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Poland

Give PiS a chance: why the EU has to play nice with Poland’s new populist government

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Polish politician Jarosław Kaczyński and German chancellor don't always see eye-to-eye on EU matters. (Bartosz Bobkowski / Agencja Gazeta)
Polish politician Jarosław Kaczyński and German chancellor don’t always see eye-to-eye on EU matters. (Bartosz Bobkowski / Agencja Gazeta)

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s governing party, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS, Law and Justice), is now as important figure in European politics as French president François Hollande. Poland_Flag_Icon

No one should be surprised that Kaczyński is now the de facto leader of Poland, and no one should have doubted that he would direct a PiS-led government to pursue its full-throated agenda of populist economic sops to Poland’s poorest easterners and socially conservative values, mixed with equal amounts of nativism, euroscepticism and paranoia.

But Poland’s fresh government is facing criticism at home and abroad that it is now dismantling many of the features of the country’s post-Cold War democracy. Notably, critics argue that the new PiS government is co-opting both Poland’s constitutional tribunal and its state-run media.

Andrzej Duda, Poland’s new president has refused to seat five judges appointed by the outgoing government to Poland’s constitutional tribunal. Though two of those judicial appointments were subsequently ruled invalid, the new PiS government pushed forward with five new appointments anyway, leaving three judges validly appointed and unconfirmed. Moreover, the new PiS government passed a law mandating a two-thirds majority (not a simple majority) for constitutional rulings. The new government has also asserted greater political power over the state-controlled media.

Barely three months into Poland’s new government, the European Commission is opening a formal inquiry against the PiS-led administration, headed by EC first vice president Frans Timmermans, to determine whether the new government’s actions amount to a ‘systemic risk’ to Poland’s rule of law, a standard that — so far — hasn’t been breached in Hungary or Romania.

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RELATED: Polish conservatives prepare to return to power after 8 years

RELATED: Poland election results: PiS sweeps to power

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Those concerns are legitimate, especially insofar as the new government is undermining judicial independence and press freedom, and some Europeans hopes that US president Barack Obama will even exert pressure, through the NATO alliance, on Poland’s new government. But the overwrought response from EU elites will only play into the hands of the PiS’s most eurosceptic leaders and, what’s more, Polish democracy is far too developed in the year 2016 to crumble as easily as many of Kaczyński’s critics fear.

Throughout the European Union, the Greek economic crisis and lingering problems with the eurozone have undermined the monetary pillar of EU integration, while the deluge of migrants from Syria, Iraq, Eritrea and elsewhere, in greater numbers than at any time since World War II, have eroded the Schengen zone and the principle of internal European borders. EU leaders have far greater problems than allowing Kaczyński and the PiS into goading them into confrontation, especially as British voters focus on a 2017 referendum that could result in the United Kingdom leaving the European Union.
Continue reading Give PiS a chance: why the EU has to play nice with Poland’s new populist government →

Hungary

Orbán designs to transform Hungary into ‘illiberal’ state

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It sounds like a headline from the European version of The Onion, but Viktor Orbán, just months out from winning a landslide reelection in April, has announced his intentions to turn Hungary into an ‘illiberal state,’ modeled after China or Russia:Hungary Flag Icon

The global financial crisis in 2008 showed that “liberal democratic states can’t remain globally competitive,” Orban said on July 26 at a retreat of ethnic Hungarian leaders in Baile Tusnad,Romania.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said, according to the video of his speech on the government’s website. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

It’s hard to know just how seriously to take Orbán’s latest comments.

If his first government, over a decade ago, was traditionally liberal conservative, Orbán’s most recent term was marked by more nationalist, illiberal and authoritarian tendencies. It’s not hard to believe that, with a two-thirds majority behind him, Orbán could turn fully away from liberal democracy and toward illiberal authoritarianism in his third term.

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RELATED: Hungarian election results : A historic win for Orbán

RELATED: Lessons from Hungary’s election —
and challenges for its future

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Other Hungarian commentators argue that Orbán’s emphasis was on the liberal market system and its failures during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. In that sense, Orbán may have been calling merely for a shift from a European social welfare state to a more state capitalist model. Though Orbán came to power as a liberal market proponent, his 2010-14 government engaged in healthy spending on public works programs,  nationalized Hungary’s private pensions system and introduced the highest VAT rate in the European Union (27%) in a bid to end Hungary’s  €20 billion post-crisis loan program with the International Monetary Fund. Nonetheless, even significant moves in that direction could spook global markets, send the Hungarian forint plummeting or dampen growth and investment.

