Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes

[Uhura's Mazda]

There were some hopes, in the first years of the Alliance, that it would grow into a unitary party of the Left - but this was not to be. Largely, of course, because of the jealous loyalty of each party (the Greens, NewLabour, Mana Motuhake, the Democrats for Social Credit and the Liberals) to its principles, but also because of the personal disputes between the leaders.

This was bad enough when Jim Anderton was running as much as he could from his own office, and ignoring the grassroots. It became almost intolerable when Winston Peters was recruited to lead the Liberals, and the Alliance, in 1992. Anderton, despite his favour of the idea, was put out by how quickly the rank and file turned to a new saviour, while the more liberal-left members of the NLP and the Greens grew weary of Peters' conservative ideals and the constant demands for contributions to campaign funds. Not that the funds were misused: the Tauranga by-election saw Winston fight off challenges from both major parties in a stonking victory.

Going into the 1993 election, there was a genuine feeling that the Alliance would be setting the narrative of the next government - and a consequent niggling worry about what exactly that narrative would end up being. As it turned out, however, only a few seats were won: Sandra Lee of Mana Motuhake took Auckland Central, Jim Anderton held Wigram and was joined by NewLabour stablemates in Jill Jeffs of Albany and Tau Henare of Northern Maori, and Winston Peters' Liberals grew their ranks, winning Hobson, Kaimai, Matakana and Whangarei. Half of the upper North Island had turned to the Alliance - and specifically the Liberals.

The 1993 result was a hung Parliament, but Jim Bolger didn't have to worry, for Anderton pledged to give NewLabour's supply and confidence to National on account of their victory in the popular vote (to much gnashing of teeth within the NLP) and Winston followed suit. It was at this point that things fell apart: the Greens, having won nothing despite contributing a fair amount of the Alliance vote, felt hard-done-to and most were aggrieved that their hard work had only led to another term of National. Mana Motuhake were mightily annoyed that the Alliance had nominated NewLabour's not-so-lefty Tau Henare for Northern Maori, which had been their strongest seat - and that he had won, thus embarrassing Mat Rata. Sandra Lee was also uncomfortable with the arrangement with National. Both parties therefore abandoned the Alliance shortly after the election - the Greens in particular were confident of getting into Parliament at the first MMP election.

From this point, the Alliance was effectively dead. An increasing level of mutual distaste between Peters and Anderton was making any attempt to work together impossible between the two major parties of the remnant, and they parted ways in 1994. The Democrats stayed with NewLabour in this ugly divorce, but only until they managed to convince Tau Henare to defect to them shortly before the '96 election, and thereby felt that they had a good shot of getting into Parliament through the coat-tail rule. Henare's true logic is unknown, but it is no secret that he was uncomfortable in the liberal-left parts of NewLabour and may have been taken in by the Democrats' tales of vast funds left over from the Beetham days.

In the run-up to the election, the old parties began shedding backbenchers to the minor parties - Peter McCardle and Michael Laws swelled the ranks of the Liberals and gushed about how Winston would be the next PM until it became apparent that he was stuck in the doldrums of 10-15%. Others, who were on board with the neoliberal reforms but in danger of deselection on the new boundaries, set up the United Party to grab the centrist vote that was in fact all with Peters and not on board with the neoliberal reforms. Finally, Peter Dunne ended up as ACT's first MP, contesting the 'genuine Liberal' vote of hardcore free-marketeers and pale students. The crossbenches were getting very full indeed.

It was apparent that not all of these parties would cross the 5% threshold, so various arrangements were set up - National did not contest Dunne's seat in the hope that ACT would serve as a coalition partner, while the former Alliance parties were at least unconsumed by acrimony to the extent that they did not run electorate candidates against one another. Dunne won, Jeanette Fitzsimons of the Greens gained Coromandel, Tau Henare held Te Tai Tokerau for the Democrats (somehow), Jim Anderton held Wigram, and although the Liberals lost all their existing seats save for Peters' Tauranga and Brian Donnelly's Whangarei electorates, they also gained two Maori electorates with Rana Waitai and Tuariki Delamere. The big surprise of the night, though, was that Mana Motuhake finally pulled out the stops and took the other two Maori electorates off Labour - albeit only with Winston's endorsement.

One of Mana Motuhake's seats was an overhang, and they therefore didn't get any more seats off the List. Henare's perfidiousness, however, launched John Wright, the Democrat leader, into Parliament. The other minor parties all crossed the threshold, although the NLP only managed it on special votes. After two months of coalition negotiations, it became clear that the only option was for the Liberals and ACT to back National - a coalition which would have a bare 62 seats out of 121. This became 61 almost immediately when Awatere Huata went Independent to get a bigger expenses package, while the Liberals, frustrated at their lack of policy input, lost a couple of MPs along the way despite heavy whipping from Michael Laws - and their participation in two terms of a New Right government finally came back to bite them at the next election.

However, before 1999, the stream of defections from National's coalition partners forced Bolger (and his successor, Jenny Shipley) to acquire the support of the Christian Coalition. Which promptly split between the Christian Democrats, who were more than happy to return to the fold, and Christian Heritage, who spun their decision as a principled, Dutch-confessional-party-style otherworldliness, but seems to have been more down to the fact that their leader didn't want to be under much scrutiny in case the media found out about the child abuse thing.

