Tag Archives: socialist party

Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections

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No matter who wins tomorrow’s presidential election in Chile — and by what margin — we will know much more about the nature of the Chilean government over the next four years from the result of the other elections that will be held.chile

Those are the parliamentary elections, in which Chileans will elect all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

The inability of current president Sebastián Piñera to win absolute majorities in the Chilean parliament in the previous December 2009 elections constrained his legislative ability over the past four years to enact the kind of market liberalization or other reforms that Piñera might otherwise have pursued.

Likewise, though former president Michelle Bachelet is the overwhelming favorite to return to La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, the extent to which her administration will be able to enact campaign promises depends in large part on her ability to win a parliamentary majority for the broad left coalition that she leads, Nueva Mayoria (New Majority), which is essentially a rebranding of the broad center-left coalition of Chilean parties, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy) — with the recent addition of the Partido Comunista (Community Party) and a couple of other minor parties.

Though it seems likely that Bachelet’s coalition will win a majority in both houses, no one knows how large their margin will be — and, of course, with the widening of the previous Concertación to include the Communists and other far-left groups, maintaining unity within Bachelet’s coalition will be even harder in the years ahead.  That’s especially true in light of the lofty platform that Bachelet has outlined during her campaign —  Bachelet hopes to achieve major tax reform (an increase in the corporate tax rate from 20% to 25% and a cut in the maximum income tax rate from 40% to 35%), education reform (free access to university within the next six years) and, most ambitiously, a new Chilean constitution.  Constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority in both houses, an outcome that’s extremely unlikely, and even large-scale reforms, such as the kind Bachelet hopes to enact for Chilean education, require a four-sevenths majority.

That, in turn, is due to Chile’s electoral system, which is designed to avoid large majorities in either direction.  In respect of the Chamber of Deputies, Chileans vote in 60 constituencies that elect two members each — Chile’s unique binomial system that Pinochet’s advisers stitched into Chile’s current constitution before ceding power to civilian leadership in 1989.  While each coalition can run two candidate in each district, the typical result is that each major coalition each wins one seat in each constituency — one coalition will only be awarded both seats if it defeats the second coalition by a two-to-one margin.  A similar system exists for the Senate — Chileans elect two senators in each of 19 senatorial districts.

Moreover, Bachelet faces a new challenge from the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party of Chile), the party created two years ago by Marco  Enríquez-Ominami, who won about 20% as an independent candidate in the previous 2009 presidential election and who is running again in this weekend’s presidential election.  Although no one predicts that the Progressive Party is likely to steal many seats in the parliamentary vote, even one or two seats in each chamber could significantly alter Bachelet’s ability to govern.  Continue reading Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections

Latest Bettencourt turn removes obstacle for Sarkozy presidential bid in 2017

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You thought you were tired of all of the talk in the United States about the inevitability of a presidential run by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton in November 2016.France Flag Icon

But imagine if your next presidential election isn’t until May 2017 and everyone is already speculating.

That’s the case in France, where former president Nicolas Sarkozy is now even more likely to become the frontrunner for the 2017 race for the Élysée Palace after French officials dropped a criminal case against Sarkozy in the so-called Bettencourt affair.

Sarkozy was accused of soliciting L’Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt for secret campaign funds.  The fundamentals of the scandal are similar to those for which former US senator and presidential candidate John Edwards stood criminal trial for soliciting secret campaign cash from banking heiress Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon, who was 96 years old at the time.

French judges are still pursuing an investigation over whether party officials in Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, Union for a Popular Movement) took advantage of Bettencourt’s mental frailty and advanced age in taking campaign donations for Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign — in particular, former UMP treasurer Eric Woerth still faces criminal liability.  But after Monday’s decision not to include Sarkozy’s name in the list of those who face liability, the former president has escaped the worst of his potential legal and political troubles for the foreseeable future.

That means that the single-most difficult obstacle between Sarkozy and a 2017 presidential bid is gone.  Though he’s no longer mis en examen (placed under investigation) Sarkozy’s legal troubles haven’t totally evaporated, and he remains under a cloud of suspicion for a handful of other shenanigans, including allegations that Libya’s regime paid €50 million to Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign.  But the Bettencourt affair was always the most serious case against Sarkozy.

As with the Clinton 2016 speculation in the United States, it’s folly to think that we can forecast with accuracy the dynamics of an election that’s years away.  But it’s stunning in some ways that Sarkozy, who lost the May 2012 presidential runoff to François Hollande, the candidate of the Parti socialiste (PS, Socialist Party), remains such a strong challenger for 2017 just 17 months after leaving office.