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Orbán’s weekend speech came as he, like Russian president Vladimir Putin (pictured above, right, with Orbán), has called for restrictions on international NGOs throughout the country. Though Hungarians revolted in 1956 against Soviet rule and in favor of freedom and democracy in one of the most dramatic Iron Curtain revolutions of the Cold War, Hungarian relations with Russia today are arguably better than Hungary’s relations with leading EU member-states. Orbán, who burst onto Hungary’s political scene a quarter-century ago as an anti-communist activist, signed a $14 billion lending deal with Russia in January in pursuit of greater nuclear energy.

If Orbán goes through with plans to eliminate liberal democracy in Hungary, which has been a member of the European Union for a decade, it would cause an immediate crisis for the incoming European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.  Continue reading Orbán designs to transform Hungary into ‘illiberal’ state →

Belgium, Czech Republic, European Union, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, The Netherlands

A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2)

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 Across Europe on Monday, officials, voters and everyone else were trying to sort through the consequences of yesterday’s voting, across all 28 member-states, to elect the 751 members of the European Parliament.European_Union

Late Sunday, I began analyzing the results on a state-by-state basis — you can read my take here on what the European election results mean in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain.

This post picks up where that left off, however, with a look at some of the results in Europe’s mid-sized member-states.

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RELATED: A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 1)

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With the count now almost complete, here’s where the Europe-wide parties stand:

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The European People’s Party (EPP), which has been the largest group in the European Parliament since 1999, will continue to be the largest group, but with fewer seats (215) than after any election since 1994.

The second-largest group, the Party of European Socialists (PES) has 188 seats, a slight gain, but not the breakout performance for which it was hoping.

The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats of Europe (ALDE) will remain the third-largest group, notwithstanding the collapse of two of its constituent parties, the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom and the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party) in Germany.

The European Greens have won 53 seats, just two less than before the elections. The Party of the European Left, which had hoped to make strong gains on the strength of its anti-austerity message, gained nine seats to 44.

The Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a slightly eurosceptic group of conservative parties, including the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, holds steady at 46 seats — that’s a slight loss of around eight seats. The Movement for a Europe of Liberties and Democracy (MELD) gained six.

The real increase was among the ‘non-inscrits,’ the unaffiliated MEPs, which will rise from around 30 to 104. The bulk of those MEPs include the newly elected eurosceptics that have made such a big splash in the past 24 hours, including Marine Le Pen’s Front national (FN, National Front) in France.

But, in addition to being a pan-European contest with wide-ranging themes that resonate throughout the European Union, the elections are also 28 national contests, and they’ve already claimed resignations of two center-left leaders — Eamon Gilmore, of Ireland’s Labour Party, and Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).

Here’s a look at how the European elections are affecting nine more mid-sized counties across the European Union: Poland, Romania, The Netherlands, Belgium, Greece, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Hungary and Sweden.

Continue reading A detailed look at the European parliamentary election results (part 2) →

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A rogues’ gallery of the EU’s top 13 eurosceptic parties

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skepticismAs voters in 28 European countries prepare to head to the polls, beginning on May 22 and running through May 25, no one knows whether Europe’s center-left or center-right will win more seats, and no one knows who will ultimately become the next president of the European Commission.European_Union

But the one thing upon which almost everyone agrees is that Europe’s various eurosceptic parties are set for a huge victory — not enough seats to determine the outcomes of EU legislation and policymaker, perhaps, but enough to form a strong, if disunited, bloc of relatively anti-federalist voices. Voters, chiefly in the United Kingdom, France and Italy, are set to cast strong protest votes that could elect more than 100 eurosceptic MEPs.

In some countries, such as Spain, euroscepticism is still a limited force — the center-left opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) is tied for the lead with the governing center-right Partido Popular (the PP, or the People’s Party) of prime minister Mariano Rajoy. But Spain is quickly becoming an outlier as eurosceptic parties are springing up in places where unionist sentiment once ran strong.