Suffice to say, this was the only occasion in NZ history when 7 parties crossed the threshold.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

OTL:



Uruguay is almost unique in South America, in that its politics are mostly sane, its parties mostly stable, its conservatives mostly reasonable and its leftists mostly socially liberal and non-corrupt. Admittedly, most of those ‘mostly’s are doing a hell of a lot of work - the Vice President elected in 2014 has been charged with embezzlement.

Traditionally, the partisan divide has been between the Colorados and the Blancos, who are descended from (i.e. they are literally the great-great-great-grandchildren of) the factions of the Civil War which peaked in the 1840s. To simplify hugely, the Colorados were the centralising, liberal inhabitants of Montevideo and the coastal littoral, while the Blancos were the decentralising, protectionist conservatives of the agricultural hinterland. The outcome of the civil war was that the Colorados became the hegemonic party of government for the next hundred years or so (like, literally, they held the executive branch non-stop between 1865 and 1959). The last Blanco militants were defeated in 1904.

Let’s start with the Colorado Party, which has, over the years, been led by such diverse figures as Jose Batlle y Ordonez, Luis Batlle Berres and Jorge Batlle Ibanez. These are just the ones who’ve become President, there’s a ton of other cousins and nephews who have been significant players in the party. The first Batlle, Jose, established the ideology of ‘Batllismo’, which is comparable to the contemporaneous New Liberalism or French Radicalism in that it was interested in solving the Social Question through state intervention and welfarism, while opposing ideas of class conflict. There was also a current of anticlericalism involved, and although the initial conception was only moderately protectionist, this aspect became more and more central under Batlle’s sons and nephews.

Until 1999, the Presidential elections were held under the Law of Lemas (all other elections are still held under this system) in which parties put forward a number of party lists (Lema = list) representing their various ideological factions, and the seats are divided first between the parties and then between the lemas, sub-lemas and occasional sub-sub-lemas that belong to that party. In this way, even though the Blancos usually topped the Presidential poll, the four or five Colorado lemas got the majority of the vote. The most popular Colorado faction was usually the Batllists. This minority group of liberal/social-democrat/radicals held power until the 1950s - and their electoral support depended on local caudillos buying votes in their Departments, particularly the two- or three-member ones. By mid-century, though, it had become really clear that the Batllist social programmes were entirely predicated on high taxes on agricultural exports, and that - and this is the key thing - agricultural profits can go down as well as up.

When the money ran out, the electorate turned to the Blancos and then, from 1966, to figures from the non-Batllist portions of the Colorado Party, who froze wages and gradually imposed an authoritarian dictatorship, #fishhooktheory. By 1976, President Bordaberry was so hardline that he proposed a new Constitution giving the military a permanent role in politics. Hilariously, the military were not at all in favour of this and deposed him in a coup. Less hilariously, the repression and murders of leftists continued. When democracy was restored in 1984, an old Batllist caudillo was elected President, but by this time, the ideological basis of Batllism had been worn away by power: it was now a style of politics based around respectability and statesmanship, and signed up to the new orthodoxy of neoliberalism. The end result of this managerialism was that the electorate eventually abandoned them in favour of the Broad Front in 2004, after a fairly severe economic crisis in which they demonstrated how bad they were at managing things. Since then, they’ve had the common centrist difficulty of finding a space between the major parties of right and left. In 2014, they nominated Bordaberry’s son Pedro, who belongs to the non-Batllist faction of social conservatives and protectionists, but is on good terms with the Frente Amplio. And the Colorados voted in favour of all the FA’s ‘culture war’ reforms.

The other traditional party, the Blancos, organised themselves into the National Party. At the outset, they were rural, protectionist conservatives, but a century in opposition simply made them a repository for anyone who didn’t like the Colorados. These are, since the 70s, grouped into two main factions, the Herreristas and the Wilsonistas.

Herrerism was the traditionally dominant form of Blanco ideology, although there isn’t much linking the current crop of Herrerists with the ideas of Luis Alberto de Herrera - other than the fact that their leader is his great-grandson. Herrerism used to be an anti-statist, agrarian and traditionalist mindset, which took its nationalism to the slightly bizarre endpoint of haranguing the USA for intervening in the internal affairs of Latin American states - you don’t get many right-wingers barracking for the Sandinistas. Nowadays, Herrerism is characterised by a hard-on for the free market and privatisation, a pro-American foreign policy, and an openness to consider social reforms. The Herrerists supplied the 2014 Presidential candidate in the form of Luis Alberto Lacalle, who was President from 1990 to 1995 and - of course - Herrera’s grandson.

On the other side of the National Party are the Wilsonistas, and I will never tire of imagining what kind of kerra-a-azy AH paramilitary organisation that name sounds like. It is usually described as being right-wing and populist, but they think of themselves as centrists and essentially it’s just a group of people who don’t like the Herreristas. It emerged in opposition to the authoritarianism of the Colorado Party and the military in the 60s and 70s and has remained oppositionist to this day - it’s just that the new Thing To Be Opposed is the liberalism of the Frente Amplio. To illustrate how amorphous Wilsonism really is, let’s have a look at the 1984 National Party manifesto, which they wrote most of: it includes proposals to nationalise literally all the banks, break up the big agricultural estates and impose state control of all foreign trade.

