PM's Election Maps And Stuff Thread

[prime-minister]

I had a little idea for something else London-related to map in between LCC elections. So, the 33 boroughs of Greater London came into existence to replace the 28 boroughs of the County of London and expand the capital region, but these boundaries were a second attempt. Initially the Royal Commision on Local Government in Greater London, known for short as the Herbert Commission after its chair Sir Edwin Herbert, proposed a very different set of boroughs covering an even larger area.

These boundaries would have created 52 Greater London boroughs out of the existing 28 boroughs, plus all the local authorities of Middlesex except Potters Bar, 17 from Surrey, 14 from Essex, 8 from Kent, and Barnet and Cheshunt from Hertfordshire. It's unclear what they would've been named as the committee never reached that stage, so I've instead elected to show the types of local authorities they were at the time as well as their boundaries.

The then-Local Government Secretary Keith Joseph turned these boundaries down both because they were considered to be undersized and because local pressure was mounting from several pro-Tory districts to prevent their inclusion. Ten districts would opt out of becoming part of Greater London- Chigwell in Essex, Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, Staines and Sunbury in Middlesex (which became part of Surrey), and Walton and Weybridge, Esher, Epsom and Ewell, Banstead, and Caterham and Warlingham in Surrey. From what I gather, Epsom and Ewell opted out right at the last minute, and for a while after the other districts had opted out was meant to be part of Kingston-upon-Thames.

Another part of why the commission had to go back to the drawing board was that several of these boundaries didn't solve the problems this reorganisation was meant to fix. For instance, North Woolwich would've stayed in Woolwich despite geographically being part of East Ham and so having a ridiculous amount of conflicting local government agencies controlling it, and the proposed borough combining Holborn, Finsbury and Shoreditch had a combined population of under 95,000.

On the flipside, you can tell there's a lot of parts of this that were in line with what the boroughs actually wanted- West Ham and East Ham staying separate, Hornsey and Wood Green merging with Southgate instead of Tottenham, Hayes and Harlington sharing a borough with Southall instead of Uxbridge, and Wembley and Wllesden remaining separate. It's also a bit funny to me how Wandsworth getting sliced apart and absorbing Battersea was something proposed this early considering it was the only existing borough to be split instead of merged.

 

[prime-minister]

I haven’t really posted much TL stuff here, but since I’m working on an idea for one at the moment, I figured I’d post a little something from it. It’s called ‘Waiting at the Church’, and it’s my first UK ATL for quite a while.

The PoD is Jim Callaghan calling an election in winter 1978 rather than holding off until spring 1979. While Labour appear to have the advantage early on, the Tories run a strong campaign and in the end Thatcher wins power, but with a majority of just 10. She aggressively whips the party to enact public spending cuts and pushes for privatization, but soon starts alienating the ‘wets’ to an even greater extent than in OTL.

The cuts are met with substantive strike action from trade unions, paralyzing many industries and sectors in a manner akin to (if not more extensive than) the Winter of Discontent, and the spending cuts cause unemployment to surge. By the end of 1979, Thatcher has become even more unpopular than in OTL, but still commands the steadfast support of the Tory right.

On the left, Labour has badly fractured with a similarly divisive leadership contest to OTL leading to the same result, i.e. Foot succeeding Callaghan and the right of the party breaking off. In TTL, however, the Gang of Four had been in discussions with prominent ‘wets’ and the Liberals to form a third front against the two main parties. This culminates in January 1980 with the formation of the Moderate Party, which soon sees a massive surge in support and manages to secure the defection of a large contingent of members of both Labour and the Tories.

At the Southend East by-election in March, the Moderates stand Shirley Williams, who captures the rock-solid Tory seat by a sizeable margin. In her first speech in Parliament since leaving it a year and a half prior, she announces the Moderates’ plan to introduce a motion of no confidence in the Thatcher government, which passes in early April.

Thatcher, condemning the ‘treachery’ of the Commons, seeks a dissolution of Parliament, but it goes poorly for both the Tories and Labour as the Moderates and Liberals form an electoral pact and win more than enough seats combined to hold the balance of power. Since the Moderates won more seats than the Liberals, Williams becomes their prospective Prime Minister, aided by her approval ratings outstripping not only those of Thatcher and Foot, but almost all the other potential Tory and Labour PMs.

Thatcher and Foot resign after Williams is voted into office by the Commons, being succeeded by Michael Heseltine and (in a similarly narrow vote to the 1979 leadership election, but in the other direction) Denis Healey. The Labour left is rattled by its defeat here, and crucially they vote in favour of the Moderate-Liberal Alliance motion to introduce PR, as do the minor parties and a significant minority of Tories seeing an opportunity to split Labour further apart.

The PR system is tabled and then implemented in a sort of compromise fashion, with the majority of constituencies drawn up as two- to four-member districts electing local representatives (aside from the island constituencies, which are too small for multiple members so continue to use FPTP). To proponents, and in the view of most of the public, this allows for a good mix of the fairer representation PR is supposed to provide and the personal accountability of the old single-member FPTP constituency system.