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RELATED: In Depth: European parliamentary elections
RELATED: The European parliamentary elections are really four contests

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Of course, not all eurosceptics are created equally. Some anti-Europe parties have been around for decades, while others weren’t even in existence at the time of the last elections in 2009. Some are virulently xenophobic, far-right or even neo-Nazi in their outlooks, while others are cognizably on the more mainstream conservative / leftist ideological spectrum. Some seek nothing short of their country’s withdrawal from the European Union altogether, while others seek greater controls on immigration. Some are even pro-Europe in the abstract, but oppose eurozone membership. That’s one of the reasons why eurosceptics have had so much trouble uniting across national lines — the mildest eurosceptic parties abhor the xenophobes, for example.

If everyone acknowledges that eurosceptic parties will do well when the votes are all counted on Sunday, no one knows whether that represents a peak of anti-Europe support, given the still tepid economy and high unemployment across the eurozone, or whether it’s part of a trend that will continue to grow in 2019 and 2024.

With 100 seats or so in the European Parliament, eurosceptics can’t cause very many problems. They can make noise, and they stage protests, but they won’t hold up the EU parliamentary agenda. With 200 or even 250 seats, though, they could cause real damage. There’s no rule that says that eurosceptics can’t one day win the largest block of EP seats, especially so long as most European voters ignore Europe-wide elections or treat them as an opportunity to protest unpopular national government.

For now, though, they’re all bound to cause plenty of trouble for their more mainstream rivals at the national level, and in at least five countries, they could wind up with the largest share of the vote. So it’s still worth paying attention to them.

Without further ado, here are the top 13 eurosceptic parties to keep an eye on as the results are announced on Sunday:

Continue reading A rogues’ gallery of the EU’s top 13 eurosceptic parties →

Hungary

Lessons from Hungary’s election — and challenges for its future

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Guest post by Dániel Kiss

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Last Sunday Hungary had a paradoxical election. Politicians and commentators had forecast that this vote would set the future direction of the country. It would determine whether prime minister Viktor Orbán and his nationalistic party Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance), would be able to strengthen their hold on power, or the leftist opposition would run Hungary according to more mainstream ideals of capitalism and liberal democracy. In fact the election turned out to be something of a flop, with only 61.2% of the electorate casting their vote. Only one parliamentary election in the country saw a lower rate of participation since democracy was restored in 1989.Hungary Flag Icon

The results too were paradoxical. Opinion polls had forecast a major victory for Fidesz. Some commentators had chosen to disbelieve them, as they thought that a significant number of voters would not feel free to say that they would be voting against a party that is known to have punished its opponents. In fact the polls turned out to be correct, and Fidesz won by a broad margin. It is not yet clear exactly how many seats they will win, as some votes (including those of Hungarians living abroad) still have to be counted four days after the election. However, it is likely that they will take 133 of the 199 seats in parliament, or just over two-thirds of the total. That means that they will hold on not only to power, but also to their supermajority of two-thirds of the seats. This supermajority has enabled them to change every law of the country since 2010, and to enact a new constitution that came into power in 2012. The left-wing opposition have not only failed to bring down Orbán’s government, which had been their aim at the election, but they have barely dented his majority in parliament. Orbán celebrated what he called “a victory that shook the sky”.

In fact the results are less favourable for him than they might appear, and they hold risks for all parties concerned. In the previous parliamentary elections of 2010, Fidesz won 52.7% of the national vote. This time the party only won 44.3%, according to the most recent figures, despite the strong support of ethnic Hungarians living abroad, who were enfranchised by Fidesz in 2011. The left-wing opposition coalition, consisting of the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP, Hungarian Socialist Party) and four recently founded small parties, won 26.2%, which is significantly better than the 19.3% won by the Socialists in 2010. The other large force opposing Fidesz, the far-right-wing Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik), also increased its share of the national vote from 16.7% to 20.7%, while the green liberal party Lehet Más a Politika (LMP, ‘Politics Can Be Different’)  saw its share fall from 7.5% to 5.3%, which is just above the threshold of 5% that is required to send deputies into parliament from the national list. Still, this is not a bad result, given that LMP split in 2013 and a number of its deputies founded one of the parties that has allied itself with the socialists.

