- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
Yeah, I left that bit out for length but you are right. Somehow, cross 75% India with 25% Tibet and you end up with a shogunate.
-
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Max's election maps and assorted others
- Thread starter Ares96
- Start date
kratostatic
You Wouldn't Steal A Political Party
- Location
- Anyers-upon-Senn, Island-of-France
- Pronouns
- He/him
A Shogunate, followed by a Shahganate?
msmp
Insert Pine Tree Flag Here
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
This is the single wildest thing I have read in ages, and it's also entirely accurate.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
Nepal never fails to deliver.
Nepal 1994 (turnout)
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
Here's a map whose methodology I will freely admit is pretty questionable, but which I needed to make to settle a question arising from something completely different. In 1991, the first free Nepalese election after the end of the Panchayat system, the western hill districts of Rukum and Rolpa were won somewhat handily by the Maoist front organisation, the United People's Front of Nepal. I also know these districts would go on to be Maoist strongholds during the civil war. In 1994, however, no UPF candidates stood in either district, even though the party as such went on existing and even had some success in a couple of seats east of Kathmandu (although they didn't win anywhere). The result was that, despite their aforementioned status as Maoist strongholds, the two districts voted largely for the Congress and RPP, and the UML candidates got very low voteshares compared to their national average. So the question I had was: did the Maoist organisations in Rukum and Rolpa call for a mass boycott of the 1994 election?
Unfortunately, the constituency-level dataset I have for 1994 isn't very complete: it only shows the votes cast for each candidate, containing no totals, invalid votes or turnout information. So I worked with what I did have, which was electorate and turnout figures for the 1999 election. This is what makes the map questionable: Nepal is, of course, a developing country that's very much in the midst of the demographic transition, and over the 1990s its population grew by about 23%. So I think it's fair to say that 1999's electorate figures won't be accurate for five years earlier, and to an extent this map may just be showing which areas grew more in that five-year period. I suspect Kathmandu and other urbanising regions will be undercounted for that reason, and I have a suspicion the very high "turnout" in the northwestern mountain districts might be due to the same thing. However, Rukum and Rolpa do show lower turnout than their surroundings, though not really dramatically so - Rolpa in particular was on the low side, with a "turnout" of 39%, compared to 43% in Rukum and around 50% in surrounding districts. So turnout was low, yes, but it's unclear whether it was low enough to indicate a boycott campaign.
Unfortunately, the constituency-level dataset I have for 1994 isn't very complete: it only shows the votes cast for each candidate, containing no totals, invalid votes or turnout information. So I worked with what I did have, which was electorate and turnout figures for the 1999 election. This is what makes the map questionable: Nepal is, of course, a developing country that's very much in the midst of the demographic transition, and over the 1990s its population grew by about 23%. So I think it's fair to say that 1999's electorate figures won't be accurate for five years earlier, and to an extent this map may just be showing which areas grew more in that five-year period. I suspect Kathmandu and other urbanising regions will be undercounted for that reason, and I have a suspicion the very high "turnout" in the northwestern mountain districts might be due to the same thing. However, Rukum and Rolpa do show lower turnout than their surroundings, though not really dramatically so - Rolpa in particular was on the low side, with a "turnout" of 39%, compared to 43% in Rukum and around 50% in surrounding districts. So turnout was low, yes, but it's unclear whether it was low enough to indicate a boycott campaign.
- Location
- Derbyshire
Of course that could mean its indicating an unsuccessful boycott campaign.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
Very possible.
Nepal 1991
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
I suppose I'd better start posting the actual election maps too. First off, I should note that I don't have constituency boundaries for anything prior to 2008, so these maps kind of have to be a bit more abstract than you're used to. Hopefully someday I'll be able to track down the boundaries, but today is not that day.
So as mentioned in the local government post, Nepal was an absolute monarchy for most of its history, with first the Rana family, the king's hereditary chief advisors, and then the kings themselves holding supreme power over the country's governance. The "democratic revolution" of 1950-51, which overthrew the Ranas, had been spearheaded by the Nepali Congress, a left-wing group inspired by the INC who hoped the Rana regime would give way to, if not a socialist republic, then at least a modern constitutional monarchy. After all, India had just recently become an independent, secular republic, and Nehru's nominally-socialist INC government had been the key foreign backer of the revolution. In the end, however, it turned out the royal house was uninterested in going from being a figurehead for the Ranas to being a figurehead for an elected parliament. Although a second mass protest wave in 1957-58 succeeded in forcing free parliamentary elections in spring 1959, the parliament thus elected and its Congress-dominated government only lasted eighteen months before King Mahendra launched a self-coup, dissolving parliament and throwing most of its leading figures in jail.
To Mahendra's mind, Nepal, which had been isolated from the surrounding world until the overthrow of the Ranas and remained an extremely poor, underdeveloped country, was simply not ready for liberal democracy. Instead, he designed his own system of government which he believed more closely resembled traditional Nepalese systems of governance and would allow the people to be represented in the fashion they best understood and were able to engage with. This was the panchayat system (not to be confused with the panchayati raj system, which is in use in India and refers specifically to local government), and it would be in use in Nepal for the better part of thirty years. A panchayat (meaning "council of five" in Sanskrit) is the traditional name for a village's governing council in the Indian subcontinent, and these village councils would indeed form the centrepiece of Nepalese governance under the panchayat system. The adult inhabitants of a village would meet and elect a nine-member panchayat (confusingly, most institutions called panchayats in the modern day have more than five members), which would then each delegate one member to sit on the local district council (zila panchayat). The district councils would in turn choose delegates to a zonal assembly (anchal sabha), which had very few powers in its own right and functioned mainly as an electoral college choosing representatives to the Rastriya Panchayat, the national parliament, from among the representatives on each district council. The Rastriya Panchayat was composed of 90 district representatives - no district elected more than two members, which meant the densely-populated Terai (plains) districts were greatly underrepresented - as well as 19 sectional and university graduate representatives and 16 royal appointees. And while official sectional organisations, representing women, youth, the elderly, peasants, labourers and ex-servicemen, did have official representation on all levels of government, political parties were banned from operating.
Obviously, a large part of the motivation for this system was to prevent the opposition from organising above the village level and ensure that the king could effectively govern the country as he pleased. Whether it was the only motivation, or if Mahendra was actually sincere about wanting Nepal to develop along its own path into a place where it could one day be "ready" to adopt a more democratic form of government, is a purely academic discussion, because what the panchayat regime was in practice was a thinly-veiled royal dictatorship. While some social progress was made during the years from 1960 to 1990 - malaria was mostly eliminated, a highway was built along the foothills connecting east and west, and land use reforms brought the Green Revolution to Nepal and ensured that more of the Terai than ever before was put under cultivation. But the regime's brief attempts at redistributive land reform in the 60s came to naught, and what little wealth the country had remained in few hands while the vast majority of the people lived in or near poverty. Discontent rose throughout the period, and limited concessions in the early 80s (including the direct election of the Rastriya Panchayat's district representatives, although they were still required to be nonpartisan) did little to ease tensions.
The sequence of events that brought down the panchayat regime began with the August 1988 earthquake, which had its epicentre in the Saptari district of the eastern Terai and hit both Nepalese and Indian communities hard, killing at least 709 people, injuring thousands and damaging buildings as far away as Patna. Rescue and reconstruction efforts were mounted, but not as quickly as the situation warranted, and there were soon rumours that members of the government were embezzling international aid money meant for the earthquake victims. Around the same time, the renegotiation of a trade agreement between Nepal and India turned sour, and when Nepal attempted to turn to China for both arms and essential goods, India responded by allowing the agreement to lapse in March 1989. Since India was (and to an extent still is, though China is working on it) the only viable land-based trading partner Nepal has, this did immediate and severe damage to the Nepalese economy. Particularly so for petroleum products, which Nepal depended almost entirely on India for, and which were now impossible to source. Without viable motorised transport, heating or machinery, and without the ability to export Nepalese goods over the country's only negotiable land border, the economy ground to a halt for months.