Moreover, the specter of a Sarkozy return is affect French politics today (and not just 2017) by shaping the way that other top UMP officials posture and by placing pressure on the current, vastly unpopular Hollande regime — the possibility of a Sarkozy comeback also exerts a gravitational pull on the far right of French politics, too.

Only 23% of the French electorate has confidence in Hollande, according to an October TRS-SOFRES poll — Hollande has watched his popularity erode in record time to become the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic:

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France’s GDP growth dropped from 2% in 2011 to exactly 0% in 2012, unemployment has risen to 10.9%, and the economy’s doing not much better in 2013.  Hollande was damaged almost from the beginning of his presidency over a nasty spat between his former partner, 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal and his current partner Valérie Trierweiler.  His bold effort to introduce a top income tax rate of 75% (of incomes over €1 million) invited capital flight and global ridicule — and a rejection by France’s top constitutional court.

His woes are so great that I wondered back in May whether the French left (and France, generally) might have been better off if Dominique Strauss-Kahn had survived his sex scandal to run for president.

Most immediately, of course, all of the ‘Sarko 2017’ talk serves to prevent the emergence of a truly post-Sarkozy center-right standard-bearer.  Recall last November’s internal UMP primary to determine a new general secretary — right-wing candidate Jean-François Copé’s 50.03% was so narrow (and so challenged) by his opponent, the more moderate former prime minister François Fillon that the result threatened a UMP civil war.

Though the tensions subsided into more of a cold war than a civil war, there was always a sense that Copé was a stalking horse for a potential Sarkozy comeback — by defeating Fillon, Copé’s narrow win prevented Fillon from becoming the undisputed leader of the French right.

What was a Copé-Fillon showdown in 2012 has now transformed into a more open Sarkozy-Fillon showdown, with Fillon billing himself as the clean-break candidate for 2017, though Sarkozy himself has yet to decide whether to make a comeback bid for the presidency and is unlikely to join the political fray against either Fillon or Hollande anytime soon.  An IFOP poll earlier this year showed that six out of 10 French voters preferred that neither Sarkozy nor Fillon run in 2017, though Fillon generally held higher approval ratings as prime minister than Sarkozy did as president, and there’s reason to believe he would have made a better candidate for the UMP in 2012 than Sarkozy.

Meanwhile, no consideration of the UMP’s machinations would be complete without considering the far-right Front national (FN, National Front) that, if anything, is gaining more strength than either the UMP or the Socialists.  The far right notched a huge victory in a by-election in the southern canton of Brignoles on October 7, when the Front national candidate Laurent Lopez won 40.4% of the vote and will face a runoff against the UMP’s candidate Catherine Delzers, who won 20.8% (another far-right party, the Parti de France, won just over 9%.)

Despite Sarkozy’s lurch to the right on immigration and crime throughout his career, it didn’t stop Front national leader Marine Le Pen from winning 17.9% of the vote in the first round of the April 2012 presidential election.  Among the factors that could push the UMP away from Fillon and toward a leader like Sarkozy or Copé in 2017 is the fear that a relatively moderate standard-bearer like Fillon would allow Le Pen to siphon even more support from the center-right.

French debate on Syria intervention highlights Sarkozy legacy on world affairs

Jean Marc Ayrault

What a difference a decade makes.

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Ten years after French president Jacques Chirac and France’s UN ambassador Dominique de Villepin made an impassioned stand in the United Nations against the US-led invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq over the issue of weapons of mass destruction, France finds itself as the chief European ally in US president Barack Obama’s push to punish the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad for the alleged use of chemical weapons in Damascus late last month.

In a parliamentary debate in Paris yesterday, French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault (pictured above) made a strong case for intervention for the purpose of demonstrating the international community’s credibility in deterring the use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the future.  Center-right legislators in the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP, Union for a Popular Movement), including the UMP’s parliamentary leader Christian Jacob, argued just as forcefully that French participation in a US-led strike against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad — without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council — over the use of chemical weapons would isolate France’s role in the international community.

Although Chirac and the UMP also opposed unilateral intervention in Iraq in 2002 and 2003, it’s ironic that the UMP has suddenly found itself as the voice of opposition to Hollande because no one is more responsible for the transformation of France’s newfound assertiveness in world affairs than former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who succeeded Chirac in 2007, who struck a consistently muscular posture on foreign affairs.  Sarkozy, always keen to rejuvenate Franco-American relations, took a starring role alongside Cameron in the UN-backed NATO campaign to enforce a no-fly zone against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and support anti-Gaddafi rebels in Tripoli and Benghazi.

