Two months to go-how we are faring in European election polls

With two months to go before election day, it can be said that the European election campaign in all nations of the EU is now almost in full swing, and there is a tense contest, apparently, between the two more prominent European President candidates, Jean-Claude Juncker (PM of Luxembourg for almost 19 years until recently) and Martin Schulz of the European Union's 'neoliberal triad' of the European People's Party, the Socialists and Democrats, and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe (EPP, S&D, and ALDE).

Meanwhile, we Greens are faring well in some parts of Europe (e.g. Spain and Portugal) but elsewhere we find our voters often shifting to parties belonging to the European United Left group, as shown in France and Denmark at least. In Italy, the Left Ecology Freedom (SEL) group has wisely made an alliance with the Tsipras List aka The Other Europe in the hope of getting representation. We should nevertheless keep up the good work and help the Green vision spread across Europe, and even in a few nations where European Green Party members cannot get significant representation, helping the respective European United Left member will mean that there is counterplay to the neoliberal capitalist agenda that pervades the European Union. The picture is of course still being complicated by the rising support of non-inscrit (NI) parties, many of which lie on the far-right of the political spectrum; the rest are generally populist protest movements like the 5 Star Movement of Italy and ANO of the Czech Republic. Also, in light of the removal of the threshold in Germany for European Parliament elections earlier this month, national thresholds in other nations of the EU should also be lowered to that of the Netherlands (i.e. only enough votes for one full seat required).

Alan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more