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Max's election maps and assorted others

Poland 1928
  • And here's 1928.

    It is interesting to note that the Senate seems to have consistently overrepresented the biggest party - and while d'Hondt is obviously d'Hondt, it's not like the constituencies were much bigger on average for the Sejm.

    And no, your eyes do not deceive you, that is in fact twelve parties winning constituencies.

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    UK 1922
  • The Coalition, which by now consisted only of the Unionists and the half of the Liberal Party who still followed Lloyd George, spluttered on for another three and a half years. It fell apart because, well, there was very little left for it to agree on after the peace was secured. Lloyd George wanted to use the massive mandate given to the Coalition in 1918 to enact sweeping social reforms, to which his coalition partners said "um, what part of 'Conservative and Unionist Party' do you not understand". It was really sort of astonishing in light of this that it went on as long as it did, and its collapse only came about after it was revealed that Lloyd George had used his position as Prime Minister to sell baronetcies and knighthoods to Liberal donors.

    The cash for honours scandal combined with the Chanak Crisis, where Lloyd George nearly provoked war with Turkey against the will of the war-weary armed forces, to force an election in autumn 1922. Unionist leader Austen Chamberlain was still cautiously willing to campaign as a Coalition, planning a joint speaking tour with Lloyd George, but on the 19th of October a meeting of Unionist MPs at the party-affiliated Carlton Club in London voted against continuing the Coalition by a three-quarters majority. Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Andrew Bonar Law, the previous Unionist leader in the House of Commons, who had led internal opposition to the Coalition within the Unionist Party. The Unionist backbenches, newly empowered, formed a committee to discuss political matters independently of the party leadership, and over time this morphed into the '1922 Committee', the modern Conservative Party parliamentary group.

    With the breakdown of the Coalition, a unified Unionist Party went to the country under Bonar Law's leadership seeking a mandate for a single-party majority. However, Lloyd George still held out hope for a new Coalition, and took about half the Liberal parliamentary party with him into a new "National Liberal" organisation. The National Liberals (not to be confused with the 1930s-50s party of the same name) campaigned on carrying on the Coalition, even though it was patently obvious that this wasn't going to happen. They still won about fifty seats, nearly as many as the main Liberal Party (theoretically led by a very tired and irrelevant H. H. Asquith) - largely because the two parties only stood against one another in about thirty constituencies.

    In general, the culture of "everyone stands everywhere" was a lot less developed in 1922, and most seats were two-way contests between any two of the three major parties. There were a few places where the Liberal vote split allowing Labour to squeak through the middle, and in general, Labour had a very good election. They won 142 seats on just under thirty percent of the vote (about the same as the two Liberal factions combined), and formed the official opposition for the first time. J. R. Clynes, who led the party into the election, was replaced as party leader in the House by Ramsay MacDonald, who'd been out of favour up until this point because he opposed the war. Within eighteen months, MacDonald would be Prime Minister.

    Oh, and the Irish thing happened. In 1920, the Irish Government Act had divided the island into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. The idea was for these to be temporary units, with an all-Ireland cooperation body called the Council of Ireland set up to facilitate cooperation and eventual merger into a united home-rule Ireland. But by this point there had been all-out war between Irish Catholics and the Crown for a couple of years, and neither side was too keen on trusting the other side with any sort of authority over them. So, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which came into effect in March 1922, allowed Southern Ireland to go its own way and become the Irish Free State, while Northern Ireland opted out of the Free State and carried on as an autonomous part of the UK. Confused yet? Well, it doesn't quite stop there, because Northern Ireland also had its parliamentary representation reduced, and for some reason, decided to go back to 1868-1885-style constituencies. Solidly Protestant counties Antrim, Down, (London)derry and Armagh became constituencies of their own, while the more marginal Tyrone and Fermanagh became one single massive two-seat constituency. Belfast, meanwhile, was brought back to its old four-seat division. All these seats were unopposed in 1922 except Derry, which was won by the Unionists on a huge margin, and Tyrone-Fermanagh, which was narrowly carried by the husk of the IPP. The Irish Nationalists also held Liverpool Scotland, an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic part of the city.

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    UK 1923
  • Andrew Bonar Law, who had just ridden a backbench revolt all the way to 10 Downing Street and led his Unionist Party to an overall majority in the House of Commons, would end up a footnote in history. After just over six months in office, the 64-year-old Prime Minister was diagnosed with throat cancer in May 1923 and resigned from office. He would die that autumn.

    Law's resignation caused a leadership struggle between Foreign Secretary the Earl Curzon of Kedleston and Chancellor Stanley Baldwin. The choice would formally be up to the King, who appointed a Prime Minister on advice from a "Magic Circle" of Unionist grandees who then confirmed his choice as leader of the party. Curzon, a nobleman and old-school Tory, believed himself to be Law's natural successor, but the choice of the Magic Circle fell on the more middle-class Baldwin, who came from a prosperous background but had made his own fortune and political career. In an age where working-class resentment was clearly rising, the upwardly-mobile MP for Bewdley (his actual hometown, no less) simply looked better as the face of the Unionist Party than the brash, divisive and aristocratic Lord Curzon.