I’ve blathered on for long enough, but to just quickly cover the actual Government: the Broad Front (Frente Amplio) is an alliance of parties to the left of the traditional big two, which was formed during the rise of the Colorado dictatorship. Previously, there had been three minor parties which usually had deputy numbers in the single figures: the Communists, the Socialists, and the christian-democratic Civic Union. These groups banded together, along with more minor left-wing groupuscules and dissident Blancos and Colorados, including the Batllist General Liber Seregni, who was their usual pick for Presidential nominee. Then, during the dictatorship, the guerilla movement grew, mainly recruiting from the urban middle classes who could afford to don berets and go camping, but who were really embarrassingly keen on leftism. As such, the Socialists were quickly pushed to the right wing of the FA while the Communists held everything together from the centre (they weren’t exactly Eurocommunists, they just fetishised Organisation in a way that the NSM fans and guerillas didn’t really do).

After the reintroduction of democracy, the Frente Amplio started to become a major player, although it was weakened by a revolving door of Christian Democrats and Batllists who tried to establish themselves as Third Way heroes before giving up and joining either the Colorados or the FA - at which point, some of their members would resile from the merger and form their own independent party of the, er... New Space, and the cycle would begin anew. The current example of this group is the Independent Party, who claim to be in the ‘Fourth Space’ and have gradually grown to have three deputies and a senator.

In 2004, Tabare Vazquez of the FA became President. He is a member of the old Socialist Party, and is therefore on the right of the FA, which helped to avoid some of the pitfalls that other Pink Tide parties have fallen into while discovering a few bespoke ones, such as a bit of opposition to his kowtowing to European investors who wanted to build a couple of hella polluting cellulose factories just upstream of, er, Argentina. His popularity enabled the election of Jose Mujica, a former guerilla, in 2009 (consecutive terms are banned) before Mujica passed the Presidential nomination back to Vazquez in 2014.

Readers will be familiar with Mujica: he was the darling of the global left for legalising gay marriage, marijuana and abortion while rejecting the Presidential Palace in favour of an old shack in the country, from which he commuted in a battered old Beetle and he had a dog that looked exactly like him and oh god i miss the days when not everything was terrible

That said, there were some on the left who weren’t happy with the economically moderate course taken by the Frente Amplio, and in 2014 these groups formed an electoral alliance called Popular Unity which managed to elect a deputy. Overall, though, Vazquez won on the second round and maintained one-seat majorities in both houses. The FA gained votes in the rural constituencies but lost some of their huge Montevideo vote to the Blancos, who also gained about half of the Colorado vote in urban areas. The Colorados themselves are now mostly made up of anti-Batllists, which has pushed one of the Batllist deputies to defect to the Independent Party; meanwhile, the National Party retained a reasonable balance between their factions. Finally, one right-winger from each major party has defected to the new Party of the People (that’s People as in Gente, tr. ‘right-wing people’, not People as in Pueblo, tr. ‘left-wing people’) since the election.

So yeah, basically it’s like Ireland except if Sinn Fein had succeeded in replacing Fianna Fail and if they had a different, but equally aaaaaaaaaaaaaa, electoral system which actively encouraged cute hoor politicians to group themselves into pointless factions.

Addendum: my favourite thing about Uruguay is the Black Native Party, a left-wing anti-racist party set up in the 1930s. It had 22 active members and received 87 votes, but that didn’t stop them from having an acrimonious split which left even the Electoral Court befuddled as to which faction was the legal successor of the initial party, and then - after copious litigation - merging again several months afterwards.

 

[Alex Richards]

That's all just amazing.

 

[Warthog]

Tame Iti, a former Communist who has been raided on suspicion of hoarding weapons for terrorist purposes, has a nutritionist.

For comrades should not live by bread alone...

 

[Nanwe]

This is damn cool, to make things weirder for Uruguay, lema literally means motto or slogan. On the other hand, the institutionalisation of factions is so very Latin American, it's no surprise.

Also, it might be a good idea to point out that in Latin American oftentimes their Christian Democrats are more akin to the Christian left that exists in Italy for instance (see: Prodi, Romano) than the CDU. Also, I love all the weird attempts by Uruguay to become even more the Switzerland of Latin American by imposing a directorial system several times in different fashions.

 

[Warthog]

Spectacular account of Banda Oriental

President Bordaberry was so hardline that he proposed a new Constitution giving the military a permanent role in politics. Hilariously, the military were not at all in favour of this and deposed him in a coup.

Is this the military version of I would never join a club that would accept me as a member? or the grizzled sergeant saying stop Lieutenant! It may look inviting but it's a trap!

Readers will be familiar with Mujica: he was the darling of the global left for legalising gay marriage, marijuana and abortion while rejecting the Presidential Palace in favour of an old shack in the country, from which he commuted in a battered old Beetle and he had a dog that looked exactly like him and oh god i miss the days when not everything was terrible

Basically Thomas Sankara with added marijuana and a cool dog?

 

[Ares96]

Very nice. I’ve been considering doing Uruguay, but you’ve done it justice as I couldn’t have.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

I have acquired a danc book about the Uruguayan military dictatorship through underhand means, and it has the results of the 1980 constitutional referendum by department, so obviously this is now happening.

It was now four years after the Army had deposed President Bordaberry in protest at his proposal to entrench their political power in a new Constitution, so it was now time for the Army to attempt to entrench their political power in a new Constitution. It was much the same as the 1976 proposals: the military would recede from their total command of the bureaucracy of the state, and would instead just form a National Security Council which could depose the President at will. The motives of the Armed Forces in calling the referendum were partly a search for legitimacy for their irregular dictatorship, but mainly a cynical attempt by General Alvarez to become President at the 1981 elections scheduled in the military's timetable.

