Elections and parties
The Spanish general election and what it teaches usThe most recent turning points in Spanish politics occurred on 2 December 2018 and 13 February 2019. 2 December saw regional elections in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, where the left had been in power for decades. The social-democratic PSOE party suffered a significant decline, dropping seven percentage points. While the conservative People's Party (PP) also lost around five percentage points, the elections in Andalusia were nevertheless a clear victory for the right. The far-right VOX party came from virtually ...
read more "A bad day for the right"
read more "A bad day for the right"
Elections on 28 April 2019Following a short term of office, Social Democrat Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called for elections in Spain in the midst of a deeply volatile political period, just one month before the European, regional (except in Catalonia, Galicia, Andalusia and Comunidad Valenciana) and local elections.
Next Sunday 28 April, the Spanish Parliament will be re-elected. These will be the 13th general elections in Spain since the transition in 1978. The traditional two-party system that prevailed for over 30 years broke down after the ...
read more "Opportunities and Risks for the Left in Spain"
read more "Opportunities and Risks for the Left in Spain"
After the 14 April parliamentary elections the Finnish parliament is more left-wing, more gender equal and younger. Among 200 MPs 91 are now women. Left Alliance got its first victory in 24 years and Social Democrats in 20 years, while Green League got its best result in parliamentary elections. According to voter advice applications the new MPs of almost all parties are more left-wing than those in former parliament. This is especially remarkable in parliamentary groups of Green League and Swedish Peoples’ Party. However, the red-green parties (SDP, Green...
read more "Finnish Parliamentary Elections 2019"
read more "Finnish Parliamentary Elections 2019"
As crowds were gathering outside Parliament on Friday to voice their discontent for being denied their ‘Independence Day’, the majority of the British public was largely confused – after all, Brexit Day was supposed to be 29 March, and if that got delayed, what happens next?
This confusion is undoubtedly shared by fellow Europeans across the continent who watch with bemusement as one of the key EU member states plunges itself deeper and deeper into a constitutional crisis with no end in sight. And while it may not look like it right now, in ...
read more "Britain after Brexit-Day. We are still here."
read more "Britain after Brexit-Day. We are still here."
A long time coming
After a new Swedish record of 131 days with only a temporary government, Sweden now finally has a coalition in place. The election took place on the 9th of September last year and on the 21st of January the new ministers were sworn in. The end result is a government of the social democrats (SAP) and the Green party. They amassed the necessary support by entering into a so called “January agreement” with the Centre party and the Liberals. This contract stipulated 73 concrete policies on which the incoming government could reach agreement with the Centre ...
read more "United we fall"
read more "United we fall"
A step towards a new political consensusLiverpool, England’s northern city famous for football, the Beatles and its notoriously quick-witted citizens, is always at its loveliest in Autumn. And it is against the backdrop of cinereal September clouds that 13,400 people decamped to the city’s docks for five days to take part in the Labour Party conference, where they would subsist on a cyclical diet of warm white wine, black coffee, composite motions and political debate.This conference hashed out policies on a massive range of issues: the party pledged to prevent the ...
read more "Labour conference 2018"
read more "Labour conference 2018"
The day after the election, no one knows who will be governing Sweden in the coming four years. The two traditional coalitions are tied at almost exactly the same result. The current governing red/green coalition; the Social Democrats, the Greens and passive support from the Left Party, received 40.6% of the votes, while the challenging centre-right coalition; the Moderates, Liberals, Centre Party and Christian Democrats, ended up with 40.3%. The rest was made up of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats at 17.6%, which makes them the third biggest party and,...
read more "The end of Swedish exceptionalism"
read more "The end of Swedish exceptionalism"
![Image: cristian, italian election / Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 [creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/]](https://rosalux.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/1026-3-1115x742.jpg)
A total anomaly or a revealing laboratory? In order to understand the results of the Italian general elections of 4 March 2018, to grasp the current situation and to outline future scenarios, we first have to take into account what happened over the past seven years and the reform of the electoral law that preceded the vote.
The electoral law reform and the defeat of the "Establishment Party"
The new law, approved in November 2017, is a majoritarian-proportional mixed system, which currently provides a share (about 35 percent) of elected ...
read more "Italy: the electoral tsunami and the neoliberal spell"
read more "Italy: the electoral tsunami and the neoliberal spell"
This two-days workshop in Madrid in March aimed to reveal the present state of the European Social Democracy, through a concrete analysis of the European Social Democratic parties in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Belgium.
This event follows the workshop held in Helsinki (see the conference report) where we examined the parties of Italy, Sweden, Central-Eastern Europe, Greece and the United Kingdom.
In parallel, the workshop was an attempt to capture the relation between the social democracy and the ...
read more "European Social Democracy: Opponents or Potential Partners?"
read more "European Social Democracy: Opponents or Potential Partners?"