    Baldwin proved a good choice, and despite only being a few years younger than Law and Curzon, had an image as a "new man" who understood the tools available to modern politicians. In his fourteen-year stint at the head of the Conservative and Unionist Party, Baldwin would massively expand the party organisation, transforming it into every bit as much of a mass party as the Liberals and Labour, incorporate films and radio broadcasts into campaign strategy, and raise millions of pounds for the party war chest.

    For now, however, Baldwin focused on his legislative agenda, and one item topped the list: tariff reform. Baldwin was a convinced protectionist, believing higher tariffs would help curb unemployment by encouraging British industry, but in 1922 Law had promised the electorate that no new tariffs would be raised without fresh elections. So it was that Parliament was dissolved and fresh elections called for the 6th of December, 1923.

    As it turned out, neither the Unionist Party nor the people were decisively behind Baldwin's protectionist agenda, and the Unionists lost eighty-six seats and their majority in the House of Commons. They remained the largest party in the House by some margin, and the House of Lords retained a safe Unionist majority, but Baldwin was nevertheless voted out of office when the new Parliament opened. Labour, still the second party in the House despite the Liberals reuniting, formed a shaky minority government with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister. It was a new age indeed...

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    Brazil 2014 (prov)
  • What you see before you is possibly the dumbest election map project I've ever undertaken. It's so useless at conveying practical information that it borders on abstract art. And yet, I've brought it out every few months when I've decided I hated life more than I hated election maps, or when I felt like it was the white whale I would finally one day stab at from Hell's heart. In the meantime, a realigning election came along and rendered it out-of-date and even more pointless, and when I looked at it tonight, I discovered that the website I drew the party-by-party results from (a media outlet's results portal - I think it was Globo, but the current Globo results page for 2014 only shows presidential and gubernatorial elections) is no longer operative. So I think the time has finally come to share what I have, declare "victory", and move on.

    Brazil might have the least useful party system in the developed world - this might hinge on your definition of "the developed world", and indeed the Brazilian party system really bears much closer resemblance to those of countries like the Philippines or Indonesia than it does either European or other Latin American ones. In the history of the Brazilian Republic, there's been two one-party periods, a brief interlude of relatively healthy democracy in the 50s and 60s, then a brutal military dictatorship that forced everyone who supported the government into one party, everyone who was willing to serve as a puppet opposition into another party, and everyone who wanted to genuinely fight the regime into various urban guerrilla groups. When democracy was re-established in the mid-80s, everyone and his uncle tried to start a new political party, and the existing political forces fractured a hundred different ways, the result being a party system where it is perfectly feasible to have twelve seats in a state all represented by members of different parties. There were twenty-eight parties in the 55th Chamber of Deputies, sixteen of which won at least ten seats.

    The situation isn't helped by the Brazilian electoral system, which is PR by state, but the voter votes for a single candidate rather than a party. The seats are distributed proportionally between registered coalitions, then between the parties within each coalition. Obviously, the coalitions are different on every level, even though presidential, legislative, and state elections are all held on the same day. A party might be part of one coalition nominating a state gubernatorial candidate, a second coalition nominating a slate of congressional candidates, and a third coalition nominating presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

    As you may have guessed, the core issue here is that the "parties" don't really function as parties. Politicians build a local voter base, which they bring with them into whichever party they happen to be a member of, and the parties join coalitions and formulate policies based solely on what their elected officials think is strategic for the moment rather than anything so banal as "principles" or "ideology".

    That said, we can sort of build a left-right scale. Or at least we can identify a few parties that are recognisably left-wing and a few who are particularly rabidly right-wing. The left lines up roughly as follows:
    - The Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) is Brazil's major socialist political force. It was formed by dissident trade unionists, Marxist intellectuals and Catholic liberation theology supporters in 1980, at the height of the military dictatorship, and came out of the woodworks to find itself the largest party on the left, with its candidate, former industrial worker and trade unionist Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, coming second in the 1989 presidential election and ultimately winning power in 2002. While in power, the PT spearheaded a huge expansion of the Brazilian welfare state, making it their goal to see poverty and hunger eliminated from Brazil. Lula served out his two terms and stayed hugely popular, even as the PT itself came under suspicion of corruption, and his handpicked successor Dilma Rousseff, a former member of one of the aforementioned urban guerrillas, was elected President in 2010. She was re-elected in 2014, and impeached by the National Congress in 2016 on dubious and controversial grounds. The PT carries on in opposition, and continues to be a very pluralist movement, with groups ranging from moderate social democrats to Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries to Catholic leftists sharing space in the party.
    - The Communist Party of Brazil (Partido Comunista do Brasil, PCdoB) is half of the old Communist Party, the oldest existing party in Brazil which split down the middle over the Sino-Soviet split in 1962 - the PCdoB being the pro-China half. Its lack of overt Soviet ties made it slightly less targeted by the CIA, but the military regime didn't care overmuch which communists they were beating down, so it came out of the military era a battered, hardened organisation. It would embrace popular front doctrine, backing Lula for president in every election he stood in, and gradually it found a niche for itself as the PT's more stridently left-wing sister organisation, winning a few deputies within the lulista coalition and even securing the running-mate position in 2018 after the PT's bigger allies left the coalition.
    - The Party of Socialism and Freedom (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, PSOL) was founded in 2004 as a left-wing split from the PT in criticism of the party's decision to ally with centrist and centre-right politicians in the Congress. It contains Trotskyites, eco-socialists, alter-globalists and various more "intellectual" strands of leftism, in addition to lending out spaces on its lists to unregistered extreme-left movements, and its base is primarily made up of left-wingers in the intellectual middle classes rather than actual workers. It's put up its own presidential candidacies in every election since its founding, but has never gotten anywhere significant, and is one of many parties to maintain a small but robust caucus in the Chamber of Deputies.
    - The Republican Party of the Social Order (Partido Republicano da Ordem Social, PROS), despite very moderate Christian left origins, has been consistently behind Dilma since its founding in 2010, and supported PT continuity candidate Fernando Haddad in 2018, the only party other than the PT and the PCdoB to do so.