Alvarez was one of the few Generals who had plausible deniability regarding the neoliberal reforms of the 1970s, having been a relatively progressive figure in the early 70s (in fact, quite a few on the Left were so convinced by his credentials that they supported the '73 coup on the grounds that it would probably be a 'good' military regime like the one that existed in Peru) and refrained from ideology since then, while the others bowed and scraped before Finance Minister Alejandro Vegh Villegas. One theory holds that the real reason they got rid of Bordaberry was that he was keen on a Mussolini-style corporatist state, while they differed by being heavily in favour of the free market. Be that as it may, by this point, the Alvarezistas were simply hungry for power. Under the new Constitution, the Colorado and Blanco parties would select a common Presidential candidate who would just happen to be General Alvarez, and the dictadura would become a democradura.

First, though, there had to be a referendum, and it really speaks to the touching naivety of the Uruguayan military that they didn't even try to falsify the results. Honestly, if I had to be ruled by a military dictatorship, I'd be packing my bags for Uruguay, hands down. They simply assumed that because Chile had just had a successful referendum along the same lines, victory for them was a shoe-in. That said, there was still quite a lot of suppression of democracy through other means - Leftist propaganda was banned, as were 300 politicians from the traditional parties (literally every National or Colorado candidate from the last three elections was banned from talking about politics at first, but the bans were gradually lifted on those who supported the dictatorship). The No campaigns were allowed one rally each in a cinema in Montevideo, and there was also a single television debate. This TV debate is popularly supposed to have decided the outcome: a Colorado newbie called Enrique Tarigo presented a very articulate and detailed case against the new Constitution, clearly winning the debate. Remember, no experienced opposition politicians were allowed to get involved, so the Army assumed that the new leaders would be thoroughly second-rate. Not all of them were.

The debate theory is a nice one (and there's also another key factor: that the abolition of Wage Councils combined with economic liberalisation had worn away at real wages while the economy made progress on paper - shades of the 2010s), but even before that, Gallup had been calling the vote too close to call. This wasn't because the polls were close - they weren't at all. But the Don't Knows were incredibly high, and the pollsters realised that in a situation where you could be arrested for saying you didn't like the Government, normal people probably weren't going to say that they didn't like the Government in the presence of a guy with a clipboard. The pollsters realised this, but the Army didn't, so they let the vote go ahead and were deeply shocked when they lost, 57-43.

This was the start of true democratisation, although it took another five years. There was an internal power struggle within the military, which resulted in Alvarez being appointed President for the term he wanted to be elected to, and - more importantly - exploratory talks between the military and the traditional parties. These talks, and subsequent rounds, collapsed mainly on the grounds that you can't really make a deal in good faith when one side has exiled or arrested most of the main people from the other side and refuses to release them, but it was a start. Free elections were held in 1984 after primaries in 1982 (and we talk about the USA's egregiously long campaign periods) in which Tarigo lost the Colorado vote quite badly to an ideological ally due to no longer being the flavour of the month.

In terms of electoral geography: the urban areas where the opposition were able to be active voted No, while the rural areas were more mixed. This lack of support for the regime in rural areas is a key factor in the weakness of the military dictatorship: unlike in other countries, the ranchers weren't vocally supportive of the regime, and many of them hankered after the generous agricultural subisidies (and also the, like, legit bribes) of the old Colorado Governments which had been stripped away by the Army's neoliberal project. Apathy was the order of the day, until the electorate were given the opportunity to have a real say. When that opportunity came, 85% of them took it.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

Welcome back, my friends, to the Uruguayan electoral map series that never ends.

Democratic elections took place in 1984 for the first time in over a decade, and, notably, not much changed compared to 1971. This is refreshing compared to the experiences of other Latin American countries emerging from dictatorships in that the same parties retained roughly the same support levels and roughly the same support bases as previously. This was mostly down to the resilience of the very loose party structures that we see in Uruguay, where the lemas and sub-lemas make it advantageous for parties to be as amorphous and broad as they can possibly be, and partly down to the relatively non-bloodthirsty nature of the military dictatorship. Twentieth-century Uruguay: so resolutely boring that even a military coup can't liven things up.

Nevertheless, there were some stark changes from the 1971 situation. The National Party, or Blancos, had been a rural conservative group, but the influence of exiled populist demagogue Wilson Ferreira had changed all that. Wilson and his loyal Wilsonistas set themselves up as the most strident opponents of the military regime (Blancos were very good at opposing things, having once been in Opposition for literally a century) and actually started organising membership-based branches of their organisation, which no other faction within the traditional parties had previously thought to do. Wilson himself made regular broadcasts from exile, which helped his followers decisively win the primaries in 1982. These were open primaries, and a majority of primary attendees showed up to the Blanco ones, which created the impression that they would win the actual election. As it happened, they didn't. Several reasons for this:
- Wilson subsequently showed up in Uruguay and made a big speech on the assumption that the Navy would rebel against the Army and make him President. In fact, he was immediately arrested and remained in prison until after the election, being prevented from running despite winning the Blanco primary.
- The Blancos refused to approve the democratic handover because it had been agreed while Wilson was still in prison. By this point, everyone was thoroughly sick of the situation and this hard-line grandstanding alienated voters.
- Wilsonista policy was scarily left-wing, which made their rural conservative base less likely to turn out in their favour. Their rural candidates tried desperately to convince voters that the policy of nationalising all the banks in fact just meant banning foreign ownership, but to little avail.
- The simple turnout differential due to GE voting being compulsory while the primaries were optional. If you opposed the dictatorship, you were more likely to turn out for democratic primaries.
- All national and local elections were held on the same day and vote-splitting was not allowed. The Broad Front candidate for Mayor of Montevideo, future President Tabare Vazquez, had a good chance of winning, so left-wing Blanco voters in the main city abandoned ship.

