UK this May. Of course, because of the way our system works, no one can say for definite when it will be until the Prime Minister actually goes to the Queen and requests that she dissolve Parliament but all the signs on the Magic Political 8-Ball point to an election on 05/05/05 (for once, a date we can all agree on regardless of how you order days, months and years).
The UK remains the only country in the EU to use the First Past The Post electoral system which means that, thanks to the vagaries of the system, we can have electoral results that seem somewhat odd to an external observer. Since 1945, no party has won more than 50% of the national vote (the Conservatives came closest in 1955 and 1959) but only one election – in the February election of 1974 – has seen neither of the two main parties (Conservatives and Labour) achieve a majority of the seats in Parliament.
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While the official results of yesterday’s re-run Presidential election will likely not be announced for a couple of days, opposition candidate Viktor Yushshenko looks certain to win this time – if the country’s Central Election Commission has been doing a better job than in November. The BBC has calculated that he has “an unassailable lead” over his opponent. The numbers currently available on the election commission’s website do not indicate any self-evident fraudulent activities (thanks to Jonathan Edelstein for the link), and some of the 12,000 election observers were quick to assert that – while there may have been some fraud – this election was very likely sufficiently legal.
Despite their limited credibility among Janukovich supporters, the international observers’ verdict will carry an enormous weight with respect to a possible legal challenge of certain results already announced by Mr Yanukovich. It is unclear what his options are. Outgoing President Kutchma, a former ally, now hopes that Mr Yanukovich will concede the election after a reasonably short period of face saving legal efforts, the BBC reports.
If the orange celebrations on Kyiv’s independence square following Mr Yushshenko’s claim of victory last night are any indication, Kyiv’s center might well remain an orange bastion until Mr Yushshenko will have eventually been sworn in as President.
It might be cold, but Kyiv is likely the place to go for great new year’s festivities this year…
The last barrier to the re-run of the Ukrainian Presidential election has been lifted, as the Parliament has now approved the combined package of changes to the Constitution and election regulations.
The main features of the agreement – which President Kuchma immediately signed into law after they were passed – are:
The BBC has a good analysis of the changes and notes that while they settle the current crisis, they also change the way Ukraine will be run in the long term with the system becoming more parliamentary and less presidential.
It looks like the legal stalemate in Ukraine could be a little closer to a solution. Possibly related to reports about the opposition offering immunity to incumbent President Kuchma in exchange for him no longer trying to factually or legally obstruct the preparations for the repeated presidential run-off election on December 26, at least most of the constitutional and procedural problems which led to parliamentary tensions last Saturday seem to have been resolved in a six hour round table talk with European mediators, including the EU’s Javier Solana and Poland’s President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
While the parties seem to have finally agreed to the dismissal of the current Central Electoral Committee, the abolition of the problematic absentee ballots, extended checks of electoral registers to keep at least most of the dead from voting, and an end to the blockade of government buildings, it is unclear at this point to which extent the issue of pre-electoral constitutional change reducing the powers of the future UkrainianPresident in favor of the parliament has been settled.
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For those of you interested, the BBC’s website has an English translation of several parts of the Ukrainian Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday. I’m not a legal expert – especially on Ukrainian law – but I was struck by one aspect of the case that we either didn’t notice, or didn’t deem important enough to acknowledge during all the other events of the past twelve days, namely that Yuschenko’s lawyers concentrated their appeal solely on the runoff election, rather than the election as a whole. This meant that the Supreme Court was only given the choice of deciding the question of whether the election on November 21st was invalid, rather than the entire electoral process. The Court could only rule on the issue before it, and while Yanukovich’s team would have preferred the whole election to be rerun (assuming they weren’t going to get the election approved by the Court) they couldn’t argue for that without asking for even more evidence of voter fraud in the first round to be introduced.
There’s a question of whether this strategy emerged by accident or design, but it enabled them to get the result they wanted – a rerun against Yanukovich – rather than the idea that seemed to be gaining strength amongst Kuchma and the government in recent days – an entirely new election, with the opportunity for them to choose a new candidate to oppose Yuschenko while also being able to delay the election process for two or three months. Of course, my lack of legal knowledge could be completely off-base here, so I’d welcome comments from readers more knowledgeable on these matters.
And one final note of explanation for our readers who may find references to a ‘Boxing Day election’ in the British press confusing – it doesn’t mean that the runoff will be settled by the Queensberry rules, merely that Boxing Day is the name used in Britain and other countries for the 26th December.
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — The Supreme Court declared the results of Ukraine’s disputed presidential run-off election invalid and ruled Friday that the run-off should be repeated by Dec. 26, bringing cheers from tens of thousands of opposition supported massed in Kiev’s main square.
The ruling, made after five days of hearings by the court’s 18 justices, was a major victory for opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who had rejected the government’s demands that an entirely new election be held.
The opposition had pinned its hopes on the court’s ruling in its bid to overturn the results of the Nov. 21 run-off vote in which Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner. The opposition said the vote was rigged to cheat Yushchenko of victory.
Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma had been pressing for an entirely new election, apparently in hopes of replacing Yanukovych with a stronger candidate.
UPDATE: (Tobias, 18:29 CET) – The Kyiv Post has some more information –
Tens of thousands of opposition protesters who had massed in central Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in anticipation of the decision cheered, waving blue-and-yellow Ukrainian and orange Yushchenko flags and chanting “Yushchenko! Yushchenko!” The crackle of fireworks could be heard in the distance.
In related news, Maidan reports that outgoing President Kuchma vetoed the recently passed law invalidating “absentee ballots” for the re-run. These ballots allowed Ukrainians to vote in other than their home districts, and were, according to numerous reports by international observers, one of the main instruments of electoral fraud in the initial run-off.