As I mentioned, resistance to the panchayat system had been ongoing since 1960, but the fuel crisis of 1989 brought it to the surface. The crisis was so severe, and the opportunity so obvious, that the two leading forces of the democratic opposition - Congress on the one hand, and the communist movement on the other - decided to come together and jointly plan a protest action to force the panchayat regime to its knees. On the 15th of January, 1990, the formation of the United Left Front was announced, bringing together seven of the roughly a dozen or so communist parties in Nepal, and on the 1st of February, the ULF and Congress formed a joint committee to coordinate opposition to the regime. This was the broadest coalition since 1960 - arguably since the original democracy movement in 1950 - and when it went into action on the 18th of February, it brought the country to its knees. Starting with a relatively isolated movement of party activists, protests began to spread after police shot a student during demonstrations in the east of Nepal, and by the end of March, mass protests were engulfing the Kathmandu Valley. Residents of Lalitpur/Patan, a relatively large town just south of Kathmandu, responded to local police violence by establishing a local committee of public safety, closing entrances to the town with roadblocks and placing policemen in detention. Elsewhere in the valley, locals organised blackouts in areas where protests were due to happen, making it much harder both to identify protesters and to employ force against them, and protests got so large and so radical that the opposition committees were losing control.
King Birendra, Mahendra's eldest son, attempted to satisfy protesters on the 6th of April, by announcing that Prime Minister Marichman Singh Shrestha, who had been in charge during both the earthquake and the trade crisis, would be removed and replaced with Lokendra Bahadur Chand, who had previously served as Prime Minister between 1983 and 1986. Chand may have been slightly more competent than Shrestha, but he was still a conservative monarchist, and his appointment did exactly nothing to please the crowds. By this point, chants calling for the king's head were a regular occurrence, and even the police were often unwilling to intervene, preferring to simply watch as protesters smashed cars and statues of King Mahendra. Birendra had only two choices by this point: either cave to the opposition's demands entirely or get killed as protesters ransacked the palace. Wisely, he chose the former - on the 8th, Congress and ULF leaders were invited to the palace for negotiation, and came out with an agreement promising to re-legalise political parties and hold free and direct elections to a national legislature. The king tried to retain Chand as Prime Minister in the interim, but this led to another (slightly less intense) wave of protests, and at the end of that, Congress leader Krishna Prasad Bhattarai was appointed Prime Minister leading a transitional government.
Although the goals of the Jana Andolan, or People's Movement, as it's become known to history, were now essentially met, there were immediate ruptures within the communist movement over where to go next. A large faction within the ULF wanted to contest the upcoming elections jointly with Congress, reasoning that they'd worked well together during the uprising and would probably continue to do so in an election campaign. However, the Congress leadership were divided on this - Bhattarai was open to the idea, but Girija Prasad Koirala, brother of the late Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala, who'd led Congress during the 1950s and been Nepal's first democratically elected Prime Minister, was staunchly opposed. This was mostly on pragmatic grounds, as he wanted to apply for development aid from the United States, which he had been warned might not be forthcoming if a future Congress government included communists. After a heated internal debate, the Congress national conference in January 1991 rejected the alliance by a narrow margin. The spurned ULF moderates decided instead to found a new unified organisation, which they gave the characteristically straightforward name Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), usually abbreviated simply as UML. While formally led by Sahana Pradhan, the widow of original Communist leader Pushpa Lal Shrestha, in practice the UML was run by its young general secretary, Madan Kumar Bhandari. Bhandari had been a student activist in the 1970s, then got recruited by Shrestha as part of a younger generation of communist leaders - having been born in 1951, he was too young to have participated in the original democracy movement, pointedly unlike both the Congress leadership and most other senior figures within his own party. He is remembered today for developing the concept of "People's Multiparty Democracy", an adaptation of earlier Marxist-Leninist thought to a post-Cold War reality, which called for communists to carry on the class struggle within a liberal democratic framework, contesting free elections against other parties and using the power thus gained to work for the improvement of material conditions.
It goes without saying that this idea was not without controversy among militant communists, many of whom derided it as revisionism or social democracy in a new form. This view was especially pronounced among supporters of the United People's National Movement, which had been formed in 1989 by those communist parties that thought the ULF insufficiently radical. Generally inspired by Maoism, the UPNM rejected cooperation either with Congress or with the monarchy, and called for an immediate constitutional convention to create a Nepalese people's republic. It too faced division after the Jana Andolan, with one of the two main groups, led by Mohan Bikram Singh, continuing to advocate an electoral boycott since the new constitution had been worked out through compromise with the old regime, a regime he regarded as impossible to compromise with. The other group, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal (remember that name, he's going to become very important later on) and Baburam Bhattarai (no relation to K.P.), regarded this as a strategic mistake, believing the new government would need to have a genuine communist presence to prevent Bhandari's exceedingly moderate line from completely dominating the left. Along with parts of the left opposition of the ULF, the Dahal-Bhattarai faction of the UPNM would end up forming the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre), which reaffirmed its commitment to underground work in preparation for the people's war they believed inevitable, while also forming a front organisation, the United People's Front of Nepal, which would contest the general election and use it as an opportunity to spread the message of revolution. Bhattarai took up the leading position in the UPFN, while Dahal stayed underground and continued to lead the CPN(UC)'s cadres.
Meanwhile, Congress was also shifting right. Having previously been a relatively radical force in Nepalese politics, advocating for a secular democratic republic and opposing the panchayat regime through all means available, it now suddenly found itself a party of power leading His Majesty's government. While K.P. Bhattarai and others continued to espouse left-wing beliefs, they were quickly becoming outnumbered by what were called panchas - panchayat-era bureaucrats who now entered politics as a way to maintain their power in their local communities. Particularly in the west of Nepal, the pancha faction came to dominate the Congress organisation. The panchas were welcomed by G.P. Koirala, ever the pragmatist, who saw in them only a chance to keep the party's (and by extension, his family's) influence growing, but their role in Congress, and in Nepalese democracy by extension, would have devastating consequences in the years to follow.
For anyone who's concerned that these divisions in the former opposition camp might mean a victory for royalist forces is about to come, don't be. They were at least as chaotic. In a lot of developing countries, right-wingers tend to distrust liberal democracy and prefer to play a supporting role to conservative institutions, and this was to some extent also true in Nepal - if you base your entire worldview on the idea that the king is a rightful absolute ruler and should be vested with complete power over society, then it can seem counterintuitive to stand for election to a parliament intended to check or supplant royal power. However, just as some Maoists chose to participate in elections despite regarding constitutional monarchy as illegitimate, so too some royalists chose to participate in elections despite regarding liberal democracy as illegitimate. Just after the Jana Andolan, a group of leading royal officials formed the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (National Democratic Party), which was intended to represent the forces of tradition, respectability and Hinduism in the political sphere, now that the king wasn't able to use his full powers in their defence anymore. The RPP soon split in half, however, following what seems to be a proud Nepalese tradition, into a more conservative faction led by our old friend Lokendra Bahadur Chand, and a slightly more liberal faction led by Surya Bahadur Thapa, who had been Prime Minister between 1965-69 and then again 1979-83. Thapa seems to have been one of the few panchas who genuinely believed in democratic development, and even spent a while in jail between his two terms as Prime Minister for giving a speech where he demanded democratic reforms.
At long last, after about a year of preparation, constitutional wrangling and recovery from the chaos of the Jana Andolan, Nepal went to the polls on the 12th of May, 1991. The new Parliament was bicameral, with an upper house called the National Assembly (Rastriya Sabha) and a lower house called the House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha). Information on the former is scarce, and I honestly don't even know the basics of how it worked in this period, so this series will focus entirely on the latter for the time being. The Pratinidhi Sabha was made up of 205 members, elected by universal suffrage (18 years old to vote, 25 to stand for election) by plurality in single-member constituencies. Each of Nepal's 75 districts was guaranteed one seat, with the remaining 140 distributed at least somewhat according to population - some changes were made for the election after this, but they weren't huge all things considered. I don't imagine I need to get into the pros and cons of FPTP here, but it was the system used by India as well as most other countries in the region, and this made it the most obvious system for Nepal to adapt. Generally speaking, electorates ranged from about fifty to eighty thousand, with a few much smaller seats in the mountain districts and, I think, some larger ones in Kathmandu in this election.
