Daily Archives: August 28, 2012

Assorted Links

First Past the Post: August 28

Leave a comment

It’s now likely that former Panamá City mayor Juan Carlos Navarro will be the presidential candidate for the center-left Partido Revolucionario Democrático in Panamá in 2014 after he won the chairmanship of the party last weekend.

Here in the United States, it’s convention week for the Republican Party, and Uri Friedman in Foreign Policy frisks the G.O.P. platform on foreign policy.

A French prosecutor is investigating whether former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was murdered after an al-Jazeera report last month suggested he may have been poisoned.

The Montreal Gazette ponders whether a victory for sovereigntists next Tuesday in Québec would lead to an anglophone flight from the province.

The Dutch Socialist Party seems to be falling back after the first debate in the Netherlands.

Meet the Dutch version of Todd Akin.

The Philippine economy shines.

Your latest FT Alphaville review of the Greek bailout.

Angola

It’s election week in Angola (but don’t expect a real election)

Leave a comment

So Angola goes to the polls this week, and José Eduardo dos Santos, Angola’s president since 1979 (pictured above), will overwhelmingly be reelected, notwithstanding the rumblings of dissent among the young, the poor and the unemployed.

The expectations are that Friday’s election will not be free and fair, as I’ve noted in the past.

But a semi-authoritarian regime with sham elections is a vast improvement on decades of civil war.  So Angola’s making progress, in that in the past decade, the country has pulled definitively out of a 30-year civil war, which began almost immediately after its independence in 1975.  A ceasefire declared in 2002 has held, and the country will have “elections” now for the second time since fighting ended.

An oil boom, too, has boosted the Angolan economy — the country recorded some of the world’s highest GDP growth rates in the past decade, including growth over 20% from 2005 to 2007, and it’s thought to be China’s largest oil supplier.  A drop in oil prices slowed Angola’s growth, but the country is expected to grow at around 10% in 2012 — oil production accounts for nearly 45% of the country’s GDP.

That’s where the good news ends.

Around 40% of the country’s 18.5 million citizens remains mired in poverty, and that fact, and the country’s stark rich-poor divide, has been the central issue in the campaigning leading up to the Angolan election.

Political parties in Angola still correspond to the two major groups that contested the civil war.

Dos Santos’s Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho (MPLA or the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Labour Party) currently controls 191 of the 220 seats in Angola’s Assembleia Nacional.

The main opposition party is the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA or the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola).  Although the MLPA is dominated by the northern Ambundu ethnic group and UNITA by the more southern Ovimbundu group, ethnicity does not play an especially huge role in Angolan politics, nor do standard measures of political ideology.

Isaias Samakuva, UNITA’s leader, has called for the election to be postponed in order to ensure a fairer process, and UNITA has accused dos Santos’s regime of widespread interference in the election process and rigging the vote through the use of state funds and through the control of the state media.  Continue reading It’s election week in Angola (but don’t expect a real election) →

Canada, Quebec

The key to Québec’s election are the CAQ-leaning francophones, not anglophones

Leave a comment

If voters support the parties in next Tuesday’s Québec election as shown in the latest Leger Marketing poll, it will be with a burst of support among francophone voters for the newly-formed Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ).

That poll showed, essentially, a three-way race, with the sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ) leading at 33%, with 28% for the CAQ and 27% for premier Jean Charest and his Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ).  Showing the volatility of the race, another poll last week showed Charest’s Liberals with a 35% lead to just 29% for the PQ and 24% for the CAQ.

Although so much has been made of anglophone voters — and their openness to the CAQ — anglophone Quebeckers, which make up roughly 10% of the Québec electorate, are still mostly captive to premier Jean Charest and his Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ).  Despite support from the prominent anglophone politician Robert Libman, the CAQ attracts just 15% of the anglophone vote to 67% for the Liberals (the PQ wins just 9%).

Francophone voters, however, split as follows: 38% to the PQ, 31% to the CAQ, 18% to Charest’s Liberals, 9% to the stridently leftist and sovereigntist Québec solidaire and 3% to the sovereigntist Option nationale, which received the high-profile support of former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau over the weekend.

It should be fairly clear that the 12% of francophone voters supporting Québec solidaire and Option nationale would otherwise be supporting the PQ in this election.  Remember that the first-past-the-post system means that the election next Tuesday will really be 125 separate elections in each election district, so in a close race, that 12% could make the difference.

But to me, the real key to the election is where François Legault and the CAQ are pulling their 30% share of francophone voters, and there are two options:

If the CAQ’s francophone support is coming predominantly from voters who have already decided that they won’t vote for Charest, the CAQ is competing for the same pool of voters as the PQ, which could ultimately lead to Charest pulling off a victory and a minority government.

If the CAQ’s francophone support is coming from voters who, for whatever reason, are attracted to its centrist / vaguely free-market platform, the CAQ is competing with the Liberals, which could allow the PQ to win a minority government.

Given that the election is in large part a referendum on Charest, on Liberal corruption and on the economy that Charest now owns after nine years in office, and given that the CAQ has been purposefully vague about its platform, I think the former is much more likely the case, and it’s why, despite what some polls show, the chances of a fourth consecutive mandate for the Liberals is still a very real possibility. Continue reading The key to Québec’s election are the CAQ-leaning francophones, not anglophones →

Canada, Quebec

Will Québec solidaire break through in next Tuesday’s election?

1 Comment

When Québec’s major party leaders gathered a few days ago for the only multi-party debate in advance of the election for Québec’s Assemblée nationale on Sept. 4, voters saw three familiar faces: Jean Charest, leader of the Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) and the province’s premier since 2003; Pauline Marois, leader of the sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ), and François Legault, a former PQ minister and leader of the newly-formed and more center-right Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ).

They also saw a less familiar face: Québec solidaire spokeswoman Françoise David who, along with spokesman Amir Khadir, are the two “spokespersons” for Québec solidaire, a stridently leftist, environmentalist, feminist and sovereigntist party founded in 2006 when several smaller parties merged.

David wasn’t a wholly outsized presence in that debate, but to the extent it was David’s first introduction to many Québec voters, her above-the-fray tone seemed to make a favorable impression.

David and Québec solidaire are, by far, the most leftwing and anti-neoliberal of the four parties (and party leaders) featured in last week’s debates:

  • On student fees, not only does David oppose tuition increases for students, but was the only party leader to wear a red square — the symbol of student protesters — on stage (even though Marois wore it in solidarity with students last spring and has come out strongly in opposition to tuition hikes).
  • On the environment, David has criticized Charest’s Plan Nord, designed to boost mining and other economic efforts in northern Québec, and her party is downright hostile to Québec’s asbestos industry (Québec is essentially the only main producer of asbestos in North America and Europe).
  • On sovereignty, Québec solidaire is firmly in favor of an independent Québec, in contrast to theMONDAY’S PIECE> nuanced “wait and see” approach that Marois has taken.

Continue reading Will Québec solidaire break through in next Tuesday’s election? →