First Nice and now Vienna.
4 dead, not 7.
NPR’s Schmitz reports Nehammer said the suspect was a 20-year-old dual citizen of Austria and North Macedonia who was sentenced to 22 months in prison last year because he’d attempted to travel to Syria in order to join the so-called Islamic State. He was released seven months later due to laws applying to young adults.
Interesting country name rabbit hole I just went down. The Balkans keep delivering.
DAGTG
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Today was the 31st anniversary of the dissolution of Czechoslovakia. Normally there’s a big parade through part of the city that ends at a party in Wenceslas Square. Of course, covid cut that down quite a bit.
But that provided plenty of time for Czechs to gather and create a clusterfuck of protests that merged into no unifying message. One was against covid measures and involved 1,000+ people not wearing masks. Might set things back a bit.
Another was much smaller, involved mask-wearing and was about the constant attempts by the ruling government to weaken Česká televize, the independent public television station of the country (sort of the BBC of the Czech Republic). The council that oversees and runs it is full of ANO supporters who want to reduce its independence and control it to put the current government in a better light.
Basically extreme opposite sides of the spectrum both telling the government to go fuck itself.
October 2021 is gonna be a political bloodbath in this country.
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America lost their Donald Trump but the Czech Republic still has theirs
Basically, restricting imported goods from the EU to force Czech people to buy local.
And guess who owns the largest food producer in the Czech Republic? Yup, the Prime Minister Andrej Babis.
The EU won’t allow it. It’s nothing more than a move by the far right party here to remind people that they still exist. But it’s still infuriating.
The election coalitions are currently competitive with ANO (the main party in the CR)
Two coalitions have been formed: a three party center-right coalition called Spolu (means “Together” in Czech) and a center-left coalition. ANO, the leader of the current minority government, has not formed a coalition.
Results so far:
ANO - 26.5%
Pirates and STAN (center-left coalition) - 25%
Spolu (center-right coalition) - 18.5%
SPD (far-right nationalist party) - 9%
Social Democrats - 7%
Communists - 7%
Tricolour (Trumpian right-wing), Greens, and all other parties combined did not make the 5% threshold.
That said, it’s very possible that they will try to form one given the results of recent polls. Their minority government exists because of conditional support for the Social Democrats and the Communists. However, those parties got crushed in 2020 because of their support of ANO. There’s no guarantee that they will even make the 5% threshold this year due to it. That combined with how badly the covid response has been bungled will make ANO cancer to any party looking to increase their political influence.
It looks like it’ll come down to how the Communists and Social Democrats do. If they can make the 5% threshold, they’ll probably support the same minority government. If not, then polls show that they’re more likely to lean toward the leftist coalition.
Looks like there’s a crisis of democracy in the Czech Republic.
The Czech supreme court ruled that the method for distributing seats among parties, the d’Hondt Method, does not equally count every vote and is unconstitutional. The issue is that it unfairly benefits large parties at the expense of minority parties.
The larger threshold* for coalitions has also been ruled unconstitutional since it’s claimed to discourage coalitions from being formed.
This is an issue because the party who loses the most from this is ANO which is currently the largest party in the country. Meanwhile, almost every other party currently in parliament would benefit greatly from this. Of course, the PM claims that the court is biased and just wants to force him and his party out of control.
As somebody who hates ANO, I like this. It is true that the d’Hondt method does disadvantage small parties. However, it will be very difficult to form a functioning government later this year. No sensible combination of the currently existing parties would be able to form a majority government or even a decent sized minority government.
*Multiple threshold is 5% for each party in a coalition
Sounds interesting. The one you mentioned…
the Constitutional Court judges annulled a clause requiring each member of a coalition – whether a party, so-called movement or other political entity – to garner 5 percent of the vote.
…sounds fair enough if, in effect, coalitions are what people vote for. Though I guess an interesting point is how formal they are. That is, are the parties obliged to govern together if they have the chance or, once they get the seats, can they choose to re-combine either immediately or after a certain period?
Then the other I couldn’t find the exact details of, but…
However, having 14 electoral regions of unequal size in the Czech Republic, in tandem with the D’Hondt method of allocating mandates, does significantly undermine the principle of equality of electoral votes. Acting on a proposal by a group of senators, in the interest of equal suffrage, the Constitutional Court has therefore decided to annual a section of election law on the proportional allocation of seats.
…and…
The court also struck off an article that enabled a situation under which far more votes have been required to win seats in some constituencies than in others.
…so sounds like something to try and stop regional representation leading to some votes being ‘worth’ more than others, which is a common issue with representative democracies. I know some countries try to ‘top up’ the regionally elected people with non affiliated representatives to get as close to the ‘fair’ proportion as possible. Is it something like that? (Though, presumably, that would require adding to the code, not just removing something.)
The changes are completely fair in my opinion. But the practical effects will be pretty awful. Would’ve been better to change this in a year where a major election isn’t happening.
The coalition is nothing more than an agreement to run as a government if they have the numbers. Each party still has its own seats.
You are right about the problem regarding regional representation. Not sure of the top up thing you mention though.
With the Czech election coming up in October 2021, things are not looking good for the current government.
Since March, the ruling party (ANO) has fallen behind the center-left coalition of Pirates + STAN. SPOLU, the center-right coalition of 3 parties, is well behind both. The Social Democrats which allied with ANO are hanging on by a thread and the Communists have largely withdrawn their conditional support and are also barely at the 5% threshold.