    That's about it, really. A couple more parties are either more dubiously left-wing or have a history of sounding much more left-wing than they really are:
    - The Brazilian Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Brasileiro, PSB) is a legacy party claiming the heritage of the pre-dictatorship PSB, which was never more than a minor player in the centre-left of that period. Its major base is the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where state governor Miguel Arraes brought in his campaign machine in the early 90s, and it continues to draw its most significant support in gubernatorial elections along the northeast coast. It sometimes backed Lula and sometimes not, eventually deciding to switch tacks and try to bring in right-wingers to bolster its local support in the states where it was competitive. This made it so hated by everyone to its left that it broke decisively with Dilma's coalition for the 2014 election, backing Marina Silva (see the Green Party section below) for president on its own ticket. Silva came in a very respectable third place with 21% of the vote, but this didn't benefit the PSB much downballot, and the party remained one of Brazil's many, many small parliamentary parties. It eventually backed the impeachment of Dilma, though to its credit, it did stop short of supporting Bolsonaro when he came to power in 2018.
    - The Socialist People's Party (Partido Popular Socialista, PPS) is the result of the Communist Party of Brazil (the other half of the split from the PCdoB) deciding it didn't want to be a communist party anymore now that the USSR wasn't around, and promptly rebranding itself as a moderate centre-left social democratic party. It became a significant force when it was joined by former Governor of Ceará Ciro Gomes (notice a pattern here?), who used it as a vehicle for his centrist presidential runs in 1998 and 2002, and in 2006 it endorsed Lula's main opponent. Like the PSB, it helped vote down Dilma in 2016, and in 2019 changed its name to "Citizenship" (Cidadania) citing the misleading nature of their name when they clearly didn't have anything to do with socialism. Today they're a centrist liberal party, with much of their membership drawn from centre-right supporters disaffected with their former parties' turn to supporting Bolsonaro.
    - The Democratic Labour Party (Partido Democrático Trabalhista, PDT) is the most left-wing of the various parties claiming the heritage of Getúlio Vargas' Brazilian Labour Party, one of the major political forces of pre-coup Brazil. The old Labour Party was working-class, centrist to centre-left and supportive of Vargas' authoritarian populism which bore a bit of a resemblance to that of Juan Perón in Argentina. The PDT was founded to carry on that tradition by Leonel Brizola, one of the true long-runners in Brazilian politics, who had been a senior figure in the pre-coup PTB and now sought to re-establish the moderate left as a political force. For most of the 80s it was touch-and-go whether the PDT or the PT would become the dominant centre-left party, and while the PDT lost out, it eventually came to accept its position as an ally of the PT. It supported Dilma through her impeachment, but in 2018, it played host to the return of Ciro Gomes, who again tried to launch a centre-left presidential bid, and again came in third place.
    - The Green Party (Partido Verde, PV), is the kind of green party where the best thing you can say about it is "at least it's not the Mexican one". It claims the left-right divide as a concept is fundamentally outdated, and despite coming from anti-military activist roots, has never fit in well with the left. They got a bit of a boost from left-wingers disaffected by Lula's lack of interest in combatting climate change and deforestation, and a fairly big boost when, in 2009, former environment minister Marina Silva defected over from the PT and declared her candidacy for president on an environmentalist and anti-corruption platform. She got a respectable third place, and promptly left the party for reasons unclear to my cursory reading. It can't have been an amicable split, though, because they didn't endorse her in 2014, and have remained stubbornly independent ever since. They're currently the only party not listed as part of the government or the opposition, which I take to indicate that they believe even Bolsonaro isn't substantially worse for their aims than the PT.

