ELECTION FEVER, PART ONE

The European elections are just finishing up and overall, it is one of those results where journalists are left wondering how to sum up an insanely complex electoral process with approximately one zillion contributing factors into a fun little news bite you can read over whilst enjoying your morning bran muffin. I do like a good bran muffin, though, so this is my stab at same.

For background: the European Parliament is the body that makes EU-wide law. All of the member states get to vote on and send Europe MPs to said parliament, which sounds simple in theory but in practice it means you’re dealing with the internal politics of 28 different countries (or 31 if you split up the UK into four countries, as some insist you do for semantic reasons) and that gets very messy very fast, because you get things like Nigel Farage refusing to do any actual work in his actual job as a European MP because his political stance is that the United Kingdom should leave the EU, except you thought there was only one useless shithead like Nigel Farage and there are in fact dozens of Farage-alikes throughout the EU, all doing their own rendition of “Slovakia/Portugal/Finland/wherever would be better off on our own.”

Historically, however, the European Parliament is dominated by two large “parties,” which are in fact conglomerate parties representing many smaller parties from all the member nations. You have the European People’s Party, which is your old-school center-right coalition of all the Sensible Conservatives from all the various countries (not the British Tories, mind you, who stopped being Sensible quite a ways back - these are your business-minded Sensible Centrists, like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron), and you have the Social Democrats, which are all the socialist parties from all the various countries, and those two massive parties-of-parties, and these two pro-EU parties have always formed a coalition government in the European Parliament which then goes about mostly arguing with itself, because it’s a coalition of socialists and conservatives who agree on very little other than that the EU is, all things considered, a pretty good thing to have what with the lack of wars and the massive trading power it provides. The Parliament has 750 seats and going into this election the EPP and SoDems controlled 412 of them, which was a pretty comfortable majority.

Unfortunately, they don’t have that majority any more. The major story of this election is that the two traditional governing blocs have taken a walloping, each of them losing about forty-plus seats in the Parliament. The good news, such as it is, is that their walloping has come at the hands mostly of other parties that are generally pro-EU - the Liberal Democrats bloc (yet another coalition of centrists, and yes they do include the actual British Liberal Democratic party) and the Greens (I assume you know what the Greens are for), and that one of the Euro-sceptic coalitions, the European Conservatives and Reformers (which this time do include the British Conservatives) lost quite a few seats as well. Nationalist parties have stayed as-is and the European Freedom and Direct Democracy bloc - which is Nigel Farage’s bloc and includes the newly created Brexit Party - gained a few seats overall, but only in a few countries and, really, if it weren’t for Brexit, they probably would have lost seats.

(Speaking of Brexit, the vote in the UK showed a pro-Remain lean in the electorate, with hard-Brexiteers coming in second place in popular vote polling to the various pro-Remain parties in the UK and tying them for seats. This will no doubt make the future of Brexit absolutely crystal clear to everybody and put all the Brexit pundits out of work forever.)

The results of European Parliament voting usually have knock-on effects. For example, Greece’s Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, has announced plans for an early election, because his left-wing Syriza party lost seats in the European Parliament to the New Democracy coalition of more conservative Greek parties. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s EPP members took a beating at the hands of more liberal parties, while Marine Le Pen’s nationalists held firm, and that’s going to affect politics there. This is macro-level politics, and it will take a while for all of the effects to reveal themselves.

ELECTION FEVER, PART TWO

I know, you’re thinking “man, so many elections” and trust me, you have no idea - there are a ridiculous number of national elections scheduled for 2019 around the world. It just happens to be a year with a much higher than average number of elections for some reason. But I digress, because I do need to write a bit about India’s election.

If the EU was a mixed bag of news, I tend to consider the results of the Indian election as being decidely less rosy, because the victory of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party simply seems to me to be bad news for anybody hoping for more stability and less bloodshed as a general rule. The BJP and their coalition of conservative parties won about sixty-five percent of the seats in the Lok Sabha (India’s lower house of Parliament), with about 45 percent of the vote because first-past-the-post voting is a terrible, terrible way to elect a government. The anti-BJP vote coalesced, as expected, around Rahul Gandhi’s United Progressive Alliance, which also gained seats overall. (The big electoral losers in this election were the various regional parties, most of which saw seat losses, and India’s two Communist parties. Yes, India has two separate Communist parties, mostly because Indian Communists couldn’t agree whether to support the Soviet Union or China in the 1960s.)

The results were a bit of a shock, because until shortly before the elections started (and India conducts their elections over the course of an entire month, which is… a lot of time) the general consensus was that the BJP was going to lose some seats but still manage to maintain at least a minority government position, or a weaker majority. However, their actual success was massive, and most experts are attributing it to the border skirmishes with Pakistan which started in February and March, because there’s nothing like the threat of war to make people nervous and decide to support whomever is already in charge.

As to why I consider the BJP victory to be a poor omen: basically, it boils down to Narenda Modi being a Hindu nationalist (remember, twenty percent of India is Muslim, Sikh or just basically not Hindu and that makes them easy targets) and willing to support and empower other Hindu nationalists and/or vaguely psychotic types. Like that one guy - not just some dork nobody, but an actual politician in office - claiming that “there will be no elections in 2024 after this election is done” last month. Or the BJP MP who won office in this election despite still facing charges of organizing a bombing a decade ago which killed nine people, and then during the election spoke about how Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin did the right thing. There’s also Modi’s disregard for political norms and his willingness to pressure the judiciary, which is a Bad Thing in a democracy, and how he has gradually centralized greater degrees of operational power in the executive, which is also bad. Calling Modi “the Indian Trump” is probably unfair, because Modi isn’t insane, senile or blatantly corrupt, is interested in governance and doesn’t have terrible hair. But he is definitely more authoritarian than Indian leaders have been in a long time, and that should make everybody nervous.

CARBON TAXATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Following the recent elections in South Africa (SEE? SEE? ALL THE ELECTIONS ARE HAPPENING), Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC have now passed a carbon tax, which will go into effect immediately and which is designed to gradually increase over time. The first phase - scheduled to last through the end of 2022 - taxes carbon dioxide emissions at a rate of approximately $11.48 Canadian per ton of CO2. For the sake of comparison, Canada - where we emit more than 150% as much CO2 per capita and have an economy five times as large as South Africa’s - is currently charging $10 per ton of CO2.

I’m just saying.

CORRECTION FROM LAST WEEK

When I was writing about the Australian election last week (SO MANY ELECTIONS) I thought I was looking at electoral maps of Australia that showed the mass popular vote across both chambers rather than what they were, which were electoral maps that showed the popular vote across the lower chamber only - which is why I mistakenly concluded that the Greens traditionally did well in rural New South Wales. Actually, it turns out that the National Party - the coalition party of the Liberal Party, the conservative party that won the election - also uses green as their party colour, because it completely makes sense for two parties to use the same colour as their symbol, especially when one of them is named after the colour.

I try not to judge these sorts of things, because the Canadian Football League had two teams named “the Roughriders” for literally decades (NOTE: this is no longer the case) and after a while we all got sick of the jokes people made when they first found out about this interesting fact. But man. Australia. Make one of the parties change colours!

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019, Chad Stahelski, theatre) - 4/5

Triple Frontier (2019, JC Chando, Netflix) - 3/5

Rim of the World (2019, McG, Netflix) - 2/5

Also, OUR BOYS ARE GOING TO THE NBA FINALS, Y’ALL.

See you in seven.