Elections

With the new government in place, everything is seemingly returning back to normal. Or is it? Two weeks after the Slovakian general elections, which stirred great European interest, Robert Fico forms his third government and is preparing to rule for another four more years…

There are now just a few months to go until Brits vote on whether to stay in or leave the EU, yet all the signs are that the hard facts of the debate are not becoming clear enough to the public.

The Irish Greens are back in the Dail (the Irish national parliament).

No-one has the right to rule by force of arms, violence; and no one has the right to dominate others by force of numbers: majority voting. So how should the Greens in particular, and society in general, make democratic decisions?

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a coalition of Left-wing, Kurdish and progressive parties, was founded in in 2012 in order to help smaller parties amplify their voices and gain access to the Turkish Parliament, where the electoral system stacks the odds strongly against them. In both the 2014 and subsequently recalled 2015 parliamentary elections, the party succeeded in winning over 10% of the vote, the necessary threshold for entering Parliament.

Thirty years on from its transition to democracy after Franco, Spain faces a new transition to another system of government, which has yet to be defined.

We need to start thinking about the future and Poland after the end of the Law and Justice (PiS) rule – even though for many it may seem like a science fiction scenario right now.

The events of the last couple of weeks in Poland are no peripheral abomination, and certainly no exception. They are a part of a global trend of liberal democratic models becoming weaker and weaker, a trend which can also be found in the heart of Europe.

The recent elections in Poland show some startling trends. A narrowing of the political landscape has all but eliminated progressive voices from the Left, and the principles of solidarity and social justice, which once defined political struggle in Poland, seem to have been discarded in favour of strict individualism.

So, what are the implications for the EU of a new socialist-led, but communist-green and leftist-supported, and ostensibly anti-austerity government in Portugal? I keep hearing this question; less frequently, the interrogation is sometimes accompanied by ‘is Portugal a new Greece’? Will there be a new conflict within the European Council, a new battle with the ECB, a new Varoufakis, and renewed talk of a Eurozone exit?