Tag Archives: Governments and parties

Serbia: Elections at last

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So Serbia has finally called for elections.

I admit that I was wrong about this government’s tenacity. I predicted back in July that the government would collapse in October. Not so. It has staggered on, month after month… gasping, retching, coughing blood, but somehow refusing to die. It bought a few weeks by holding a referendum on a new Constitution, which was pretty useless but got voted in anyway. Then G17 — the liberal technocrat Europhile party, the smallest member of the ruling coalition — gave the government a few weeks more by the Kafkaesque maneuver of having all its ministers resign, but not actually leave office until the government accepted their resignations. Which took nearly two months.

But anyway, elections are coming, and a date has been set: January 21, 2007.

So what does it all mean?
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OSCE Upbeat on American Election

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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which looks into these sorts of things from Vancouver to Vladivostok, gave a generally positive assessment of the elections held in the United States on Tuesday, November 7.

“The overall election administration, including the processing of voters on election day, seemed professional and efficiently organized in most polling stations we visited,” said Giovanni Kessler, who headed the mission.

“However, the swift introduction of Direct Recording Equipment (DREs), at times without a voter verifiable audit paper trail, appeared to negatively impact on voter confidence. This remains a challenge for the future.”

Commenting on the campaign, Kessler raised his concern that a large number of political advertisements consisted of personalized attacks on opponents.

From the full initial report, an issue important to me:

No provisions have, however, been made to address the long-standing issue of representation of those residents of Washington DC who are not elegible to vote in another State.

Lack of representation is a constitutional quirk, but the fact remains that half a million Americans (more than the population of the state of Wyoming, for example) have no real representation in either the House or the Senate.

The mission consisted of 18 international election analysts from 15 OSCE participating States who were deployed to 14 [US] States to assess the electoral environment and procedures, meet representatives of State and local election administration, political parties and candidates, and civil society.

A limited number of polling stations in California, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia and Washington were visited by OSCE/ODIHR, but no systematic observation of polling and counting procedures was conducted.

You may have heard about the results. Good news, I think.

Elections in Bulgaria (II)

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Last week we posted about the Presidential elections in Bulgaria, which led to a runoff between incumbent center-left President Parvanov and challenger Volen Siderov, founder and leader of the xenophobic populist-nationalist “Attack” party.

Well, a pleasant surprise: Parvanov won the runoff with a whopping 78.7% of the vote, outpolling Siderov nearly 4 to 1. To put it in context, Siderov barely did better than Le Pen did in France a few years back.

Kudos to the Bulgarians.

Elections: Bulgaria

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Bulgaria has a Presidential election this weekend. There’s no question who’s going to win, but there’s still some nail-biting suspense.

Why? Well, the current President is former Socialist Georgi Parvanov. (“Former” Socialist because the Bulgarian President must not be affiliated with any political party.) He seems to be a decent enough fellow. The Bulgarian Presidency doesn’t have a lot of power, but Parvanov looks good, says all the right things, and has generally acted Presidential. Earlier this year, he acknowledged that he’d “cooperated” with the State Security Service back in the days of Communism; perhaps because he was quick to admit it, nobody seems to hold it much against him.

Parvanov is reasonably popular. He’s not considered brilliant, but he’s energetic, peripatetic, and constantly in the public eye. (There’s a joke that if you want to see him, build a doghouse, and he’ll show up to cut the ribbon.) So, he will almost certainly win the election this Tuesday.

But. Under Bulgaria’s election law, Presidential elections go to a second round if (1) nobody wins 50% of the votes cast, or (2) 50% of eligible voters don’t turn out. Parvanov will probably get well past 50%, but low turnout seems likely — in the last national election, only 42% of the voters showed up. So there will probably be a second round.

This raises the interesting question of who’ll come in second.
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Virtual politics and real bullets

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The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the Russian-appointed prime minister of Chechnya, who she was about to accuse of torture. After a week of rising hysteria in the Russian media and state, with a wave of goon-squad assaults on Georgian businesses and the collection of sinister lists of Georgian-sounding schoolchildren – what, pray, is the purpose of this? – this ought to inter any lingering myths of Russian democracy. It is time to grasp that we are sharing a continent with a very large tyranny, in fact, that we never ceased to do so.