The loss was a big shock to Wilson, who immediately resiled from his left-wing populist policies and returned to socially conservative populism in a desperate attempt to regain the Blanco base. Spoiler: he lost in 1989.

As such, the winners on the day were the Colorado Party. The minority faction consisted of right-wingers who had supported the dictatorship, but the main Presidential candidate was a Batllist. Batllism, you may remember, was the Establishment ideology of Uruguay, and if it can be described in ideological terms, it broadly equates to 'people who have heard of Keynes'. The candidate, Sanguinetti, was the leader of List 15, the trad Batllist list, but he was in coalition with another, funkier Batllist list called List 85, led by his VP candidate. So if you wanted to vote a Colorado in as President, you could either go for the right-winger or the Keynesian technocrat. If you went for Sanguinetti, you could then choose whether to vote for 15 or 85 further down the ballot - and most of the Sanguinetti voters actually went for List 85, because despite the fact that the VP candidate hated Sanguinetti for personal reasons, the List 85 posters featured Sanguinetti's face much more prominently than the List 15 posters, so voters thought that 85 was the Sanguinetti slate. Batllist Senators and Deputies were therefore largely antipathetic towards Sanguinetti, even though the exact same votes had been cast in both elections. I have been unable to discover which precise expletives Sanguinetti used when he found out what had happened.

The third major party was the centre-left Broad Front. Their leader, Liber Seregni, was still in prison, but he made much less drama out of this than Wilson did. Additionally, the Communists and former Guerillas were still banned from taking part, but they managed to stand decoy lists within the Front. No major gains or losses were had, except growth in Montevideo and declines in rural provinces as lefties in the interior moved over to the Wilsonista Blancos as the only tolerable candidates with a chance of winning in two-member constituencies. Internally, there was some major change. Most of their lists went backwards, including the Communists and guerillas, while the people who had engaged constructively with the democratisation process made up substantial ground. This effectively meant that the Christian Democrat and ex-Colorado Batllist factions moved up to the front rank in what had initially been a Marxist alliance. One commentator noted that the result of the '84 election was that Batllists were victorious in all three parties.

In terms of minor parties: the Patriotic Union, an attempt at a bespoke pro-regime party, got 302 votes across the entire country. Rounding out the Chamber, however, was the Civic Union, which had splintered from the Christian Democrats in 1971 when they joined the Broad Front. Because banter, this anti-socialist Christian Democratic party initially called itself the Radical Christian Union, but this was changed by 1984, by which point they were the somehow the most right-wing party in the country. Sanguinetti appointed one of their number as Minister of Defence: predictably, he almost immediately declared that the Army's intelligence corps was not under his active authority and could basically do what it liked as long as it wasn't an actual coup. Such Radical Christian, many Civic.

In terms of electoral geography, note the Colorado squeaky-bum-time in their traditional heartland of Montevideo, while the Blancos struggle in most of the interior. That very pale Colorado department in the West went their way by 9 votes - 33,397 to 33,388.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

Compare the 1971 election, the one directly before the military takeover. Very similar results, but the Blancos dominated much more in the interior where their traditional voters were. This was the first showing of the Broad Front, which had previously just been individual minor parties - the Front doubled its voteshare from the total of its members' votes in 1966, and came second in Montevideo. In a context of guerilla warfare and industrial unrest, the growth of the Left was quite worrying to conservatives and the armed forces, which was a major contributing reason to the fall of democracy.

The result between the Colorados and Blancos was very close, 41%-40%. This election was one example of the Law of Lemas producing a 'wrong-winner' result, because the main Blanco candidate, Wilson Ferreira, got 26% of the overall vote and topped the poll. But because the Colorado candidates were more ideologically varied (running the gamut between social democrats and authoritarian conservatives) they scooped up more votes, meaning that the authoritarian moron Bordaberry became President with the support of only 22% of the people.

 

[Ares96]

This continues to be fantastic. I guess it's the Kiwi in you, but you really are good at capturing low-key insanity.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

I'm not going to do 1989, because it's quite a boring map - Blancos win everywhere, apart from Montevideo, where the Frente Amplio break through. The Colorados come second overall without coming first in any Department. Incidentally, this was the high point of the periodic Christian-Democratic splinters from the Broad Front, in that the New Space party got 8% of the vote and 9 seats in the Chamber. New Space were an alliance of the Civic Union (Christian Democrats who had left the Front in 1971), the Christian Democrats (the Civic Union people who had chosen to stay in the Front in 1971, but now left in 1989 and subsequently rejoined when New Space didn't work out for them) and List 99 (Batllists who had left the Colorados in 1971 and now left the Front in '89, going on to split into three new lists before the next elections, one of which was called - and I'm not making this up - List 99,000).

What I am going to do is look at the Presidential votes for the Colorado candidates, because they happen to be quite evenly split between the two main candidates.

Sanguinetti, the vaguely Third Way Batllist, was term-limited - and probably wouldn't have been keen to run again anyway, what with how he didn't even have majority support within his own faction, let alone the Chamber or the Senate. Throughout his term he had had to depend on the kindness of Blancos, who despite running well to the left of the Broad Front in 1984 and traditionally being on the right, occupied the centre-ground in the late 80s in practice.

