Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Electoral Politics Page 16 of 31

The Hung UK Parliament

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On June 9, 2017

18 Comments

The final results are 318 for the Conservatives, 262 for Labour, 35 for the SNP (Scottish), 12 for the Liberal Democrats, 10 for DUP (Democratic Unionist) and 13 “Other.”

There are 650 seats total, meaning 326 are needed for a majority.

DUP is who the Conservatives will govern with, and they are the Protestant Unionists in Northern Ireland. Not very nice people and associated with violence carried out on behalf of staying in the UK.

Labour will not be forming the government, odds are, but this is a victory for Labour in that the Conservatives’ majority is reduced to a minority.

72 percent of 18-24 year olds voted, which is unprecedented to my knowledge.

The takeaway is simple: Left-wing neoliberalism is dying (and with luck is dead), in England. A straight up message of nationalizing railroads and energy, of free tuition, of building homes, did far better than the neoliberals have done in years.

This was a two party election–third parties shed followers.

Corbyn outperformed massively, which is the risk of demonizing one’s enemies. Having screamed about how terrible he was, Blairites are reduced to saying, “Anyone else would have done better, May was awful.” After they’ve lost two elections to Corbyn and been wrong about him three times, this sounds weak.

Center-right parties are dying or reinventing themselves. There is no appetite for mealy-mouthed neoliberalism. Go all right, or go what passes these days for hard-left. The demographics are 100 percent on the left’s side: The younger people are, the more left-wing they are, and now, they’re even voting when offered politics which appeal to them.

I mean, given the university loans crisis, it seems like basic, no-brainer politics to offer them debt-forgiveness and free tuition.

In more immediate terms, the question is whether May will survive. Boris Johnson is likely sharpening his knife collection as we speak: She didn’t have to call this election and she lost her majority in it, after a terrible personal performance in which she appeared scared to be in the same room as Corbyn.

The second issue is when the next election will be. Is a coalition with the DUP in the works? Is it a strong coalition? It wouldn’t take much for the Conservatives to lose a vote of no-confidence and be back at the polling booths, though other parties will be reluctant to knock them out–and with good reason, fearing that Britons will punish them for having to go back to the polls so immediately.

A new election may be necessary, soon, and accepted as such, if the Conservatives find themselves unable to effectively negotiate Brexit.

I shall be interested to see if Labour MPs, who still hate Corbyn, launch another attack. There have been gestures of peace, but many will never give Corbyn credit for anything, and genuinely do disagree with his politics. I assume, however, that they will at least wait a while, while continuing to snipe and leak in hopes of weakening him.

We shall see.

Overall, I’m very happy with this result. I expect(ed) the realignment to take till 2020/24 for demographic reasons, but this is an early earthquake sign of better politics to come.

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The Labour Surge in Britain (Election Day Thread)

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On June 6, 2017

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Update 2: Betting markets now think Corbyn will be PM. I cannot, in my entire life, recall an election I have been so happy to watch.

Update: Exit polls point to a hung parliament, Tories with the most seats, which means they’ll be given the first chance to form a government. But we’ll see.

Leaving this up on election day. Anecdotally, more young people are voting than usual. We’ll see. Corbyn’s probably the best candidate I’ve seen in my adult life and I’m hoping he wins. Use this is a thread related to the election.

So, Brits vote on Thursday for a new government. When the election was called, the Conservatives under May were up over Labour by more than 20 percent in most polls. Today, the spread has tightened, with Labour behind in most polls–but not all.

As was the case in the US with Sanders v. Clinton, the divide is generational. Those aged under 44 are for Corbyn and aged over 44 are for May. The younger they get, the more they’re for Corbyn. The problem, as everyone has pointed out, is turnout: Youngs tend to vote less.

Even the best polling doesn’t show a straight up Labour victory, it shows the Tories failing to get a majority. Polls in Britain have tended to be wrong away from Conservatives, but, given how unreliable polls have been over the past few years, I certainly have no idea how this will go. I certainly didn’t expect the election to be this close when it was called, though I’m very glad to be wrong.

Unless Labour wins, expect that Labour MPs will launch another coup attempt against Corbyn, even if his results are good.