Had he won reelection in May 2012, Sarkozy would likely be just as enthusiastic as Hollande to support Syrian intervention — probably more so given the opportunity to supplant the United Kingdom as Obama’s chief partner.  Some former Sarkozy officials, notably former foreign minister Alain Juppé, support France’s forward role in Syria.

But Sarkozy, who may run again for president in 2017, has been uncharacteristically quiet on France’s role in any military action against Syria.

Silence or not, it’s the UMP’s Sarkozy who put France on the path to a more aggressive foreign policy, in part by returning France to NATO’s military command after a 40-year absence.  Since the start of Syria’s civil war two years ago, both Sarkozy and Hollande have called for Assad’s removal, and Sarkozy helped lifted the EU arms embargo on Syria to allow weapons to the anti-Assad opposition.

Hollande, who marked a rupture from Sarkozy in presidential style, social policy and economic policy, has largely followed Sarkozy’s path on foreign affairs.  Hollande ordered French troops into northern Mali earlier this year (like Libya, an action also approved by the Security Council) to reclaim territory that had been occupied by radical Islamists.  Though it was a limited intervention, taken with a light touch by a country long accused of pursuing a neo-colonial Françafrique policy since the 1960s, Hollande’s action looks for now to have been very successful in stabilizing Mali — Mali’s newly elected president Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was sworn in yesterday.   Continue reading French debate on Syria intervention highlights Sarkozy legacy on world affairs

Portugal is set for a center-right government

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Twenty-two days later, Portugal is set to return to its center-right government, capping a month of twists and turns in a political crisis that began with the resignation of Portugal’s finance minister Vítor Gaspar and, then, the resignation of foreign minister Paulo Portas over the austerity program that Gaspar had been in charge of implementing as a condition of Portugal’s €78 billion bailout. portugal flag

Portugal’s prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho (pictured above) reached a deal over a week ago to continue the center-right government led by prime minister and his Partido Social Democrata (PSD, Social Democratic Party) in coalition with the more socially conservative party Portas leads, the Centro Democrático e Social – Partido Popular (CDS-PP, Democratic and Social Center — People’s Party), soothing the mercurial Portas by appointing him deputy prime minister and giving him additional input over future bailout discussions and the course of Portuguese economic policy.

But Portugal’s president Aníbal Cavaco Silva, formerly a PSD prime minister from 1985 to 1995, and himself often the subject of Portas’s barbed criticism, refused to approve the deal, instead asking the two parties to bring the opposition center-left Partido Socialista (PS, Socialist Party) into government for a ‘grand coalition’ that would govern through June 2014, the end of the current bailout program.

Read more background here.

Despite talks over the past week, the three parties have failed to come to an agreement, and Cavaco Silva will now approve the government, a move that’s already pushing down Portugal’s 10-year bond yield:

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Obviously, the Socialists would never join a government when they lead polls by nearly 10 points, despite the fact that it was the decision by Socialist prime minister José Sócrates to seek a bailout that led to snap elections in June 2011 that brought Passos Coehlo and Gaspar to power.

The challenge for Passos Coehlo is now three-fold: Continue reading Portugal is set for a center-right government

Coalition crisis brings Portugal back to center-stage in eurozone bailouts saga

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Until today, Portgual’s beleaguered government looked like it would avoid crisis — just barely.portugal flag

But the decision by Portugal’s president to seek a broad unity government to carry out the terms of Portugal’s bailout program has cast doubt again on whether the center-right government led by Pedro Passos Coelho will be able to serve through the end of its natural term of government in 2015 or at least long enough to see through the termination of the €78 billion bailout program in June 2014.

Despite a deal last week that saw Passos Coelho’s more conservative coalition partners agree to return to government, Portuguese president Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who served as prime minister of Portugal from 1985 to 1995, is now pushing for a broader coalition in light of risks that the government might falter again.  Cavaco Silva’s top priority is that Portugal has a reliably strong government to see through the bailout program next year and to avoid snap elections now in favor of early elections sometime next June.

But that appears to have backfired, and it remains unclear just what will happen next in Portugal’s governing crisis — Cavaco Silva’s ploy may have made early elections even likelier, which are certain to become a referendum on further austerity measures in accordance with Portugal’s bailout.  The political crisis comes at a time when Lisbon was set to host International Monetary Fund and European Union officials next Monday for a review of the bailout program and amid reports that Portugal will require a second bailout when the current one runs out next year.