    As mentioned, there are also a few clearly right-wing parties:
    - The Democrats (Democratas, DEM), formerly the Liberal Front Party (Partido da Frente Liberal, PFL) are the main heirs to the ARENA, the right-wing party set up to support the military regime - well, they were the half of the ARENA that decided maybe this democracy thing is worth taking a second look at. Its leaders have consistently denied that it's right-wing, but this is clearly about the same strategy that led them to name the party "the Democrats". It was among Lula's most implacable opponents throughout his presidency, and carried this attitude over to Dilma, whom they helped impeach. In the 2018 election they backed Geraldo Alckmin's candidacy, which attempted to unite the traditional centre-right against Bolsonaro, but gained absolutely no traction whatsoever, and they now support Bolsonaro in the Congress.
    - The Progressives (Progressistas, PP), who like the Democrats have a decoy name, are the result of a merger of two parties who were each themselves the result of mergers between two parties, and one of those four parties was the half of the ARENA that thought this democracy thing was perhaps not worth taking a second look at. Despite generally being a very right-wing party, they've also tended to align with Lula and Dilma's governments out of a sense of wanting to be in the room where it happens. This stance has divided the party somewhat, with the Rio Grande do Sul branch nearly bolting from the party several times over what they see as excessive corruption and lack of principle. Their most famous member during this period was probably Rio de Janeiro deputy Jair Bolsonaro, who represented the party from 2005 until breaking with the leadership in 2016.
    - The Party of the Republic (Partido da República, PR) are the result of a merger between the evangelical-inspired Liberal Party and the far-right, pro-military Party for the Reconstruction of the National Order. Like the Progressives, they formed a slightly awkward part of Dilma's coalition in 2014, but then turned on her, and currently form the second-biggest party in Bolsonaro's presidential majority.
    - The Social Christian Party (Partido Social Cristão, PSC) are, as the name hints, a Christian democratic outfit, who had a brief surge of popularity in the late 80s before collapsing in the early 90s. They were able to find a path back to (some measure of) power by allying with the growing evangelical Protestant churches, current party leader Pastor Everaldo Pereira being a leading figure in the Brazilian Assemblies of God. These movements tend to be strongly socially conservative, and the PSC follows this line, taking a particularly hard stance against LGBT rights. Former judge Wilson Witzel was elected Governor of Rio de Janeiro on the party's ticket in 2018, and has ratcheted up police anti-drug operations in the state to nearly Dutertean levels. And of course, they played host to Bolsonaro from 2016 to 2018, during which time he laid much of the groundwork for his eventual presidential run.
    - The National Ecological Party (Partido Ecológico Nacional, PEN) is one of the most ridiculous things to come out of the mess that is the Brazilian party system in recent years. Originally meant to be a centre-right environmentalist party that could support Marina Silva in case she couldn't get the PSB on side, it failed to attract her attention and instead moved toward a constituency of communitarian evangelicals ("PEN" was often thought to be a shibboleth abbreviation for "PENtecostal"). In 2017, Jair Bolsonaro began to alienate the PSC leadership (as he tends to do when he's stayed in a party for long enough) and decided to maybe have a look at the PEN, whose leaders were reasonably inclined towards him. In fact, they were so inclined towards him that at the mere hint of him possibly joining, they changed the name of the party to PATRIOTA (hopefully I shouldn't have to translate that), announced plans to start drawing in conservative Catholics as well as evangelicals, and most notably, completely abandoned environmentalism (Bolsonaro being an all-but-open climate change denier). After all this hoopla, when they asked Bolsonaro to make the leap, he said "nah" and went off in search of something else, but they stuck to the new course and stood a no-hoper candidate for President.
    - When Bolsonaro decided to skip the PEN and carry on party-shopping a while longer, the vehicle he eventually picked out was the Social Liberal Party (Partido Social Liberal, PSL), a small party that until then had been libertarian, supporting gay rights and secularism but also backing the impeachment of Dilma and supporting free-market reforms. Bolsonaro did not change its name upon entering, but he did throw out the entire party platform and replace it with his own hard-right nationalist agenda. The old libertarian leadership left the party to found their own movement called Livres ("Free" (pl.)), which declared "independence" from Bolsonaro's government without formally aligning with the opposition.
    - Oh, and of course, when Bolsonaro inevitably pissed off the PSL leadership in November 2019, he decided to found his own party called the Alliance for Brazil (Aliança pelo Brasil, APB), which basically supports whatever he says it supports. Why he didn't do this back in 2016 is frankly anyone's guess, but I suppose Brazil decided it just made too much sense as a country.
    - Bolsonaro's other main cheerleading team beside the PSL were the Brazilian Labour Renewal Party (Partido Renovador Trabalhista Brasileiro, PRTB), a far-right outfit originally led by Levy Fidelix, a man who has both the name and physical appearance of a character from an Asterix comic, and who before 2018 was best known for making some fairly outrageous homophobic comments during the 2014 election campaign. Bolsonaro's vice-presidential candidate, General Hamilton Mourão, was parachuted into the party to legitimise his candidacy, because this is apparently somehow something you just need to do in Brazilian politics.