I want to emphasize that they are doing so for ideological reasons. The excuse that Corbyn was hopeless doesn’t cut it any longer, but they will still try to take him down. This is because they genuinely don’t believe in his politics: They want to be slightly less cruel Conservatives, not 60s style social democrats updated to treat women and non-whites well.

Those are their genuine beliefs: They’re neoliberals. They blocked censuring Tony Blair for Iraq, they like cruel austerity politics, and war.

It’s interesting how much better Corbyn has done during the campaign: It seems that when the media can no longer lie about him as much, and when May no longer has the media covering for her incoherence and, well, excusing her repeated refusals to appear in public (which are now looking like cowardice not calculation), Corbyn shines.

Certainly, Corbyn regularly gets rock star treatment: The people who like Corbyn really like him. No one is enthusiastic for May.

So, we’ll know soon. No prediction from me, but a preference. May will do incalculable harm if she gets a term: gutting worker and environmental rights, social welfare, and the NHS. Brits have another possibility. This is the last off-ramp. If they don’t take it, it’s on them.

 

Macron Wins in France

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On May 7, 2017

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Le Pen’s result is actually somewhat worse than the polling, at 35 percent.

I remain convinced that the real loser of this election is Britain, which is going to find it brutal to leave the EU without an ally–and Le Pen would have been an ally.

Macron, who ran Hollande’s disastrous economic policy, will be a Trudeau-style leader, very shiny and so on, good on talking about social issues, but his policies are standard neoliberal: Take away workers’ rights, and grind them down in the name of labor market flexibility. These policies won’t improve the economy.

Hopefully next time, the real left will be in the final round (it was close this time with Melenchon).

It remains a pity that we have to grind this out, in great misery, rather than simply leaping to candidates like Corbyn, Melenchon, or (to a lesser extent) Sanders, but the electorate is still not willing to actually embrace positive change. Even when they want change, they want it done by assholes (Cameron/May/Trump) or by people whose track records indicate servile subservience to neoliberal norms (Trudeau, Obama, Macron).

So be it. We will simply have to wait for death and the time to make changes. It will cost us much misery and many deaths, but it is unavoidable.

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Sterile Elites and the French Election

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On May 3, 2017

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France has an electoral run-off system. The top two candidates in the general poll go on to a face-to-face election. This year, that is Macron and Le Pen. Melenchon, the left-wing candidate came up just short.

What is happening was inevitable, and predicted. Europe had been sclerotic before 2008, but enough people were doing well. After 2008, Europe, more than perhaps any other areas in the world, doubled down on austerity and neoliberal policies like “labor flexibility” (code for “fire for any reason, reduced (ideally no) protection from bosses.)

And so we now have the neo-fascist (in a much more real way) vs. the neoliberal who ran Hollande’s vastly unpopular economic policy.

The French establishment has reacted predictably.

Elites simply can’t pivot. They don’t know how to do anything but keep doubling down on neoliberal austerity. It is their entire playbook, and this default strategy may wind up costing them everything.

Polls currently have Macron winning, and Le Pen has been softening her rhetoric on leaving the EU, though it’s primarily, “We can wait a bit and have a referendum.”

I consider that a mistake, not because of electoral considerations this time, but because of the electoral considerations next time. As sometime-poster Mandos has pointed out, the EU has set up both membership in the EU and the Euro so that leaving them frontloads the pain onto whoever leaves. If you’re leaving, you need to get it over with right at the start of your term so you have time to recover from the pain.

(Leaving the Euro is clearly correct on policy terms, though whether Le Pen and her team have the chops to manage it properly is another matter.)

The other consideration is that if Le Pen doesn’t win this time (and the polls are unreliable, given past performance around similar candidates and issues), she’ll be on the final ballot in the next round, because the policies Macron will pursue will make the French worse off–just as they did when he ran them from Hollande. They aren’t going to miraculously work now that Le Pen is even more of a threat, or because Mercury goes retrograde or something.

But then there’s a very real chance Melenchon will be on the last round ballot next time, too, and he’s been pulling no punches. He refused to endorse Macron (he did not play Bernie Sanders Nice) and unlike Sanders followers, who overwhelmingly voted for Clinton, about two-thirds of Melenchon supporters refuse to vote Macron.

