Compass Elections: Late October Roundup
Andrej Babis and Milos Zeman depicted in satirical public art in Potštejn, Czechia (Wikimedia Commons)
QATAR: A GLASS ⅔ FULL, OR A GLASS ⅓ EMPTY?
QATAR, GENERAL - OCT 2
by Anthony Duan
Citizens of the Persian Gulf State of Qatar were able to vote for seats in their country’s Parliament for the first time on October 2. While only 30 of 45 seats have been chosen through election—with the Emir, or monarch, selecting the remaining 15—turnout was a significant 63.5 percent, far more than local polls’ ten percent, demonstrating citizens’ enthusiasm for the democratic process. While local elections have been held in the past, the recent elections have granted the people some power in determining day-to-day legislation and the budget, though control over the security and economic spheres remains within royal hands.
The election was unfortunately not much of a success in terms of women’s representation; while a woman is serving as Qatar’s Foreign Affairs Spokesperson, all 28 female candidates were defeated in their races, and it is only through the Emir’s appointments that this imbalance may be ameliorated (four have been serving since 2017, and in the nearby UAE, appointments have led to the country’s parliament being composed of 50 percent women and 50 percent men). Nonetheless, their ability to run is a sign of women increasingly asserting themselves in the region, with women’s suffrage having been extended in neighboring Saudi Arabia six years prior (albeit only at the local level, as no national legislature is elected there).
Despite these advancements, the elections themselves, postponed since 2007, simply do not truly herald a democratic transition in Qatar. While billboards and TV were employed during the campaign, no debates and no political parties were allowed. No cabinet is set to be assembled after the election, and only descendants of those who were citizens in 1930 were permitted to vote. The tribe of Al-Murrah has found itself on the losing end of this law, and some protestors have been arrested, dampening the possibility of a fully representative government.
Tribal interests are expected to predominate, with districts being drawn based on area of origin rather than residence to enable roughly equitable representation while simultaneously reinforcing the role of tradition. In any event, with a Saudi Blockade having only ended this year and with the 2022 World Cup set to be held in Doha, the country’s citizens are being exposed in many ways to a modernizing world.
DISAFFECTED CITIZENS OUST DISAFFECTED CITIZENS: CZECHIA ‘21
CZECHIA, LEGISLATIVE - OCT 9
by Anthony Duan
The United States voted out a billionaire president in 2020. The Czechs seem set to do the same to their billionaire Prime Minister Andrej Babis in 2021. His party, the populist Action of Disaffected Citizens (ANO), has captured approximately 27 percent of the vote, with the center-right Together alliance winning another 27 percent and the liberal alliance known as Pirates and Mayors earning 15 percent. With the center-right and liberal coalitions set to win a combined 108 of the Czech Parliament’s 200 seats, it appears impossible for Babis to remain in power, and while Czech President Milos Zeman (a colorful character renowned for heavy drinking and condemned for his open transphobia) may give him the opportunity to attempt to form a government, he will almost certainly be unsuccessful in doing so, for his Social Democratic coalition partners and Communist allies have both failed to surmount the threshold for the first time in their histories.
Having achieved his office by emphasizing anti-corruption and transparency, Babis’s troubles stem in large part from his purchase of a chateau on the French Riviera, achieved through the manipulation of supposed offshore companies as revealed by the Pandora Papers. With both the Together and Pirates and Mayors blocs having campaigned on a pro-Western and pro-democracy platform, and with every party in their alliances refusing any coalition with ANO, the implication is clear: they aim to move Czechia away from the influence of the ailing Zeman and his ally Babis. Unlike Babis, they do not ally with the increasingly autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and they do not prompt conflict of interest allegations as Babis did when his company Agrofert received EU subsidies.
Yet criticism of Babis stemmed not only from accusations that he undermined Czech democracy but also from simple incompetence. Rising debt and the effects of COVID-19 mangled much of his former popularity, and opposition leader Petr Fiala emphasized his commitment to democracy and his strong stance on a national budget in crisis. Of course, considering that the opposition’s commitments to transparency mirror those Babis promised in years past, we cannot celebrate too soon. While a European alignment for Czechia seems at the very least clear, the country’s fortune is far from guaranteed.
The electoral system is intended to allow for the representation of multiple political parties; every party is eligible for seats so long as it wins five percent of the national vote, and though seats are allocated within 14 multi-member regions, each region distributes its seats proportionally between parties according to their vote share. Each voter is allowed to choose a single party and four candidates on its list, who will be elevated to the top so long as they receive five percent of individual votes for candidates of their party.
Without further ado, here is a rundown of Czech political parties and what they stand for, as well as the number of seats allocated to each alliance:
Action of Disaffected Citizens (ANO), 72 seats: Its acronym simply means “yes.” but it is difficult to ascertain what exactly “yes” means. It is generally believed that they stand for “no” to immigrants and “yes” to Babis, but as they are a vaguely-defined populist party sometimes seen as little more than a vehicle for their leader to further his own business interests, they quite frankly hold little firm ideology.
