Alan's Green Thoughts

The Spanish general election of 2019 was a sensational defeat for the Popular Party, which achieved its worst ever election result. They won only 66 seats, less than half of their 2016 total, and were nearly pushed into third place by the moderately conservative Citizens' Party. Their vote share plummeted from 32.57% to 16.7% and even their main rivals, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) have never polled that badly (their lowest total being 85 seats in 2016). This happened not only due to the increasingly authoritarian stance of Mariano Rajoy driving away moderate voters to the Citizens' Party, but also because the Vox (Latin for "voice") absorbed many of their most extreme conservative voters, despite Vox and the Popular Party both supporting stringent restrictions on abortion. Vox polled 10.26%, giving it 24 seats, not as significant an advance as pollsters predicted following its result in Andalusia last year. By contrast, the Citizens' Party won a t...

Readers, one local by-election did happen yesterday, even though election day for the 2019 local elections is next week, and the results of it were as follows: Shropshire UA, Belle Vue: Labour 603 (47.1%, +4.1%), Liberal Democrats 408 (31.5%, +3.2%), Conservative 152 (11.9%,-12.3%), Green 65 (5.1%, +0.6%), UKIP 58 (4.5%). Shropshire, with the exception of the unitary authority of Telford & The Wrekin, will not hold its next set of elections until 2021 and also this being a solitary by-election in one of Shropshire's safest Labour divisions, little of significance can be concluded from this sole by-election apart from a substantial Conservative collapse nationwide. On a more important note, European elections will likely be held in the UK on 23 May, since it is unlikely the Conservatives will be able to pass through an acceptable deal that would cancel said elections before 22 May. With the vote more fragmented than ever before, how will they turn out? East Midlands...

Earlier today, the full list of candidates for European elections in the UK was announced by each region. Some opinion polls have been conducted on each of the largest seven parties (i.e. the Brexit Party, Change UK, Conservative, Green, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP), who have submitted lists everywhere in Britain. However, seat projections should not be calculated at this stage as each party's regional support varies widely, as do the number of seats per region. Which brings us to this interesting question in psephology: how would it look if we used Sainte-League instead of d'Hondt? Sainte-League's key difference from d'Hondt is that when it comes to allocating seats to political parties, the divisor 2n+1, where n is the number of seats a party has already won within a round of allocation, is used instead of n+1. This means that when determining who gets the remaining seats in a PR constituency after the first set of seats have been allocated, the party...

The Green Party of Canada were widely expected to top the poll in Prince Edward Island, which is also due to a dissatisfaction with the Conservative-Liberal merry go round as much as rising awareness of environmental issues. Although the Greens did not top the poll in Prince Edward Island after all, they did increase their vote share from 10.81% to 30.62%, the best ever performance by the Green Party in Canada. This gave them 8 seats out of 27 in Prince Edward Island, and more importantly the balance of power in Prince Edward Island's legislature. It is also the first time the Canadian Greens have reached official opposition status in any provincial legislature, and it will serve them well in the Canadian federal election in October. The Liberals were hit hardest by said Green surge; they dropped to 6 seats and their leader Wade MacLauchlan lost his own riding of Stanhope-Marshfield. Highlighting once again how unfair first past the post is, the Liberals suffered these losse...

The Finnish Parliamentary election of 2019, which took place on Sunday 14th April, resulted in above all else a crushing defeat for the Centre Party of Juha Sipila, whose attempts at introducing universal basic income made no difference to the outcome. The Centre Party slipped from first to fourth place, finishing with 31 seats and just 13.76% of the vote; Juha Sipila subsequently announced he would stand down as leader of the Centre Party in September 2019. Despite this loss of support they still finished first in the more rural districts of Finland where ironically they lost more voters, but at the same time they lost their only seat in Helsinki. A split in the Finns Party, which saw the formation of the Blue Reform Party after the election of Jussi Halla-aho, who has been convicted of inciting religious hatred against Muslims, as Finns Party leader, could have caused an early election, which was averted. However, the subsequent Oulu child sex exploitation scandal in 2019,...

The Israeli elections of 2019 proved to be a disappointment for those wishing to oust Israel's controversial Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has recently been indicted by Israel's attorney general on corruption charges. The centrist Blue and White Alliance (blue and white being the colours of the Israeli flag) formed from a coalition of made sweeping gains, but narrowly missed out on pole position. Likud, the main conservative party of Israel, managed to gain seats at the expense of some of its partners, bringing its seat total of 36 with 26.46% of the vote. The Blue and White Alliance narrowly finished behind Likud with 35 seats and with 26.13% of the vote, which nevertheless meant it more than trebled the seat total its component parties achieved in 2015. The 3.25% threshold for entry to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, has made political alliances increasingly necessary with many different demographic interests in Israel. The Israeli Labor Party was the bi...

Readers, the results of British local by-elections from 11th April 2019, and one from 4th April 2019: (4/4/19) Norfolk CC, Wroxham: Conservative 922 (55.7%, -3.2%), Liberal Democrats 395 (23.9%,+4.0%), Green 174 (10.5%, +5.0%), Labour 163 (9.9%, -0.8%). [UKIP did not stand] (11/4/19): Burnley BC, Rosehill with Burnley Wood: Liberal Democrats 341 (37.5%, -11.0%), Labour 249 (27.4%, -6.8%), Burnley & Padiham Independent 154 (16.9%), Conservative 115 (12.6%,-0.4%), Green 51 (5.6%, +1.3%). All changes are since May 2018. Edinburgh UA, Leith Walk (1st preference votes): SNP 2596 (35.7%, +1.3%), Green 1855 (25.5%, +5.8%), Labour 1123 (15.5%, -7.0%), Conservative 777 (10.7%, -3.7%), Liberal Democrats 623 (8.6%, +4.8%), Independent (Illingworth) 110 (1.5%), UKIP 85 (1.2%), Socialist Labour 56 (0.8%, -0.2%), Independent (Scott) 16 (0.2%), For Britain 14 (0.2%), Libertarian 12 (0.2%).SNP gain from Labour at stage 10. Lambeth LBC, Thornton: Labour 998 (41.5%, -22.3%), Liberal Demo...

Readers, in case you did not tune in to the live coverage of the Newport West by-election declaration, the votes cast were as follows: Jonathan Clark, Plaid Cymru, 1,185 (5.0%, +2.5%) June Davies, Renew, 879 (3.7%) Matthew Evans, Conservative, 7,357 (31.3%, -8.0%) Neil Hamilton, UKIP, 2023 (8.6%,+6.1%) Ruth Jones, Labour, 9,308 (39.6%, -12.7%) Ryan Jones, Liberal Democrats, 1,088 (4.6%, +2.4%) Ian McLean, SDP, 202 (0.9%) Hugh Nicklin, For Britain, 159 (0.7%) Richard Suchorzewski, Abolish the Welsh Assembly, 205 (0.9%) Philip Taylor, Democrats & Veterans, 185 (0.8%) Amelia Womack, Green Party, 924 (3.9%, +2.8%) Given the current climate of Brexit chaos, the 2.2% swing from Labour to Conservative is rather surprising since the Conservatives have been responsible for most Brexit-related problems. However, Labour is still in power in the Welsh Assembly and their support of the controversial M4 relief road did not go down well with residents of Newport West; howe...