A Melenchon deputy explained:

We don’t want to help Marine Le Pen, but we don’t want to endorse Mr. Macron,” he said.

“He’s the candidate of free trade,” Mr. Coquerel said. “He’s going to assist in the Uberization of society. Everything we are going to fight against in the coming months. There’s no possible rapprochement.”

This is correct behaviour, as far as I am concerned. Melenchon is not a colleague, he did not run under the same party, and he disagrees with almost all of Macron’s economic policies.

If Macron can’t win against Le Pen without the left’s support, he doesn’t deserve to win, because he isn’t a left-winger on non-social issues. And while social issues are important, so is whether or not you have a good job. Freedom in poverty, as those of us who have been poor know, isn’t really freedom.

Besides, Melenchon is in the same position as Le Pen. He’ll almost certainly be in the next “last round” if Macron wins, because, again, Macron is going to hurt a lot of French. It is inevitable, he cannot avoid doing so because he genuinely believes in neo-liberal austerity as the road forward.

There are a large contingent of people who are “just hanging on.” The status quo sort of works for them, but they can see the abyss, and they don’t want change, yet, even though they aren’t happy.

They will only want change if the game of economic Russian roulette that is austerity happens to take them out, and dump them into a slum. Their numbers decline every election, as some eat that austerity bullet and others die (since they tend to be older) and a very few can no longer stomach buying their present with their children’s future. (This is rare, most don’t care, and I base that on the cold hard numbers. If they cared, things would have changed long ago. Their children are expendable to them.)

So we play the game out. Time’s wheel must grind on, bodies caught in the gears, till the last neoliberal has failed, and we get either the populist right or the populist left.

Those are your choices: populist right, populist left, or continued decline into what will become an increasingly obvious dystopian surveillance state; something out of an 80s cyberpunk novel, but without the actual cool tech (as yet).

But there is no other choice that moves away from current trends except populist right or left. Those are the choices. Choose.

Update (how LePen will win, if she does):

A false story of “I will help fix your awful life” wins against a true story of “I’m going to hurt you, but the other person is lying about helping you and will hurt you even worse.”

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Macron vs. Le Pen in France

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On April 23, 2017

23 Comments

This is the final showdown. A reminder, Macron ran Hollande’s economic policy, and wants to do even more “liberalizing” of the French economy. A.K.A., more gutting of worker’s rights, wages, and so on.

The polls show Macron winning, but given the reliability of polls lately, who knows?

What I do know is this: Macron will swiftly be as popular as Hollande (meaning, in the doghouse), and the next election, if LePen doesn’t win this one, will be LePen’s to lose (and if she loses, it will be to someone like Melanchon—a left wing populist).

Britain needs LaPen to win. LePen is willing to take the pain to Frexit. She won’t be slowed down by the EU’s promises of pain–instead, she’ll pile it on.

This is what 37 years of international neoliberalism has brought, and bought, us.

(Oh, and Corbyn is Britain’s only chance to do Brexit in a way that isn’t an enema with a sledgehammer, but it looks like that’s what Brits want.)

Should be interesting, anyway.

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The Wild 2020/2024 Elections

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On March 3, 2017

46 Comments

So, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and Oprah are both reputedly interested in being President. Zuckerberg is supposedly lining up for 2024, and has certainly been acting like it.

George Clooney’s name has been bandied about.

So has a more normal candidate, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a neoliberal’s neoliberal and near-complete asshole.

2016 didn’t just teach aspirants that right-wing authoritarian populism could work, it told celebrities, who know Trump mostly as a celebrity (which is reasonable; he’s not a big time billionaire, nothing compared to Zuckerberg or Bezos and Thiel and so on), that if a second rate celebrity with serious personality issues can make it to the President’s chair, so can they.

I’ve seen some political operatives bemoaning this, but I’ll be frank: I’d take Oprah or Clooney in a heartbeat over Cuomo. I know he’s a right-wing tard who does the very minimal good stuff he has to to stay elected.

(Zuckerberg, on the other hand, I’ll pass on–as he himself said: Anyone who trusts him is an idiot.)