The results were predictable in that Congress won - the combination of having led a revolution against a deeply unpopular regime and also having access to the rural patronage networks that had supported that regime is both hard to obtain and hard to beat - but the details were more surprising. Far from the landslide victory predicted, or the one that they likely would've obtained had the united Congress-ULF front come to pass, they won 110 seats, an overall majority of 15. While they did very well in the western and central regions of the country, in the east, which had formerly been thought of as the main Congress stronghold, the UML completely crushed them. So too in the Kathmandu Valley. The most surprising result of the night came in Kathmandu-1, the seat covering the centre of the capital, where K.P. Bhattarai stood as the Congress candidate and Madan Bhandari for the UML. To almost everyone's surprise, the much younger and less well-known Bhandari won by a small margin, knocking out the Congress leader and making him ineligible to serve in government according to the constitution he himself had just written. The RPP, meanwhile, was hamstrung by its division into two factions, and ended up winning only four seats in spite of their around 12% of the popular vote combined. Their MPs were outnumbered both by the Maoist UPFN and by the Nepal Sadbhavana Party, a regional party in the Terai that championed the rights of the local Madhesi ethnic groups.
With Congress in the majority but missing K.P. Bhattarai from its party bench, there was only one obvious candidate for the premiership: Girija Prasad Koirala. Following in the footsteps of both of his elder brothers, Koirala formed his government on the 26th, becoming the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Nepal in over thirty years. He would persist in office through the entire parliament, neither resigning, losing his coalition, getting removed by his party or getting overthrown in a coup d'état - a feat no Nepalese government since has managed. Is that to say he was a successful Prime Minister? Well, not quite...
So as mentioned in the local government post, Nepal was an absolute monarchy for most of its history, with first the Rana family, the king's hereditary chief advisors, and then the kings themselves holding supreme power over the country's governance. The "democratic revolution" of 1950-51, which overthrew the Ranas, had been spearheaded by the Nepali Congress, a left-wing group inspired by the INC who hoped the Rana regime would give way to, if not a socialist republic, then at least a modern constitutional monarchy. After all, India had just recently become an independent, secular republic, and Nehru's nominally-socialist INC government had been the key foreign backer of the revolution. In the end, however, it turned out the royal house was uninterested in going from being a figurehead for the Ranas to being a figurehead for an elected parliament. Although a second mass protest wave in 1957-58 succeeded in forcing free parliamentary elections in spring 1959, the parliament thus elected and its Congress-dominated government only lasted eighteen months before King Mahendra launched a self-coup, dissolving parliament and throwing most of its leading figures in jail.
To Mahendra's mind, Nepal, which had been isolated from the surrounding world until the overthrow of the Ranas and remained an extremely poor, underdeveloped country, was simply not ready for liberal democracy. Instead, he designed his own system of government which he believed more closely resembled traditional Nepalese systems of governance and would allow the people to be represented in the fashion they best understood and were able to engage with. This was the panchayat system (not to be confused with the panchayati raj system, which is in use in India and refers specifically to local government), and it would be in use in Nepal for the better part of thirty years. A panchayat (meaning "council of five" in Sanskrit) is the traditional name for a village's governing council in the Indian subcontinent, and these village councils would indeed form the centrepiece of Nepalese governance under the panchayat system. The adult inhabitants of a village would meet and elect a nine-member panchayat (confusingly, most institutions called panchayats in the modern day have more than five members), which would then each delegate one member to sit on the local district council (zila panchayat). The district councils would in turn choose delegates to a zonal assembly (anchal sabha), which had very few powers in its own right and functioned mainly as an electoral college choosing representatives to the Rastriya Panchayat, the national parliament, from among the representatives on each district council. The Rastriya Panchayat was composed of 90 district representatives - no district elected more than two members, which meant the densely-populated Terai (plains) districts were greatly underrepresented - as well as 19 sectional and university graduate representatives and 16 royal appointees. And while official sectional organisations, representing women, youth, the elderly, peasants, labourers and ex-servicemen, did have official representation on all levels of government, political parties were banned from operating.
Obviously, a large part of the motivation for this system was to prevent the opposition from organising above the village level and ensure that the king could effectively govern the country as he pleased. Whether it was the only motivation, or if Mahendra was actually sincere about wanting Nepal to develop along its own path into a place where it could one day be "ready" to adopt a more democratic form of government, is a purely academic discussion, because what the panchayat regime was in practice was a thinly-veiled royal dictatorship. While some social progress was made during the years from 1960 to 1990 - malaria was mostly eliminated, a highway was built along the foothills connecting east and west, and land use reforms brought the Green Revolution to Nepal and ensured that more of the Terai than ever before was put under cultivation. But the regime's brief attempts at redistributive land reform in the 60s came to naught, and what little wealth the country had remained in few hands while the vast majority of the people lived in or near poverty. Discontent rose throughout the period, and limited concessions in the early 80s (including the direct election of the Rastriya Panchayat's district representatives, although they were still required to be nonpartisan) did little to ease tensions.
The sequence of events that brought down the panchayat regime began with the August 1988 earthquake, which had its epicentre in the Saptari district of the eastern Terai and hit both Nepalese and Indian communities hard, killing at least 709 people, injuring thousands and damaging buildings as far away as Patna. Rescue and reconstruction efforts were mounted, but not as quickly as the situation warranted, and there were soon rumours that members of the government were embezzling international aid money meant for the earthquake victims. Around the same time, the renegotiation of a trade agreement between Nepal and India turned sour, and when Nepal attempted to turn to China for both arms and essential goods, India responded by allowing the agreement to lapse in March 1989. Since India was (and to an extent still is, though China is working on it) the only viable land-based trading partner Nepal has, this did immediate and severe damage to the Nepalese economy. Particularly so for petroleum products, which Nepal depended almost entirely on India for, and which were now impossible to source. Without viable motorised transport, heating or machinery, and without the ability to export Nepalese goods over the country's only negotiable land border, the economy ground to a halt for months.
As I mentioned, resistance to the panchayat system had been ongoing since 1960, but the fuel crisis of 1989 brought it to the surface. The crisis was so severe, and the opportunity so obvious, that the two leading forces of the democratic opposition - Congress on the one hand, and the communist movement on the other - decided to come together and jointly plan a protest action to force the panchayat regime to its knees. On the 15th of January, 1990, the formation of the United Left Front was announced, bringing together seven of the roughly a dozen or so communist parties in Nepal, and on the 1st of February, the ULF and Congress formed a joint committee to coordinate opposition to the regime. This was the broadest coalition since 1960 - arguably since the original democracy movement in 1950 - and when it went into action on the 18th of February, it brought the country to its knees. Starting with a relatively isolated movement of party activists, protests began to spread after police shot a student during demonstrations in the east of Nepal, and by the end of March, mass protests were engulfing the Kathmandu Valley. Residents of Lalitpur/Patan, a relatively large town just south of Kathmandu, responded to local police violence by establishing a local committee of public safety, closing entrances to the town with roadblocks and placing policemen in detention. Elsewhere in the valley, locals organised blackouts in areas where protests were due to happen, making it much harder both to identify protesters and to employ force against them, and protests got so large and so radical that the opposition committees were losing control.