    This leaves the largest group of parties by far, the ones who don't have any firm ideological direction, don't claim to have one, and have never really claimed to have one:
    - The (Party of the) Brazilian Democratic Movement ((Partido do) Movimento Democratico Brasileiro, (P)MDB) was originally the catch-all controlled opposition party under the military dictatorship. They enjoyed a brief flowering of support in the 80s, holding a majority in the Chamber of Deputies that wrote the current Brazilian constitution, before splitting six ways from Sunday and leaving only the most morally-debased machine politicians still in the party. They made a conscious decision not to engage in presidential elections after 1994, no doubt partly to avoid forcing its members to choose one candidate to support from among them, and their main focus has been on state gubernatorial elections as well as the Senate, although they do elect a respectably-sized bloc of deputies as well. They did tend to support Lula and Dilma for the same reason the Progressives did, before turning around and impeaching Dilma upon realising that it would make one of their own President. In office, Michel Temer would do his level best to make himself equally despised by exactly everyone in Brazil, and the party underwent a slow-motion crisis ahead of the 2018 election as they realised they now actually had a record in government that they might have to defend. They dropped the "Party of" from their name, tried to position themselves as a centrist to centre-right liberal pro-open society party, and even made murmurs about the possibility of expelling some members whose political views were known to veer far from this new middle path. The result was complete electoral meltdown.
    - The Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB), nicknamed the tucanos after the bird in their longtime party logo, is on the centre-right much like the Portuguese party with a similar name. As ever, the space between "social" and "democracy" is very, very important here. The PSDB originated as the left faction of the PMDB, who originally wanted to form a popular front with Lula and the PT, but when this was rebuffed they founded their own party in 1988. They stood sociology professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso for President in 1994, who won outright in the first round for two elections in a row and became the first Brazilian president ever to win re-election in a democratic vote. Cardoso had been known as a Marxist in academia, but because his main opponent in both elections was Lula, the right came to back his candidacy, and he governed as a Third Way centrist. It's a bit controversial how left-wing the PSDB ever was, but with Cardoso's election it definitely stopped being left of centre in any meaningful sense, and after his departure in 2002 it's only carried on drifting rightwards, forming the key opposition to Lula and Dilma and being just about the only party never to align with the PT in any coalition anywhere. They and the PMDB made up the key bloc behind the impeachment of Dilma, and they supported Temer's presidency before launching a broad centre-right coalition for the 2018 presidential election under Geraldo Alckmin, who had been their candidate against Lula in 2006 and now essentially promised a continuation of the centre-right establishment's politics. This was not at all an advisable strategy in that situation, and Alckmin wound up getting some 5% of the vote, with both the PSDB and PMDB losing about half their seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
    - The Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrático, PSD), not to be confused with the above, is a new outfit founded in 2011 by São Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassab, who had previously been a Democrat. It was immediately accused of being a Lulista plant to steal votes from the opposition, and indeed Kassab supported Lula, but since Dilma's reelection it shifted rightwards, participating in both Temer's and Bolsonaro's presidential majorities.
    - The Party of Christian Social Democracy (Partido Social Democrata Cristão, PSDC), not to be confused with the above or the above the above, was a minor Christian-democratic group who supported none of the coalitions in 2014, standing its own presidential candidate who won about 60,000 votes in a country of two hundred million. They did the same thing in 2018, having shortened their name to Christian Democracy (Democracia Cristã, DC), and... won some 40,000 votes. Insert Curb Your Enthusiasm theme here.
    - Solidarity (Solidariedade) is a very moderate centre-left party linked to the Força Sindical, a trade union centre on the "pragmatic" end of the movement. Despite their trade unionist backing they've tended to align with the PSDB, supporting their candidacies in both the 2014 and 2018 elections.
    - The Humanist Party of Solidarity (Partido Humanista da Solidariedade, PHS), not to be confused with the above, was a minor Christian-social grouping that backed Lula in 2002 only before sitting out two elections, backing Marina Silva in 2014, and finally fucking off into obscurity after the 2018 election, in which they won enough votes to be represented but not enough to secure public funding for the party itself.
    - The Brazilian Republican Party (Partido Republicano Brasileiro, PRB) might or might not be the political wing of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus), a frankly quite unsettling evangelical church which has been banned in a number of African countries and been responsible for a large number of child abductions and manslaughters as part of their religious work, and runs the usual mildly exploitative tithing system expected of groups like it. The UCKG openly wants to create a "theocratic state" in Brazil, and has latterly supported Bolsonaro in his political efforts, though the PRB strenuously denies that this is its goal or indeed that it's connected with the UCKG at all. It even backed Lula and Dilma through most of their respective presidencies, citing their "concern for eliminating social inequality", but of course quite happily stuck the knife in and now supports Bolsonaro.
    - The Brazilian Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, PTB) is the other main party claiming the heritage of the old PTB aside from the PDT. They were awarded the name of the old party by the government, largely because of the involvement of Getúlio Vargas' great-niece in their founding, and have charted a more centrist course than that of their sister party, generally supporting the PSDB in its presidential bids and aligning with the opposition to Lula and Dilma.
    - In 1989, a left faction split from the PTB to found the Labour Party of Brazil (Partido Trabalhista do Brasil, PTdoB). They've generally been in between the PTB and the PDT politically, but definitely closer to the latter - the PTdoB did support the opposition candidate in 2014, but banded together with the PDT to support Ciro's comeback in 2018. Perhaps recognising the slight People's Front of Judea vibe their name gave off, the party rebranded in 2017 to AVANTE ("FORWARD").
    - The National Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Nacional, PTN) was founded in 1995 by the brothers Dorival and José de Abreu, who were both in the Chamber of Deputies for either the PMDB or PSDB, even the Portuguese Wikipedia doesn't seem to care which of the two they represented. It carried on as a minor centrist force for twenty-odd years before changing its name to Podemos in 2016, inspired by Obama's election slogan rather than the Spanish party of the same name (as its leaders were anxious to point out). It began to flirt with e-democracy, broke out of Temer's presidential majority, tried to launch its senator Álvaro Dias as a presidential candidate with the backing of the PSC, and finally joined Bolsonaro's presidential majority after swallowing the PHS in November 2018. So it goes in Brazilian minor-party politics.
    - The Progressive Republican Party (Partido Republicano Progressista, PRP), similarly to the PHS, was a small chancer party of the centre-right who merged with Podemos after doing shit in the 2018 elections.
    - The Party of National Mobilisation (Partido da Mobilização Nacional, PMN) is another independent centre-left group, who backed Lula but not Dilma, and to their credit at least don't back Bolsonaro either. AFAICT, their name is the most interesting thing about them.
    - Finally, the Christian Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Cristão, PTC) have perhaps the most misleading name out of everyone - they have very little to do with the labour movement, the PTB legacy, or organised Christianity, and were formerly the hard-right libertarian National Reconstruction Party (Partido da Reconstrução Nacional, PRN), most famous as the party whose candidate, Fernando Collor de Mello, was elected president in 1989 in the first free and direct presidential election since the 1964 coup. Collor proceeded to burn everything in his path and resign to avoid impeachment, which led his party to undergo a bit of a crisis and decide to rebrand in what might be either the least conspicuous or the most conspicuous way possible, depending on your point of view.

