The Daily Kos International Elections Digest is compiled by Stephen Wolf and David Beard, with additional contributions from James Lambert and Daniel Donner, and is edited by David Nir.
Leading Off
● India – parliament (April 11-May 19)
Elections in the world's largest democracy saw Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's radical-right Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party win a landslide victory over the center-left Indian National Congress, securing a second term for Modi at the helm of India's first back-to-back majority governments in decades. The BJP expanded its majority and won 65% of the seats with 45% of the vote as part of the National Democratic Alliance, giving Modi strong backing to pursue an increasingly far-right agenda.
Campaign Action
Modi's opponents hoped to force a hung parliament by denying his party or even his coalition a majority, but the BJP and its allies unexpectedly gained seats compared to their already historic 2014 victory. Led by Gandhi family scion Rahul Gandhi, the INC and its United Progressive Alliance of allied parties earned just 26% of the vote and 17% of the seats, with various regional parties taking much of the balance.
India is an ethnically and religiously diverse country, and although Hindus make up roughly 80% of the population, it's also home to one of the world's largest Muslim populations, given the nation's sheer size of 1.3 billion people. Modi and his party espouse a hardline form of Hindu nationalism called Hindutva that targets Muslims for discrimination in particular. Years before Modi became prime minister in 2014, he had once been banned from entering the U.S. for allegedly providing tacit support to Hindu ultranationalists who massacred Muslims in riots in his role as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat in 2002.
While Modi was never prosecuted in that incident, he and his party have fostered a political climate that has emboldened Hindu nationalists, often with violent results. One notable sign of how the BJP has increasingly lost its claim to being a mainstream party was running Sadhvi Pragya Thakur as a candidate. Prosecutors suspect Thakur helped plot a 2008 bomb attack that killed 10 people and wounded 82 others in a heavily Muslim city, yet she still won election.
Modi and the BJP came to power in 2014 in part due to widespread voter dissatisfaction with the long-dominant INC over weakening economic growth and the party's reputation for corruption, but while the BJP passed several business-friendly reforms and welfare proposals to benefit the very poor, economic growth has remained below expectations as unemployment rose. As a result, the BJP's 2019 victory instead appears to have delivered a mandate to Modi to more vigorously pursue his Hindu nationalist agenda both domestically and against Muslim-majority Pakistan. The results may also embolden the BJP to further undermine the independence of the media and judiciary.
Notable Developments
● Australia – parliament (May 18)
In an upset, the center-right Liberal-National Coalition narrowly won a third term over the center-left Labor party, despite Labor's small but consistent lead in pre-election polls. Many observers have attributed the surprise outcome to new Prime Minister Scott Morrison's energetic campaigning and personal popularity. Morrison had consistently outpolled Labor leader Bill Shorten when voters were asked whom they'd prefer as prime minister since he took office last year after an internal party coup.
The Coalition, as it's often known, had won 76 of Parliament's 151 seats in 2016, and gained a net of one seat. Labor lost one seat and ended with 68, with the remainder going to small parties and independents. Beneath these top-line numbers, though, 12 seats switched parties, as Labor and the Coalition traded a number of constituencies.
Notably, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who led the Coalition to victory in 2013 before getting ousted by the party in 2015, lost his seat to an independent. Abbott was known for his strident opposition to same-sex marriage and a carbon tax. It was the first time his seat, a wealthy suburb of Sydney, had not voted for a Liberal since it was created in 1922.
Polling in this race has come into question following the Coalition's unexpected win, particularly over the question of whether pollsters may have engaged in "herding"—that is, the possibility that firms sought to match results produced by peers to avoid looking like an outlier. While in aggregate the polls were not wildly off (they had Labor up 2-3 points, though they ended up losing by 3 points), not one poll in the last year showed the Coalition ahead, which is statistically unlikely in such a close race.
● Austria – parliament (likely September)
In a dramatic turn of events, Austria's coalition government between the conservative Austrian People's Party (OVP) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) collapsed after a damning video surfaced that exposed FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache offering to sell government contracts in exchange for illegal funding for the FPO's 2017 election campaign. In the recording, Strache was shown as eager to strike a deal with a woman whom he thought was a representative of a Russian oligarch aligned with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, something that appeared instead to be a setup.
The scandal prompted Strache and the FPO to resign from the government and consequently side with the center-left opposition Social Democrats (SPO) to vote no confidence in OVP Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a first in Austria's post-World War II history. The move paves the way for early elections to be held, likely in September.
Strache's exposure has blown open concerns over the FPO's increasing attempts to entrench itself and its allies in power and impose increasingly authoritarian measures in Austria. The FPO formally maintains a cooperation agreement with Putin's United Russia Party, and the leaked video showed Strache stating how he wished Austrian media resembled that in neighboring Hungary, where far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban has effectively ended real democracy by rigging the electoral system and consolidating his faction's grip over the judiciary and any independent media threatening his rule.