King Birendra, Mahendra's eldest son, attempted to satisfy protesters on the 6th of April, by announcing that Prime Minister Marichman Singh Shrestha, who had been in charge during both the earthquake and the trade crisis, would be removed and replaced with Lokendra Bahadur Chand, who had previously served as Prime Minister between 1983 and 1986. Chand may have been slightly more competent than Shrestha, but he was still a conservative monarchist, and his appointment did exactly nothing to please the crowds. By this point, chants calling for the king's head were a regular occurrence, and even the police were often unwilling to intervene, preferring to simply watch as protesters smashed cars and statues of King Mahendra. Birendra had only two choices by this point: either cave to the opposition's demands entirely or get killed as protesters ransacked the palace. Wisely, he chose the former - on the 8th, Congress and ULF leaders were invited to the palace for negotiation, and came out with an agreement promising to re-legalise political parties and hold free and direct elections to a national legislature. The king tried to retain Chand as Prime Minister in the interim, but this led to another (slightly less intense) wave of protests, and at the end of that, Congress leader Krishna Prasad Bhattarai was appointed Prime Minister leading a transitional government.
Although the goals of the Jana Andolan, or People's Movement, as it's become known to history, were now essentially met, there were immediate ruptures within the communist movement over where to go next. A large faction within the ULF wanted to contest the upcoming elections jointly with Congress, reasoning that they'd worked well together during the uprising and would probably continue to do so in an election campaign. However, the Congress leadership were divided on this - Bhattarai was open to the idea, but Girija Prasad Koirala, brother of the late Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala, who'd led Congress during the 1950s and been Nepal's first democratically elected Prime Minister, was staunchly opposed. This was mostly on pragmatic grounds, as he wanted to apply for development aid from the United States, which he had been warned might not be forthcoming if a future Congress government included communists. After a heated internal debate, the Congress national conference in January 1991 rejected the alliance by a narrow margin. The spurned ULF moderates decided instead to found a new unified organisation, which they gave the characteristically straightforward name Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), usually abbreviated simply as UML. While formally led by Sahana Pradhan, the widow of original Communist leader Pushpa Lal Shrestha, in practice the UML was run by its young general secretary, Madan Kumar Bhandari. Bhandari had been a student activist in the 1970s, then got recruited by Shrestha as part of a younger generation of communist leaders - having been born in 1951, he was too young to have participated in the original democracy movement, pointedly unlike both the Congress leadership and most other senior figures within his own party. He is remembered today for developing the concept of "People's Multiparty Democracy", an adaptation of earlier Marxist-Leninist thought to a post-Cold War reality, which called for communists to carry on the class struggle within a liberal democratic framework, contesting free elections against other parties and using the power thus gained to work for the improvement of material conditions.
It goes without saying that this idea was not without controversy among militant communists, many of whom derided it as revisionism or social democracy in a new form. This view was especially pronounced among supporters of the United People's National Movement, which had been formed in 1989 by those communist parties that thought the ULF insufficiently radical. Generally inspired by Maoism, the UPNM rejected cooperation either with Congress or with the monarchy, and called for an immediate constitutional convention to create a Nepalese people's republic. It too faced division after the Jana Andolan, with one of the two main groups, led by Mohan Bikram Singh, continuing to advocate an electoral boycott since the new constitution had been worked out through compromise with the old regime, a regime he regarded as impossible to compromise with. The other group, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal (remember that name, he's going to become very important later on) and Baburam Bhattarai (no relation to K.P.), regarded this as a strategic mistake, believing the new government would need to have a genuine communist presence to prevent Bhandari's exceedingly moderate line from completely dominating the left. Along with parts of the left opposition of the ULF, the Dahal-Bhattarai faction of the UPNM would end up forming the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre), which reaffirmed its commitment to underground work in preparation for the people's war they believed inevitable, while also forming a front organisation, the United People's Front of Nepal, which would contest the general election and use it as an opportunity to spread the message of revolution. Bhattarai took up the leading position in the UPFN, while Dahal stayed underground and continued to lead the CPN(UC)'s cadres.
Meanwhile, Congress was also shifting right. Having previously been a relatively radical force in Nepalese politics, advocating for a secular democratic republic and opposing the panchayat regime through all means available, it now suddenly found itself a party of power leading His Majesty's government. While K.P. Bhattarai and others continued to espouse left-wing beliefs, they were quickly becoming outnumbered by what were called panchas - panchayat-era bureaucrats who now entered politics as a way to maintain their power in their local communities. Particularly in the west of Nepal, the pancha faction came to dominate the Congress organisation. The panchas were welcomed by G.P. Koirala, ever the pragmatist, who saw in them only a chance to keep the party's (and by extension, his family's) influence growing, but their role in Congress, and in Nepalese democracy by extension, would have devastating consequences in the years to follow.
For anyone who's concerned that these divisions in the former opposition camp might mean a victory for royalist forces is about to come, don't be. They were at least as chaotic. In a lot of developing countries, right-wingers tend to distrust liberal democracy and prefer to play a supporting role to conservative institutions, and this was to some extent also true in Nepal - if you base your entire worldview on the idea that the king is a rightful absolute ruler and should be vested with complete power over society, then it can seem counterintuitive to stand for election to a parliament intended to check or supplant royal power. However, just as some Maoists chose to participate in elections despite regarding constitutional monarchy as illegitimate, so too some royalists chose to participate in elections despite regarding liberal democracy as illegitimate. Just after the Jana Andolan, a group of leading royal officials formed the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (National Democratic Party), which was intended to represent the forces of tradition, respectability and Hinduism in the political sphere, now that the king wasn't able to use his full powers in their defence anymore. The RPP soon split in half, however, following what seems to be a proud Nepalese tradition, into a more conservative faction led by our old friend Lokendra Bahadur Chand, and a slightly more liberal faction led by Surya Bahadur Thapa, who had been Prime Minister between 1965-69 and then again 1979-83. Thapa seems to have been one of the few panchas who genuinely believed in democratic development, and even spent a while in jail between his two terms as Prime Minister for giving a speech where he demanded democratic reforms.
At long last, after about a year of preparation, constitutional wrangling and recovery from the chaos of the Jana Andolan, Nepal went to the polls on the 12th of May, 1991. The new Parliament was bicameral, with an upper house called the National Assembly (Rastriya Sabha) and a lower house called the House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha). Information on the former is scarce, and I honestly don't even know the basics of how it worked in this period, so this series will focus entirely on the latter for the time being. The Pratinidhi Sabha was made up of 205 members, elected by universal suffrage (18 years old to vote, 25 to stand for election) by plurality in single-member constituencies. Each of Nepal's 75 districts was guaranteed one seat, with the remaining 140 distributed at least somewhat according to population - some changes were made for the election after this, but they weren't huge all things considered. I don't imagine I need to get into the pros and cons of FPTP here, but it was the system used by India as well as most other countries in the region, and this made it the most obvious system for Nepal to adapt. Generally speaking, electorates ranged from about fifty to eighty thousand, with a few much smaller seats in the mountain districts and, I think, some larger ones in Kathmandu in this election.
The results were predictable in that Congress won - the combination of having led a revolution against a deeply unpopular regime and also having access to the rural patronage networks that had supported that regime is both hard to obtain and hard to beat - but the details were more surprising. Far from the landslide victory predicted, or the one that they likely would've obtained had the united Congress-ULF front come to pass, they won 110 seats, an overall majority of 15. While they did very well in the western and central regions of the country, in the east, which had formerly been thought of as the main Congress stronghold, the UML completely crushed them. So too in the Kathmandu Valley. The most surprising result of the night came in Kathmandu-1, the seat covering the centre of the capital, where K.P. Bhattarai stood as the Congress candidate and Madan Bhandari for the UML. To almost everyone's surprise, the much younger and less well-known Bhandari won by a small margin, knocking out the Congress leader and making him ineligible to serve in government according to the constitution he himself had just written. The RPP, meanwhile, was hamstrung by its division into two factions, and ended up winning only four seats in spite of their around 12% of the popular vote combined. Their MPs were outnumbered both by the Maoist UPFN and by the Nepal Sadbhavana Party, a regional party in the Terai that championed the rights of the local Madhesi ethnic groups.