Results of the most recent poll:
Pirates and STAN (center-left coalition) - 26.4%
ANO - 23.9%
Spolu (center-right coalition) - 17.7%
SPD (far-right nationalist party) - 10.5%
Communists - 5.7%
Social Democrats - 5.1%
One could argue that ANO would form the same coalition after the next election but given how the Social Democrats have been dominated in last year’s Senate and regional elections, I’d bet against it.
The center-right coalition is try to gather support for a vote of no confidence. The center-left is trying to call for a snap election.
The PM lost a vote of no confidence in the past and refused to step down. So it’s a purely symbolic gesture. The center-left won’t get enough support for a snap election since they’re currently the favorite to win. It’s a bunch of nothing designed to gain more support and weaken the minority government further. But it shows how shitty and incompetent the current government is.
Germany will be holding Federal elections next month. The current polling is looking like this:
Union= ruling christian conservatives
Grüne= Green Party
SPD= social democrats
AfD= far right
Linke= socialists
It looks like no two party coalition will be able to get a majority. This could be interesting but we‘ll probably end up with another Union chancellor.
Wow. That’s a powerful Green Party you’ve got in Germany.
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Ah, forgot to update the Czech election coming up this October
A description of the parties and when their popularity was last year.
How things were during lockdown
Sadly, things are more like they were last year now. ANO has recovered enough to regain the lead but the coalitions are very close behind. It looks we’ll in the same situation the Czech government was in 2017 where ANO couldn’t form a functioning government because everybody who isn’t them hates them and doesn’t want to form a government. Took some work behind the scenes to coerce a semi-functional coalition to run the country.
The graph looks a bit different because there’s a new party in there. Přísaha (translates to Oath) is another ANO-style catch-all populist party. This one was found by the chief investigator of a Czech corruption scandal which occurred in 2013. In the end, everybody charged with a crime was acquitted…twice. So yeah did a bunch of work and nothing happened to anybody involved. Now he thinks he can get into politics after being Czechia’s Robert Mueller. The only positive is that he might keep ANO low enough to keep the coalitions in the race.
A coalition of small right-wing parties was formed. I went over Tricolour (basically America’s Republican Party) and now we have Svobodní (Freedomites), the an-cap wing of the far-right, and Soukromníci which is a more center-right party which has a grand total of zero federal representatives and a meager two regional representatives in the country. Combined, they’re unlikely to make the 5% threshold.
Any scope for a three party coalition?
There are four possibilities. SocialDemocrats-Socialists-Green will have such a tiny majority (if that) that it probably won’t work. ChristianDemocrats+Social Democrat+Lib Dems will not be done by the SPD as they do not want another coalition with the CDU (might be different if the CDU loses even more voters and the SPD becomes the biggest party in that potential coalition - also unlikely).
So what is left is the „Traffic Licht“ coalition of the Social Democrats (red) the LibDems(yellow) and the Greens (duh!) and the „Jamaica-coalition“ of the CDU+LibDems+Greens. The latter seems the most likely, but if the CDU loses its top spot things could get really weird.
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I agree with this.
A lot depends on the actual election results, for example if Green>Social Democrats or the other way round. If the Greens end up as the second largest party they might be more interested in a coalition that excludes the Christian Democrats to have the first Green chancellor.
Being the minor partner in a CDU/SPD coalition has only hurt the social democrats in the past. They still get the blame for anything that government messes up and the major partner gets most of the credit for the good things. The FDP as classic liberals are ideologically closer to the CDU than the Green Party/Social Democrats. Therefore I think they are more likely to agree to a coalition of CDU&FDP+Green than being the third wheel in a Green&SPD+FDP coalition.
The numbers just aren’t there for a Green/Social Democrats/Socialist and in the past the SDs were hesitant to associate with the Socialists because it might alienate centrist voters who only lean left but don’t want the Socialists in the government.
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Austria‘s conservative government is losing support due to its handling of the pandemic, corruption and general ineptitude. So they turned the wheel of populist distraction and it landed on anti-sharia law
Similar to what the Czech government has been doing. Ever since bungling covid, they’ve been pushing the xenophobia button repeatedly to get the nationalist vote. Pretty sure ANO is gonna stay in power.
They recently consolidated foreigner health care plans under one company here. Thank fuck that I’m not under a foreigner health plan.
An insurance in Germany does a yearly survey about the fears of the Germans. How it works: participants get fixed topics and have to rate them on a scale of 1 to 7 where 1 means no fear at all and the 7 means biggest fear.
The winner is the fear of higher taxes. Runnerup is the fear of inflation. These are followed by the fears of overburdening because of refugees, fear of contaminants in food, fear about care when old and fear of too many immigrants. Fear of climate change only 8th. The survey was made before the floodings so they asked additional 1000 people at the end of July and now the fear of natural desasters and climate change had a huge increase.
Unfortunately it looks like the SPD might win the next elections with a candidate who just keeps his mouth shut. Election platforms seem to work only for the hardcore base of AFD, FDP and Die Linke(Leftists). The rest of the population is more concerned if the person becoming chancellor is capable and less about what he/she wants to do once they are the elected government. So I assume we will have another wasted 4 years ahead of us.