Furthermore, far-right parties like the FPO have increasingly sought out control over their nations' interior ministries when they've joined governing coalitions in recent years across Europe. In Austria, that opened the way for the FPO to attempt to exert political control over the police, the national security apparatus, and investigations into the extreme right. In turn, many Western governments have largely cut out Austrian intelligence officials from receiving potentially sensitive information.
The results of the European Parliament elections, which took place just days after the scandal broke, still showed the OVP in a dominant position with a strong plurality over the SPO, and the FPO nevertheless maintained a significant level of support that would preclude the SPO and their Green allies from forming their own coalition. However, given the toxicity of the FPO, another right-wing alliance looks less likely than a new grand coalition with the center-left opposition, and the FPO's exposed attempts to undermine democracy may chasten Kurz after he had moved the OVP hard to the right to win the last election.
● Belgium – parliament (May 26)
Belgium elected a new parliament on the same day as the European Parliament elections, but it may be a long time before anyone knows who won them. Twelve different parties won seats, with the right-wing New Flemish Alliance coming in first with 16%, but the far-right Vlaams Belang (VB) finished a surprising second with 12%. The Flemish (Dutch-speaking) part of the country shifted right with its increased support for VB, while the Walloon (French-speaking) region and the capital of Brussels shifted left, with increased support for the far-left Workers' Party and the ECOLO (Green) Party.
Breaking down the results by ideology, rather than region, shows the far-left won 12 seats, the center-left 50, the center to center-right 45, the right-wing 25, and the far-right 18. Any parliamentary majority will likely come from the three groups in the middle, as most parties will not work with the parties of the far-right or the far-left.
● Canada: Newfoundland and Labrador – provincial parliament (May 16)
Incumbent Premier Dwight Ball led his centrist Liberal Party to a photo finish in Canada's easternmost Atlantic province, winning 20 seats out of 40 in the provincial legislature and halting a steady parade of right-wing victories at the downballot level in Canada. Ball, who enjoyed a landslide win over the governing center-right Progressive Conservatives in 2015, nevertheless lost a considerable amount of ground in the popular vote (from 57% to 44%) and number of seats (from 31 to 20) this time around. However, his win did defy a streak of opinion polling in May that appeared to show the PCs with the upper hand.
Ultimately, the PCs won 15 seats, the left-leaning New Democratic Party won three, and two independents, both of whom are former Liberals who were ejected from their caucus in recent years, emerged victorious. While Ball's 20 seats are one shy of the number needed to form a majority government, there's an outside chance that a judicially-administered recount, expected to take place in June, may reverse a razor-thin NDP win in the constituency of Labrador West and tip the scales in favor of the Liberals.
● Denmark – parliament (June 5)
Denmark will head to the polls on June 5, and the center-left bloc appears poised for a blowout victory and a return to power after four years of a center-right minority government led by the Venstre party. The Social Democratic-led alliance of five parties, ranging from centrist to radical left, has held a decisive edge over parties on the right in every poll this year. That same polling has shown the radical-right Danish People's Party tumbling from it 21% take in the last election to roughly half that share, bleeding support both to the left and to multiple small far-right parties.
However, that diminished support for the Islamophobic radical-right has come at the cost of Denmark's Social Democrats themselves moving far to the right on issues regarding immigration, for instance by voting for a law to allow the confiscation of jewelry from refugees and policies that apply additional legal restrictions to communities with large concentrations of immigrants deemed as "ghettos." If the Social Democrats succeed in undermining the radical-right's support among their traditional working-class base by adopting their harsh restrictions on immigration and immigrants living in Denmark, it may encourage other struggling parties on the left to do the same elsewhere in Europe.
● European Union – European Parliament (May 23-26)
Elections for the 751-member European Parliament were held across 28 European Union countries over four days in May, giving citizens the rare opportunity to directly influence the makeup of the supranational EU. The two largest groups of political parties, the center-right European People's Party and the center-left Socialists and Democrats, both lost seats; the Greens, the centrist Liberals, and right-wing nationalists all saw gains to varying degrees.
While there were some continent-wide trends, particularly the retreat of the two traditional political groups and the rise of the Greens, the results were also heavily influenced by each country's domestic political situation. For example, the radical-right nationalists gained seats almost entirely due to the recent rise of the far-right League in Italy, which dominated there with 34% and went from five seats to 29. Similarly, the Liberals benefitted from French President Emmanuel Macron's new Liberal alliance gaining 14 seats amid the collapse of the traditional center-left and center-right in France.