With Congress in the majority but missing K.P. Bhattarai from its party bench, there was only one obvious candidate for the premiership: Girija Prasad Koirala. Following in the footsteps of both of his elder brothers, Koirala formed his government on the 26th, becoming the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Nepal in over thirty years. He would persist in office through the entire parliament, neither resigning, losing his coalition, getting removed by his party or getting overthrown in a coup d'état - a feat no Nepalese government since has managed. Is that to say he was a successful Prime Minister? Well, not quite...
- Location
- Derbyshire
Seems a reasonable compromise to display things like that.
prime-minister
Average electoral map enjoyer
- Location
- Cambridge
- Pronouns
- They/them
Excellent stuff! The writeup more than makes up for the limitations of the map.
One little thought I had though, with the districts that only elected one member, you could probably put the whole province in that colour? Fair enough if you want to go with consistency between all of them, I just feel like it might make them stand out more.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
It's something I thought about, but I decided it looks too much like the map is unfinished that way.
For 1994 and 1999, I've made full results spreadsheets based on information at nepalresearch.org (a wonderfully Web 1.0 site that's mostly news clippings, but also has a bunch of information provided by a German political scientist who studied Nepalese elections in the 90s), and so I'll be able to do shading by district as well as by constituency. Those maps will very likely go up on Wikipedia at some point as a result, as might some version of this.
Nepal 1994
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
The opening of the first democratically-elected Nepalese parliament in thirty years was met with high hopes. For the downtrodden people of Nepal, particularly women, Dalits and ethnic minorities, the new Congress government was expected to deliver real material change. And to some small extent, it did - a number of new schools and universities were opened under the Koirala ministry, with particular focus placed on training physicians and engineers to help develop rural Nepal and improve public health. Many of these were run on concession by private actors, as part of a liberalisation programme agreed by Koirala and the IMF in order to secure favourable terms for development aid. These same goals (as ever, it's unclear how much of it was due to IMF demands and how much was Koirala's own intent - this was the man who singlehandedly drove a wedge between Congress and the UML after the Jana Andolan, after all) also scuppered any hope of land reform or Indian-style reservation policies for the lower castes. As a matter of fact, Dalit representation declined in the 1991 election compared to the last parliament elected under the panchayat system, nor did other sectors get friendlier to the lower castes than they had been previously.
That wasn't all, though. In 1992, the first post-panchayat local elections were held, and this reignited the conflict between panchas and communists that had been especially heated in western Nepal following the Jana Andolan. Congress won a majority of votes and seats nationwide, but not only did the UML make gains, a new front was formed by the Maoist UPFN and the syncretic-Jucheist Nepal Workers Peasants Party (I'm not making this up, look them up - as if being supporters of Juche wasn't enough, their party logo used to have a swastika in it) as well as a number of smaller parties, and this won power in several rural areas. Most notably, Rolpa district in west-central Nepal got an outright majority for the Maoists, and while the district councils had very limited power in practice, this still caused much stirring both in Kathmandu and in the region's pancha-dominated local sections of Congress. With the active support of Home Minister Khum Bahadur Khalka, as well as his loyalist Armed Police Force (APF), a campaign of violent retribution against communist activists and anyone suspected of being a communist activist (in other words, random peasants) wracked west-central Nepal over the following years, setting the stage for the Maoist insurgency that would begin in earnest in 1996.
On the 16th of May, 1993, a car went off the road into the Narayani River in Chitwan district, a short distance west of Kathmandu, killing two of its three occupants. Nepal's roads being what they are, this sort of thing was far from unheard of, but this case was unusual because of who the casualties were. One of them was Madan Kumar Bhandari, general secretary of the CPN(UML) and leading figure of the moderate Nepalese left, and the other was Jibaraj Ashrit, Bhandari's right-hand man and head of the UML's organisation department. The deaths were ruled an accident by an official inquest, but many in the UML and the broader left continue to believe it was murder - their suspicions are corroborated by the fact that the driver, the sole survivor of the incident, was himself murdered years later. The inquest verdict caused mass protests in Kathmandu, resulting in 26 deaths when protesters and police came to blows, and soon the demand of the protesters went from a new inquest to the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Koirala.
It was in fact Bhandari's death that would undo Koirala's government, but not in quite that immediate a fashion. Bhandari had, of course, been an MP, and his death meant that a by-election was called for his seat in central Kathmandu in February 1994. To supporters of K.P. Bhattarai, Koirala's old rival for the Congress leadership, this was an obvious chance to get their leader back into power, but Koirala himself was more lukewarm on this. It's again a bit unclear whether he actively did anything to hinder Bhattarai's campaign, but either way, the UML once again won the seat, this time with Bhandari's widow, Bidhya Devi Bhandari, as their candidate. Bhattarai's supporters were incensed, and when Koirala called a vote of confidence in his government in July, 36 Congress MPs voted with the opposition. Koirala duly resigned and asked the King to dissolve the lower house, and elections were scheduled for November.
The campaign, to put it mildly, did not go well for Congress. Not only were they accused of murdering, threatening and sabotaging their opponents, they'd gotten very little done in government, and Nepal's economy continued to be sluggish. The UML, meanwhile, were able to capitalise on this discontent and called for all the broken promises of Congress rule to be fulfilled - land reform, electrification, access to clean water and a television in every village, plus an end to corruption and political violence. Even without Bhandari, their campaign was very well-coordinated and effective. Really, though, this was an anti-incumbent wave rather than a pro-UML one, as evidenced by the fact that the RPP, now reunited, also made strides. The previous three and a half years hadn't made liberal democracy look great, and while the RPP stopped short of calling for a return to royal autocracy, their message of tradition and order had a lot of appeal.
When the people had voted, the result was clear, except insofar as it wasn't very clear at all. Congress had lost about five percentage points in the popular vote, going from 39% in 1991 to 34% in 1994, and while this was still a narrow plurality, the UML narrowly edged them out to become the largest party in the new parliament. The RPP went from four to twenty seats, while the bloc of independents grew from three to seven. Finally, the Maoist bloc was completely wiped out, and the reason for this is simple - well, as simple as it gets when you're talking about Nepalese communists. The CPN (Unity Centre), the major Maoist underground party, had a split earlier in 1994 over the ongoing political violence, with the majority faction arguing it was time for people's war, while the minority believed they should continue to contest elections and operate as a normal political party. Both factions tried to register candidates under the United People's Front label, but a court decision awarded the designation to the moderate faction, which led the hardliners to boycott the election altogether. As a result, while a group called the UPFN stood for election in 1994, it achieved no success and was mainly focused in the valleys surrounding Kathmandu. The old UPFN strongholds in Rukum and Rolpa districts, meanwhile, had very low turnout and saw Congress and RPP candidates elected with only the most token of UML opposition.
The elections having returned a hung parliament, King Birendra asked both Congress and UML to investigate forming a government, and when Congress failed to negotiate a coalition with the RPP, the UML were asked to form a government under Man Mohan Adhikari, a 74-year-old veteran of the Biratnagar jute mill strike and the 1950-51 democracy movement. The government was comprised entirely of UML members, but the RPP and NSP agreed to give passive support to it. Nepal had its first-ever communist government, and one of the first freely elected ones anywhere in the world, and it had been achieved with the support of Hindu royalists. Could it last?
That wasn't all, though. In 1992, the first post-panchayat local elections were held, and this reignited the conflict between panchas and communists that had been especially heated in western Nepal following the Jana Andolan. Congress won a majority of votes and seats nationwide, but not only did the UML make gains, a new front was formed by the Maoist UPFN and the syncretic-Jucheist Nepal Workers Peasants Party (I'm not making this up, look them up - as if being supporters of Juche wasn't enough, their party logo used to have a swastika in it) as well as a number of smaller parties, and this won power in several rural areas. Most notably, Rolpa district in west-central Nepal got an outright majority for the Maoists, and while the district councils had very limited power in practice, this still caused much stirring both in Kathmandu and in the region's pancha-dominated local sections of Congress. With the active support of Home Minister Khum Bahadur Khalka, as well as his loyalist Armed Police Force (APF), a campaign of violent retribution against communist activists and anyone suspected of being a communist activist (in other words, random peasants) wracked west-central Nepal over the following years, setting the stage for the Maoist insurgency that would begin in earnest in 1996.