Almost immediately after PR is passed into law, the party system splits again. The Labour left break off to form the Socialist Party, and a smaller faction of the Tory right forms the hard right National Party; it soon becomes clear that without a coalition between the parties, the government has very little capacity to function.

Despite this, since Williams passed the popular PR law, reduced spending cuts and managed to form a settlement with the trade unions (at least temporarily), she felt her position was strong enough to seek a new dissolution of Parliament at the end of 1980, with the date of the next election set for the 5th February 1981.

That’s the election shown here, and as you can tell, the Moderates do pretty well out of it, becoming the largest party by a narrow margin. Having said that, despite both having their membership ripped asunder Labour and the Tories holds up relatively well, and the personal votes of many Socialist candidates (as well as Labour voters in areas like Liverpool and the South Wales valleys sympathising with the party’s more left-wing stance) helps them outperform expectations. Ironically, the Liberals don’t make especially large gains from the new system, as the new Moderate-Liberal pact sees them stand down in the Moderates’ favour in much of the country in exchange for Moderate campaign support in areas friendly to them.

Between them, the Moderates and Liberals have 238 seats, far ahead of the traditional major parties, and Williams enters negotiations with both Labour and the Tories hoping to form a coalition with a comfortable majority in the Commons. Despite the ideological closeness of the rump parties to each other, this is not to be- the Tories refuse to go into coalition after doing so the first time led them to their worst result in almost 150 years, and Labour are wary of allying with the Liberals after the Lib-Lab pact.

What Williams is able to secure is a new confidence and supply arrangement, and one where the government is much more stable since the Moderates now have a substantial grouping in the Commons and a mandate of sorts.

So yeah, I'm open to feedback on this idea, and particularly stuff like how realistic the voting patterns on the map seem and the alternate Labour split, since I'm still undecided on stuff like who in the Gang of Four would make sense as a prospective PM (I considered Roy Jenkins but then changed my mind and went with Williams instead).

 

[prime-minister]

I just realised I’ve been sitting on an Iceland 2009 map for ages and never got round to doing a writeup for it, which is a shame because it’s a fairly interesting election and I probably could’ve and should’ve a long time ago.


The 2009 election remains the high watermark for the left-wing Social Democratic Alliance (SDA), though their current poll numbers are very healthy and there’s a possibility they could surpass that if they hold steady by the next election, and to date mark the only time since its founding that the Independence Party has not been the biggest party in the Althing. The reason for these big reversals in fortune was, of course, the severe consequences of the Great Recession in Iceland.

The Independence Party had been in power continuously since 1991, first in coalition with the old Social Democratic Party from 1991 to 1995, then with Iceland’s other major party the Progressive Party up until 2006, and then with the SDA (which had formed in 2000 after the three separate social democratic parties presented a joint list in 1999) after the Progressives pulled out of the coalition. Initially this had seen the SDA’s until-then meteoric growth take a hit, with the party losing seats at the 2007 election, not helped by the fact it had long been seen as too soft-left by a faction that proceeded to leave to form the green socialist Left-Green Movement, but the Independence Party would proceed to spectacularly self-destruct in the brief parliamentary term that followed.

See, between 1991 and 2004, the Independence Party’s leader Davið Oddsson, had served as Prime Minister and enacted a swathe of privatisation and tax cut plans. While he had resigned due to a combination of an agreement with the Independence Party limiting his time left in office and a failed bill trying to establish restrictions on media company ownership that President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson had vetoed, he served Minister for Foreign Affairs for a year and then became Governor of the Central Bank of Iceland. Under his watch, and arguably because of his government’s policies, the Central Bank would prove impotent when the Great Recession caused a crisis of confidence in three of Iceland’s biggest banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki.

These banks had been expanding internationally, and now had assets 11 times the size of Iceland’s GDP and accrued the country 7 times that in external debt; the most obvious way this manifested was in the Icesave dispute where the UK and Netherlands claimed Iceland owed them the insurance for deposits investors there had made into Landsbanki before it folded. All three of the banks were taken into government ownership and renamed to try to distance them from the mismanagement which had led to their collapse, a humiliating development for the Independence Party, and most of their international operations were cut back, causing a decline in foreign involvement in Iceland’s economy; famously, a year later McDonald’s closed its last Icelandic branch, and the last ever cheeseburger brought there was turned into an exhibition piece by the buyer.

The public response to this is perhaps best summed up by a phrase popularised by comedian and later Mayor of Rekjavik Jón Gnarr in a comedy sketch on the end-of-year comedy special Áramótaskaupið– ‘Helvítis fokking fokk!!’, which apparently roughly translates as ‘What the fuckity fucking fuck!!’ and is officially my favourite slogan in the history of politics. In the winter of 2008-9, all hell broke loose with protestors demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Geir Haarde and for new elections to be called immediately; the protests were the biggest in Iceland’s history, and the police using tear gas on the protestors was an even worse look for the government. Another act of public disobedience, where people banged pots and pans to disrupt the Althing’s first meeting of the year, gave the protests their popular nickname- the ‘Kitchenware Revolution’.