By contrast, the Greens made gains across Western Europe, coming in second in Germany and Finland, third in France and Denmark, and fourth in the U.K. and Ireland, in some cases earning their highest vote share ever. They also saw notable increases in their vote in Belgium and Denmark. However, the Greens did not enjoy the same type of surge in Eastern Europe, which largely saw less turnover than in the western part of the continent and isn't as strongly divided along the traditional left-right axis.
For the new term of the European Parliament, the two traditional party alliances will for the first time no longer have the ability to pass legislation on their own but will need to rely on the Greens and/or the Liberals to govern. The "euroskeptic" and nationalist right remains an issue for the European Union, but in Parliament they have neither the numbers nor the unity (there are three separate political groups to the right of the EPP) to make a significant difference.
In the United Kingdom, 73 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) were elected and will remain in office until the country formerly leaves the union. When that happens, the size of the Parliament will decrease by 46 seats to 705 members, and 27 MEPs who were elected but not yet seated will enter the body. Those 27 come from 14 nations that were statistically underrepresented, while the U.K.'s 46 seats will be held in reserve for potential future new members. For a further discussion of the EU elections in the U.K. and the country's current political situation, please see our separate item below.
● Germany: Bremen – state parliament (May 26)
Similar to its poor showing in the European Elections, the center-left SPD lost elections held on the same day in the small German state of Bremen, which it had controlled for the past 73 years. The center-right CDU won 26% of the vote, while the SPD won 25%, though there's a good chance that a three-party coalition between the SPD, the center-left Greens, and the far-left Die Linke (literally "the Left") can form the next government.
● Greece – parliament (July 7)
After the ruling left-wing Syriza party lost the European Elections to center-right rival New Democracy, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called early elections to be held in July. ND has consistently led Syriza in polling by 8-10 points, with no other party polling in double digits. Due to Greece's 50-seat bonus for the party that finishes in first place, there's a good chance ND will be able to form a majority government if next month's results reflect the current polls.
● Guatemala – president and legislature (June 16)
Right-wing Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales has drawn outcry both domestically and internationally over his efforts to undermine a United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission. However, his impending departure from office following a single-term limit has done little to quell voter discontent against an entrenched establishment widely viewed by Guatemalans as corrupt and willing to undermine the rule of law.
Ahead of this month's elections, the country's Supreme Court disqualified several candidates, including anti-corruption crusader and former Attorney General Thelma Aldana, on seemingly dubious grounds (a judge who is now under investigation for bribery had charged Aldana with financial abuse of office). Aldana had won widespread praise four years ago when she and fellow prosecutors helped bring down center-right President Otto Perez Molina, who resigned and was later imprisoned on charges of corruption, but her inability to run leaves anti-corruption activists without a prominent candidate in the race.
Former Congresswoman Zury Ríos, whose father, Efraín Ríos Mont, led a right-wing dictatorship that committed genocide during Guatemala's Cold War-era civil war, was also disqualified under a constitutional ban against relatives of those who took power in past coups running for president. Consequently, with both women barred from seeking the presidency, the race has been thrown into turmoil, and an Aug. 11 runoff in the event no candidate wins a majority looks likely. One of the most prominent remaining contenders is Sandra Torres of the center-left National Unity of Hope, who lost by a 67-33 margin to Morales in 2015.
● Israel – parliament (September 17)
Unexpectedly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing majority following April's elections, even though Israel's broad right-wing alliance won 65 of 120 seats in the Knesset (parliament). This marks the first time in Israeli history that the Knesset has voted to dissolve itself without establishing a new government and will send the country back to the polls just five months after its last vote.
Despite the right's seeming victory two months ago, a deep dispute between Avigdor Lieberman's secular-but-hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party and the strictly Orthodox Haredi religious parties derailed the formation of a new coalition. Haredim, who represent about 11% of Israel's population, have long been exempt from military service, but the country's Supreme Court ruled the exemption unconstitutional two years ago. Lieberman had introduced legislation to increase Haredi conscription, which the religious parties vehemently oppose and have demanded be amended—a demand Lieberman refused.
Bereft of Yisrael Beiteinu's five seats, Netanyahu's alliance only accounted for 60 seats, one short of a majority. No other party was willing to join with Netanyahu, prompting him to call new elections lest a rival be given an opportunity to form a different coalition.
● Malawi – president and legislature (May 21)
In the southeast African nation of Malawi, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) President Peter Mutharika narrowly won a second term by a 39-35 margin over Malawi Congress Party leader Lazarus Chakwera. Vice President Saulos Chilima, who left the DPP in 2018 to form his own party after claiming Mutharika hadn't done enough to reduce corruption, took just 20%. However, both Chakwera and Chilima have alleged that there were signs of fraud. It's unclear just how credible the accusations are, but the country's high court nevertheless refused to sustain an injunction blocking the results certifying Mutharika as the winner.