On the 16th of May, 1993, a car went off the road into the Narayani River in Chitwan district, a short distance west of Kathmandu, killing two of its three occupants. Nepal's roads being what they are, this sort of thing was far from unheard of, but this case was unusual because of who the casualties were. One of them was Madan Kumar Bhandari, general secretary of the CPN(UML) and leading figure of the moderate Nepalese left, and the other was Jibaraj Ashrit, Bhandari's right-hand man and head of the UML's organisation department. The deaths were ruled an accident by an official inquest, but many in the UML and the broader left continue to believe it was murder - their suspicions are corroborated by the fact that the driver, the sole survivor of the incident, was himself murdered years later. The inquest verdict caused mass protests in Kathmandu, resulting in 26 deaths when protesters and police came to blows, and soon the demand of the protesters went from a new inquest to the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Koirala.
It was in fact Bhandari's death that would undo Koirala's government, but not in quite that immediate a fashion. Bhandari had, of course, been an MP, and his death meant that a by-election was called for his seat in central Kathmandu in February 1994. To supporters of K.P. Bhattarai, Koirala's old rival for the Congress leadership, this was an obvious chance to get their leader back into power, but Koirala himself was more lukewarm on this. It's again a bit unclear whether he actively did anything to hinder Bhattarai's campaign, but either way, the UML once again won the seat, this time with Bhandari's widow, Bidhya Devi Bhandari, as their candidate. Bhattarai's supporters were incensed, and when Koirala called a vote of confidence in his government in July, 36 Congress MPs voted with the opposition. Koirala duly resigned and asked the King to dissolve the lower house, and elections were scheduled for November.
The campaign, to put it mildly, did not go well for Congress. Not only were they accused of murdering, threatening and sabotaging their opponents, they'd gotten very little done in government, and Nepal's economy continued to be sluggish. The UML, meanwhile, were able to capitalise on this discontent and called for all the broken promises of Congress rule to be fulfilled - land reform, electrification, access to clean water and a television in every village, plus an end to corruption and political violence. Even without Bhandari, their campaign was very well-coordinated and effective. Really, though, this was an anti-incumbent wave rather than a pro-UML one, as evidenced by the fact that the RPP, now reunited, also made strides. The previous three and a half years hadn't made liberal democracy look great, and while the RPP stopped short of calling for a return to royal autocracy, their message of tradition and order had a lot of appeal.
When the people had voted, the result was clear, except insofar as it wasn't very clear at all. Congress had lost about five percentage points in the popular vote, going from 39% in 1991 to 34% in 1994, and while this was still a narrow plurality, the UML narrowly edged them out to become the largest party in the new parliament. The RPP went from four to twenty seats, while the bloc of independents grew from three to seven. Finally, the Maoist bloc was completely wiped out, and the reason for this is simple - well, as simple as it gets when you're talking about Nepalese communists. The CPN (Unity Centre), the major Maoist underground party, had a split earlier in 1994 over the ongoing political violence, with the majority faction arguing it was time for people's war, while the minority believed they should continue to contest elections and operate as a normal political party. Both factions tried to register candidates under the United People's Front label, but a court decision awarded the designation to the moderate faction, which led the hardliners to boycott the election altogether. As a result, while a group called the UPFN stood for election in 1994, it achieved no success and was mainly focused in the valleys surrounding Kathmandu. The old UPFN strongholds in Rukum and Rolpa districts, meanwhile, had very low turnout and saw Congress and RPP candidates elected with only the most token of UML opposition.
The elections having returned a hung parliament, King Birendra asked both Congress and UML to investigate forming a government, and when Congress failed to negotiate a coalition with the RPP, the UML were asked to form a government under Man Mohan Adhikari, a 74-year-old veteran of the Biratnagar jute mill strike and the 1950-51 democracy movement. The government was comprised entirely of UML members, but the RPP and NSP agreed to give passive support to it. Nepal had its first-ever communist government, and one of the first freely elected ones anywhere in the world, and it had been achieved with the support of Hindu royalists. Could it last?
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
And here's the map shaded by district.
- Location
- Derbyshire
I feel like this period of Nepal reels like a plot line meant to have been slotted into history 30 years earlier.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
It will only keep getting more and more so as we move forward.
msmp
Insert Pine Tree Flag Here
- Pronouns
- he/him/his
Given that's the 1994 map, we're only seven years away from one of the single most explosive turns of subcontinent history, too.
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
Which I would argue belongs a few centuries earlier rather than a few decades earlier.
South Africa 1981
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
Alright, it's high time I actually posted some of this stuff, so forgive the brief break from Nepal.
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, a few months ago, myself, @Nanwe and @Uhura's Mazda embarked on a project to map pre-1994 South African elections. While we found a good amount of information, especially constituency-level results, things went rather worse on the map front, and that means I wasn't able to get very much of use out of my part of the project.
However, something that already existed before our project started was a map of the 1989 election result, and we were able to determine that every election after 1981 used those same boundaries. So without further ado, here they are.
In 1978, the National Party celebrated thirty continuous years of majority government. In that time, they'd instituted what we know as apartheid (largely formalising and tightening existing racial laws that went back to the founding of South Africa), stripped black South Africans of citizenship and founded new "homelands" intended to become independent states, banned multiple violent and non-violent resistance movements and repeatedly put down uprisings by the black majority and their supporters, broken away from the Commonwealth and declared a republic, taken a staunch anti-communist position during the Cold War, fought several border conflicts against liberation movements in the now-former Portuguese colonies, and of course, resisted the introduction of television until 1976 for fear that it would indoctrinate white youth against the apartheid system. For most of this time, the white minority had enjoyed unbroken economic growth and prosperity, and this helped prevent widespread resistance to the racist social order among the population that was able to vote, but between an economic downturn and hardening international opposition, it was becoming more and more clear by the late 1970s that the South African system such as it existed was unsustainable.
In spite of this, the National Party as such was looking safer in power than it ever had been. There was a simple reason for this - the parliamentary opposition was in complete shambles. The United Party, which had been the main opposition to the Nationals for most of their time in power, had never been able to formulate a coherent alternative to apartheid. Some within the party wanted to dismantle the system and create a non-racial democracy in South Africa, but the old guard of Anglo-South African power brokers retained an essential belief in white minority rule and simply regarded the Nationals as too uncouth and anti-British. This division was first seen in 1959, when younger, liberal elements within the UP broke off to form the Progressive Party, the first avowedly anti-apartheid party to enter the South African Parliament since the institution of apartheid, but their influence was limited by the fact that, until 1974, they only ever won a single seat. In 1972, however, another upset occurred when Harry Schwarz, an anti-apartheid liberal whose views largely aligned with those of the Progressives, won the local UP leadership in Transvaal Province, and two years later Schwarz made headlines by signing an agreement, the Mahlabatini Declaration, alongside KwaZulu chief minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in which the two set out a blueprint for what a multiracial South African democracy could look like. In 1975, after holding his own seat of Yeoville and seeing the Progressives break out to win six seats, Schwarz left the UP altogether and formed the Reform Party, which soon merged with the Progressives to form the Progressive Federal Party. In 1977, the PFP overtook the UP to become South Africa's official opposition.
However, the old guard of the UP were less than eager to join this initiative. Instead, they sought to overcome the party's other big limiting factor - its limited appeal outside the circle of English-speaking urban voters - by seeking an alliance with moderate Afrikaner politicians. The Nationals had suffered a three-way split in the early 70s, with first a hardline faction under former communications minister Albert Hertzog (the man who had kept South Africa television-free through the 60s) leaving to form the Herstigte Nasionale Party (the "Reconstituted National Party" - universally known even in English as the HRP or as the Herstigtes), and then a moderate faction under former interior minister Theo Gerdener forming the Democratic Party (not to be confused with the later party of the same name). The UP old guard immediately saw a kindred spirit in Gerdener and moved to ally with the DP, which eventually led to the formation of the New Republic Party out of the DP and the rump UP in 1977. The NRP went into the 1977 general election with high hopes of becoming a strong opposition force against the Nationals, but as mentioned before, they weren't even able to overtake the PFP. In fact, the NRP would never really gain a foothold outside of Natal and the eastern Cape, which not coincidentally were and are also the only rural parts of South Africa where most white people speak English.