In late January, Geir agreed to resign, citing his recent diagnosis of oesophageal cancer and definitely nothing else, and Ólafur invited the SDA’s Social Affairs Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir to form a coalition with the Left-Greens. Jóhanna was one of the only government ministers whose conduct the public approved of, and had a good working relationship with the Left-Greens even though they didn’t command a majority in the Althing combined, which stood the two left-wing parties in good stead for the election Jóhanna proceeded to call.

That election would see the combined left win a majority in the Althing for the first time in history, with the Independence Party losing nearly 13 percentage points and 9 of its 25 seats (it likely only avoided losing more thanks to interim chairman, and later PM and Centre Party leader Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, accepting the public demand for an early election). The Left-Greens even topped the poll in the Northeast constituency where its leader Steingrímur J. Sigfússon is based. The newly-formed Citizens’ Movement also won 4 seats, a sign of how the Kitchenware Revolution would give rise to minor parties in Iceland for quite some time to come.

While the new government would be famously radical in many areas, notably including Jóhanna’s status as the world’s first LGBTQ person elected as a head of state, its ban on strip clubs and its invocation of the Landsdómur (national court) for the first time ever to try to convict Geir for misconduct during the financial crisis, it ended up falling short in many others. Davið Oddsson faced few consequences, becoming editor of the Morgunblaðið newspaper in September 2009, a post he holds to this day; attempts at a new citizen-drafted constitution proved heavily protracted; and the SDA’s efforts to bring Iceland into the EU were stymied by opposition from across the political spectrum, especially with the Icesave dispute damaging trust in European cooperation.

The SDA-Left-Green government would ultimately office after a landslide defeat in 2013 having run out of time to push for many of their reforms and lost popularity over their handling of others, with a new Independence-Progressive coalition being formed which unceremoniously threw out the constitutional plans and attempts to join the EU.

 

[prime-minister]

Maybe I should've saved this idea for May the 4th, but since I discovered the data to do it was very easy to find and it was a good excuse to reuse and adjust my old council area basemap, I figured it'd be fun to.

 

[prime-minister]

Max mentioning Saarland in his recent Germany posts made me remember I had a map of the
elections in the Saar Protectorate lying around.



During its time as an independent nation, the Saarland was effectively in a disputed position internationally between France and West Germany, but with an initial bias towards France due to the whole 'Nazi annexation' thing, a trade agreement with the country, and the fact pro-German parties weren't allowed to run at first. The dominant party in the 1947 and 1952 elections was the Christian People's Party of the Saarland (Christliche Volkspartei des Saarlandes, CVP), which won majorities in those elections. This was in no small part due to its leader Johannes Hoffmann, who had been an anti-Nazi dissident after the Saarland's annexation, and its stance as ideologically very similar to the CDU without being pro-German.

Other parties in the Saarland at the time included the Social Democratic Party of the Saarland (Sozialdemokratische Partei des Saarlandes, SPS), a social democratic party obviously close to the SPD but with the same ambiguous position on the Saarland's foreign policy as the CVP, even having Cabinet positions at times; the Democratic Party of the Saarland (Demokratische Partei Saar, DPS), the local branch of the FDP which was initially also sympathetic to France but then became home to a lot of ex-Nazi Party members who wanted the Saarland to rejoin Germany, for which the party was banned in 1951 (I get the impression it was for the German revanchism and not the former Nazism, depressingly); and the Communist Party of the Saarland (Kommunistische Partei Saar, KP), who (shock!) were communists, though notably they were actually the only party whose members voted against ratifying the Constitution.

I mentioned before how Hoffmann was ideologically very similar to the CDU, but where his ideology differed (and differed from France, in fact) was in foreign policy. He argued for Saarland to establish a separatist position where it would become a unifying European buffer state of sorts. To this end, as the Saar's Prime Minister he advocated for the Saar Statute that would make it independent with the trade agreement with France continuing.

However, public opposition to the Statute and the continued French cooperation it represented had grown significantly, not helped by the chaotic policies of the Fourth Republic in contrast to West Germany's emerging prosperity. The 1952 election saw 24.5% of the vote going to blank ballots for the banned pro-German parties, and in turn Hoffmann and his rule became an enemy of the movement too; in the October 1955 referendum on the Saar Statute, the No campaign used the slogan 'Der Dicke muss weg' (literally 'The fat guy has to go').

Indeed, that referendum saw a strong vote against the Statute (I would include a map of it here but the results are reported on district boundaries rather than the three constituencies the Lantag elections were done on, so I'll do that once I've got a good basemap for it) that led Hoffmann to resign and new elections to be called. This time, pro-German parties were allowed to run, including the CDU and DSP (the SPD by another name- I think I can trust they don't need introducing!), as well as the DPS, which had became very popular after the ban on it was lifted due to its steadfast support for the nationalist movement and came just 1.2% behind the CDU. The Heimatbund alliance of these three pro-German parties took a combined 63.9% of the vote and 33 (rising to 34 after electoral appeals) of the 50 seats in the Landtag.

With public opinion in Saarland now clearly majority pro-German unification, the French and West German governments negotiated the Saar Treaty, allowing Saarland to become a German state in exchange for channellizing the Moselle and teaching French as the first foreign language of the province. This was agreed in October 1956, and on the 1st January 1957 Saarland joined West Germany. Interestingly, DPS leader Heinrich Schneider would be elected as the first member of the Bundestag for Saarbrücken at the election later that year, the second-to-last time to date that the FDP has won a constituency seat.

