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European Parliament elections

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Derec

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So the elections for the EU parliament are underway. The way this is set up is that national parties form EU-wide blocks. So the conservative EPP contains for example German C?U (Angela Merkel's party) and French LR (Nicolas Sarkozy's Party). Social-democratic S&D contains German SPD (Olaf Scholz, current Chancellor) and French SP (François Hollande). Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance is part of classically liberal Renew Europe, as is German FDP. These groups run from center-left to center-right, and on the fringes there are far-left (Greens, The Left) and far-right (ECR and ID).

NY Times has a link to election results. It shows that more mainstream parties still have a majority together, even though not all countries have reported results yet.

There seems to be a significant shift to the right though.
In France, right-wing RN (part of the ID block) won twice as many seats as Macron's Renewers, even as they edged out the Socialists (really social democrats, they keep the name for nostalgia mostly) for second place. Macron already announced snap parliamentary elections for later this month.
Battered by Far Right in E.U. Vote, Macron Calls for New Elections in France
In Germany center-right C?U won most seats (30), but far-right AfD got second-most (16). SPD got 14 and Greens, who lost most votes got 12. I have these numbers from Spiegel.de, and are a bit different than the Times'. Btw, AfD is no longer part of ID for some reason.

Italy seems to be the biggest country still outstanding.
 
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Europe is heading for turmoil;

Over the course of one night last year, three people were killed in separate attacks across Sweden - three of many violent attacks to rock the country in 2023. The first victim was an 18-year-old man who was shot dead in a Stockholm suburb on September 27. Just hours later, one man was killed and another was wounded in a shooting in Jordbro, south of the city.
The violence meted out across the region in those 12 hours made international headlines, but to many living in Sweden - did not come as a surprise. In a series of interviews, Swedish academics, a politician and a high ranking police officer have spoken to MailOnline about the multi-faceted crisis, describing a nation at crisis point that is ill equipped to tackle the scale of the violence.
Click to expand...

How Sweden became a 'haven' for mafia gangs and the EU's gun crime capital off the back of surging migration: As murders surge, police and politicians say the nation is at crisis point

It should not come as a surprise that the natives are becoming increasingly restless.
 
I suspect that the failures of the mainstream parties on mass migration are the chief reason right-wing parties gained so much.
Angela Merkel, who infamously opened the floodgates to uncontrolled mass migration, is from the CDU and thus ostensibly a conservative. The immigration failures of the Merkel government led to the creation of AfD in the first place.

Some more news from Europe:
German chancellor vows to deport criminals following brutal attack by Afghan migrant
AP said:
Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed Thursday that Germany will start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant last week left one police officer dead and four more people injured.
The brutal attack in Mannheim, which was captured on video and quickly went viral online, shocked the country.
Scholz addressed parliament in a speech focused on security Thursday, just days before European elections in which far-right populists across the continent are expected to make big gains.
[...]
The 25-year-old attacker, who killed a 29-year-old police officer who was trying to stop him, came to Germany in 2014 as an asylum-seeker.
[...]Germany does not currently carry out any deportations to Afghanistan or Syria. The German government does not have any diplomatic relations with the Taliban in Kabul, and considers the security situation in Syria too fragile to allow deportations there.
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That's right. No matter what you do, Germany was not deporting your ass if you were an invader from Syria or Afghanistan.

Also, these mass migrants are getting bolder and demanding the Califate.
Protesters call for Islamic state in Germany: ‘Caliphate is the solution’
profile:player-960x540

Danke, Merkel!
 
Oh Noes! Religious nutcases are religious nutcases. News at Eleven. :rolleyes:
 
Derec said:
So the elections for the EU parliament are underway. The way this is set up is that national parties form EU-wide blocks. So the conservative EPP contains for example German C?U (Angela Merkel's party) and French LR (Nicolas Sarkozy's Party). Social-democratic S&D contains German SPD (Olaf Scholz, current Chancellor) and French SP (François Hollande). Emmanuel Macron's Renaissance is part of classically liberal Renew Europe, as is German FDP. These groups run from center-left to center-right, and on the fringes there are far-left (Greens, The Left) and far-right (ECR and ID).

NY Times has a link to election results. It shows that more mainstream parties still have a majority together, even though not all countries have reported results yet.

There seems to be a significant shift to the right though.
In France, right-wing RN (part of the ID block) won twice as many seats as Macron's Renewers, even as they edged out the Socialists (really social democrats, they keep the name for nostalgia mostly) for second place. Macron already announced snap parliamentary elections for later this month.
Battered by Far Right in E.U. Vote, Macron Calls for New Elections in France
In Germany center-right C?U won most seats (30), but far-right AfD got second-most (16). SPD got 14 and Greens, who lost most votes got 12. I have these numbers from Spiegel.de, and are a bit different than the Times'. Btw, AfD is no longer part of ID for some reason.

