Leading Off
● Algeria – presidential resignation
In a political earthquake in North Africa, longtime Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika resigned earlier this month after 20 years in power. The frail 82-year-old's attempt to run for a fifth term had set off massive protests and strikes against corruption and the government's authoritarianism. Protesters, many of whom are young, have been calling for widespread changes to Algeria's system of government, under which the National Liberation Front (FLN) has been in power almost without interruption since the country gained independence from France in 1962.
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The last time Algeria held genuine multiparty elections was in 1991, which saw the Islamic Salvation Front poised to oust the much more secular FLN from power after the first round of voting. The military, however, initiated a coup that canceled the runoffs and annulled the elections, leading to a decade of civil war and the deaths of 100,000 to 200,000 people. With military support, Bouteflika ascended to the presidency in the opposition-boycotted 1999 election, and the FLN and its allies have maintained a chokehold on power ever since.
Although Algeria saw widespread protests when the initial Arab Spring demonstrations swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, the political and economic reforms imposed to quell them did little to undermine Bouteflika's grasp on power. That background makes this year's ouster of the president even more remarkable given that the Arab Spring revolutions collapsed in a reversion to authoritarianism or catastrophic civil war everywhere except in neighboring Tunisia.
While elections will likely follow at some undetermined point, it remains to be seen whether they will truly be free and fair. The military still retains significant power, and protesters are demanding far-reaching changes that would threaten its control in this nation of 42 million people.
Notable Developments
● Australia: New South Wales – state parliament (March 23)
The center-right Liberal/National Coalition won a third term in Australia's most populous state last month, though with a reduced majority. In 2015, the Coalition captured 54 of 93 seats, but it took only 48 seats this election, just one seat more than the 47 needed to form a majority government. However, this decrease largely did not benefit Labor, the main opposition party, which won two more seats than in the last election, but with a slightly smaller share of the vote.
Instead, the biggest beneficiaries were the right-wing Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, which held on to the seat it picked up in a 2016 by-election and won two additional seats. The Greens also won three seats, as did three independents. All eyes now turn to Australia's upcoming national election, which is expected to be held in May but has not yet been set.
● Canada: Alberta – provincial parliament (April 16)
Rachel Notley stunned Canada four years ago when she led her center-left New Democratic Party to victory in 2015 in the traditionally conservative province of Alberta, which hadn't elected a left-of-center government for 85 years. That year's election saw the tiny NDP crush the province's long-reigning Progressive Conservative dynasty, with the hard-right Wildrose Party doing serious damage to the PCs' right flank, ushering in a 54-seat NDP majority in the 87-member provincial parliament.
But it will be extremely challenging for Notley's NDP to re-create its 2015 success this year, in no small part due to a unification of the Wildrose and PC parties under the new United Conservative Party banner. The dominant issue, though, is the beleaguered state of Alberta's resource-dependent economy, which has been battered by sagging oil prices and legal battles that have delayed pipeline projects, keeping industry exports bottlenecked.
Still, while early polls suggested a right-wing blowout, there are some indications that this election may not be a complete write-off after all. The UCP, led by Jason Kenney, a former federal cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's Conservative government, has been mired in a series of controversies relating to extremist views of its candidates.
At the outset of the campaign, two UCP candidates resigned after their histories of incendiary comments were exposed on social media. One, Caylan Ford, complained that white supremacists were not being treated fairly after Charlottesville and expressed sadness that whites were being "replaced" in their European "homelands." Another, Eva Kiryakos, was exposed for sharing anti-immigrant literature complaining of "rapefugees," lamenting the "perversion" of transgender people, and accusing gays of wanting to "convert" schoolchildren.
Even after these early stumbles, scores of other UCP candidates have been exposed for harboring similar views, including one incumbent, Mark Smith. Smith was caught on tape at the end of an anti-abortion rant in 2013 saying that "homosexual love" was not "good love," and instead comparing LGBTQ relationships to pedophilia. Furthermore, Smith authored a document stating that publicly funded religious schools should be able to fire LGBTQ teachers simply on the grounds of their sexual orientation.