 

[prime-minister]

I finally got round to doing a follow-up to the 1989 House of Councillors election map I made a while back. Surprisingly, despite the fact that this was just shy of a year before the election which famously shattered the 1955 system, and the fact the 1989 election was by far the JSP's finest hour after it split in the 50s, 1992 was a much more quiet election than either of those, and in many ways makes for a standard 'green map' of the LDP sweeping the country.

Having said that, there are still interesting points. For one thing, the LDP lost seats again, which isn't that surprising considering the Lost Decade had begun by this point even if the party hadn't split, but the JSP actually gained some, hitting their highest seat total after 1965 in this election. This was not only despite the party being well into its death spiral, but also despite their voteshare almost halving compared to 1989 thanks to the free trade dispute dying down and Takako Doi not being leader anymore.

The really notable part, though, is that future Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa's Japan New Party, founded less than two months prior, won four seats with 8% of the vote in the national constituency, a premonition of things to come. I also suspect the Independent elected in Hosokawa's native Kumamoto Prefecture (and the others that ran) was probably aligned with them too, though I can't find much info on their allegiances.

 

[prime-minister]

Considering I made a whole Czechoslovakia TL on the Other Place, I may as well map the first election in the independent Czech Republic.


Following the Velvet Divorce, the Czech Republic continued on with its National Council elected in 1992 as the legislature, with the first election held three years later. The two Václavs- Havel, the President and leader of the Civic Forum independence movement and previously a signatory of Charter 77, and Klaus, the first independent Czech Prime Minister- had a pretty spotty working relationship, as Klaus wanted to introduce a more intensive neoliberal policy. Nevertheless, Klaus's party, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS), and Havel's, the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA), were in coalition with the refounded version of the pre-coup People's Party (now known as the Christian Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People's Party, KDU-ČSL).

The left were finally starting to get a more coherent strategy, as the Czechoslovak Party of Social Democrats (ČSSD) led by Miloš Zeman led a vigorous campaign that involved a national road trip on an old bus named 'Zemák' (which apparently means 'countryman', 'potato' and 'Zeman's Karosa (the make of the bus)'- Zeman's personal brand is weirdly heavily tied into buses, to the point that Czech Wikipedia has a whole article about the various buses called Zemák he's used in his campaigns). Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) had had control of it taken over by the anti-revisionist wing, further strengthening the ČSSD as a left-wing alternative.

Because of the continued strength of the Rally for the Republic - Republican Party of Czechoslovakia (SPR-RSČ), neither the left nor the right held enough seats to form a majority government, with the ODS-led coalition 2 seats short of one. This led to the ČSSD having to tolerate the government, which gradually led to it returning to government over the course of the next brief term, and contributed quite a bit to the corruption endemic in modern Czech politics.

One little thing of note about the electoral system is that the 1996 and 1998 elections didn't have a constituency for overseas voters. As far as I can tell (the most immediate explanation I could find was genuinely on the Japanese Wikipedia of all places, so I may have misunderstood), it instead had a second round of seat allocation, based on taking the votes for the main parties above the 5% threshold that didn't contribute to netting seats and allocating them in one national constituency.

 

[prime-minister]

The 1996-98 session of the Chamber of Deputies saw the unstable ODS-led governing coalition collapse partly due to economic decline and partly because of a scandal in which it was revealed that two people claimed to be the ODS’s biggest sponsors were pseudonyms for Milan Šrejber, who privatised the Třinec Iron and Steel Works. Just to twist the knife further for the ODS, it was revealed in November 1997 that the party had a secret Swiss bank account, which made any attempts to fix the apparent embezzlement look pretty farcical.

The ODA and KDU-ČSL withdrew all support for the government in response, and the ODS’s Interior Minister Jan Ruml challenged Václav Klaus for the party leadership. You might have expected him to win, but Klaus had strengthened his position with the ODS rank and file with the fact that he was in Sarajevo at the time, and coined the nickname ‘Sarajevském atentátu’ (‘Sarajevo assassinations’) for his treatment among his supporters; it’s likely that his being at the Bosnian front also helped his image of being both a strong leader and disconnected from the ODS’s corruption. Nethertheless, Klaus stood down in favour of Czech National Bank governor Josef Tošovský, who led a caretaker government until new elections could be held in the summer of 1998.

Consequently, Klaus defeated Ruml in the leadership contest easily. Ruml’s faction then left the ODS to form the Freedom Union (US), which initially surged in the polls, helped by the ODS being tarnished and the ODA choosing not to contest the election. However, the US would soon be drowned out thanks to their support for the Tošovský government and the ODS recovering some of their popularity thanks to Klaus’s continued leadership- there was little difference in the US and ODS policy platforms, but the ODS stressing the personally popular Klaus benefitted the party despite its scandals.

However, the favourites for the 1998 election were definitely the ČSSD; as part of his continued obsession with buses, Miloš Zeman personally requested Tony Blair provide him with a pair of Routemasters to campaign with. The party also benefitted from a pledge to fight corruption (Zeman tied himself to the Mani Pulite anti-corruption campaign in Italy) and halt privatization, though its recycling of slogans from 1996 was perhaps less inspiring.