Italy seems to be the biggest country still outstanding.
Click to expand...
Note that these elections use PR.

Will be interesting to see the reactions of the PR junkies after these election result.
 
ZiprHead said:
Oh Noes! Religious nutcases are religious nutcases. News at Eleven. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Europe did a good job to largely neutralize Christianity as a source of religious nutcases. But then politicians like Angela Merkel decided to import millions of Islamist nutcases, with predictable results.
I like this cartoon about the issue:
KOLGAREV_Igor_europa-islam.jpg
 
Tigers! said:
Note that these elections use PR.
Will be interesting to see the reactions of the PR junkies after these election result.
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As do national elections in most of these countries. No, right-wing parties doing well is not a reason to go back to the literally medieval and very flawed FPTP system.
Rather, the mainstream parties should look inward and ask themselves why so many voters reject them. The embrace of unrestricted mass migration, especially by very religious Muslims from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria is certainly one big part of the puzzle.
 
Harry Bosch said:
Hopefully the rise of the right in Europe will kill any notions of wanting a PR type of system in America. Proportional representation gives too much power to minority party crazies in my view.
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I hope not. Proportional representation is a far better system . FPTP has way too many downsides
- spoiler effects
- geographic effects (safe districts)
- related to the above, gerrymandering

PR much better reflects the electorate than FPTP. Instead of imposing a medieval system, one should examine why these parties gained popularity.
Engage ideas, not try to sideline them with a cockamamie voting system. The ideas will emerge one way or the other - see Trump/MAGA and also the Squad. Would it not be better if the MAGA or Squad ideas were represented by a MAGA or Left Party in House of Representatives? They would get their hearing, but could not hold the major parties hostage.
 
As Rudyard Kipling put it: 'This is the tempest long foretold, slow to make head, but sure to hold.'

The people of Europe are in revolt. In France, following victories by Marine Le Pen's National Rally in every region, Emmanuel Macron has dissolved the lower house of parliament and called a snap election. In Belgium, the liberal prime minister, Alexander De Croo, has resigned. In Germany, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) has beaten all three parties that form the governing coalition: the Greens, the Liberals and the Social Democrats. The political structures of the European Union have been shattered. And, as the EU attempts to deal with unprecedented numbers of illegal arrivals on its shores, the cause is obvious. Its voters have had enough of price rises, political correctness and eco-posturing.
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Daily Mail

Western Europe is heading for trouble.
 
Harry Bosch said:
Hopefully the rise of the right in Europe will kill any notions of wanting a PR type of system in America. Proportional representation gives too much power to minority party crazies in my view.
Click to expand...
Is there any actual *evidence* of that?

PR Library: Common Criticisms of PR and Responses to Them - FairVote
PR Encourages Unstable Coalitions and Legislative Gridlock?

... They note that multiparty coalitions are usually quite stable, and that scholars have found no widespread or systematic evidence of persistent instability in countries that use proportional representation voting. They maintain that if this problem were common, you would expect to see it in most countries that use proportional representation. But the record of PR use in dozens of European countries over many decades shows only a few instances–Italy being one of them–where instability has been a serious problem. The vast majority of PR countries have enjoyed stable and efficient governments.

... Small Parties Have Too Much Power in Coalition Governments

... They also note that it is rare for a small party to bypass the party with the most voter support when looking for a coalition partner.

... Small Parties Get Too Many Concessions in Coalition Governments

... Proportional representation proponents argue that in most cases there is nothing wrong with smaller parties having some influence over the coalition’s agenda. Indeed, that is part of the point of power sharing coalitions–they pursue a mixture of policies that represent the interests of voters who supported those parties. In addition, the record of PR use in European democracies provides very few examples of small parties acting as “the tail that wags the dog.”

... Proportional Representation Would Balkanize American Politics

... PR proponents argue that multiparty systems also encourage dialogue and negotiation; they simply do it at a different point in the election process. (after an election instead of before it) ... The multiparty legislative coalitions typical of PR systems may actually require parties to be more cooperative and less adversarial in their relationships.
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More PR rebuttals.
... PR Requires More Expensive Campaigns

... PR proponents respond by observing that because candidates can be elected with a smaller percentage of the vote–say 10% or 20%–that their campaigns don’t have to try to reach all the voters. They can target their campaigns toward their likely supporters and this may keep costs lower.

... PR Voting is Too Complicated and Will Confuse Voters

... But as proponents point out, various PR systems have been in use in other advanced Western democracies for many decades, and there is no evidence that citizens in these countries are confused or intimidated by these voting systems.

... PR Weakens the Constituency-Representative Link

... But in multi-member districts, voters typically have access to representatives from several parties and this makes it easier to find a sympathetic ear. Voters are thus more likely to seek help from those officials and to more actively lobby them concerning policy matters.

