Voters Show the Way Forward

13 Feb 2012

Tony Kinsella

Voters from the Atlantic to the Adriatic and from the Baltic to the Straits of Gibraltar have delivered clear and often merciless verdicts this past year. Nine of the EU’s 27 Member States held general elections, as did Croatia and Switzerland. There were also state legislative elections in 7 of Germany’s 16 Länder, a Senate election in France and the Croatian referendum on EU membership.

If the results of many, but by no means all, of these elections were reported in different media, most of the campaigns attracted little attention and less analysis. While politics across Europe are shaped by different histories, state structures and voting systems, some patterns are easily distinguishable.

Incompetent administrations were swept aside. Political parties judged to have actively contributed to the economic and fiscal crises were decimated. Voters consistently opted for the classic opposition, or alternative government.

Extremist approaches, from either the right or the left, gained no traction with established populist or extremist parties losing votes. Where traditional parties of government opted for extreme policies their support collapsed. The most notable example is the implosion of Germany’s liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).

During its ten years in opposition (1998-2009) the FDP adopted a more radical neo-liberal stance calling for significant relaxation of business regulations. This stance would give the party its best ever electoral performance in 2009 when it won 14.6 percent of the vote. As the world economy spun into recession, the FDP remained locked into policy positions which came to be seen as being more and more radical. German voters deserted it in droves during 2011 and some opinion polls now place its national support at a mere 2 percent. The collapse in FDP support across Germany has left Chancellor Merkel at the head of what is, in effect, a minority government.

Voters everywhere consistently endorsed the preservation of the European model of a market economy with strong regulation, or what is often referred to as the “Social Market Economy” or even “Rhineland Capitalism”.

February - Ireland

Irish voters decimated Fianna Fáil in punishment for its inept handling of the economy over three terms. Polls suggested that voters first considered making Labour the country’s biggest party, before tending towards a Fine Gael overall majority. In the end the electorate massively endorsed the familiar option of a Fine Gael-Labour coalition, made Sinn Féin the country’s second opposition party, and under the freedom accorded by Ireland’s PR-STV electoral system elected an incoherent and inchoate group of independent Deputies, and ones from smaller parties.

March - Estonia

Estonian voters endorsed their status quo on March 6, returning the centre-right prime minister Andrus Ansip with two additional seats in the country’s 101 seat Riigikogu (parliament). Estonia’s Social Democrats had a good election, almost doubling their seats from 10 to 19.

April - Finland

Finland’s voters went to the polls in a general election on April 17. The surprise event was the breakthrough of the extraordinarily difficult to qualify Perussuomalaiset or True Finns party which went from 4% and 5 seats in the 1997 elections to 15% and 39 seats in Finland’s 200 seat Eduskunta unicameral parliament. The True Finns took votes from most of the other parties but primarily from the Centre Party which has traditionally been strongest in Finland’s rural areas.

The True Finns under their colourful and provocative leader Timo Soini, a devout Roman Catholic in this largely Lutheran country and a fan of London’s Millwall football club, are both nationalist and populist. They argue for maintaining or improving Finland’s generous social and educational provisions but are highly critical of their country’s participation in EU financial rescue operations.

June - Portugal

Portugal’s centre-left Socialist government under José Sócrates was into its second term when it lost a confidence vote in the Portuguese parliament at the end of March 2011. The

Sócrates administration went ahead with negotiating the EU-IMF-ECB emergency financial support package before the June general election.

The Socialist party’s vote fell by almost 9 percent, while that of the centre-right Social Democrats of Pedro Passos Coehlo rose by 9.6 percent. Portugal’s voters chose their normal alternative government of the Social Democrats and the Peoples’ Party.

September – Denmark and Latvia

Danish voters went to the polls on 15 September with an outgoing centre-right coalition effectively seeking a fourth term. Voters here also chose their country’s natural alternative government, a centre-left coalition led by the Social Democrats under Helle Thorning-Schmidt. If the radical Red-Green Alliance component of that government did well in the elections, so too did the more centrist Social Liberal Party. The big losers in the Danish election were the parties furthest to the right, including the Danish People’s Party - one of those hard-to-determine Nordic right-wing populist entities - which saw its vote decline by 3 percent.

Although the Latvian elections of 17 September saw the centre-left Harmony Centre party emerge as the country’s largest (31 out of 100 seats in the Latvian Saeima), a centre-right coalition under former prime minister Valdis Dombrovskis formed the new government.