Together (SPOLU), 71 seats: An alliance of the ODS, KDU-CSL, and TOP 09, they took one fewer seat than ANO due to Czechia’s regionalized electoral system.
Civic Democratic Party (ODS): A conservative party that dominated the country in the 1990s, it has often wafted between support for and opposition to Czech involvement with the European Union. Nonetheless, it holds a pragmatic reputation in practice, and despite former President Vaclav Klaus’s attempts to promote a Eurosceptic stance within their party, he departed in 2008. They support NATO, conservation, and immigration quotas, though they also oppose racism and see preventing hate as one of the government’s ideally-limited powers.
Christian and Democratic Union—Czechoslovak Peoples’ Party (KDU-CSL): One of the country’s oldest parties, it dates from 1919 during the era of Czechoslovakia, when the Republic was united with its eastern neighbor. Advocating for socially conservative centrism, it holds similar views to the Catholic Church, once dominant in the country.
Tradition, Responsibility, Prosperity (TOP 09): Founded in—you guessed it, 2009!—this party may no longer win ⅕ of the vote share as it did in 2010, but it is nonetheless a pro-European party that split from the similar KDU-CSL while holding ODS-style conservative values such as support for NATO, emphasis on the family, Judeo-Christian heritage, the free market, and the rule of law. Fun fact: it’s led by a prince from the time of Austro-Hungary, when Czechia was known as Bohemia—Karel Schwarzenberg.
Pirates and Mayors (PirSTAN), 37 seats: A smaller opposition alliance of the Pirates and Mayors, they are somewhat more liberal than the conservative SPOLU but can be seen as their more centrist counterpart due to their alliance against ANO and other groupings.
Czech Pirate Party: No, the name is not a joke. One of the main parties that has led protests against Babis’ alleged conflicts of interest, it was founded in 2009, and it entered Parliament in 2017. Its policies are designed to attract voters beyond its core youth base, advocating for measures such as greater use of the internet to combat corruption, lower taxes, and individual freedom. Under Zdenek Hrib, a noted critic of Russia and China, they control the Mayorship of Prague.
Mayors and Independents (STAN): A party that seeks relatively little attention in the public eye, they can generally be considered a centrist force, and their name fills in most of the gaps anyhow.
Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), 20 seats: Falling two seats from the previous election, they are a far-right party that often stokes xenophobia against Muslim immigrants. (With 58 percent of Czechs opposed to having Muslims as neighbors, 10 percent choosing them more-or-less cannot be too unexpected.) Their base, however and tragically, has some extremely radical elements: their Secretary once called for the gassing of Roma, the LGBTQ+ community, and Czech Jews. There is very little more to say other than the fact that their leader is named Tomio Okamura, suggesting that their anti-immigrant rhetoric is selective.
MUSSOLINI TOPS POLLS, FAR-RIGHT GAINING IN ITALY:
ITALY, LOCAL - OCT 4
by Anthony Duan
Yes, you read that correctly, and no, the time machine hasn’t transported you back to 1922. The Fascist dictator’s granddaughter has amassed more than 8,000 votes in Rome’s local elections on October 3 and 4, placing her first in the at-large contest conducted under rules of semi-proportional representation (albeit with a runoff to secure the most popular party its majority.) Running as a candidate of Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), a party placed on the far right of the political spectrum, Mussolini has downplayed the influence of her surname upon her election. She claims to have triumphed on her own merits and to be a friend of left-wingers, a tolerant stance unlike her grandfather’s—an association she is not fond of reminding others of. As for Rome itself, a mayoral runoff is expected to be held between right-winger Enrico Michetti and moderate leftist Roberto Gualtieri, as no candidate for the post received 50 percent of the vote. Gualtieri is expected to prevail.
In most other major Italian cities, including Milan, Naples, and Bologna, the center-left Democratic Party and its allies are expected to win without the need for a runoff, and this coalition remains favored to prevail in Rome and Turin as well. The right-wing coalition of the aforementioned Brothers, Matteo Salvini’s populist League (a party charged with stranding ships of African migrants at sea), and former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia is expected to win mostly in smaller towns and cities The major city of Trieste, east of Venice, also appears to be in their hands. In fact, the Brothers, led by Giorgia Meloni, are receiving 20 percent in national opinion polls, and have overtaken the League as the largest party of Italy’s ascendant far-right, though that party too maintains around 20 percent support. While Prime Minister Mario Draghi retains a 70 percent approval rating, it does say something that Italians are increasingly voting for the Brothers, an opposition party, over the League and the Democrats, both included within the government.
Former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s also-populist Five Star Movement has meanwhile fallen into an absolute rut, with it plummeting to three percent in Milan, Italy’s second-largest city, and with Virginia Raggi, the mayor of Rome and a Five Star member, falling to a projected third place in polls. For all of the party’s claims to represent the vanguard against Italy’s persisting corruption, and for all of their founder Beppe Grillo’s whipping-up of anti-establishment sentiment through his own holiday, F*ck-Off Day, an inability to solve problems as basic as trash collection demonstrates the cyclical rise and fall of the European power’s unstable politics.