Who would replace him? Well, his VP was Tarigo, the master debater against the 1980 Constitution and subsequently the trickster who'd pulled Batllist votes towards his own List 85 with dodgy posters. Sanguinetti, however, endorsed Tarigo as his successor - but the conservative Establishment section of Batllism were much less keen, largely because Tarigo actually appeared to believe in things and have an ideology. He was the face of the young, mass-membership social-democratic sub-faction which thought that trade unions might genuinely be a good thing. Obviously, the Establishment couldn't have that: the founding purpose of the Colorado Party was to serve the interests of a few dozen pork-distributers.

As such, a conservative Batllist, Jorge Batlle y Ibanez (yes, relation), entered the ring against Tarigo. This posed a problem, as the conservative-authoritarian-populist wing of the Colorados had already chosen to run with Pacheco, who had been President from 1967 to 1972 and begun the whole awful process of military authoritarianism in the first place. There was a very real concern that if two Batllist candidates ran and got individually fewer votes than Pacheco, they would attract progressive voters merely to hand those votes to Pacheco and enable a return to horribleness. So the Batllists organised a primary election, which was bitterly contested but won narrowly by Batlle over Tarigo - Batlle would therefore be the sole Batllist candidate in the 1989 election! Apart, that is, from Hugo Fernandez Faingold, a Sanguinettista who refused to accept the result of the primary and ran as an Independent within the Colorado lema. It's a great electoral system.

Be that as it may, the division weakened the Batllist current in the eyes of the electorate, along with the Colorado Party as a whole, so the upshot was that the Blancos won the election. However, both Batlle and Pacheco won about 14% of the national vote - there were about 2,000 votes in it.

This is mapped below. Batlle is obviously quite popular in the areas where his relatives used to dole out civil service jobs in return for votes, but I'll admit that I'd have thought Montevideo would be stronger for him. I have two hypotheses to explain the urban vote for Pacheco: 1) the Colorado vote in urban areas was more right-wing than average, because most of the progressives who might have supported the Batllists had already abandoned ship for the up-and-coming Broad Front; and 2) Sanguinetti and Tarigo had the bulk of their bases in Montevideo, so their supporters might have been put off by this random Batlle scion throwing his hat into the ring and stealing the nomination.

It hardly mattered, because Batlle beat Pacheco by a whisker overall (Fernandez Faingold, naturally, got 0.7%) and both were beaten handily by the much more united Blancos. After the defeat - the first loss to the National Party in a generation - the Batllist faction formally split into Sanguinettistas and Jorgistas. Hilariously, that split is still in effect, although the two factions cautiously began to work together again from 2009 onward, by which point the Colorados were definitively the third party of Uruguayan politics.

Absolute scenes.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

All the European Parliament candidates before PR was introduced who got more than 5% but weren't from a major party (i.e. Lab, Con, LD, SNP, PC, and Greens but only in 1989 yes I know how arbitrary that is)

1979

• Cornwall and Plymouth - Richard Jenkin (Mebyon Kernow) - 5.9% - pretty much the central figure of Mebyon Kernow for most of the late 20th century. He ran on a single issue of fighting for a EuroParl constituency that didn't include Plymouth.
• The Cotswolds - Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett (United Against the Common Market) - 6.1% - literally the leader of Pathfinder Force in Bomber Command, responsible for blowing Germany to pieces during the War. I suppose he thought he hadn't quite finished the job. He had previously been a Liberal MP for about a month after winning a by-election in May 1945.

1988 by-election

• Hampshire Central - Martin Attlee, 2nd Earl Attlee (SDP) - 7.7% - yes, that's right, Clement's son. Yes, that's right, the continuity SDP.

1994

• Glasgow - Tommy Sheridan (Scottish Militant Labour) - 7.6% - latterly a convicted perjurer. SML was a sister party of SPEW and got folded into the SSP a few years later in an attempt to dilute the London CWI influence and replace it with that of the London SWP.
• London North East - Jean Lambert (Green) - 6.5% - latterly an MEP.
• The Cotswolds - M Rendell (New Britain) - 5.7% - I've been unable to find anything on this guy; suspect it's enough to say that New Britain was a white nationalist party which boasted two future UKIP MEPs as members, along with the astronomer Patrick Moore.
• Coventry and North Warwickshire - Robert Meacham (For British Independence and Free Trade) - 5.5% - another one who did absolutely nothing else with his life.
• Devon and East Plymouth - David Morrish (Liberal) - 6.2% - a Liberal Councillor in Exeter from 1961 to 2011, and a rare Remainer in the Continuity Liberals.
• Essex North and Suffolk South - Carlo de Chair (Independent Anti European Superstate) - 6.0% - Wikipedia says that it was Carlo's father, former Tory MP, sex addict and father-in-law of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Somerset de Chair, but Wikipedia is wrong.
• Essex West and Hertfordshire East - Bryan Smalley (Independent for a Sovereign Britain) - 5.5% - subsequently a member of New Britain and UKIP (he stood again in 1999 and 2004), he has also written a book on the history of Much Hadham (a village in Hertfordshire) and numerous letters to the Daily Telegraph.
• Herefordshire and Shropshire - Felicity Norman (Green) - 5.6% - interested in agricultural stuff; also bizarrely endorsed by RESPECT when she stood again in 2009.
• Itchen, Test and Avon - Nigel Farage (UKIP) - 5.4% - feel like I've heard of this guy.
• Kent West - Craig Mackinlay (UKIP) - 5.2% - Now Tory MP for South Thanet and election criminal.
• Sussex South and Crawley - PJ Beever (Green) - 5.1% - a woman.