    Now, because I hate it when things make sense and love it when they're confusing, this is nothing at all like the left-right order the parties are presented in on the map. This, instead, is based on the coalitions in the 2014 presidential election, which as mentioned was held on the same day as the legislative election but under coalitions which were totally different. I made up the order of the parties inside each coalition a long time ago, and tbh, I'm not sure I find most of them defensible. In particular, the PP should clearly be on the extreme right of Dilma's coalition, not left of the PROS and the PMDB. That said, you can probably understand why I've not been eager to go in and rearrange them...

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    München 2014
  • So there are municipal elections in Bavaria this spring, which look like they could be Actually Interesting, and in view of that I decided to map the last elections in Munich.

    First of all, yes, it is a six-year term. Germany seems to generally take the view that the lower the level of government, the longer the terms of office can be, so in Bavaria you get a four-year term for the Bundestag, five years for the Landtag and Bezirkstage, and six years for Kreistage and local councils. The electoral system for the latter, as in most of the rest of Germany, is open-list PR with Kumulieren (the ability to cast up to three votes for the same candidate) and Panaschieren (the ability to vote for candidates from multiple different party lists) - although I have to wonder how many people use these in practice given they have 80 votes to distribute and a ballot paper the size of a tablecloth (I'm not even linking to the image directly, that's how massive it is). There's a single constituency for the 80 seats of the city council, in addition to which the Oberbürgermeister, who is directly elected in a two-round vote, gets an ex officio seat chairing the council.

    If we associate Bavaria in general with hardline Catholic conservatism, and that's not an undeserved reputation, Munich (and Nürnberg) are the two big exceptions. SPD members have held the mayoralty of Munich since 1948, with the sole exception of the 1978-84 term, and though the SPD have had a plurality on the council for slightly less of that time, the presence of the KPD in the 40s and 50s and the Greens from the 80s onward has generally ensured a narrow left-wing majority. The growth of the Greens combined with general bad times for the SPD, however, meant that the CSU won a plurality of seats in 2014, though only a narrow one (26 seats to the SPD's 25, with the Greens on 13). The only poll taken for the 2020 election suggests a dead heat between the CSU, SPD and Greens.

    Municipal elections in Germany do not, of course, have the five-percent threshold, which means you get a fair few interesting oddities on most councils. In Munich that's the Free Voters, the Pirate Party and the AfD, which I assume everyone who reads this will be familiar with, but also:
    - the Ecological-Democratic Party (Ökologisch-Demokratische Partei, ÖDP), a right-wing green party which integrates a mild form of deep ecology with conservative family-values social policy and has had an outsized influence on public discourse in Bavaria ever since it successfully sponsored a referendum to abolish the Bavarian Senate;
    - the Pink List (Rosa Liste, RoLi), an advocacy group for LGBT rights who entered the Council in 1996 as Germany's first LGBT political party with local representation, and have maintained their single councillor ever since;
    - the Bavaria Party (Bayernpartei, BP), who want an independent Bavarian state (they're split between those who want a republic and those who want to invite the Wittelsbachs back), and were successful in the 40s and 50s but have since shrunk to the point where they don't get seats in the Landtag but do get state campaign funding;
    - the Wählergruppe HUT ("Hut" means "hat", but also stands for "humanistisch, unabhängig, tolerant" - "humane, independent, tolerant"), which was founded by a group of cultural workers around the nightclub owner Wolfgang Zeilnhofer-Rath, and stands for a fairly vague pro-open-society, anti-bad-things programme;
    - and the Bürgerinitiative Ausländerstopp (very roughly translated as "Citizens' Initiative for an End to Immigration", BIA), a front list for the far-right NPD, which is only still legal in Germany because the Verfassungsschutz were unable to prove that their evidence supporting a ban hadn't been written by agents-provocateurs, which supports roughly the policies you'd expect based on their name.

