Catalans form region-wide human chain to demand vote on independence

September 11, 2013 Kevin Lees 3 Comments

Unwilling to wait until 2016 or later for Catalan independence, regional political leaders organized a protest today — on September 11, the Catalan national day — in the form of a human chain that stretched from the French Pyrenees to the Mediterranean coast.

They did so as more of Catalunya’s 7.5 million citizens favor independence from Spain, with Catalan president Artur Mas still locked in a battle with Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy over federalism and over the issue of whether Catalunya can unilaterally call a referendum to determine its future.

‘La Via Catalana’ — which drew over 500,000 people today — highlights just how strongly many Catalans feel about independence these days, especially in light of an economic crisis that’s taken a toll on all of Spain. Catalunya, as one of the wealthier regions of Spain, contributes a relatively greater amount to the federal budget and receives comparatively less back from the federal government in return. Ultimately, Catalans resent sending revenue to poorer regions of Spain in the same way that Germans resent sending revenue to bail out Greece and other poorer countries in the European periphery. A recent survey shows that 52% of Catalans prefer independence to just 24% who favor remaining part of Spain.

Mas took his case today global with a high-profile op-ed in The New York Times demanding a referendum for Catalan independence:

We also seek no harm to Spain. We are bound together by geography, history and our people, as more than 40 percent of Catalonia’s population came from other parts of Spain or has close family ties. We want to be Spain’s brother, as equal partners. It goes beyond money or cultural differences. We seek the right to have more control over our economy, our politics, our social services.

The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause. We seek the freedom to vote. Every individual has a right to expect this from his government, while also sharing equally in the benefits. In Europe conflicts are resolved democratically, and that is all we ask.

Mas pointed to the examples of Canada, where the federal government worked with Québec to hold two independence referenda in the past three decades, and to the United Kingdom, where prime minister David Cameron and Scottish first minister Alex Salmond have agreed to the terms of a September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence.

Last week, Mas hinted that he would be willing to back down from his demand of a 2014 referendum, indicating that a vote in 2016 would be largely acceptable. Mas is still requesting Madrid’s approval to hold a status referendum, but Rajoy, the leader of the center-right Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) unequivocally opposes Catalan independence and has warned Mas that any referendum held without Madrid’s consent is a violation of the Spanish constitution. But as popular support for Catalan independence rises to even higher levels, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Rajoy to refuse the opportunity for a clear vote — even Cameron has gently nudged Mas toward agreeing to a referendum.

Complicating the matter is the fact that many Catalans now believe they have the right to hold a vote in 2014 no matter what Rajoy says — and not in 2016 or some future date. The ‘referendum now’ camp includes the pro-independence, leftist Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC, Republican Left of Catalunya) as well as many members of Mas’s own autonomist center-right party, Convergència i Unió (CiU, Convergence and Union).

For his part, Mas is willing to delay the referendum until 2016 because a constitutional confrontation with Rajoy might prompt another round of early elections — a mistake Mas is unlikely to make again after calling snap elections shortly after last year’s Catalan national day for November 2012. Mas did so with a thinly veiled goal of riding the pro-independence wave to an even larger majority in the 135-member Catalan parliament (the Parlament de Catalunya). But the strategy backfired and the CiU instead lost 12 seats, mostly to the pro-independence Republican Left that, for now, is supporting Mas’s regional government. Polls earlier this summer showed the Republican Left leading voter opinion for the first time ever, which means that Mas hopes to avoid elections anytime in the near future. Continue reading Catalans form region-wide human chain to demand vote on independence →

Canada, Quebec

The problem with Pauline Marois’s sovereignist minority government in Québec

September 11, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

One year into the minority government of Québec premier Pauline Marois, the province is again at the center of controversy with a new attempt to legislate a ‘charter of Québec values’ that’s drawing ire from the rest of Canada.

That chart above isn’t a joke — it was released yesterday by Québec’s government, and it purports to demonstrate examples of ‘non-ostentatious’ signs that state employees are permitted to wear.

You’ll note that two-thirds of ‘approved’ examples are Judeo-Christian religions and three-fifths of the ‘banned’ examples are not. The ‘secular charter’ (la charte de la laïcité) would ban public sector workers from wearing kippas, turbans, burkas, hijabs or ‘large’ crucifixes. Remember that in Québec, the public sector is quite expansive, so the charter would capture not only folks like teachers, police and civil servants, but employees in Québec’s universities and health care sector as well.