The results saw a comfortable victory for the ČSSD, but a much better performance for the ODS than expected. After securing President Havel’s support to form a government, Zeman reached out to the KDU-ČSL and US for a government, but Ruml refused to work with Zeman even if the KDU-ČSL leader Josef Lux was allowed to become PM instead.

As a result, Zeman opened talks with Klaus to arrange what was known as the ‘Treaty on creating a stable political environment in the Czech Republic’, or more commonly the ‘Opposition Agreement’ (Czech: Opoziční smlouva). This committed the ČSSD and ODS to cooperating to keep each other in government, with the opposition party being granted the chairmanship of the houses of parliament and the control bodies in exchange for forfeiting the right to call a motion of no confidence in the government, as well as agreeing to bipartisan foreign and domestic affairs ‘with preferential consideration of stability, prosperity and the position of the Czech Republic in the world’.

As you might guess, this basically meant the ČSSD got to enter government in exchange for accepting the post-neoliberal consensus and committing the Czech Republic to international cooperation. And of course it led to absolutely no more corruption in Czech politics ever.

 

[prime-minister]

Despite the threadmark title, no, this isn't anything to do with the Olympics.

 

[prime-minister]

Apologies to @vjw for this.

I was tempted to call 1999 Ukraine's weirdest election, but considering this is the same country that's had two separate presidential elections connected to revolutions, one of which was voted on three times, and which elected its equivalent of Malcolm Tucker who subsequently became a war hero, that doesn't seem right. What's weird about 1999 is the voting patterns and parties involved.

Ukranian politics is generally defined by an east-west divide- the east tends to support Russophilic parties, whereas the west is much more pro-European- though from my understanding, ideologically most parties and candidates are fairly close together on major social and economic issues and tend to be fairly personal vehicles. Back when it was a thing, the Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU) broke both those rules, being fairly strong across the country and having a revisionist communist philosophy.

Leonid Kuchma is a good example of a politician who threaded that needle, winning his first term by pledging to liberalise trade while also improving relations with Russia through the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, where the two promised not to invade each other's territory (which certainly aged well).

However, Kuchma's popularity had been damaged by his decision to interfere with the funeral of Orthodox Patriarch Voldymyr Romaniuk in 1995 and the suspicious deaths of Yevhen Shcherban and Viacheslav Chornovil, two political opponents of his (though nothing has been proven about Kuchma actually being involved in either's death, his involvement with Georgiy Gongadze's kidnapping and murder means it's very likely he was involved), while politically his privatisations and efforts to keep Ukraine non-aligned through his Multi-Vector Policy ingratiated him to western voters and alienated him from eastern and left-leaning ones.

A lot of candidates hoped to capitalise on this alienation, and while Chornovil had been the frontrunner for the Europhilic opposition, his death left them without an obvious figurehead- the most prominent Kuchma opponents running for the presidency were now KPU leader Petro Symonenko and Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU) leader Oleksandr Moroz. Moroz had run with the KPU's support in 1994, but this time he became one of the 'Kaniv Four', who sought to endorse a single candidate.

This went badly for him as the grouping fell apart, and one of them (Verkhovna Rada Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko) just endorsed Symonenko instead. While Moroz did win Poltava and Vinnytsia Oblasts, he polled less than half a percent above LaRouchite Russophile Nataliya Vitrenko of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSPU) and only managed just over half of Symonenko's vote, putting the KPU leader against Kuchma in the second round.

The second round vote was basically between Kuchma presenting himself as a moderate and sweeping the allegations against him under the rug, while Symonenko's campaign presented what Wikipedia calls 'classic Communist content' (which makes it sound like a greatest hits album to me- Dizzy With Success: The Very Best of Stalinism, anyone?). Ironically, I'm not really sure why the voting patterns turned out the way they did- guessing it's just due to socio-economic factors in the east and anti-Russian attitudes in the west, but I'd definitely appreciate if anyone could elaborate on them.

 

[prime-minister]

Well, I've been away a little while, but I finally had an idea for something new to map- the council elections in my mum's home city. As you do.



Amusingly, I spent all evening tracing David Jeffery's map of the election by ward in Paint, only to find out Wikipedia has basemaps for the council wards from 1953 onwards and I probably could've just edited that into a useable format in GIMP. Then again, Jeffery has helped provide online records of the results, so it's a good excuse to credit him at least.

I decided to start with 1970 because it's the last election to date where the Tories controlled the city council, and a good illustration of how much the city has changed in 50 years. To put it mildly, it's hard to imagine the city ever looking like this again after Toxteth, 'managed decline' and Hillsborough. Also of note, though, is the weakness of the Liberals- 1970 was just the beginning of them building up an apparatus in the city, but during the 1970s they would grow fast, in no small part because of the Tory brand's toxicity slowly but surely building up.

Perhaps even more indicative of how much things have changed than the Tories winning the most seats, however, is the presence of the Liverpool Protestant Party. The famously large Irish Catholic migration to Liverpool during the 19th century led not only to the city having an infamous Orange Order (so much so that both my mum and Tom Baker's autobiography attest to its awfulness from personal experience about 30 years apart), but also to both Catholic and Protestant parties forming in the city on either side of the sectarian divide.