October – Poland and Switzerland

Poland voted on 9 October. The Civic Platform (PO) of outgoing prime minister Donald Tusk was comfortably returned winning 209 seats in the 460-seat Sejm. Support declined for all Poland’s conservative opposition parties and for the Democratic Left Alliance. The secular Movement of Support (Ruch Poparcia, RP), a breakaway faction from the Civic Platform, polled strongly for a first outing and won 40 seats.

The relative stability of Swiss federal politics has been more and more disturbed by the growth of the populist and xenophobic Swiss People’s Party (SVP). The SVP first emerged in 1987 and grew steadily during 1995-2007 to become the country’s largest party. While it remains the largest party in the 200-seat National Council with 54 seats to the 46 held by the Social Democratic Party, on 23 October it recorded its first ever reverse with its vote falling by 2.4 percent.

November - Spain

Spain’s general election took place on 20 November against the background of economic recession and severe austerity programmes. The outgoing Socialist prime minister Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero did not stand for re-election and his PSOE party faced an uphill struggle to win a third term. Spanish voters opted for a clear change of government with the centre-right PP’s vote rising by 4.7 percent to 44.63. The PSOE vote slumped 15.1 percent to 28.8. The United Left (IU) progressed slightly to be the third party with just under 7 percent of the vote.

December – Croatia and Slovenia

Croatia went to the polls on 4 December. The outgoing centre-right HDZ coalition which has dominated Croatian politics since independence was roundly defeated by the centre-left Kukuriku coalition led by Zoran Milanovic which won 81 of the parliament’s 151 seats.

On the same day Slovenian voters delivered a surprise. The outgoing centre-left Social Democratic administration of Borut Pahor was in considerable disarray and the expectation was that the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party would head the polls. The mayor of Ljubljana, Zoran Jankovic, launched a new centre-left grouping, Positive Slovenia, which emerged as the largest party by winning 28 of the 90 seats in the Slovenian National Assembly.

January/February 2012 – Finland and Croatia

The first round of Finland’s presidential election took place on 22 January 2012. The powers of the once pivotal Finnish presidency have been gradually reduced to a point where the office is now roughly similar to its Irish counterpart.

Saulo Niinistö of the centre-right National Coalition Party emerged as the clear victor with almost 37 percent of the vote. The two surprises came from the second place won by Pekka Haavisto of the Green League with nearly 19 percent of the vote and from the serious decline in the vote for the True Finns. Under their colourful leader, Timo Soini, the True Finns had won 15 percent of the vote in the April 2011 general election. Mr. Soini’s score as a presidential candidate was down to 9.4 percent. In the run-off round on 5 February,Sauli Ninisto won 63%of the vote with Pekk Haavisto on 37%.  “ Finland has returned to a society of common sense, where we fear nothing, but are courageous, internationally minded and tolerant. I am very pleased about that” commented the Finnish Prime Minister.

Croatian voters also went to the polls on 22 January to decide on their country’s membership of the European Union. The result was unequivocal with 66.67 percent in favour and not one of the country’s electoral districts recording a “No” majority. Having signed the Treaty of Accession in December 2011, Croatia is now on track to become the 28^th Member State of the EU.

German Länder elections 2011

Seven of Germany’s sixteen federal states (Lander) with a collective population of around 26 million people elected new state assemblies during 2011. Under German electoral law a party must win at least 5 percent of the vote before it qualifies to take any seats. While local issues impacted on many of these elections, four patterns clearly emerged.

The most dramatic was the collapse in the liberal Free Democrat Party (FDP) vote. The FDP failed to reach the 5 percent threshold in five of these seven elections and is thus no longer represented in those state assemblies.

The second pattern is related in that other parties advocating more extreme policies, Die Linke (The Left) and the far-right National Democratic Party suffered minor losses.

The third is significant progress by the Greens right across Germany. The SPD vote is up, while the CDU vote is down.

The governing federal CDU-FDP coalition is effectively a minority administration. Certain laws, most notably European treaties, need to be adopted by both houses of the German parliament. The Bundesrat or upper house is composed of delegates from the Länder and Chancellor Merkel’s government lost its majority there in February 2011. The opposition majority in the Bundesrat has steadily grown with each subsequent state election.

Merkel’s coalition will not seek re-election in 2013 as the FDP is in deep crisis. In several key senses Ms. Merkel has become a “lame duck” Chancellor.

February - Hamburg: Many had seen Hamburg’s CDU-Green 2008 coalition as a harbinger of new German political alliances, but February’s results told another tale. CDU support in Hamburg collapsed (-21 percent) and it lost half its seats. The SPD vote increased by 17 percent.