    Another note - around 40% of all votes cast were postal votes, and these show a significantly more right-wing slant than in-person votes, so the polling division map shows a slightly higher percentage for the SPD and lower for the CSU than would be entirely representative. For that reason, I've included a smaller map of postal votes by city district (Stadtbezirk), which is the lowest level they can be usefully mapped for.

    val-de-m-2014.png
     
    Brazil 1945/1950/1955/1960 (P)
  • So Brazil's presidential elections during the Fourth Republic (otherwise known as the Populist Republic) were a bit of a mess. In 1945, the armed forces overthrew Getúlio Vargas and proclaimed free elections, in which Army general Eurico Gaspar Dutra and Air Force brigadier Eduardo Gomes stood as the main candidates. Dutra was supported by Vargas from behind the scenes, and endorsed by the PSD, which was essentially a formalised national organisation for the various Getulist political machines in the different states. This superior organisation turned out good enough to put Dutra in the presidential palace, and to give his allies in the PSD a majority in the Congress.

    val-br-p-1945.png

    Dutra's main achievement in office was the 1946 constitution, which maintained a system of government styled after the US, but with direct elections for President and Vice President (the latter on a separate ballot, which accounts for about half of the confusingness of the period) and the Chamber of Deputies elected by PR. The new constitution also gave women the vote, which they'd technically already had under Vargas, except that all suffrage under Vargas was a bit "lol".

    With the tyrant Getúlio Vargas having been overthrown, democracy inaugurated in Brazil and the country's first democratically-elected president in twenty years (or possibly ever, depending on what you count as "democratically elected") served out his term in peace, the first regular presidential and vice-presidential elections were held in December 1950, returning a comfortable majority result in support of centre-left populist candidate (checks notes) Getúlio Vargas. His main opponent was Eduardo Gomes, who repeated his effort from five years before, and this time had an organised broad anti-Getulist party, the National Democratic Union (UDN) behind him. This would in time shed whatever tiny left-wing factions it once had to become Brazil's major right-wing conservative party.

    val-br-p-1950.png

    Vargas actually did alright as a constitutional head of state, kind of. He pursued economic nationalism, very similar to that of Juan Perón over in Argentina, and famously nationalised the petroleum industry in 1952 creating Petrobras, now notorious as one of the most corrupt institutions in the Western world. By 1954, though, he was on thin ice after his head of security was accused of putting out a hit on one of his political rivals. The armed forces again called for his removal from office, and Vargas decided to shoot himself in the head rather than give them the satisfaction of capturing him alive.

    The 1955 elections went off without a hitch though, which is honestly kind of striking, and the right-Getulist PSD formed an alliance with the left-Getulist PTB to nominate Juscelino Kubitschek, a rural doctor from the backcountry of Minas Gerais, for president with João "Jango" Goulart, a rural lawyer from Rio Grande do Sul who'd been a protégé of Vargas (they were both from the same town) and who had made himself a hero of the working classes as Vargas' Minister of Labour, for vice-president. The ticket won a fairly comfortable victory in a three-way race with the UDN and the PSP of Adhemar de Barrios, the fabulously corrupt but politically savvy former governor of São Paulo.

    val-br-p-1955.png

    Kubitschek had the most successful presidency of the entire period - for one thing, he managed to serve his full five years without either getting forced out of office or killing himself. He's probably most well-remembered for beginning construction on Brasília, a new capital way out in the backcountry of Goiás (coincidentally not far from where Kubitschek grew up over in Minas), but he also initiated loads and loads of other development projects, possibly pocketing quite a bit of money for himself in the process or possibly not. It was, however, enough to make him a target of anti-corruption populists.

    One such man was Jânio Quadros, the eccentric former governor of São Paulo (notice a pattern here?), who had a reputation for wearing dishevelled clothes, eating mortadella sandwiches (a popular Paulista street food) during his public appearances, and waving around a broom to symbolise his promise to sweep out corruption. His nomination was supported by the UDN, which could find no credible candidate of its own after three consecutive losses, while the PSD nominated Field Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott, who'd been one of Kubitschek's most trusted advisers.

    The 1960 election is the most confusing of the era, because while Quadros handily defeated Lott for President, the vice-presidential ballot looked very different. There was a large working-class movement that called for a "Jan-Jan" (Jânio-Jango) vote, and they were successful enough to ensure that Goulart was returned as Vice President for a second term even as his running mate went down in flames. As such, the most left-wing candidate had won in both races, and the conservative establishment was inevitably going to sit up and take notice.

    val-br-p-1960.png

    Quadros, while a successful state governor, quickly turned out to be way beyond his depth as President. He resigned in August 1961, citing "terrible occult forces" working against him - this might or might not have been a bluff intended to boost his popularity, but the Congress called the bluff and allowed him to resign. This passed the presidency to João Goulart - Goulart, who had spent his entire term as vice-president championing social reforms in the Senate and building relations with the Communist bloc, and who was right now, at this very moment, on a state visit to the People's Republic of China. The right-wingers in the Congress initially wanted to physically prevent Goulart from assuming office, but a compromise was reached where Goulart would be allowed to take power, but not before constitutional amendments had been passed turning Brazil into a parliamentary republic with a Prime Minister who handled just about all actual policy-making.