Kenney has responded by deflecting criticisms of his candidates, claiming that these views don't reflect his party. His sincerity, however, appears entirely questionable, especially given his own past as an anti-LGBTQ activist in San Francisco, as well as the fact that weakening the privacy protections currently in place for Albertan LGBTQ schoolchildren is one of his legislative priorities.
It remains to be seen whether these explosive controversies will be enough to keep the UCP from victory, particularly given the shape of Alberta's energy sector. Recent opinion polling has been frustratingly scant, but some polls do appear to show a significant tightening between the NDP and the UCP. Regardless of the end result, no one could accuse this election of being boring.
● Canada: Prince Edward Island – provincial parliament (April 23)
Voters in Prince Edward Island—Canada's smallest province in both land area and population—will head to the polls on April 23 to decide whether to give its governing centrist Liberal Party a fourth consecutive term in power. Current polling indicates that the Liberals are in a three-way battle with the center-right Progressive Conservatives and, surprisingly, the upstart Green Party.
The Greens have actually led several recent polls despite holding almost no media events or policy announcements, saying they prefer to focus on door-knocking. If they pull off an upset, they would form the first provincial Green government in Canada.
Concurrently, voters will also decide whether to adopt a mixed-member proportional representation system in a province-wide referendum, which, if enacted, would also be the first of its kind in the country.
● Estonia – parliament (March 3)
As expected, Estonia's governing coalition, led by the centrist to center-left Centre Party, with the support of the center-left Social Democratic Party and the conservative Fatherland Party, lost its majority in elections last month. The opposition center-right Reform Party won 34 of the parliament's 101 seats, ahead of Centre's 26, but the biggest gains went, as predicted, to the far-right Conservative People's Party, which more than doubled its support to win 19 seats. Meanwhile, Fatherland won just 12, and the Social Democrats 10.
Consequently, with no bloc winning a majority, the parties have attempted to form a new coalition. The Reform Party had been expected to lead the next government, but Centre rejected the idea of a grand coalition based on the parties’ differences on economic policy, with Reform favoring cuts to taxes and public spending. Centre has long faced difficulties forming an alliance because of the party's strong support among Estonia's ethnic-Russian minority, which rivals view as tying it to Vladimir Putin's Russia, although both Centre and Reform strongly favor the European Union and NATO.
However, the alternatives after this election are limited, since Reform has ruled out an alliance with the far-Right. Indeed, Centre began talks on forming a government with Fatherland and the Conservative People's Party, which has faced widespread criticism, and such a coalition could ultimately prove unwieldy given the far-Right's Russophobic ultranationalism. Alternately, Reform could replace Centre in the coalition with the Social Democrats and Fatherland, or a new election could be held.
● Finland – parliament (April 14)
Finland's upcoming parliamentary election is poised to see a major rebound for the center-left Social Democrats and Green Party at the expense of the radical-right Finns Party following the collapse of the country's right-of-center governing coalition. That coalition was led by the center-right Centre Party, with the backing of the conservative National Coalition, which had included the Finns from 2015 until 2017. That year, however, the Finns split in half, with more moderate dissidents forming the new Blue Reform Party, while the increasingly extreme Finns left the coalition.
The Finns had campaigned in the last election as strongly anti-immigrant and right-wing on sociocultural issues while professing nominal support for the Left's positions on economics, but their support in the polls dropped almost immediately after the 2015 elections once they joined a center-right government and began backing its spending cuts. At the same time, polls indicate that Blue Reform is set to lose most or all of its seats, and both Centre and the National Coalition are also poised to lose ground, making another such center-right coalition unlikely after 2019 following the coalition's failed push to reshape Finland's healthcare system.
However, polls show a left-leaning alliance made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens, the left-wing Left Alliance, and the centrist Swedish People's Party, which draws support from Finland's small Swedish minority, falling just shy of an outright majority. It's unclear if such a decidedly center-left coalition, which Finland hasn't seen since in several decades, could win outright, but at the very least, the center-left appears poised to be in a dominant position to form the next coalition, which could include Centre or potentially even the small center-right Christian Democrats.