Exactly what will happen next is unclear, but the worst must be assumed. The reaction of Europe so far appears to be deafening silence. See the BBC report above for a tasty quote from the secretary of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, suggesting she was killed by “self-appointed executioners”. Self-appointed? I don’t think his Midlands constituents lost very much when they voted him out back in 2004. No Baltic gas pipelines were involved, so German silence is a given, France will presumably continue to find Russian support on the UNSC useful, and Britain will probably shut up – hasn’t Tony Blair prided himself on his personal relationship with Putin? (Personal politics, the great delusion of the last hundred years.)

If you need any convincing, I recommend Andrew Wilson’s book Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World. This is a truly impressive march through a morass of deceit and state-sponsored bullshit, whose central thesis is simply that most of Russian politics, as it was marketed both to the Russians and also to the western politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats who funded it through the 1990s, does not exist. Parties do not have members, policies, or constitutions, and do not represent real interest groups. Even when, like the Communist Party, they actually do exist, they are frequently not actually trying to win the elections-sensationally, Wilson quotes a senior Communist as being horrified how close the party came to unwanted victory in 1996.

Instead, parties, movements and politicians are usually prepared from whole cloth for specific political projects, and created in the public mind by a barrage of TV advertising for the mass and outrageous web propagandists for the elite. It is possible to buy an entire political party, tailored to one’s specifications, from $100,000.
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Getting Hotter in Hungary

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As we have noted on Afoe in recent weeks Hungarian society seems badly divided and faces daunting economic adjustments (and here). This weekend’s municipal elections seem to have resolved nothing, with both sides seeming effectively able to claim some sort of victory:

Preliminary results released by the election office, with some nearly all the votes counted, showed Fidesz winning the mayorships in 15 of Hungary’s 23 largest cities, as well majorities in 18 of 19 county councils.

The Socialists retained power in most of Budapest’s 23 districts and Budapest Mayor Gabor Demszky — supported by the two-party governing coalition — won his fifth consecutive term since the 1990 return to democracy.

Not surprisingly under the circumstances the temperature is rising fairly rapidly. Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany yesterday asked the Hungarian parliament to hold a vote of confidence in his government (and this will now take place on Friday). On Sunday night Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom called on Gyurcsany to step down.

With the outcome of Friday’s vote seeming to lean in Gyurcsany’s favour the opposition Fidesz party are getting frustrated and restless. Opposition leader Viktor Orban is already crying ‘foul’:

Opposition leader Viktor Orban of the Fidesz party said the confidence vote was a “deceitful and worthless trick.” He called instead for a constructive vote of no-confidence in parliament, in which the coalition would be forced to name a new prime ministerial candidate.

While Lajos Kosa, a Fidesz vice president, is being downright provocative:

“The budget will come and further austerity measures worth 1,000 billion forints ($4.6 billion) will come too and then in the spring all of us will be chased out (from parliament), all of us, because a general uprising may break out in the country”

Indeed the party is currently threatening to boycott the vote:

“We will not be there… we won’t take part in this comedy,” Fidesz parliament faction leader Tibor Navracsics told a news conference.

Which all takes us back to that early guest post by P O’Neill where he perceptively warned:

“But an older concern is working its way back onto the agenda: how to handle an economic crisis in a member country……However, the risk of the latter type of crisis in a member country is now quite high.”

Caucasian Crisis Communication

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There seems to be a dangerous crisis in progress between Russia and Georgia. During the past week, the Georgians have surrounded the headquarters of the Russian forces in Georgia with policemen and arrested four officers of the GRU (Russian military intelligence) for allegedly spying and conspiring with opponents of the government, in order (so they say) to prevent further integration of Georgia with NATO. On top of that, the Russians have been evacuating nationals from Georgia, and have also announced a stop to the withdrawal of their troops from the country.

Yesterday, the Russian “peacekeeping force” in South Ossetia complained of being overflown by Georgian Sukhoi-25 (NATO name Frogfoot) aircraft, the Soviet answer to the A-10. Before that, the Georgians had accused “somebody” of firing a Strela-2 man portable SAM at President Saakashvili’s helicopter, whilst a group of US senators were aboard. And the Russians have also complained that “new NATO states” have been selling Georgia arms.

Today, a border incident resulted in an Abkhasian man being killed and two Georgian police wounded, the first time in this round of the conflict that the trouble includes Abkhasia. This could yet get very serious indeed-it doesn’t take a Kissinger to realise that all kinds of complicated strategic interests and ethnic/religious identities are involved.

How much EU or NATO support can Georgia count on? Or will the EU seek to reassure Russia?