The success of Fidesz can partly be explained by the continuing appeal to voters of its combination of nationalistic rhetoric with anti-market, statist policies. The party also managed to outmaneuver the Socialists in the run-up to the elections. The Fidesz government forced utility companies to lower their tariffs to private consumers twice by 10%, which met with considerable approval in a country where many people struggle to make ends meet. Continue reading Lessons from Hungary’s election — and challenges for its future →

Hungary

Hungarian election results: historic win for Orbán

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fidesz

With almost all ballots counted, Viktor Orbán has not only won reelection as Hungary’s prime minister, he will also command the same two-thirds supermajority as his party, Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance), has held for the past four years.  Hungary Flag Icon

But the other winner in Sunday’s election is the nationalist, far-right Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik), which improved on its 2010 performance to win nearly 21% of the vote.

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RELATED: How Hungary’s Viktor Orbán got his groove back

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With just over two-fifths of the vote, Fidesz will win over two-thirds of the seats in Hungary’s Országgyűlés (National Assembly), which Orbán reduced in number from 386 to 199 for this year’s election. That will continue its power to determine Hungarian policy, virtually without opposition — in the past four years, Orbán has used a similar supermajority to rewrite the Hungarian constitution, diminish the power of the constitutional court, and revise an election law that maximized his party’s gains in Sunday’s election.

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Though Lehet Más a Politika (LMP, Politics Can Be Different), a liberal green/left party, seems likely to to make it into the National Assembly (just barely!), the election results leave Orbán with almost nearly the same supermajority that he had in 2010 and, in fact, Orbán is the first prime minister to win reelection in Hungary since 1990.

The center-left opposition, Osszefogas (‘Unity’), hardly won a quarter of the vote, and it barely overtook the surging, xenophobic, euroskeptic Jobbik. That’s despite a late-January attempt of the center-left and centrist opposition  to unite behind Attila Mesterházy, the leader of the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP, Hungarian Socialist Party).

It’s the worst of both worlds for European policymakers who hoped that the 2014 Hungarian elections might curb Orbán’s power — not only has Jobbik made real gains (thereby making itself almost as strong as the center-left opposition just two months before European parliamentary elections), but Orbán and Fidesz will hold an impregnable supermajority for the next four years to continue consolidating power, eliminating checks and balances and, potentially, reducing faith in the rule of law and Hungary’s democratic institutions.

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Spring 2014 voting blitz: five days, six elections

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We’re beginning to hit the peak of what’s perhaps the busiest world election season of the past few years.

What began as a slow year with boycotted votes in Bangladesh and Thailand in the first two months of 2014 snowballed into a busier March, with important parliamentary elections in Colombia, the final presidential vote in El Salvador, parliamentary elections in Serbia, a key presidential election in Slovakia, and municipal elections that upended national politics in France, The Netherlands and Turkey.

But the pace only gets more frenetic from here.

Between today and Wednesday, five countries (and one very important province) on three continents will go to to the polls: Continue reading Spring 2014 voting blitz: five days, six elections →

Hungary

How Hungary’s Viktor Orbán got his groove back

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Despite a united opposition front, prime minister Viktor Orbán is headed to a crushing victory in Hungary’s April 6 parliamentary elections this weekend, consolidating his hold on power in the emerging central European country of 10 million.Hungary Flag Icon

Orbán’s victory looks so assured that it’s hard to believe anyone ever thought that his chances for 2014 reelection would be much tougher.

Only a year ago, Orbán appeared to have a much more troubled path to victory.

For example, an Ipsos poll from January 2013 shows that the three largest of the five parties that comprise the opposition, Osszefogas (‘Unity’), would win a combined 43% of the vote, compared to just 41% for Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance). The largest opposition party, the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP, Hungarian Socialist Party) won 32% of the vote.

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RELATED: Hungarian left unites, but will it be enough to stop Orbán?

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But the most recent March 31 Századvég poll gives Fidesz 51% of the vote, with just 25% for Unity. The far-right, anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalist Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik), which has surged over the past six months, would win 18%, and there’s a chance that it could actually win more seats on Sunday than the center-left Unity.

In early 2013, despite an uphill challenge under new election rules, designed to benefit Fidesz, the opposition had a strong case against Orbán, who has isolated Hungary from the rest of the European Union, increasingly chipped away at democratic checks and balances and the rule of law, and nearly torpedoed an already struggling economy with tax increases, further budget cuts, and a haphazard nationalization of Hungry’s private pension system.

What happened? Continue reading How Hungary’s Viktor Orbán got his groove back →

Hungary

Hungarian left unites, but will it be enough to stop Orbán?