It's fairly well known that the Irish Nationalist T. P. O'Connor (coincidentally, apparently my granddad was friends with a different T. P. O'Connor!) sat for the Liverpool Scotland seat from 1885 until his death in 1929, the only one ever to represent an area in Great Britain, but less so that the Protestants were politically active in the region separate from the Liverpool Tories despite the close association often drawn between the two.

The Protestant Party was formed by local Protestant leader George Wise and basically focused on attacking the Tories for doing anything sympathetic to Catholics and Labour for being socialist heathens, being formed partly in response to the former allowing Catholic schools public money under the Education Act 1902, along with other policies. The rumblings of home rule probably also stirred up anger among Liverpool Protestants, of course.

Two of their biggest bugbears were the Irish nationalist movements (duh) and the construction of what is now Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (i.e. the Catholic one); they helped block the council allowing the Archdiocese of Liverpool to buy the land for it until the abolition of the Boards of Guardians in 1929, and when construction started in 1933 local Catholic groups had to fund it. They even stood the Reverend H. D. Longbottom (yes, really) for the Liverpool Kirkdale constituency in 1931, 1935 and 1945, and he got a solid quarter of the vote in both of the former two elections.

1970 was also sort of the Protestant Party's last hurrah, as they retained their 7 seats. The Tories stood aside for them in St. Domingo and Netherfield wards, which they won over Labour- St. Domingo was very Protestant, sometimes electing three councillors from the Protestant Party. At the 1972 election, they would get wiped off the council and never returned.

 

[prime-minister]

The following year's election is, erm, a little different results-wise.

One thing to keep in mind, in fairness, is that this result is only partly because of Heath coming to power (though I wouldn't be surprised if New Pence getting instituted the month before this election didn't help the Tory campaign), and mostly because the seats up for election were the ones in each ward that were last elected in 1968. As an illustration of how dramatic the swings at work here were, there were no fewer than eight seats where Labour won more than 70% of the vote which they gained from Tory incumbents. Both Gillmoss and Speke genuinely went from Tory margins of around 1% to Labour margins of around 60%.

 

[prime-minister]

Just to clarify, I don't think I'll be continuing to map every year's elections in order, but here's 1972.


This was the last election held that elected Aldermen (whose numbers I can't find from a cursory look, annoyingly), on these boundaries and with elections in thirds every three years. The Local Government Act's creation of Merseyside County Council extended the city councillors' term to four years and had that body elected in the fourth year where no city councillors were up. Despite the county council getting abolished under Thatcher, Liverpool still has that cycle, and so every three years no councillors are elected in the city.

It was also the election which finally kicked the Tories out of power in the city for good. Incidentally, the Tories' leader, Sir Howard Steward, had just been knighted in the 1972 New Years Honours; he had previously been an MP for Stockport South and was apparently one of the 15 MPs who That Was The Week That Was publicly mocked in 1963 for never speaking in Parliament since the last election. His Labour successor Bill Sefton was also notable, not only for having also preceded Steward as council leader, but also for being a self-described Marxist who took a life peerage anyway in 1978.

The sheer scale of the Tories' reversal in fortunes in Liverpool after Heath came to power can be pretty easily told from the fact that in 2 years they lost 50 seats, and in the same amount of time Labour's seat count more than doubled and the Liberals' seat count almost quadrupled. (I might have to go back and do 1967-69, the elections where the Tories made their big gains, for comparison at some point.)

In addition to all the big swings against the Tories, Labour edged out the Protestants in St. Domingo by literally one vote, and their remaining councillors seemingly didn't even bother to stand in 1973 (the party's Wikipedia page says they won a seat, but Jeffery's results tables don't list them anywhere) and merged with the Tories in 1974.

One little detail I found interesting is that the Liberal in Low Hill (the ward near the city centre surrounded by red) is future Liberal and Lib Dem MP and current crossbench peer David Alton, who won Edge Hill in a by-election right after Callaghan's government lost the vote of no confidence in 1979 and sat for Mossley Hill until it was abolished in 1997. Perhaps unsurprisingly considering he became Baby of the House, he was also Baby of the Council in this election. (I mention him not only because he's the last non-Labour MP Liverpool has elected to date, but also because his views are notably colourful- he's both a vocal anti-abortion advocate and an aggressive advocate for sanctions on authoritarian regimes.)

 

[prime-minister]

Ok, this really will be the last election I do the year after the last.

This was the first all-up election since 1953 when the old wards were drawn, and like that election the candidates' terms were decided by what position they came in. Whoever came first in the ward would sit until 1978, second place until 1976 and third place until 1975.

This election saw the Tories get massively squeezed out, and though Labour won the popular vote by about 1%, the Liberals took the most seats (I believe for the first time since 1895!) and would win control of the council the following year.

 

[prime-minister]

The Tories winning the popular vote in Liverpool? Led by Thatcher? Yeah, it actually happened.


Admittedly the high watermark here didn't translate to winning enough seats to not come last of the three main parties, but the fact that even this good a result for the Tories happened in Liverpool so late is bizarre to me.