For good measure, the proposed charter would also tweak Québec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms to limit religious exemptions, though it wouldn’t eliminate subsidies to religious private schools in Québec that are largely Catholic and largely funded by the state and it wouldn’t eliminate property tax exemptions for churches and other religious buildings.

In short, the charter looks less like a secular bill of rights than a sop to French Canadians to perpetuate preferred legal and cultural benefits at the expense of other ethnic and religious groups — tellingly, the crucifix hanging in Québec’s provincial assembly would be exempt from the law. A charter that, at face value, purports to secularize Québec’s society, would actually enshrine the dominant Catholic French Canadian culture and exclude Canada’s growing global immigrant population from many of the religious freedoms typically associated with a liberal democracy. If passed into law, it would conflict with the religious freedom guaranteed in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms (essentially, Canada’s bill of rights) — Québec did not sign the federal Charter, nor did it approve of the 1982 constitutional settlement, but remains subject to the federal Charter. That means the ‘secular charter’ could once again put Québec on a collision course with the rest of Canada.

It’s also the latest salvo in a series of only-in-Québec culture-war misfires that have plagued the Marois government since it took power last year, and it goes a long way to explaining why Marois and the sovereignist Parti québécois (PQ) are in danger of losing the next election.

Over the past year, it would have been enough for Marois to declare victory on the issue of student fees and largely pacifying student protests, to declare that her government would largely continue Charest’s Plan Nord, a push to develop Québec’s far north in pursuit of resources over the coming decades, and to focus on bringing investment and jobs to Québec. Marois’s government has also pushed to end support for Québec’s notorious asbestos industry, winning plaudits from environmentalists.

But if you want to know why Marois’s minority government isn’t in a more commanding position, it’s because it has pursued language and culture legislation as a time when Québec, which wasn’t exactly Canada’s most growth-oriented province to begin with (its per-capita GDP of around CAD$43,400 is CAD$5,500 less than neighboring Ontario’s and a staggering CAD$35,000 less than resource-rich Alberta), is falling behind the rest of Canada.

Between August 2012 and August 2013, Canada’s unemployment rate has dropped from 7.8% to 7.6%, but in Québec, the unemployment rate rose from 7.8% to 8.1%.

Instead, her government has plunged Québec back into the language wars, drawing ridiculous global headlines — a great example is the crackdown of the Office québécois de la langue française against a Montréal Italian restaurant’s use of the word ‘pasta’ and other Italian words on its menu and demanding the restaurant print their French equivalents more prominently. (Though we all know that apéritif or hors-d’œuvre is not the same thing as antipasto are not the same thing).

It comes after the Marois government has largely given up its year-long fight to pass Bill 14, which would amend Québec’s La charte de la langue française (Charter of the French Language, also known as ‘Bill 101’) by allowing the government to revoke a provincial municipality’s bilingual status if the anglophone population falls below 50%, requiring small businesses (of between 26 and 49 people) to use French as their everyday workplace language, and mandating that all businesses that serve the public use French with customers.

Marois switched gears from the language charter to a new religious charter when it became clear that her minority government would have a hard time pushing Bill 14 through, but also because a ban on religious symbols is relatively popular among the Québécois electorate. Continue reading The problem with Pauline Marois’s sovereignist minority government in Québec →

Syria, United States

In Depth: Syria

September 11, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

As the international crisis over the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war unfolds, find below all of Suffragio‘s coverage of the unfolding crisis in Syria:

How Obama’s speech on Syria succeeded and how it failed
September 10, 2013

Putin’s Syria deal shows how US threat of force (instead of use of force) can achieve success
September 10, 2013

French debate of Syria intervention highlights Sarkozy legacy on world affairs
September 5, 2013

Ten questions the United States Congress should be asking about Syria
September 4, 2013

Photo of the week: Obama administration preps for Syrian military action
September 3, 2013

The big news on Syria this weekend? Iran’s suprisingly mellow reactions to US military plans
September 1, 2013

How to distinguish Obama’s congressional vote on Syria from Libya
August 31, 2013