March: Saxony-Anhalt, Rhineland Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg: On March 20 the voters of Saxony-Anhalt gave the CDU a rap on the knuckles (-4 percent). The SPD vote remained stable, and the Greens on 7.1 percent won their first seats. The FDP won a mere  3.8 percent of the vote, thus losing all their seven seats in the Magdeburg assembly.

A week later the voters in Rhineland Palatinate continued to desert the FDP reducing it to just over 4 percent of the vote, costing it all its 10 seats in the state assembly. The SPD (-9 percent) suffered from local issues, but the Green vote rose by almost 11 percent giving them 18 of the 101 seats in the state assembly at Mainz – a breakthrough for them.

If the Hamburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Rhineland Palatinate results had been warning shots across the German government’s bows, the results of the March 27 vote in Baden-Württemberg holed it on the waterline. This prosperous state had been consistently governed by the CDU since 1952, but the party’s vote fell by over 5%. The liberal FDP, its junior coalition partner, lost 8 of the 15 seats it had held. The leader of the Greens, Winfried Kretschman, became his party’s first Chief Minister of a German Land winning over 24 percent of the vote.

May – Bremen:

The city state of Bremen went to the polls on 22 May with a new voting system and with the voting age lowered to sixteen. The outgoing SPD (+2 percent)/Green (+6 percent) coalition was triumphantly returned. The CDU (- 5 percent) and the FDP (-3.5 percent) had a worse day, and the FDP once again lost all its seats.

September- Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania:

Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, the home state of Chancellor Merkel, went to the polls on 4 September. The victors were the SPD (+5.5 percent) and the Greens (+5 percent). Her CDU had a bad day (-5.7 percent) while the FDP vote collapsed (-6.9 percent). Once again the FDP lost all its seats. While the far-right National Democratic Party retained its presence in the 71-seat assembly, its vote declined and it lost one of its six seats.

The Berlin state elections on 18 September saw the SPD vote decline by 2.5 percent, the CDU’s rise by 2.1 percent, with the Greens progressing 4.5 percent to become the assembly’s third party with 30 seats. The FDP (- 5.9 percent) suffered another humiliation, losing all its 13 seats. The Berlin elections were also noteworthy for the first successful outing of the alternative Pirate Party which took almost 9 percent of the vote and won 15 seats in the 152-seat assembly.

Partial French Senate election - September

165 of the 348 seats in the French Senate were up for election on 25 September. The electorate are members of local and regional authorities and mayors. The Socialist Party and the Greens (EELV) gained an extra 25 seats giving the French left a majority in the Senate for the first time since the foundation of the 5^th Republic in 1958. The leader of the Socialist Group in the Senate, Senator Jean-Pierre Bel, was subsequently elected president of the Senate, the second ranked office holder of the French Republic after the president.

This reflected successive gains by the left in municipal, departmental and regional elections over recent years and a growing disaffection with President Sarkozy’s government amongst the non-party mayors of France’s many small rural communes. Loss of the Upper House constrains the government’s freedom of action not least in terms of amending the French constitution.

Conclusions

Our media, print, broadcast and online, bombard us with details of the US Republican Party primaries. European election results are lucky if they feature, and analysis of electoral campaigns is in even shorter supply. There are many structural reasons for this media imbalance which is to be found in most, if not all, countries. The real problem is, I would suggest, more one of an outmoded conceptual approach rather than a simple shortage of resources and skills.

The most misleading, and therefore dangerous, fall-out from these shortcomings is the impression that Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy hold to the keys to any European solution.

President Sarkozy faces an uphill challenge if he is to have any chance of winning a second term in May 2012. Chancellor Merkel must negotiate with the opposition SPD and Greens to pass key legislation through the German parliament. Her CDU must also contemplate a 2013 general election where the outgoing coalition will not be capable of seeking a second term.

Voters want governments to address the crises their countries face. In 2011 they rewarded administrations they saw as competent and ruthlessly punished incompetence. They have, so far at least, shown no signs of being seduced by the simplistic solutions offered by any extreme or radical grouping.

We are just beginning to see the outlines of how Europe is going to deal with its debt and liquidity crises. Solving those crises will be a major but insufficient achievement. Getting Europe’s economies moving again remains the real challenge.

Europe’s voters seem to have grasped those realities rather more quickly than some of their political leaders and many of their journalists.

As an independent forum, the Institute does not express any opinions of its own. The views expressed in the article are the sole responsibility of the author.