● Panama – president and legislature (May 5)
Panamanian voters elected Laurentino Cortizo of the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party as their next president by an unexpectedly slim 33-31 margin over center-right Democratic Change candidate Rómulo Roux, but nothing was unexpected about the crushing defeat for the governing right-wing Panamenista Party, whose nominee, José Blandón, took just 11%. Cortizo benefitted from voter outrage over incumbents linked to corruption scandals, which helped his party win the presidency after a decade out of power and also come one seat shy of a majority in the National Assembly.
● Philippines – legislature (May 13)
In a dismaying outcome for the rule of law, candidates allied with authoritarian populist President Rodrigo Duterte won a sweeping victory in midterm legislative elections for most of the Filipino House of Representatives and half of the country's Senate. Since taking power in 2016, Duterte has run roughshod over democratic norms and engaged in a brutal drug war that has killed approximately 25,000 people, many of whom have been victims of vigilantes. Nevertheless, the president maintains a staggeringly high approval rating of nearly 80%.
Duterte will likely be able to further consolidate power for himself and his allies after winning a supermajority in the Senate, and Duterte's administration has already succeeded in stacking the nation's highest court with pliant judges. The far-right will now be free to pass constitutional amendments that could ultimately lead to Duterte flouting the single-term limit of six years and unleashing even more violence.
● South Africa – parliament (May 8)
The center-left African National Congress (ANC) won another majority government, though with a smaller percentage of the vote than in any election since the end of apartheid. The ANC won 57.5%, down from 62% in 2014, largely to the benefit of the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which won 11% (up from 6% last time). The centrist Democratic Alliance, which, after a strong showing in local elections and the ascensions of its first black leader, had high hopes for this race, nevertheless ticked down from 22% in 2014 to 21%. They were likely hurt by the right-wing Freedom Front Plus, a party representing Afrikaners (the descendants of Dutch settlers) that won 2% of the vote.
● Turkey – Istanbul mayor (June 23)
In a major blow to Turkey's weakened democracy, the Turkish High Election Council caved to pressure from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to cancel March's election for mayor of Turkey's largest city, which was won by an opposition candidate, and rerun the race later this month. The questionable decision let stand the elections for lower offices that took place at the same time, showing that this decision was about Erdoğan and his right-wing Islamist party, not electoral irregularities.
The center-left opposition Republican People's Party denounced the ruling but has decided to participate in the rerun election rather than boycott it. The ousted mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, is running again, and limited polling shows him with a narrow lead.
● Ukraine – parliament (July 21)
Seeking to build off of his landslide victory in April as a first-time candidate and take advantage of a honeymoon period to deliver a parliamentary victory for his new party, President Volodymyr Zelensky has called early elections for July 21 instead of waiting until the end of October. However, while his anti-establishment Servant of the People Party has a significant polling lead over all of its rivals, it has no presence in the outgoing Parliament, where some among the opposition are trying to block early elections in court.
● United Kingdom – prime minister resignation
Prime Minister Theresa May announced her intention to resign as prime minister once the Conservative Party chooses a successor this summer, less than three years after taking the job in the wake of the Brexit vote in 2016. During her time in office, May called for a disastrous snap election in 2017 that lost her party its majority; since then, she's repeatedly failed to win parliamentary approval for the withdrawal agreements she has negotiated with the EU.
The final straw for May's premiership came in the form of the European Parliament elections, which she had tried to avoid by finalizing the U.K.'s departure from the union before they could take place. The election ended up being the worst for May's Tories since 1832: The party won just 9% of the vote as its voters deserted in droves for former U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage's new Brexit Party, which took first with 32% of the vote.
However, despite the Brexit Party's plurality, parties that support remaining in the EU won the most votes overall. The pro-remain center-left Liberal Democrats and the Greens both gained significantly to finish in second and fourth place, respectively, while the Labour Party suffered a similar embarrassment for its refusal to take a stronger stand in favor of a second referendum on Brexit. It won just 14% of the vote to finish third.
In all, the "remain" side took 40% while the pro-Brexit faction won 35%, with the muddled Labour and Conservative establishment accounting for just 23%. With polls showing that most Labour supporters want to stay in the EU while most Tory voters wish to leave, it's likely that overall, the elections showed a small edge for the pro-remain forces.
As for the position of prime minister, former London Mayor and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson now appears to be a favorite to replace May if he can make it to the vote of the Conservative Party membership. However, Conservative MPs will first narrow the selection to two candidates, and Johnson could get squeezed out during that phase. Eleven candidates have already declared and more are likely before nominations close June 10. What this might mean for Brexit remains, as always, unclear, but given the inability of the current Conservative coalition to pass any proposed deal, early parliamentary elections are always a possibility.