The only real result of this, as mentioned, was to strengthen the Nationals, who won their best-ever result in 1977 with 65% of the vote in contested seats and 134 out of 165 seats in the House of Assembly. One might think this would give a strong hand to the relatively hardline National Party leadership of John Vorster, but soon after the election a scandal broke where Vorster and information minister Connie Mulder were found to have run a slush fund that moved tax money into various business ventures, most notably attempts to purchase newspapers in South Africa and the US and turn them into mouthpieces for the Nationals. "Muldergate", as it became known (one of the first scandals outside the US to receive a -gate moniker), led to the resignations of both Vorster and Mulder, and the coming to power of Pieter Willem Botha, the man who would lead South Africa for the next decade and see the apartheid regime through some of its worst crises.
Botha was as much of a committed white supremacist as his predecessors, but unlike most of them, he recognised that some changes would need to be made to keep the system from breaking down. He'd served as defence minister through Vorster's entire time in government, dealing both with the collapse of Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique and the slow losing struggle for white minority rule in Rhodesia, and the latter in particular had brought him some lessons about how not to do things. For all his implacable opposition to majority rule, Botha had become convinced that the white population alone was too small to support a democratic order, and would be doomed if the other races banded together in opposition to apartheid. Instead, he thought, South Africa should fully embrace the concept of "separate development" - a description of the philosophy behind apartheid that went back as far as the 50s - and allow both the Coloured and Indian populations to participate in the democratic system, albeit using only their own political parties (South African law forbade political parties from having members in more than one racial group, a rule designed to prevent multiracial opposition parties from operating) and still firmly in a subordinate role to the white majority.
To achieve these goals, Botha would need to rewrite the South African constitution, and the first step in that process would be to seek a new parliamentary mandate. The House of Assembly elected in 1977 would expire in November 1982, but was dissolved a year and a half before that in order to coincide with the first tranche of constitutional reforms, including the abolition of the Senate (long a completely powerless body) and the institution of a President's Council, a fully-appointed body with representation for all racial groups except the black majority. Botha hoped that a snap election would give him the mandate to rewrite the constitution fully, and this was the message he took to the voters on 29 April 1981.
Not everyone was impressed, however. For the first time since 1948, right-wing opposition to the Nationals began to emerge in force, initially concentrated around the HNP. Conservative Afrikaners in rural areas, especially in the Transvaal, looked at developments in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia (now Rhodesia Zimbabwe, soon just Zimbabwe) and saw their entire world crumbling before them. South Africa was simply not in the position it had been a decade earlier, nor was the idea of white minority rule in Africa, and Botha's proposed reforms looked a lot like surrendering to this new reality where they would've preferred to fight for the old ideals. This tendency would only grow through the 80s, but in 1981 it wasn't enough to win the HNP a single seat. They did garner over 12% of the popular vote though, which technically made them South Africa's third-largest party, but of course the NRP were much more geographically concentrated and were able to hold eight of their ten seats as a result.
The PFP, meanwhile, continued to make gains, going from 17 to 26 seats and cementing their position as the main opposition. Once again, the primary opposition to the Nationals was found on the left, and this encouraged Botha to proceed with his reforms despite the conservative backlash. The constitutional revision would be carried out fully by 1984, including a constitutional referendum and a partial election to two new chambers of parliament representing Coloured and Indian voters, but far from cementing white supremacy, it would split the National Party in half and pave the way for the end of apartheid altogether.
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, a few months ago, myself, @Nanwe and @Uhura's Mazda embarked on a project to map pre-1994 South African elections. While we found a good amount of information, especially constituency-level results, things went rather worse on the map front, and that means I wasn't able to get very much of use out of my part of the project.
However, something that already existed before our project started was a map of the 1989 election result, and we were able to determine that every election after 1981 used those same boundaries. So without further ado, here they are.
In 1978, the National Party celebrated thirty continuous years of majority government. In that time, they'd instituted what we know as apartheid (largely formalising and tightening existing racial laws that went back to the founding of South Africa), stripped black South Africans of citizenship and founded new "homelands" intended to become independent states, banned multiple violent and non-violent resistance movements and repeatedly put down uprisings by the black majority and their supporters, broken away from the Commonwealth and declared a republic, taken a staunch anti-communist position during the Cold War, fought several border conflicts against liberation movements in the now-former Portuguese colonies, and of course, resisted the introduction of television until 1976 for fear that it would indoctrinate white youth against the apartheid system. For most of this time, the white minority had enjoyed unbroken economic growth and prosperity, and this helped prevent widespread resistance to the racist social order among the population that was able to vote, but between an economic downturn and hardening international opposition, it was becoming more and more clear by the late 1970s that the South African system such as it existed was unsustainable.
In spite of this, the National Party as such was looking safer in power than it ever had been. There was a simple reason for this - the parliamentary opposition was in complete shambles. The United Party, which had been the main opposition to the Nationals for most of their time in power, had never been able to formulate a coherent alternative to apartheid. Some within the party wanted to dismantle the system and create a non-racial democracy in South Africa, but the old guard of Anglo-South African power brokers retained an essential belief in white minority rule and simply regarded the Nationals as too uncouth and anti-British. This division was first seen in 1959, when younger, liberal elements within the UP broke off to form the Progressive Party, the first avowedly anti-apartheid party to enter the South African Parliament since the institution of apartheid, but their influence was limited by the fact that, until 1974, they only ever won a single seat. In 1972, however, another upset occurred when Harry Schwarz, an anti-apartheid liberal whose views largely aligned with those of the Progressives, won the local UP leadership in Transvaal Province, and two years later Schwarz made headlines by signing an agreement, the Mahlabatini Declaration, alongside KwaZulu chief minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in which the two set out a blueprint for what a multiracial South African democracy could look like. In 1975, after holding his own seat of Yeoville and seeing the Progressives break out to win six seats, Schwarz left the UP altogether and formed the Reform Party, which soon merged with the Progressives to form the Progressive Federal Party. In 1977, the PFP overtook the UP to become South Africa's official opposition.
However, the old guard of the UP were less than eager to join this initiative. Instead, they sought to overcome the party's other big limiting factor - its limited appeal outside the circle of English-speaking urban voters - by seeking an alliance with moderate Afrikaner politicians. The Nationals had suffered a three-way split in the early 70s, with first a hardline faction under former communications minister Albert Hertzog (the man who had kept South Africa television-free through the 60s) leaving to form the Herstigte Nasionale Party (the "Reconstituted National Party" - universally known even in English as the HRP or as the Herstigtes), and then a moderate faction under former interior minister Theo Gerdener forming the Democratic Party (not to be confused with the later party of the same name). The UP old guard immediately saw a kindred spirit in Gerdener and moved to ally with the DP, which eventually led to the formation of the New Republic Party out of the DP and the rump UP in 1977. The NRP went into the 1977 general election with high hopes of becoming a strong opposition force against the Nationals, but as mentioned before, they weren't even able to overtake the PFP. In fact, the NRP would never really gain a foothold outside of Natal and the eastern Cape, which not coincidentally were and are also the only rural parts of South Africa where most white people speak English.
The only real result of this, as mentioned, was to strengthen the Nationals, who won their best-ever result in 1977 with 65% of the vote in contested seats and 134 out of 165 seats in the House of Assembly. One might think this would give a strong hand to the relatively hardline National Party leadership of John Vorster, but soon after the election a scandal broke where Vorster and information minister Connie Mulder were found to have run a slush fund that moved tax money into various business ventures, most notably attempts to purchase newspapers in South Africa and the US and turn them into mouthpieces for the Nationals. "Muldergate", as it became known (one of the first scandals outside the US to receive a -gate moniker), led to the resignations of both Vorster and Mulder, and the coming to power of Pieter Willem Botha, the man who would lead South Africa for the next decade and see the apartheid regime through some of its worst crises.