Cameron loses House of Commons vote on Syria military intervention
August 29, 2013

Did Syria’s Assad regime have a Dr. Strangelove moment?
August 29, 2013

On Syria, Obama administration prepared to shoot now, ask questions later
August 27, 2013

Kerry’s forceful remarks on Syria fail to explain why Assad’s to blame
August 26, 2013

U.S. says very little doubt Assad responsible for Syrian chemical warfare, preps possible intervention
August 25, 2013

Obama wisely treads softly in wake of Syrian chemical attack
August 23, 2013

U.S. move to support anti-Assad allies jeopardizes Lebanon’s stability
June 19, 2013

Lebanon remains tense after kidnappings, hopes to avoid Syrian chaos spillover
August 17, 2013

Germany

In Depth: Germany

September 11, 2013 Kevin Lees Leave a comment

<See below Suffragio’s preview of Germany’s September 2013 Bundestag elections, followed by a real-time listing of all coverage of German politics.>

Germany, the most populous European nation-state, will vote nationwide on September 22, selecting all of the members of the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament, which in turn elects the chancellor, Germany’s executive.

Since 2005, Germany’s chancellor has been Angela Merkel, and she widely leads the polls to return for another four-year term as chancellor, though it remains unclear whether her coalition partners will win enough seats to continue Merkel’s current center-right coalition.

Here’s a quick look at the parties:

Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party). Germany’s primary center-right party, the CDU is the party of Merkel and of former chancellor Helmut Kohl. Polls currently show that the CDU, together with the CSU, will win between 38% and 40% of the vote, making it almost certain that the CDU/CSU will together form the largest bloc in the Bundestag. Unlike the Republican Party in the United States or the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, however, the CDU is much less ideologically driven, a function of the relatively consensus-based approach that German’s political elites have taken to policymaking in the postwar era. Under Kohl’s 16-year reign, the CDU championed both the reunification of West and East Germany as well as the development of the European Union that we know today, including the single currency — and Kohl and the CDU had a strong hand in defining both events.

Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union). In Bavaria, Germany’s second-most populous state, the CSU governs instead of the CDU for reasons that date back to the pre-war period. The CSU is more socially conservative and more focused on the relatively more conservative (and Catholic) Bavaria in particular, and the CSU has controlled Bavarian state government continuously since 1947. The CSU unites with the CDU in federal politics, and while there are policy differences between the two parties from time to time, they essentially function as a single unit for federal purposes — most recently, Bavaria’s minister president Edmund Stoiber served as the CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor in 2002.

Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party). Think of the FDP today as the CDU’s more sharply ideological cousin. It’s more liberal (in the classical sense) on both counts — much more economically liberal and free-market oriented and more social liberal. So it’s much more enthusiastic about cutting taxes and reducing the role of government, but it’s also more progressive on social issues, such as marriage equality (which the FDP supports and the CDU/CSU does not). Guido Westerwelle, Germany’s first openly gay party leader, led the FDP to a record-high 14.6% support in the September 2009 elections, and the FDP thereupon joined the CDU/CSU in a ‘black-yellow’ governing coalition (black for the CDU, yellow for the FDP). But the FDP’s popularity quickly slid, in part due to Westerwelle’s mixed performance as foreign minister, and he resigned as party leader in 2011. His replacement, Philipp Rösler, is Germany’s first Vietnamese-born party leader, but the party is struggling in the polls with just around 5% support, making it unclear whether Merkel will be able to build a majority with just the CDU/CSU and the FDP.

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party). Germany’s primary center-left party, the SPD last led the country under moderate chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 1998 to 2005. If one of Merkel’s chief accomplishments has been the phaseout of Germany’s nuclear energy (typically a goal of Germany’s political left), Schröder’s primary accomplishments included a series of labour market reforms (‘Hartz IV’) that sharply reduced social benefits for long-term unemployed (typically a goal you would associate with the political right), demonstrating just how little ideology matters to German politics. After narrowly losing the September 2005 elections, the SPD agreed to join a ‘grand coalition’ with the CDU that successfully saw Germany through the worst of the 2008-09 global financial crisis. But in the ensuing September 2009 elections, voters seems to give all of the credit to Merkel and the CDU, not to the SPD, which won its lowest vote total in the postwar era (23%). The SPD, which supports the former finance minister Peer Steinbrück for chancellor, is now mired at between 25% and 27% in the polls. Like the CDU, the SPD is very favorable to the European Union and a strongly federal Europe.