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mesterházy

As Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán hopes to consolidate his hold on Hungarian government in the country’s April 6 elections, the Hungarian center/left is uniting in a broad anti-Orbán coalition.Hungary Flag Icon

Under the banner of Osszefogas (‘Unity’), five of Hungary’s center-left parties will band together behind the prime ministerial candidacy of Attila Mesterházy (pictured above, center), the leader of Hungary’s largest opposition party, the Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSzP, Hungarian Socialist Party).

The coalition brings together four relatively new groups:

  • Együtt 2014 (E14, Together 2014) is a new social democratic party founded in October 2012 by former prime minister Gordon Bajnai, a Socialist who governed Hungary s somewhat of a technocratic caretaker between April 2009 and May 2010, when which Orbán came to power with a supermajority.  Bajnai’s government tried to steer a course through crippling budget austerity and an economy that hit its nadir with a 6.8% contraction in 2009.  From the outset, Bajnai (pictured above, far left) has advocated a united anti-Orbán front for the 2014 elections.
  • Párbeszéd Magyarországért (PM, Dialogue for Hungary) is a green liberal party founded in February 2013 as a breakway faction of Lehet Más a Politika (LMP, Politics Can Be Different), another green party founded in 2009.  PM’s leaders are Timea Szabó and Benedek Jávor, the latter an environmental lawyer and botanist.  The party has, since March 2013, been allied with E14 in advance of this year’s elections.
  • Demokratikus Koalíció (DK, Democratic Coalition) is the party of Ferenc Gyurcsány, prime minister between 2004 and 2009, and it was founded in October 2011 when Gyurcsány (pictured above, center, behind Mesterházy) left the Socialists, taking with him 10 of the Socialists’ 59 seats in the National Assembly.  Gyurcsány’s decision to unite under Mesterházy is particularly helpful for the anti-Orbán opposition because Gyurcsány remains more well-known than Mesterházy.  Even though Mesterházy led the (disastrous) 2010 electoral effort, Gyurcsány has more governing experience and political canny.  Gyurcsány, who came to power at a time when Hungary’s budget deficit was spiraling out of control (even in pre-crisis days), resigned in 2009 after introducing ever harsher budget reforms in line with a 2008 financing agreement with the International Monetary Fund.  Gyurcsány’s budget reforms, and his attempt to modernize the Hungarian health-care system, alienated him from his own party. 
  • The Magyar Liberális Párt (Hungarian Liberal Party) was founded in April 2013 as a pro-European, liberal party by Gábor Fodor, a former education minister in the mid-1990s and an environmental minister in 2007-08.  Fodor (pictured above, far right) was the the final leader of the Alliance of Free Democrats/Liberal Party, a predecessor to the current party that divided in 2008, when the liberal coalition lost the last of its 20 seats in the National Assembly.

Though the green LMP hasn’t joined the coalition, the five-party front is demonstrating about as much unity as you could expect — and much more than the alternative, much feared a month ago, that Orbán would take advantage of the disunity to win an outsized supermajority in the National Assembly. 

In the current 386-member National Assembly, Orbán’s ruling conservative party, Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance) controls 226 seats.  Together with its ally, Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt (KdNp, Christian Democratic People’s Party), which today has become more a satellite of Fidesz than a truly independent party, Orbán controls 263 seats.  That’s a supermajority of just over two-thirds, and that’s permitted Orbán to introduce constitutional reforms and other laws that have strengthened his hold on power and undermined Hungary’s democratic institutions.

The Socialists control just 48 seats, and the far-right nationalist Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik) controls 43 seats.

Under new electoral rules, the National Assembly will be reduced from 386 seats to just 199 seats.  Unlike the prior system, where just over half of the seats were determined by proportional representation, the new system tilts slightly more toward plurality districts — 106 seats will be determined in single-member districts by first-past-the-post voting.  Another 93 seats will be determined by party-list proportional representation (with a 5% threshold for parties and a 10% threshold for coalitions).  In an election with five center-left parties competing against each other as much as against Orbán, Fidesz remained the overwhelming favorite to with the 106 plurality seats.  So the unification of the center-left opposition makes a nearly impossible race merely a tough race.

A January 15 IPSOS poll shows Fidesz with around 48% of the vote, the Hungarian Socialists with 27%, Jobbik with 11% (far below the troublingly high 17% it won in the April 2010 elections) and other parties in single digits.  But when you add the new Unity coalition totals together, Fidesz leads by a more narrow margin of 48% to 37% (DK and E14 each win 5% of the vote.