Something worth noting is that Hamilton was only council leader for part of 1978- I can't find a specific date as to when, but later that year the Liberal council leader Trevor Jones took control of the council with Tory support.

 

[prime-minister]

One term of Thatcher later...

While most of the country gave Labour a humiliating defeat in 1983, Liverpool actually swung towards them quite heavily, which isn't that surprising considering Thatcher's infamous disdain for the city. (This was reflected in the general election too, though, as the Tories were shut out of Liverpool for the first time ever, and have never won a seat there again. The sources I've looked at seem to be pretty mixed on whether they notionally held any seats on the 1983 boundaries, likely because no one seems to have properly calculated it.)

While the Liberals retained the support of many Scousers distrustful of Militant's influence over the council's Labour delegation, by 1983 they had been governing the city for 5 years with the Tories' support, and Labour weren't shy of pointing it out. This likely helped convince swing voters to back Labour to get back into power.

Part of the reason Labour got back into power was because they sort of had the best of both worlds as far as appealing to voters was concerned; the party's local leader was still John Hamilton, who wasn't part of Militant but was friendly to them, and their deputy leader was Derek Hatton, Militant's poster boy. At this point, they had both plausible deniability for the Militant association from their opponents and the backing of the tendency, but things would get messy fast.

One interesting point I noticed is that the SDP were more or less a non-factor, which is ironic considering one of their pre-1983 MPs was from Liverpool (not to mention from Toxteth specifically!). I assume that's both because the Liberals already had a solid foothold here and overshadowed them, and because the Labour right in the area wasn't and isn't especially large.

 

[prime-minister]

Sometimes you just stumble on the resources to make a map in an evening and have to do it.

It turns out everyone's favourite country that shares its name with a Womble has fairly easily accessible results online for its elections (well, I did have to track down a Cyrillic webpage to find how the seats were allocated, but still), and a good map of all the constituencies which have been the same since 1991, but hasn't really been mapped much. So, behold!

The 1991 election was the first under Bulgaria's current constitution, promulgated three months before in June, and the second to be held after the end of Communist rule. The first such election had been held to elect a Constituent Assembly the previous year, and used a mixed electoral system where half the members were elected in single member constituencies and half by PR; it sounds interesting, but I don't really have any leads on the constituency boundaries or a breakdown of the results.

So instead we're starting with 1991, the first election to the modern National Assembly. It was reduced from 400 seats for the Constituent Assembly to 230, and the electoral system was changed from mixed-member to pure PR, with members elected by oblast (aside from Plovdiv, which was a separate constituency from its oblast, and Sofia, which was split into three constituencies along with a fourth for the rest of the oblast) by the D'Hondt method, with a 4% national threshold. Aside from the 2009 election, this is the method that's been used for every Bulgarian election since.

In 1990 the Bulgarian Socialist Party (Българска социалистическа партия, BSP), the rebranded Communist Party, had won an overall majority, but its leader Andrey Lukanov soon became unpopular. He and the reformist wing of the party had elbowed out Todor Zhivkov after he had ruled the country for 35 years, and despite the democratising reforms, it quickly became clear Bulgaria's economy was not only corrupt but collapsing thanks to its big consumer goods deficit. The fact Lukanov was buddies with Robert Maxwell certainly didn't help lessen that impression.

Lukanov finally resigned amidst a general strike and protests, and a new technocratic government was formed by independent judge Dimitar Popov, the first non-Communist Bulgarian PM in 44 years. His government's purpose was basically just to get the constitution hammered out and then hold a new election, and brought the non-Communist parties into power- the Union of Democratic Forces (Съюз на демократичните сили, СДС/SDS) and Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (Български земеделски народен съюз/BANU)- with the implicit support of the BSP.

Both the BSP and SDS had popular dissidents in charge. On the BSP's side was Aleksandar Lilov, a former Politburo member expelled in the early 1980s who moved to Britain, returning on the then-BCP's request. He was an outspoken reformist, having criticised Zhivkov for economic mismanagement (which was why he was expelled), denounced the Revival Process and its assimilationist oppression of Bulgarian Muslims, and had the BCP transition into the BSP and renounce Marxism-Leninism in favour of democratic socialism. The downside was that liberals wanted him gone as a vestige of the Communist regime, though I imagine he had a certain amount of popularity among those nostalgic for the regime's economic stability compared to the uncertainty of the early 90s.

On the SDS side, you had Philip Dimitrov. Dimitrov was also an unusual character, a law graduate, attorney and psychotherapist who'd become vice-president of the Green Party when it was founded in 1989 and helped break the secret police's sealing of their files, contributing to them being abolished. Under his stewardship, the SDS was able to position itself as a modern and moderate alternative to the BSP, with an indication it would continue the privatisation and market-opening reforms the Popov government had tentatively begun.

This was the central battle line the two parties fought the 1991 election on, and interestingly, despite dominating the seats only 67.5% of Bulgarians voted for them. A further 7.55% went for the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (Движение за права и свободи Dvizhenie za prava i svobodi, ДПС/DPS), the party of Bulgaria's ethnic minorities (particularly Turks), and the other quarter of the vote was messily distributed between a series of small parties that all failed to cross the 4% threshold. The largest of these was the BANU, which took 3.86% of the vote, but seven parties won at least 1% of the vote and came home empty-handed.