1996 by-election

• Merseyside West - Steve Radford (Liberal) - 6.9% - categorically does not keep a gimp in his cellar. He doesn't even have a cellar.

1998 by-election

• Yorkshire South - Peter Davies (UKIP) - 11.6% - later became Mayor of Doncaster for the English Democrats.

 

[Alex Richards]

Somerset de Chair

Mazda, I've been very generous with you, but there's no way this is actually a real person.

 

[RyanF]

Mazda, I've been very generous with you, but there's no way this is actually a real person.

That's a name? I thought it was a title held by Rees-Mogg.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

Mazda, I've been very generous with you, but there's no way this is actually a real person.

His obituary is a read worth savouring.

 

[Alex Richards]

His obituary is read worth savouring.

Utterly mental.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

Utterly mental.

I'm really annoyed that someone else got to the title 'The Teetotalitarian State' before I did - I was saving it for a collection of satirical essays on how Millennials have ruined civil liberties, alcoholism, and free markets.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

With apologies to @moth and @Mumby.

The fascinating history of British Liberalism came to an end, in many ways, with the decision of Liberal leader Clement Davies to defy his Party Executive in 1951 and guarantee Winston Churchill a majority. The institutional inheritance of the old Liberals was even then split between the Liberals and the National Liberals, and Davies' choice split the mainline Liberals asunder once more. Only a minority of the right-liberals followed the five Daviesite MPs into coalition with the Conservatives and the Nat Libs, while the vast majority of the grassroots (derided as "cranks and closet Socialists" by some senior Daviesites) remained in the Grimondite wing, named for their sole remaining MP.

The process of disentanglement was messy, as was the nomenclature. At first the coalitionists were called Daviesite or Independent Liberals - both because they were independent of the Liberal Party and because they vaunted their political independence from the Tories, on the dubious grounds that they had their own policies, their own whips, and the right to fight Conservatives in elections. On the latter point, they were differentiated from the National Liberals, who were by now largely a flag of convenience for Conservatives in certain constituencies. One of the prices for Davies' entry into the new National Government was that the Nat Libs must dispose of their Liberal branding, so they were renamed the Centre Party in short order. Meanwhile, the Grimondite Liberals found themselves being called Radical Liberals and then merely Radicals, despite their protestations that they were entirely identical with the Liberal Party of yesteryear - in the end, the Independentist propaganda of the Daviesites won the air battle, and the 'Independent' differentiator gradually withered away.

The Daviesite Liberals, then, had high hopes that the influence of Liberal principles on the National Government would reopen a gap in the market for their own group. It was not to be. Davies made little impact on the Education portfolio he was given in Churchill's cabinet apart from to make efficiency savings, and was shuffled off to the Wales Office when Eden came in. Liberal electioneering material merely pointed to the moderate and democratic policy of the Conservatives as evidence that they were restraining the Tories' worst impulses, although this is difficult to prove. In any case, the best opportunity for the Liberals to exert influence was surely during the Suez Crisis - but the aimless Daviesites acquiesced in Eden's deeply flawed leadership. That is, apart from Donald Wade, who found so little support in his party that he defected to the Grimondites.

Davies might reasonably have assumed that the Tories would arrange for Liberals to run unopposed in winnable seats - or at least allow Wade to be succeeded by a Liberal at the next election. Before 1951, Churchill had promised to stand aside in 40 winnable constituencies, but the Liberals' habit of standing against Conservative candidates (although never in a tight race) stood in the way of the close relations enjoyed by the Tories and the Centre Party. A Conservative was selected in Huddersfield West. Shortly afterwards, the Liberal Rhys Hopkin Morris passed away, and a Liberal was endorsed by the local Tories, but the campaign was left entirely in the hands of the near-skint Daviesites, which allowed former Liberal Megan Lloyd George to take the seat for Labour. To their credit, the Conservatives approved of Emlyn Hooson to succeed Clement Davies upon the latter's death in 1962, and arranged for the transferral of the Centre Party seat of Torrington to Mark Bonham-Carter in a by-election in 1958, in order to defray the losses of the previous year. In 1964, another Centre constituency was transferred in the form of Ross and Cromarty, held until his death by Alasdair Mackenzie.

The National character of the Government was maintained by the presence of not only Centre Party figures like Gwilym Lloyd George, John Maclay and Charles Hill in Cabinet, but also (upon the retirement of Davies) of new Liberal leader Roderic Bowen as Secretary of State for Wales and Housing and, latterly, Mark Bonham-Carter as a junior minister in the Foreign Office - he returned there as Secretary of State during the Howe Government. However, Bowen was dispensed with in the Night of the Long Knives and Cabinet-level Liberal representation only returned when Butler reappointed him to counter the free enterprise hardliners in his Cabinet. While the Centre Party increasingly became a centre of Gladstonian opposition to the post-war economic consensus, the Liberals atrophied in support, in influence, and in ideological rigour. Which is not to say that the Centre Party was united in dryness - the wet standard-bearer Heseltine later described their ideology as "Centre Party", after all - but the reinvigoration of their structures by the free-market 'Hastings Group' in the late 50s set them well apart from the disintegrating Liberals. The latter party weren't even united on internationalism, as Mackenzie was a voluble opponent of the EEC.

