I mean they’re not public with it like the far-right but yeah bigotry towards Muslims and Romany is not exclusive to one party. They’re just varying degrees of it.
Golden Dawn leaders found guilty of running a criminal organization in Greece.
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Link…
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Holy shit. Athens would just be a pile of ashes if Golden Dawn wasn’t declared a criminal organization.
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The three center-right parties in the Czech Republic have formed a preelection coalition
This was a possibility for a while but was made official when they saw the latest poll which has the Social Democrats and Communist parties (both part of ANO’s minority government) missing the 5% cut in next year’s election. Along with that, ANO polled its worst since they formed their first government in 2017.
Should also be noted that the results of the poll are based on polling from September 21st to October 9th. So it doesn’t factor in all of the massive flubbing by ANO since then.
The thing that’s weird between these 3 is how different they are despite being center-right. TOP 09 is a fan of migration and pro-Europeanism. ODS is opposed to it and Eurosceptic. Neither party has a tinge of social conservatism to it which makes it weird to see a Christian conservative party join in. Seems that the only thing they have in common is getting rid of the current PM and his party.
It’s tilting when the right manage to put differences aside when you know how bad the left often are at doing the same.
Throughout the 80s here there was an anti-Tory majority in the country, but because it was split between Labour and the centrist party in a first past the post system the Tories ended up winning three GEs on the trot and changed the whole country markedly for the worse.
Thing is that there’s almost no way they’ll form an effective minority government. They simply won’t get enough votes. TOP and KDU have spent the last 4 years bouncing around the 5% threshold. The last poll had them at 6 and 5.5% respectively.
Voters that have left the Social Dems and Communists are now supporting Pirates. It has made Pirates the most popular opposition party in the country. If they can come to terms with Mayors and Independents, it will be very competitive.
Simply put the fate of the government will depend on how many people stick with small minority parties rather than voting for more popular ones.
Exactly what Icelandic women did in the 70s. Got an equal pay law passed the next year.
Of course Poland’s been having abortion strikes and protests for years now.
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.