If the election were held tomorrow, Fidesz would still win, but the Unity coalition might together win seats that would otherwise fall to Fidesz.  In other words, Mesterházy and the united opposition would turn a landslide defeat into a robust defeat.

But is there a way to actually win the election against Orbán? Or does Fidesz have a lock on April’s elections?  Continue reading Hungarian left unites, but will it be enough to stop Orbán? →

14 in 14, Hungary

14 in 2014: Hungary parliamentary elections

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5. Hungary parliamentary election, expected in April.Hungary Flag Icon

April’s elections will be the first to take place under the rules of the new laws and the new constitution enacted in 2012 by prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose conservative Fidesz – Magyar Polgári Szövetség (Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance) came to power in 2010 with a supermajority in Hungary’s Országgyűlés (National Assembly).

Orbán (pictured above) is easily the most controversial head of government in the European Union, and he’s been criticized for a governing style that’s taken populist turns and authoritarian twists over the past four years, even aside from the controversial constitutional reforms that are likely to give Orbán and Fidesz an advantage in the upcoming elections.

The number of seats in the National Assembly will shrink from 386 to just 199 — 106 seats will be determined on a first-past-the-post basis in single-member constituencies, while 93 will be determined on the basis of party lists (with a 5% threshold).  That’s a slight change from the previous system when around 54% of the seats were determined by party lists; under the new system, about 53% of the seats are determined on the basis of constituencies.  Moreover, the previous two-round election system has been replaced with a one-round system that no longer features a minimum turnout requirement.

That’s all likely to boost Fidesz, which holds a wide lead against a fragmented, withered opposition.  Polls show Fidesz with a nearly two-to-one lead against the nearest opponent, and the electoral law changes could easily amplify Orbán’s majority.  The Magyar Szocialista Párt (MSZP, Hungarian Socialist Party), which became massively unpopular under former prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, attracts just around 20% of voters in polls.  Gyurcsány split from his party in 2011 to form the Demokratikus Koalíció (DK, Democratic Coalition), and opposition unity talks have so far failed.  Meanwhile, the far-right nationalist Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom (Jobbik) will be looking to maintain its stunning level of support from 2010, when it won nearly 17% of the vote.

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What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics

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Iceland was supposed to be different.Iceland Flag IconEuropean_Union

In allowing its banks to fail, neo-Keynesian economists have argued, Iceland avoided the fate of Ireland, which nationalized its banks and now faces a future with a very large public debt.  By devaluing its currency, the krónur, Iceland avoided the fate of countries like Estonia and others in southern Europe trapped in the eurozone and a one-size-fits all monetary policy, allowing for a rapid return to economic growth and rapidly falling unemployment.  Neoclassical economists counter that Iceland’s currency controls mean that it’s still essentially shut out from foreign investment, and the accompanying inflation has eroded many of the gains of Iceland’s return to GDP growth and, besides, Iceland’s households are still struggling under mortgage and other debt instruments that are linked to inflation or denominated in foreign currencies.

But Iceland’s weekend parliamentary election shows that both schools of economic thought are right.

Elections are rarely won on the slogan, ‘it could have been worse.’ Just ask U.S. president Barack Obama, whose efforts to implement $800 billion in stimulus programs in his first term in office went barely mentioned in his 2012 reelection campaign.

Iceland, as it turns out, is hardly so different at all — and it’s now virtually a case study in an electoral pattern that’s become increasingly pronounced in Europe that began when the 2008 global financial crisis took hold, through the 2010 sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone and through the current European-wide recession that’s seen unemployment rise to the sharpest levels in decades.

Call it the European three-step.

In the first step, a center-right government, like the one led by Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Independence Party) in Iceland in 2008, took the blame for the initial crisis.

In the second step, a center-left government, like the one led by Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and the Samfylkingin (Social Democratic Alliance) in Iceland, replaced it, only to find that it would be forced to implement harsh austerity measures, including budget cuts, tax increases and, in Iceland’s case, even more extreme measures, such as currency controls and inflation-inducing devaluations.  That leads to further voter disenchantment, now with the center-left.