● Guinea-Bissau – parliament (March 10)
The small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau held its second parliamentary election following a 2012 military coup, and the nominally left-wing PAIGC party of President José Mário Vaz narrowly lost its outright majority. Nevertheless, PAIGC will remain in control of the unicameral National People's Assembly thanks to its alliance with the three small parties, since the center-left opposition Party for Social Renewal and a breakaway faction of PAIGC members failed to win a majority.
However, the biggest political division is within PAIGC itself, as Vaz has repeatedly fired prime ministers from his party only for his subsequent appointees to fail to attain the support of parliament, leading to political crisis and budgetary dysfunction. Some observers are hoping that a newly elected parliament will lead to a more functional relationship with the president, who is supposed to face election in his bid for a second term in a contest that has yet to be scheduled this year.
● India – parliament (April 11-May 19)
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will attempt to win a second term in the world's largest election ever held, beginning April 11 and lasting for over a month. Indian elections are held in stages, with different states voting on different dates, in part due to the incredibly large electorate that includes approximately 900 million currently eligible voters—almost four times as many as in the United States.
Modi leads the right-wing Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is running as part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The BJP, even without its coalition allies, won an absolute majority of 282 seats in the 543-member Parliament for the first time in 2014. While economic growth has remained strong under Modi, unemployment has risen, and some new measures have hurt small businesses.
The main opposition is the Indian National Congress (INC), running as part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). The INC has governed India for much of its independence and has usually been led by a member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. That's once again the case in this election: Rahul Gandhi is the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers and has served as a member of Parliament since 2004.
In 2014, the INC suffered the worst electoral defeat in its history, winning only 44 seats. Polling has shown a rebound for the INC, though its coalition still consistently trails the BJP's. The central question of the election is whether the BJP alliance can win a majority in Parliament. Depending on how close BJP and its allies can get, Modi may struggle to win a vote of confidence. A wide variety of state-centric and ideology-specific parties invariably win seats in Indian elections and can make coalition building outside of the two main alliances complicated. Results are scheduled to be announced on May 23.
● Indonesia – president and legislature (April 17)
Incumbent President Joko Widodo is again facing retired Lt. Gen. Prabowo Subianto in a rematch of the 2014 election that Widodo narrowly won. Indonesia, the world's fourth-largest country, shook off military-influenced rule in the late 1990s and has only directly elected its president since 2004.
Widodo has been polling in front and is the favorite, but he's faced questions over increased Chinese investment in the Indonesian economy, including in high-speed rail and mining. Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries want Chinese investment and trade but are wary of the influence and pressure that can come along with it. Polling has show a marked decrease in favorable views of China among Indonesians in recent years. Subianto has attempted to tap into this anti-China sentiment, vowing to review a $6 billion high-speed rail line financially backed by China.
Both candidates have questionable human rights records, though Subianto's is considerably worse. Widodo has cracked down on hardline extremist groups and not followed through on many reforms he had promised in his first election. Meanwhile, Subianto, who served under the country's previous strongman, Suharto, has been accused of massacring civilians in the 1980s and torturing pro-democracy activists in the 1990s.
Hardline Islamist groups have widely thrown their support behind Subianto, which led Widodo to choose a conservative Islamic cleric as his running mate in an attempt to co-opt some fundamentalist support. Elections are also being held for the legislature and provincial councils.
● Israel – parliament (April 9)
In the wake of Israel's attorney general announcing in February that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be indicted, it seemed that the grip on power Netanyahu had maintained since 2009 was in real peril. Polling in early March, in the wake of the announcement, projected an almost even divide between pro-Netanyahu parties (parties of the center-right, far-right, and Orthodox Haredi religious parties) and anti-Netanyahu parties (parties of the center and left, and Arab parties) in the 120-member Knesset.
However, during the month of March, the pro-Netanyahu side regained a lead in the polls and is projected to win somewhere between 62 to 69 seats. While this lead isn't insurmountable, even if the polls are accurate, Netanyahu has to be considered the favorite to hold on.
A key factor will be which parties take at least 3.25% of the national vote. That's the minimum threshold needed to enter parliament, but doing so guarantees a party four seats. A record 14 parties have a realistic shot to make it, which could determine whether Netanyahu will win another term, or whether his main rival, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Benny Gantz, who is leading the three-party Blue and White centrist coalition, has a chance.