Botha was as much of a committed white supremacist as his predecessors, but unlike most of them, he recognised that some changes would need to be made to keep the system from breaking down. He'd served as defence minister through Vorster's entire time in government, dealing both with the collapse of Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique and the slow losing struggle for white minority rule in Rhodesia, and the latter in particular had brought him some lessons about how not to do things. For all his implacable opposition to majority rule, Botha had become convinced that the white population alone was too small to support a democratic order, and would be doomed if the other races banded together in opposition to apartheid. Instead, he thought, South Africa should fully embrace the concept of "separate development" - a description of the philosophy behind apartheid that went back as far as the 50s - and allow both the Coloured and Indian populations to participate in the democratic system, albeit using only their own political parties (South African law forbade political parties from having members in more than one racial group, a rule designed to prevent multiracial opposition parties from operating) and still firmly in a subordinate role to the white majority.
To achieve these goals, Botha would need to rewrite the South African constitution, and the first step in that process would be to seek a new parliamentary mandate. The House of Assembly elected in 1977 would expire in November 1982, but was dissolved a year and a half before that in order to coincide with the first tranche of constitutional reforms, including the abolition of the Senate (long a completely powerless body) and the institution of a President's Council, a fully-appointed body with representation for all racial groups except the black majority. Botha hoped that a snap election would give him the mandate to rewrite the constitution fully, and this was the message he took to the voters on 29 April 1981.
Not everyone was impressed, however. For the first time since 1948, right-wing opposition to the Nationals began to emerge in force, initially concentrated around the HNP. Conservative Afrikaners in rural areas, especially in the Transvaal, looked at developments in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia (now Rhodesia Zimbabwe, soon just Zimbabwe) and saw their entire world crumbling before them. South Africa was simply not in the position it had been a decade earlier, nor was the idea of white minority rule in Africa, and Botha's proposed reforms looked a lot like surrendering to this new reality where they would've preferred to fight for the old ideals. This tendency would only grow through the 80s, but in 1981 it wasn't enough to win the HNP a single seat. They did garner over 12% of the popular vote though, which technically made them South Africa's third-largest party, but of course the NRP were much more geographically concentrated and were able to hold eight of their ten seats as a result.
The PFP, meanwhile, continued to make gains, going from 17 to 26 seats and cementing their position as the main opposition. Once again, the primary opposition to the Nationals was found on the left, and this encouraged Botha to proceed with his reforms despite the conservative backlash. The constitutional revision would be carried out fully by 1984, including a constitutional referendum and a partial election to two new chambers of parliament representing Coloured and Indian voters, but far from cementing white supremacy, it would split the National Party in half and pave the way for the end of apartheid altogether.
"Weimar" 1949
- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
- Pronouns
- he/him
The other day, I had an idea I like to call "what if reichswahlgesetz 1920 still on tv today". It's pretty straightforward: calculating what post-war German elections would look like if they'd never bothered replacing the Weimar-era electoral system. This is pretty easy to do, because it was such a mathematically simple system that even I can make a spreadsheet that calculates seat distribution when vote numbers are put in. And I already have spreadsheets of most of the post-war elections, so it's a quick affair.
I've calculated 1949, but not mapped it yet - the constituencies only slightly reworked to fit the new state borders (broadly speaking, each state makes up a WKV - NRW gets split into Nordrhein and Westfalen, while Hamburg is merged with S-H and Bremen with Niedersachsen, and the three states that would make up BaWü form a single one together) and, for this election only, to avoid splitting OTL constituencies. 1949 having only one ballot makes things a bit wonky for that election, partly because I don't have results below OTL constituency level, and partly because there were a lot of cross-party agreements and, at least in some states, a lot of independent candidates. Being unable to effectively separate these, I've counted them as a single bloc, but it's worth noting that under these rules, you can just take their seats out of the equation and the rest would look the same. No individual independent reached 60,000 votes, but the "German unity" (anti-SSW) candidate in Flensburg came damned close, and a couple of the ones in Württemberg-Baden crossed 30,000 as well. It's not impossible that you could've gotten a handful of seats for candidates who IOTL stood as independents, had they been forced to pool their votes by a different electoral system.
Anyway, the thing you've been waiting for, the actual result.
SPD 116 (-15)
CDU 100 (-15)
FDP 47 (-5)
CSU 23 (-1)
KPD 23 (+8)
BP 16 (-1)
DP 16 (-1)
Z 12 (+2)
WAV 11 (-1)
DKP/DRP 7 (+2)
RSF 4 (+4)
SSW 1 (+-0)
Independents 19 (+16)
Total seat count is 395, or 376 without the independents. Compared to the 402 seats on offer in the OTL election, it's a pretty close match, but I can't imagine the Bundestag would grow by a hundred members to match its OTL size in 1953.
The EVB and RWVP still failed to win a seat, not having attained 30,000 votes even on a federal level. The only "large" party to clearly benefit from this system is the KPD, which can actually use all those votes in states where they didn't hit OTL's 5% state-by-state threshold. Beyond them, the Centre and DKP/DRP both gained, and most interestingly (pinging @Uhura's Mazda) the RSF, the political wing of the Freiwirtschaft movement, manages to win two constituency seats (one in Westfalen-Süd and one in Düsseldorf-Ost, so both of the Ruhrpott constituencies), which means it qualifies for another two seats for its national list and ends up with a surprisingly strong bloc of four seats in the Bundestag.
EDIT: And the map:
I've calculated 1949, but not mapped it yet - the constituencies only slightly reworked to fit the new state borders (broadly speaking, each state makes up a WKV - NRW gets split into Nordrhein and Westfalen, while Hamburg is merged with S-H and Bremen with Niedersachsen, and the three states that would make up BaWü form a single one together) and, for this election only, to avoid splitting OTL constituencies. 1949 having only one ballot makes things a bit wonky for that election, partly because I don't have results below OTL constituency level, and partly because there were a lot of cross-party agreements and, at least in some states, a lot of independent candidates. Being unable to effectively separate these, I've counted them as a single bloc, but it's worth noting that under these rules, you can just take their seats out of the equation and the rest would look the same. No individual independent reached 60,000 votes, but the "German unity" (anti-SSW) candidate in Flensburg came damned close, and a couple of the ones in Württemberg-Baden crossed 30,000 as well. It's not impossible that you could've gotten a handful of seats for candidates who IOTL stood as independents, had they been forced to pool their votes by a different electoral system.
Anyway, the thing you've been waiting for, the actual result.
SPD 116 (-15)
CDU 100 (-15)
FDP 47 (-5)
CSU 23 (-1)
KPD 23 (+8)
BP 16 (-1)
DP 16 (-1)
Z 12 (+2)
WAV 11 (-1)
DKP/DRP 7 (+2)
RSF 4 (+4)
SSW 1 (+-0)
Independents 19 (+16)
Total seat count is 395, or 376 without the independents. Compared to the 402 seats on offer in the OTL election, it's a pretty close match, but I can't imagine the Bundestag would grow by a hundred members to match its OTL size in 1953.
The EVB and RWVP still failed to win a seat, not having attained 30,000 votes even on a federal level. The only "large" party to clearly benefit from this system is the KPD, which can actually use all those votes in states where they didn't hit OTL's 5% state-by-state threshold. Beyond them, the Centre and DKP/DRP both gained, and most interestingly (pinging @Uhura's Mazda) the RSF, the political wing of the Freiwirtschaft movement, manages to win two constituency seats (one in Westfalen-Süd and one in Düsseldorf-Ost, so both of the Ruhrpott constituencies), which means it qualifies for another two seats for its national list and ends up with a surprisingly strong bloc of four seats in the Bundestag.
EDIT: And the map:
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An impressive but daunting project Max, I look forward to seeing more.