With Christmas coming up soon and little in the way of electoral news, I thought I’d spend this week going through the major elections expected in 2009. At the moment, the big ones from my perspective are:
- Queensland general election, expected by September.
- Indian federal election, expected by May.
- European Parliament election, in June.
- United Kingdom general election, which must be held by mid-2010 but could be held in 2009.
- German federal election, to be held in September.
- Indonesian presidential election, in July, and legislative election in April.
- British Columbia provincial election in May, along with a referendum on introducing the Single Transferable Vote electoral system.
I’ll get started with Queensland later tonight.
Germany will be very interesting.
I don’t know how you campaign against a government of which you are a large party but I’m sure the SPD will find a way.
I can’t wait to see what kind of multi-coloured coalitions get thrown up.
Well surely it would become more of an election about “first principles” while the minor parties attack the government.
Definitely.
Polls are showing more than a third of the vote being divided up equally between the FPD, The Left Party and The Greens.
The SPD have kind of broken down but if they can get over their issues with The Left then an SPD/Left/Green would be desirable and achievable.
Being the junior partner in a government is always electoral poison, even for the SPD.
Also, my understanding of the SPD/Left division is that it isn’t so much a split between moderate left and far left, but more that the SPD is dominated by former West German moderates who don’t wanna work with the unreconstructed East German communists in the Left Party.
Not to mention that in 2005 those issues were exacerbated by the tensions between the Schroder and the leader of The Left who was an ex SPD chairman and candidate for Chancellor.
There are also significant elements in The Left who couldn’t bear the thought of collusion with the bourgeois swine in the SPD.