Come the Jenkins landslide of 1969, both Bowen and the other surviving defector of 1951, Arthur Holt, both lost their seats to Labour. Bowen, a party leader and Cabinet minister, was lost among the other scalps of the night, which presaged an even more dispiriting future. This was confirmed when the death of Alasdair Mackenzie came the next year. Instead of approving a Liberal to take a seat with such a strong Liberal history, the Conservatives made it clear that they would prefer it if the Party could make room for Desmond Donnelly to return to Parliament with his Democratic Labour Party. Seeing that the writing was on the wall, Hooson and Bonham-Carter wound up the Liberals and joined the Centre Party, joined sometime later by the DLP.

​

The Grimondites, meanwhile, took most of the Liberal money, most of the members and over half of the votes. However, the larger donors struggled to maintain their enthusiasm for bankrolling a party with only a single MP and a tendency towards the centre-left - the loss of the Bonham-Carters was a personal as well as a financial disappointment for Grimond. Consequently, the Radical Liberals struggled to put up large numbers of candidates. When Gravesham MP Richard Acland defected their way from Labour ahead of the 1955 poll in protest at their acceptance of the policy of nuclear deterrence, he was dismayed to find that he could not prevail upon the South East Radical and Liberal Association to pay his deposit.

Acland paid his own way and wasted £500, but in his former constituency of North Devon, a promising young man by the name of Jeremy Thorpe won the Radicals' second proper seat with the aid of a local electoral pact with Labour. These kinds of deals became increasingly common over the course of the existence of the Radical Party, moving from ad hoc deals hammered out between local executives to something approaching a full electoral alliance. Even a tiny party could not be allowed to split the vote in defeats as close as those of 1951 or 1964.

If the Radicals had anything on their side, it was a combination of charismatic orators and genuine policy innovation. Freed from the dead weight of the right-Liberals, the Radicals centred themselves around co-operative industry, opposition to nuclear weapons, environmental activism (which usually verged into NIMBYism) and social liberalisation on areas like divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Their principled stances brought them plaudits but few votes - even their previously potent local representation withered away once Grimond directed Michael Meadowcroft to break up the Radical-Conservative alliances that still existed in many local authorities come the early 60s. On the plus side, their opposition to Eden's imperialism in Suez brought over two defectors: Donald Wade from the Daviesite Liberals and Frank Medlicott from the Centre Party. Neither were re-elected against Conservative opponents.

Moderate electoral success did arrive after over a decade of hard work in Liberal-pedigree seats in Grimond's Northern Scotland stomping ground - Inverness from a Unionist, Caithness and Sutherland from a recent defector to the Centre Party, and shortly afterwards, a border seat from another Unionist as David Steel entered Parliament in a by-election. Labour stood aside in all but Roxburgh, as well as standing aside for the Radicals' ultimately unsuccessful candidate in Ross and Cromarty (incidentally, one of the four occasions on which the Daviesites and Grimondites actually opposed each other at an election). At the next election, they reimposed a candidate against John Bannerman in Inverness because he had sought and received the endorsement of the Scottish National Party - the poor man came third and handed Inverness back to the Tories. A Bannerman-style strategy was, however, successful in Cornwall, where a deal with Mebyon Kernow secured the election of Peter Bessell in 1969. This presaged, of course, the rise of nationalist parties as the only effective minor parties in Great Britain.

Now on five seats, the Radicals were at the height of their powers. But it was all a mirage. Their victories were largely gained solely with the acquiescence of the Labour Party - in fact, at the retirement of John Stuart Mowat, unhappy with a long-sought political life, they pressured the local Radicals into accepting a known Labour man as their new candidate on pain of a contested left-wing vote. This was only the first indignity: Peter Bessell's dodgy business dealings came back to bite him and his creditors agreed not to take action against him while he was an MP, out of respect for the office. This resulted in Bessell hiring a yacht in Plymouth on election night while the bailiffs besieged him on the pier. When a phonecall came through to tell Bessell he'd lost his seat, he cast off and sailed to the Caymans for the rest of his natural life. Unfortunately for the Party, this whole standoff had been noticed by a BBC camera crew and was reported on throughout the night by a bemused Cliff Michelmore.

The Radical brand was never to recover, but the death knell was surely the murder of Norman Scott, which - quite apart from anything else - immediately ended the leadership of Jeremy Thorpe in brutal ignominy. The Radicals lost the by-election, and badly. Come 1978, the Party struggled to save half a dozen deposits in seats it didn't hold (partly because of the recurring scandals, partly because they'd supported the tired Jenkins Government when it was whittled down to a minority at the end of the Parliament) while on a policy level, it was becoming increasingly clear that there was little separating them from the Jenkinsites. Bowing to financial and political pressure, Grimond took his last Radicals into Labour and stood down, a broken man, in 1982. David Steel would eventually serve as Home Secretary when Labour took back power from the Third National Government in 1996.

Although Centre Party leader Michael Heseltine would depose Howe in 1988, the winding up of the Radicals was to all intents and purposes the final end of independent Liberalism in Britain.

​

 

[Md139115]

His obituary is a read worth savouring.

This cannot be real. I reject the idea that it can be real. I demand the execution of the editor, the obituary writers, and anyone else connected to this insanity’s publication for crimes against journalism.