... Proportional Representation Encourages Extremism

... The overall record of PR use in Western democracies shows that extremism has not been a problem. Most European countries have been using PR during the last 50 years and they have not been plagued by extremist parties. This is largely because the threshold levels in most of these countries have been set high enough–as in the 5% level in Germany–to make it difficult for these very small parties to win any seats.

... Extending political representation to these groups can have a moderating and co-opting effect. If these groups feel that they have some voice in the political system, it could decrease their sense of political alienation and make them less likely to employ violence or other undesirable means to attract attention to their views.

... PR Increases the Administrative Complexity and Expense of Elections

... Defenders respond that election administrators in countries that use PR have had no problems mastering the vote counting and seat allocation processes.

... PR Requires Votes for Party Slates Rather than Individual Candidates

... All the PR systems that are being proposed for the United States – including choice voting, the mixed-member system, and open party list voting – allow voters to cast votes for individual candidates.
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Can Proportional Representation Create Better Governance? - the main conclusions:
Proportional electoral systems are better at achieving what voters want. -- Proportional systems are better at promoting consensus – especially in polarized societies – and achieving public policies that better reflect what majorities of citizens want.

Proportional electoral systems can enhance government accountability. -- In polarized societies, some forms of proportional systems represent improvements over winner-take-all elections when it comes to holding politicians accountable at the ballot box by giving voters more choices within and across parties.

Proportional electoral systems can reduce political instability. -- Proportional systems that maintain the number of parties at a moderate level can reduce the risk of political instability currently posed by the winner-take-all system in the United States.

Balance is possible between two parties and too many parties. -- The choice of electoral reform is not a binary one between the two-party system that winner-take-all encourages and the fragmentation seen in very permissive proportional systems. PR systems can be designed to ensure a healthy balance between too few and too many parties, and can also facilitate good governance.
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When does winner-take-all work?
The experience of the United States shows that WTA models have historically worked at achieving a correspondence between policies and public opinion when polarization was low and there was some overlap between the main parties, but these conditions are increasingly disappearing.

... Proportional systems, in contrast, seem to be better at achieving congruence even with a polarized electorate because moderate parties become pivotal players in coalitions.
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An interesting consequence:
Proportional representation systems favor the median voter and programmatic policies, resulting in higher levels of progressive redistribution.

... Iversen and Soskice posit that centrists fear the prospect of radical redistribution more than no redistribution, driving them toward a center-right alliance in a two-party environment. Under PR, by contrast, centrists can control a moderate party which, in turn, can be the pivotal partner in coalition governments, opening the door to reliable alliances with pro-redistributionist forces on the left.

... Many studies have documented that proportional systems experience less inequality than WTA systems—and that as the degree of proportionality increases, inequality tends to fall.
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"When Losers Win" - electoral inversions. "WTA elections, however, open the door to situations in which a party or candidate wins fewer votes than another and yet is still able to capture a greater share of seats." and "Electoral inversions are unheard of in PR systems but not uncommon in WTA systems, where the geographical distribution of votes—not just their total number—drives results."

Like: UK: 1951, 1974 -- NZ: 1978, 1981 -- CA 2019 -- (since the 1990's) US House: 1996, 2012, US Senate: 2004, 2016, 2022, US Presidency: 2000, 2016

When inversions do occur, they can compromise the legitimacy of elections among voters and hinder the will of the majority, both of which can contribute to democratic instability. This is a risk baked into WTA and is among its greatest shortcomings.
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Such geographical distributions are sometimes exploited: gerrymandering. Even without that, many US Congressional elections are no longer competitive, due to many districts having mainly Democratic or Republican voters -- voters who are unwilling to vote for a Republican or a Democrat, respectively.
 
Let's see how different nations do in quality of governance. The data:
Quality-of-democracy indices:
One can construct a profile of high-scoring nations:
  • Parliamentary system: the legislature is dominant, and it runs the executive branch, with a separate executive being weak and sometimes absent
  • Proportional representation
  • Single legislative chamber or a dominant one
Most of the high scorers use proportional representation. If it is such a horrible system that leads to horrible misgovernment, why doesn't that show up in these ratings?
 
PR can introduce instability
- Italy has had 69 governments since WW2. Average of 1 every 1.2 years (1 year, 2.5 months). Hardly conducive to good governance.
- Israel has been riven for years now and this instability is not helping the current situation
- The Dutch are still trying to form a government months after their last elections which occurred when the previous cobbled coalition collapsed.
- Belgium had no government for 589 days in 2010-11 and 682 days in 2018-2020

I could go on.
PR certainly has some advantages over FPTP but it is not the panacea that many of its proponents claim of it.
 
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