The third step is the return of the initial center-right party (or parties) to power, as the Independence Party and their traditional allies, the Framsóknarflokkurinn (Progressive Party) will do following Iceland’s latest election, at the expense of the more newly discredited center-left.  In addition, with both the mainstream center-left and center-right now associated with economic pain, there’s increasing support for new parties, some of them merely protest vehicles and others sometimes more radical, on both the left and the right.  In Iceland, that means that two new parties, Björt framtíð (Bright Future) and the Píratar (Pirate Party of Iceland) will now hold one-seventh of the seats in Iceland’s Alþingi.

This is essentially what happened last year in Greece, too.  Greece Flag IconIn the first step, Kostas Karamanlis and the center-right New Democracy (Νέα Δημοκρατία) initially took the blame for the initial financial crisis.  In the second step, George Papandreou and the center-left PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement – Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα) overwhelming won the October 2009 elections, only to find itself forced to accept a bailout deal with the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.  In the third step, after two grueling rounds of election, Antonis Samaras and New Democracy returned to power in June 2012.

By that time, however, PASOK was so compromised that it was essentially forced into a minor subsidiary role supporting Samaras’s center-right, pro-bailout government.  A more radical leftist force, SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς), led by the young, charismatic Alexis Tsipras, now vies for the lead routinely in polls, and on the far right, the noxious neo-nazi Golden Dawn (Χρυσή Αυγή) now attracts a small, but significant enough portion of the Greek electorate to put it in third place.

The process seems well under way in other countries, too.  In France, for examFrance Flag Iconple, center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy lost reelection in May 2012 amid great hopes for the incoming Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party) administration of François Hollande, but his popularity is sinking to ever lower levels as France trudges through its own austerity, and polls show Sarkozy would now lead Hollande if another presidential election were held today.

It’s not just right-left-right, though. The European three-step comes in a different flavor, too: left-right-left, and you can spot the trend in country after country across Europe — richer and poorer, western and eastern, northern and southern. Continue reading What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics →

Hungary

Orbán feisty in first U.S. interview

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Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is taking a feisty tone in his first interview with a U.S. journalist.

In a remarkably sassy back-and-forth with Lally Weymouth, Orbán makes no apologies for his party Fidesz or his conduct since Fidesz has taken power in Hungary.  Fidesz holds 263 of the 286 seats in the Hungarian parliament after a landslide win in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

For example, here’s Orbán on revising the Hungarian constitution last year:

Since your party, Fidesz, won a two-thirds majority, you have basically obliterated all checks and balances. Do you agree?
No. The constitution is based on checks and balances. That is a very unfair domestic opinion.

Your critics say you rushed the constitution through without consulting the opposition.
That is factually false. There was a commission created by the parliament. It invited all the parties represented in the parliament——even the opposition—to be part of that process.

Isn’t it fair to say the outcome of the legislation has been to concentrate all power in your hands?
The constitution by itself does not make it possible to concentrate any kind of power.

Here he is on freedom of the press:

Why did you decide there should be a board to control the media? You appoint the head of the media board, and parliament appoints every member of the board. And members stay in power for nine years and cannot be replaced unless there is a two-thirds vote in the parliament.
Everybody agreed that the previous media regulation system collapsed. It was the responsibility for the new parliament to create a system that works. Until the last election, international observers like you admired the Hungarian system because two-thirds majority means consensus. Now that we have a two-thirds majority, it is an accusation….

But is the government acting in an even-handed fashion toward those in the print media that oppose the government? The government gives out advertising to the print media.
The government owns some companies—like an electric company or an oil company—and they run advertising. Try to imagine Hungary as at least as democratic a country as the United States.

More, on the Jacksonian attempts to circumvent the central bank:

You have given [central bank] Gov. Andras Simor a really hard time. He seems like a distinguished civil servant. What’s wrong with him?
“Distinguished” depends on your taste, but he is a good servant. He stays. Nobody would like to push him out. It’s impossible.It sends quite a signal when you cut someone’s salary by 75 percent.
Hungary is a poor country. We decided that regardless what kind of office you have if you are a public servant, you have a salary cap for everybody of 2 million forints, which is 6,000 euro [about $7,800] per month.

There’s much, much more — about gay rights, about abortion, about the perceived crackdown on religion, about other examples of executive overreach, none of which will provide much comfort to onlookers among Hungary’s peers in the European Union and in the United States, already troubled at Hungary’s backsliding from liberal democracy.