The SDS formed a coalition with the DPS, forming the first Bulgarian government not to contain figures associated with the Communists since the end of the Secold World War. I think it also technically made Dimitrov the first person associated with a green party to become head of state anywhere in the world, too, but don't quote me on that (especially because he wasn't part of the Green Party by this point anymore).

 

[prime-minister]

I only remembered the other day Taiwan was holding its presidential election in January, and sort of expected it'd be a 'massive right-wing surge after two terms in power from the left' kind of election. I was a bit off.

I'll probably do a follow-up map with both a clearer explanation of the parties' nominees and a city-county breakdown of the DPP, KMT and TPP (Taiwan People's Party) vote, because the TPP performed really well in this election, coming a strong third with the best performance for a third-party nominee since 2000 as well as deadlocking the Legislative Yuan in the down-ballot legislative election.

 

[prime-minister]

Sorry I've been absent for a while, but I made a little thing since it was Good Friday the other day.

The Northern Ireland Forum is one of the four often-forgotten precursors to the NI Assembly set up during the Troubles, and was the one which represented the province in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement. It was set up to deliberate the agreement's provisions, though it quite deliberately had no power over legislation or the negotiations whatsoever.

Probably the two most interesting things about it (and the reason I mapped it instead of the first Assembly election, though I might do that another time) are to do with its electoral system. First, unlike basically every other election on the island, neither FPTP nor STV were used- instead, D'Hondt method PR was used to elect seats in the constituencies, which were based on the boundaries drawn up for the 1997 election and elected 5 members each. The part about the new boundaries is notable because the 1982 election had used the old ones despite the then-new ones being ready, and this had made voters very cross about the pointless disparity.

Second, it had a quite unusual top-up seat system where all of the 10 largest parties got 2 seats each, no matter how many votes they got. This was done quite deliberately to guarantee that the minor Loyalist paramilitary parties would get admitted to the Assembly as well as Sinn Fein, and led to some quite unusual participating parties in the Forum.

Along with the usual suspects (the funny part is I typed that and suddenly remembered that one Derry Girls episode where the adults are desperate to work out who Keyser Söze is), who won all the constituencies seats except one in North Down which elected Robert McCartney of the UK Unionists, because North Down, you also had:

• the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), a unionist paramilitary party with ties to the UVF who evolved out of working-class Protestantism into basically the only outwardly left-wing unionist party. It was sort of a weird mirror of Sinn Fein- it evolved from a militant group into one which supported the Good Friday Agreement, but unlike Sinn Fein it never truly cut ties with the paramilitary forces. Even so, its members of the Forum, David Ervine and Hugh Smyth, were outspoken progressives.
• the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), a Protestant party aligned with the UDA which quickly went a bit loopy, first calling for Northern Irish independence from both the UK and Ireland and then going all in on calling for devolution and a Bill of Rights. Its elected members were Gary McMichael, who went all in on ceasefire and the Good Friday Agreement, and John White, whose priority over politics was allegedly drug-dealing.
• The Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC), a cross-community group which waffled on the nationalism question (and feminism, ironically) but was fairly influential in helping challenge attitudes to women in politics in the region. One of its co-leaders and Forum members, Monica McWilliams, is credited as having helped secure restitution for victims and a civic forum, and she would win election to the Assembly in 1998.
• the Labour Coalition, listed as just 'Labour', made up of a group of small defecting parties from the SDLP. I think they were nationalist-aligned, but it's a bit hard to tell. The two members elected to the Forum would later set up the 'Labour Party of Northern Ireland', which is a huge rabbit hole of a name with how many times it's been used by completely unconnected groups and gone nowhere.

Also of note is that the Forum was meant to be abolished on the 31st May 1997, but could be extended for a year (which it was, because duh). I suspect amendments would have been made if the Good Friday Agreement had stalled any longer than it did, but in any case, the Forum was succeded by the first modern Northern Ireland Assembly elected a month after its abolition.

 

[prime-minister]

And here's the Assembly's first election.

The Assembly went back to being elected by STV and bumped all the constituencies from five seats to six, while removing all the top-up seats. As with my Eire maps, which use the same system but with variably-sized constituencies, I've done maps by candidate and by party, since they differ significantly. The DUP candidates did noticeably better than their party lists, particularly because they ran one particularly strong candidate in Mid Ulster, West Tyrone and Strangford against several less strong candidates from the other parties.

Interestingly, it was actually the SDLP of all parties which won the most votes, though the UUP beat them in the seat count. As you can probably tell, despite the system a lot of vote-splitting went on (not that it mattered that much considering the power-sharing agreement). In particular, Belfast North and East Derry/Londonderry gave over 20% of the vote each to at least three of the four main sectarian parties.

I might also map the unionist vs republican vote, since Wikipedia notes that 50.6% of first preference votes went to unionists and 38.6% to nationalists and the rest for non-sectarian parties like the Alliance, but it doesn't have any kind of voteshare map and I'm a bit unsure how to categorise the minor parties into each side.