Portugal’s most recent crisis began when finance minister Vítor Gaspar resigned on July 1 after rising complaints over the implementation of the bailout program.  Gaspar, a technocratic economist first appointed after the June 2011 elections that swept Passos Coelho and his center-right Partido Social Democrata (PSD, Social Democratic Party) into power.  He had become the poster child for austerity and widely reviled as Passos Coelho’s party has fallen up to 10 points behind the main center-left opposition, the Partido Socialista (PS, Socialist Party) in polls.

Passos Coelho immediately appointed treasury secretary Maria Luís de Albuquerque as Gaspar’s replacement, but the following day, his foreign minister Paulo Portas resigned.  Portas, also the leader of his more socially conservative coalition partner, the Centro Democrático e Social – Partido Popular (CDS-PP, Democratic and Social Center — People’s Party), indicated that he would pull his party’s support from the coalition in opposition to the new finance minister’s appointment, arguing that it marked a continuity of policy with which Portas and his party now disagreed.

Nonetheless, a weekend deal between Passos Coelho and Portas appeared to have healed the rift — Portas would become deputy prime minister and take a larger role in steering the country’s finances, though de Albuquerque would remain as the new finance minister.  Though the deal required Cavaco Silva’s approval, it seemed likely to win it this week, given that Cavaco Silva (pictured above) had been crucial in bringing Passos Coelho and Portas back together.

Instead, Cavaco Silva’s call for a unity government to include the Socialist Party as well has renewed the Portuguese political crisis, given that the Socialists and their new leader, António José Segurocontinue to push for early elections rather than join a unity government.

Though Portuguese 10-year bond yields have fallen from a recent July 3 high of 7.47%, they edged up to a still-worrying 6.77% today after Cavaco Silva’s gambit.

While Cavaco Silva may have failed, his logic isn’t unreasonable.  Cavaco Silva’s goal was to steer Portugal between what he viewed as two poor alternatives — one in which he’ll have to trust  Portas and the conservative Christian Democrats to see through the bailout program, and another in which Portugal faces snap elections that could result in a hung parliament (or worse, if the two major leftist blocs outperform already robust expectations).

Continue reading Coalition crisis brings Portugal back to center-stage in eurozone bailouts saga

Bachelet enters Chilean presidential race as top contender

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Michelle Bachelet returned to Chile on Wednesday, wasting no time in declaring her much-awaited candidacy for president, with an air of inevitability that makes former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s hold on the U.S. presidency in 2016 seem tenuous.chile

Bachelet (pictured above), who previously served as president from 2006 to 2010, and more recently as the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, would be the first Chilean president in the post-Pinochet era to win a second term to the presidency.

Under the Chilean constitution, no president may run for reelection, though presidents can return for non-consecutive terms.

She is almost certainly a shoo-in to win the presidential nomination of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy), usually known simply as the Concertación, the coalition of center-left parties that has dominated Chilean politics in the era following the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Bachelet is also the favorite to win the general election on November 17 — although incumbent Sebastián Piñera will not be on the ballot, he’s had a turbulent time as president since his election in 2010.  Piñera’s greatest contribution to Chilean democracy may well have been his election — after running a moderate, respectful campaign, his election marked the return of conservatives to power for the first time since Pinochet left office, trumpeting the full normalization of Chilean politics.

But Piñera will leave office relatively unpopular — despite his government’s successful rescue of 33 trapped miners in October 2010, more recent troubles, such as rising poverty, income inequality and massive student protests in 2011 and 2012 in favor of the creation of new public universities, the end of for-profit education, and a new system to facilitate the financing of secondary education, have left his administration unloved and mocked for its numerous hiccups and misfortunes — so-called piñericosas.

The two likely candidates to challenge Bachelet will face off in a June primary among the parties of the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change), which formed in 2009 to boost Piñera’s campaign as a merger of two parties (and some other smaller parties):

  • The Unión Democrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union), a party formed in the early 1980s among civilian supporters of Pinochet’s economic policies and military rule, and which moderated itself in the early 2000s.
  • Renovación Nacional (RN, National Renewal), which broke away from the UDI over the issue of the 1988 plebiscite on Pinochet’s continued rule — although RN ultimately largely supported Pinochet’s reelection, it originally favored an alternative candidate.  Piñera himself comes from the RN leadership, not from the UDI.