Unlike many, I don’t see this is bad, per se. It is bad that the political class has failed so badly that they are no longer trusted and people are looking outside the political class. It is bad that the US and the world has created so many vastly rich people that they can do this, not needing to have a political party firmly behind them.

But given that we live in an oligarchy and a celebrity state, and given that the politicians have failed and failed and failed, it’s quite reasonable for Americans to try to pull from different pools.

And, as I say, I’d take Oprah or Clooney over any neoliberal in a heartbeat.

This is where we are, it is where the decision of the political class to sell out to money has led us, and there’s little point in bemoaning it, though one should certainly note it.

It is as it is.

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Election Interference

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On February 27, 2017

57 Comments

So, Obama put sanctions on Russia, ostensibly for interfering in American elections.

The argument has been made that keeping them under these sanctions “disincentivizes” Russia interfering in other countries’ elections.

Okay.

I think this falls to the level of schoolyard ethics.

Russia should stand down when the US stands down. The US has interfered in multiple elections, and recently helped the Maidan overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in a coup.

As for electronic spying, what is known is this: Americans were tapping the German Chancellor’s phone.

There is nothing that Americans want Russians to stop doing that they themselves do not do, with the possible exception of annexation. (And there’s a strong argument that the US still annexes what it wants, de facto, if not de jure.)

The schoolyard bully telling others, “Only I get to hit people” doesn’t go across really well.

It is simply impossible to take the US seriously on any form of “don’t spy,” “don’t fight,” or “enforce human rights.” Just impossible. Of course Russia will try to get friendly governments elected when the West has it under economic sanctions. Of course Russia will try and get friendly governments in power: Just like America does.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but people who unilaterally disarm and refuse to fight get a lot worse done to them than having their faces shoved in the dirt.

America supported a coup that overthrew a democratically elected government. There is no question about this. Then, when the Russians intervened in the Ukraine, they insisted on punishing the Russians.

Think this through a little.

At most, Russian interference in the US election involved the selective release of real, true, information.

The rest of the world wishes American interference stayed at that level.

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The Realpolitik of Britain’s Interest in a LePen Victory

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On February 24, 2017

21 Comments

Marine LePen continues to close the margins on a final round run-off. She’s still likely to lose, but it’s getting closer.

The odd thing here is that if Britain intends to Brexit, which it does, it would be very helpful to Britain if LePen won, because right now Brussels is determined to punish Britain severely for Brexit, so as to dissuade other possible rebels.

But LePen has said she wants Frexit, and if both France and England are leaving, it becomes quite hard to “punish” them, so long as they work together even slightly. That’s just too much of Europe, and especially Europe’s economy.

As I said in the past, I’d favor Brexit under a left-wing government, even minus the Euro, the binding agreements that are part of the EU make running a real left-wing government impossible, but under the Conservatives, it’s likely be a fiasco.

However the case for France is a lot stronger, because France isn’t winning under the Euro and hasn’t been for some time. France would be better out of the Euro. Again, it would be better that it be done by someone other than LePen, but the left has emasculated itself in these debates by refusing to be for nationalism, and thus ceding the anti-EU argument mostly to the right. (There are some exceptions.)

Frankly, the entire south of Europe should leave the Euro (though not necessarily the EU), and so should France. It just is not in their interest to stay, at least not if “interest” means “the interests of most of the population.”

It is a pity that people like LaPen and Farrage are the people filled with passionate conviction, while most of the left swings in the wind pathetically, and the only major left-wing leader of conviction, Corbyn, has polls leaving him far, far behind the Conservative party. (Though I consider that more an indictment of Britons than Corbyn.)

If the good people won’t do the right thing, it falls to the bad people to do the right thing in so much the wrong way that it may turn out to be the wrong thing.

This, by the way, is true as much of the EU as of leaving the EU. The EU and the Euro in particular were set up to force people into neoliberal policy. This was a betrayal of the spirit of the EU, which was about preventing war, not about impoverishing people. The technocrats are so convinced they are right that no amount of real world evidence of failure can convince them otherwise.

And so the right-wing rises. And Europeans are embracing them more and more.

Create an intolerable present with a clearly intolerable future and people will take a winger on very unpleasant people for even a slight chance to change things.

So it is, and so it shall be–if our elites don’t start changing, or we don’t change our elites.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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