    Goulart was able to strengthen his hand once in office though, and in 1963, he called a plebiscite to confirm the amendments. They were rejected by over 80% of voters, and were nullified, allowing Goulart to assume the sum of executive power. He immediately set about on an enormous reform programme, creating a state electric company, redistributing land to rural peasants, and massively expanding public education with the goal of eradicating illiteracy (additionally important because the 1946 constitution made literacy a requirement for voting). This was to be funded by a big corporation tax hike, which obviously didn't play great with the sort of right-wing establishment types who already basically thought Goulart was a crypto-Communist. It also didn't play well with the United States, which was famously quite jumpy around any Latin American leader who might be construed as somewhere to the left of Attila the Hun.

    On 31 March 1964, tanks rolled out into the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Goulart was kicked out of the city, tried to make a stand in Brasília, but ultimately fled to Uruguay as the Congress passed a resolution deposing him from office. The Congress then elected Field Marshal Humberto Castello Branco, Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, to the presidency for the remainder of Goulart's term (well, Quadros' term, really) - he promised to uphold Brazilian democracy and do his utmost to combat abuses of power. Which, er, yeah.
     
    NZ 1890
  • I've been off doing another New Thing, with some help from @Uhura's Mazda - well, quite a lot of help, really. He dug out a book of old NZ electoral boundaries going back to the deep mists of Victoriana, scanned this, pointed me to some results resources, and wrote the below.

    1890

    The 1890 election is often referred to as a watershed of New Zealand political history: before this point, Governments were formed of assorted factions of Independents, some of whom consistently brought down the Premier halfway through a term, and all of whom were more interested in development for their region and their seat than in matters of principle or ideology. Shortly before this election, the main Opposition factions got together in a caucus and pledged to support John Ballance as Premier over the incumbent, Harry Atkinson. These were the Liberals - the first organised party in New Zealand history.

    So goes the received knowledge, anyway. In actual fact, Grey's Government of the late 1870s had been proclaimed as a Liberal Government and attempted to govern in a Liberal way (as the word was understood in New Zealand), but it wasn't a very good Government, so the Liberals of the 1890s tended to categorise it with all the others of the period. And relatively little changed in a meaningful sense in 1890 - members continued to agitate for roads and bridges and voted for Liberal ideological legislation as a quid pro quo for development and public works - the general effort of colonialisation.

    Why, then, did people vote for the Liberals? Partly because the previous Government had made itself unpopular through the grinding years of Depression, notably by passing the Property Tax. They had also been hit by the first labour unrest that New Zealand had yet seen, which caused the Chicken Littles in the newspaper offices to warn of an apocalyptic showdown between capital and labour. By contrast, the new Liberal Party promoted itself as a non-sectional party of all classes, who could unite the country. When the formal Liberal organisation was formed, after - not before - the election, it was called the Liberal and Labour Federation, although some members took the 'Labour' bit more seriously than others.

    They also promised all sorts of panaceas, chief among which was a land tax. Would it be graduated or flat? Would it replace all other forms of taxation or merely supplement them? Would it be based on the nationalisation of land or would farmers be able to retain their freehold? Different Liberal candidates would give you different answers - not only at this election, but for the entire duration of the 1891-1912 Liberal Government. The whole thing was based on an uncertain foundation - if the land tax was a punitive measure to force large landowners to 'burst up' their estates and put wannabe farmers on the land, then eventually everybody would theoretically fall below the payment threshold, but Liberals talked about it as the chief source of revenue for an endless list of roads and bridges.

    Despite the evidence of this map, the outcome of the election was uncertain until the General Assembly was called - just like all previous elections, but like very few subsequent ones. The lines between a Liberal, and Independent Liberal, and a pure Independent, were quite vague, and it was perfectly possible that enough people would renege on their commitment to Ballance's leadership caucus that Atkinson might retain power. As such, he delayed the calling of the Assembly for as long as possible, and in the meantime he appointed a bunch of new members of the upper house, who could be trusted to block Ballance's radical Bills. This set the worrying precedent that a Premier without a proven mandate could advise the Governor on the use of royal prerogatives.

    But the House met and Ballance was elected Premier. He is remembered as the first Liberal Premier of New Zealand, but as we've seen, George Grey had a solid argument to be remembered as such, and he often reminded Ballance of this from his cantankerous position on the backbench. Even Atkinson was regarded as a Liberal until the Liberal Party came along - he supported manhood suffrage, women's suffrage, proportional representation and even National Insurance. In truth, most of New Zealand's political scene regarded itself as Liberal: almost everybody had voted Liberal back Home, because you don't move to the other side of the world if everything's going well for you. As such, although the Liberal Party castigated its opponents as Conservatives, this map shows them as the Opposition, which is what they called themselves.

    The Liberals flooded the towns and the mining seats, along with others dominated by small farmers, especially in the South Island, while the rural North Island voted for Atkinson's candidates, by and large.

    Ballance formed a Cabinet including the Papal Knight Sir Patrick Buckley, the publican demagogue Richard Seddon, and the Fabian teetotaler William Pember Reeves - and not only would the personal contradictions shape the Liberal Government, but so would the internal contradictions of their ideas. Over the next three years, Ballance and his team would have to not only prove that their Liberalism had the answers - but also that partisan government was something worth doing in the first place.

    And the map itself:

    ddq20yc-00962b93-45bf-4b0f-9055-006465a04726.png
     
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