On the anti-Netanyahu side, Ra'am-Balad, an Arab coalition, has been above the threshold in most polls, while the new centrist party Gesher has usually fallen short. On the pro-Netanyahu side, both center-right Kulanu and right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu look likely to succeed in most polls, while Zehut, a new right-wing libertarian party, had been missing the threshold earlier in the campaign but is now shown regularly surpassing it.
● Panama – president and legislature (May 5)
Panama's center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party is favored to return to power for the first time in a decade, following losses in 2009 to the center-right Democratic Change Party and in 2014 to the right-wing Panameñista Party. As Panama does not employ a runoff or any sort of ranked-choice voting, candidates can win the presidency with only a plurality, as happened in 2014 when the winner received just 39%. The Democratic Revolutionary Party's candidate, Laurentino "Nito" Cortizo, had previously served in the National Assembly from 1994 to 2004 and was minister of agricultural development from 2004 to 2006.
● Spain – parliament (April 28)
Spain will hold early elections later this month after center-left Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was unable to pass a budget when Catalan separatist parties withheld their support. However, polling in the last several weeks has shown the current stalemate—or something like it—could end up continuing. Indeed, the Socialists have improved their standing to nearly 30% of the vote, but some of those gains have come at the expense of the left-wing Podemos. Surveys show the two parties still well short of a majority without relying on various Basque and Catalan nationalist or separatist parties, who may once again hold the balance of power.
At the same time, these polls also suggest that a right-wing coalition made up of the center-right Citizens, the right-wing People's Party (PP), and the far-right Vox party may yet fail to win a majority of its own. These recent shifts make it somewhat less likely that a far-right party would serve in government for the first time since the end of Francisco Franco's fascist dictatorship in the mid-1970s. However, Vox is still all but guaranteed to become the first far-right party with a significant parliamentary presence since Franco's demise, with polls giving it about 10% of the vote.
Adamantly against Catalan nationalism, Citizens had surged to a plurality in the polls shortly after 2017's disputed Catalan independence referendum and subsequent clampdown by the PP-led national government helped tarnish the PP while raising the salience of the secession issue. Citizens, however, has since seen its support tumble back to pre-referendum polling strength after Vox sprung onto the scene following its breakout performance in December regional elections in Andalusia, Spain's most populous region. That decline may render a Socialist-Citizens grand coalition impossible after April's parliamentary elections.
● Turkey – local elections (March 31)
In a surprising setback to autocratic Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, late last month Turkey's main opposition party, the center-left and secularist Republican People's Party, won key mayoral races in Ankara, the country's capital, and Istanbul, its largest city, after more than two decades out of power. However, Erdoğan has still not conceded his party's loss in Istanbul, and his allies have demanded a recount, ominously claiming that there were invalid votes.
Erdoğan, who rose to prominence as mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s, has achieved narrow victory after narrow victory in recent years by suppressing the opposition in the media and likely resorting to actual election fraud, but a recent economic downturn and currency crisis have dented his seemingly impervious support.
Erdoğan's party, the right-wing Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), and an allied far-right party did combine to win a majority of all votes cast in the local elections, but the results have been widely interpreted as disappointing for AKP and a rebuke to Erdoğan. Whether they actually signal a loosening of his grip on power is an entirely separate question, however.
● Ukraine – president (March 31 and April 21)
Following the first round of Ukraine's presidential election, populist comedian Volodymyr Zelensky and incumbent President Petro Poroshenko will advance to an April 21 runoff, with Zelensky taking 30% and Poroshenko a weak 16%. Indeed, Poroshenko just barely avoided getting shut out of the runoff after former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was the runner-up in 2010 and 2014, earned 13% of the vote.
Zelensky may now be favored to oust Poroshenko following the president's turbulent first term. After Ukraine's 2014 revolution brought Poroshenko to power, Vladimir Putin's Russia invaded and illegally annexed Crimea, and Putin's regime has empowered a deadly separatist movement in the far east of the country, which has a significant ethnic-Russian population. Furthermore, Poroshenko oversaw austerity measures as part of an International Monetary Fund bailout and has generally faced attacks from opponents such as Zelensky for not taking on Ukraine's entrenched oligarchy.