However, that instability may save Italy from a far-right administration. Although opinion polls for the country’s approaching 2023 election show a coalition between the Brothers and League to be Italy’s most likely post-Draghi government, the local elections made clear that the country’s main urban centers are not tilting towards their cause anytime soon. Indeed, scandals have recently arisen for both radical parties—for the League, Salvini’s social media manager was accused of drug dealing, and the Brothers have been hit with charges of illegal fundraising and continued fascist sympathies. Meloni’s party has often been noted for sympathizing with fascist soldiers in World War II, support of traditional gender roles, and, of course, opposition to immigration. Nonetheless, if even using the fascist tricolor flame has not dampened their support, these controversies may not actually cost them a 2023 victory. Moreover, despite the League’s participation in a government led by the liberal-socialist Draghi, conflicts over Italy’s COVID vaccine passports have rendered their involvement nominal at times, with the far-right opposing any sort of mandate and the government instituting a pass system nonetheless. Their populism, it seems, can only take them so far, and with the collapse of Conte’s Five Star-League coalition government brought about by the League itself, the “ideology” of populism may be fading away in favor of a more polarized center-left and far-right. Five Star is going nowhere, however, and has allied with the center-left in the past. The balance of power has shifted to the more experienced (and less prone to infighting) center-left.
There is little further explanation necessary for the parties, at least until an election is called (which may come prior to 2023). The electoral system is somewhat more complex, with voters able to choose either a mayoral candidate or one of the City Council candidates’ lists connected to that mayoral candidate, the latter of which also counts as a vote for the mayoral candidate in question, but the former of which is not connected to any specific list. If voting for a list of candidates, an open list system is applied, meaning that the voter may vote for a specific candidate on the list and that candidates on a list are ranked in order of personal votes received. Afterward, the seats are distributed roughly proportionally with the caveat that lists connected to the victorious mayor (elected in a runoff between the top two candidates if no majority is achieved at first) receive at least 60 percent of seats in a majority bonus system.
LAND OF THE MOUNTAIN, LAND OF THE STREAM, LAND OF THE UNEXPECTED
AUSTRIA, LOCAL - SEP 26
by Anthony Duan
Such a title so curiously fits Austria, which saw slivers of the electorate elevate some truly unusual parties to offices on the state and local level on September 26. While most attention on the small Alpine Federation of less than 10 million people is certainly on the fact that former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has been forced to resign over allegations of bribery, let us focus on the state elections in Upper Austria and the city council elections in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city. Before we go onward, it is important to point out the unusual nature of Austria’s coalition government: Kurz himself is a member of the conservative Peoples’ Party, which formed a coalition with the leftist Greens after a different corruption scandal involving their former partners, the anti-immigration and far-right Freedom Party. The Central European state is no stranger to hodgepodge governments.
Let’s start at the state level in Upper Austria, upstream of the capital city of Vienna and home to Austria’s lowest coronavirus vaccination rate, at only 55 percent. A recently-created party known as People Freedom Fundamental Right (MFG) has crossed the four percent threshold to enter the state Parliament and win three of 56 seats. MFG is a party that opposes any sort of pandemic-era restriction, including mask mandates, vaccine passports, and lockdowns under any circumstances whatsoever. In fact, its supporters have spread conspiracy theories about the vaccine, and some have even questioned the virus’s existence. While Austria’s next federal (and many state) elections are not due until 2023—a year by which, fingers crossed, there will be no restrictions to speak of—the party, despite its objectively terrible name, is already planning to run in other states. However, the similarly anti-restriction Freedom Party may reduce any impact it has had, as that party already shares power in the state through the system of Proporz, where not only the legislature is elected proportionally, but the state cabinets are as well.
Meanwhile, in Graz, the Communists have claimed the role of the city’s largest party with 29 percent of the vote, besting the Peoples’ Party and its mayor Siegfried Nagel, who has promptly resigned after 18 years in his post. Even the Communist mayoral candidate, Elke Kahr, has referred to the results as “more than surprising,” but as she points out, her party’s victory is due to what she describes as her party being “there every day and for years… especially for the poorest.” With other parties often focusing on ideology and doing little to emphasize their role outside of campaigns, her bloc has focused deeply on local issues such as housing, carving out a niche for themselves in a country where Communists often do not even cross one percent of the national vote. While Kahr remains uncertain about accepting her position as mayor, the expected consequence of her party finishing first in Austria’s parliamentary system (as is common in Europe), it is doubtful any coalition excluding the Communists will come to fruition, with its 15 seats of 48 demonstrating the simple fact that, at least in the Styrian city, there’s a new player in town. It should be noted that Styria is the only Austrian state with Communists—two at that—working as parliamentarians alongside conservative, liberal, and socialist colleagues.
The electoral system is at-large proportional for cities, but it is more complex for states. Seats are first distributed in regional multi-member constituencies, and remaining seats are calculated at the statewide level in order to provide overall proportionality. Lists are closed, meaning that the parties ultimately decide the order of candidates, and a four percent threshold is applied. In Europe, unlike the U.S., a party’s actual vote share counts for something.