The UDI’s has indicated that its candidate will be independent Laurence Golborne, an engineer by training and the former CEO of Cencosud, a Chilean retailer.  He was, until recently, the Chilean minister of public works and before that, the former minister of mining and energy, where he became very popular in the wake of the government’s successful 2010 Copiapó mine rescue.  The RN candidate, Andrés Allamand, until recently, was Chile’s defense minister.

A CEP Chile poll in early January showed 49% favored Bachelet, while 11% supported Golborne and just 5% backed Allamand.  Another late January poll showed Bachelet leading 42% to 15% for Golborne and 5% for Allamand.

That lead will invariably narrow between now and November, however, when the center-right candidate emerges in June.  Despite the highest income inequality in the Organization for Economic Development (note that Chile is the only South American OECD country), Chile’s strong mining industry has powered growth rates of 6% since 2011, its GDP actually growing faster than before a temporary dip during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

It’s quite incredible to think that the Concertación, which controlled the Chilean presidency from 1990 to 2010, held consecutive power three years longer than the military mostly under Pinochet (17 years).  The Concertación includes four parties: Continue reading Bachelet enters Chilean presidential race as top contender

Gaspar defends Portuguese economic program at Brookings

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Portuguese finance minister Vítor Gaspar (pictured above) spoke to a small audience at the Brookings Institution Tuesday, notably less than 36 hours after Cyprus and the ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund agreed on the terms for a Cypriot bailout — the fifth such eurozone bailout during the currency zone’s sovereign debt crisis.portugal flag

Of course, Portugal is one of those of other five countries, and Gaspar, for the past 21 months, has been responsible for implementing the terms of Portugal’s own bailout program.

Gaspar presented as optimistic a case as possible for Portugal’s current economic state on Tuesday. But he admitted that despite gains in lowering the country’s budget deficit, restoring Portuguese banks to greater health, and boosting the growth of Portuguese exports (the latter as much a sign of painful ‘internal devaluation’ of wages and incomes within Portugal as any sign of newfound productivity or competitiveness), Portugal’s GDP growth and employment rate remain problematic.  The Portuguese economy contracted by 1.6% in 2011 and 3.2% in 2012, and is expected to contract by a further 2.3% in 2013, while its unemployment rate, as of the last quarter of 2012, is 16.9%, its highest level yet.

As Gaspar noted, Portugal’s economy — second only to Italy’s — was already on the ropes when it entered the eurozone.  In particular, from 1990 to 2012, he claimed that the Portuguese economy marked a poorer performance than either Japan during its ‘lost decade’ or the United States during the Great Depression.  Regardless of whether that’s exactly right, there’s no denying that Portugal has faced long-term structural problems — since 2000, it’s notched GDP growth in excess of 2% just once (in 2007, when it grew by 2.37%, and that was at the height of the eurozone and global credit boom).

Gaspar placed much of the blame on Portugal’s failure to pursue macroeconomic stability in accordance with ‘best practices’ — i.e., Portugal simply failed to adjust properly upon accession to the eurozone 14 years ago.

Gaspar serves under prime minister Pedro Passos Coelho, whose liberal, center-right Partido Social Democrata (PSD, Social Democratic Party) came to power in the last election in coalition with the more socially conservative Centro Democrático e Social – Partido Popular (CDS-PP, Democratic and Social Center — People’s Party).

Among his solutions are greater EU-level banking union as a means of reducing the risk premium associated with peripheral economies such as Portugal’s — Gaspar added that the higher borrowing costs that constitute financial headwinds, especially in the context of budgetary adjustment.

But it was surprising not to hear any mention of the emigration of up to 1 million Portuguese from the country over the past 14 years — and nearly 250,000 since 2011 alone.  Passos Coelho in late 2011 was criticized when he suggested that young, enterprising Portuguese citizens should emigrate to Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil in South America, or to Angola in southeastern Africa, still in the throes of an oil boom.  Angolan visas issued to Portuguese nationals jumped from just 156 in the year 2006 to nearly 150,000 by mid-2012.

Mozambique, another former Portuguese colony, apparently issues 200 visas a day to Portuguese nationals.

Invariably, that escape valve has kept Portuguese unemployment lower than the rates over 25% recorded in Spain and Greece.

Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros has made a very compelling case that the emigration of younger, working age Portuguese, combined with a decreasing birth rate and greater longevity has resulted in relatively fewer workers contributing to pensions and health care for relatively greater numbers of retirees, placing extraordinary long-term fiscal pressure on Portugal, given the lackluster expectations for future growth: Continue reading Gaspar defends Portuguese economic program at Brookings