Die Grünen (the Greens) formed in 1979 in order to purse the ‘new politics’ issues of ecological and environmental preservation, and they were long one of Germany’s leading anti-nuclear voices. They joined Schröder’s government in 1998 to form a ‘red-green coalition’ that governed the country through the next eight years, and popular Green party leader Joschka Fischer became foreign minister and a highly regarded voice on international affairs, both inside Germany and globally. Although the party still tilts to the left, there’s an increasing amount of market-based pragmatism among its younger, emerging leadership. It’s polling between 10% and 11% today, which should make it the third-largest party in the next Bundestag.

Die Linke (the Left) is a merger between two groups, the former East Germany-based Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a faction of leftist former SPD leaders who disapproved of Schröder’s moderate, reform-driven agenda in the early 2000s. The PDS emerged out of the ashes of the old communist Socialist Unity Party that dominated the Soviet-alligned German Democratic Republic (East Germany) until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the two Germanies in 1990. Today, although the party competes nationally, its chief support comes mainly in the six states that were once party of East Germany. Its agenda is far more ideologically rigid than that of either the SPD or the Greens, and the SPD has long refused to consider forming a governing coalition with the Left.

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) is a new political party founded in February 2013 as Germany’s first specifically euroscpetic party. Polls show that it could win up to 5% of the vote in the Sept. 22 elections, which would be an amazing feat for a country that’s long been among the most pro-European and pro-union within Europe.

Germany’s political system dates to the constitutional arrangement adopted by the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War II. Many elements of Germany’s Basic Law (Grundgesetz) are designed to avoid any return to the kind of Nazi extremism that dominated German politics between 1933 and 1945.

The Bundesrat, or the Federal Council, is the upper house of Germany’s parliament, but its members are unelected, instead chosen by each of the state governments. Therefore, all of the electoral action focuses on the Bundestag, which has to have at least 598 seats.

Germany has a dual electoral system — 299 members of the Bundestag are elected in single-member districts on a basic first-past-the-post standard (just like a member of the US House of Representatives or the British House of Commons). So voters will choose first a member within their electoral district — unlike in the United States, however, where incumbency is much ‘stickier’, many voters perceive this vote as a vote for the party they want to control the government (and indirectly, for chancellor) than a vote for a particular local legislator.

Another 299 members are elected pursuant to a proportional representation standard that asks voters to cast a second vote for a political party. The idea is that, notwithstanding the 299 members elected directly, party representation in the Bundestag should roughly correspond to popular voter support. So often, parties will win additional ‘overhang seats’ on the basis of the ‘party vote’ to bring their percentage of seats in the Bundestag roughly in line with their level of support on the ‘party vote.’ This often means that the Bundestag will have more than 598 members — it had 672 members between 1994 and 1998, for instance.

But the threshold for winning representation on the ‘party vote’ is 5% — that’s why the FDP and the AfD are trying furiously to win at least 5%, because the difference between 4.9% and 5.1% is the difference between winning around 1/20 of the seats in the Bundestag and winning none.

Find below all of Suffragio‘s previous coverage of German federal and state politics and the 2013 federal election campaign:

SPD party membership approves German grand coalition
December 14, 2013

Germany reaches coalition deal, faces SPD party vote
November 27, 2013

Merkel’s CDU-CSU, Gabriel’s SPD stumbling toward a not-so-grand coalition in Germany
November 20, 2013

Merkel’s coalition talks with Green Party leaders this week seem serious
October 11, 2013

That ‘transcending ideology’ thing from Obama 2008? Angela Merkel did it. Obama hasn’t.
September 25, 2013

German election results — federal Bundestag and Hesse state results (in five charts)
September 23, 2013

LIVE BLOG: Can Merkel win an absolute majority?
September 22, 2013

Germany (and Hesse) votes today!
September 22, 2013

Has the first Ossi chancellor been good or bad for the former East Germany?
September 20, 2013

Close state election in Hesse could tilt federal Bundesrat further left
September 19, 2013

Your weekend cocktail party glossary for the German election
September 19, 2013