Voters, Voters Everywhere. Even in Countries Without Democracy

In light of what, in retrospect, appears to be a rambling and incoherent endorsement of dictatorship in my previous blog entry I decided I should reestablish my democratic credentials with a rambling and incoherent endorsement of democracy in this one.

To this end I thought I would take a quick look at a few of the democratic elections that have happened around the world so far this year.  I have selected four countries, pretty much at random, that have gone to the polls in the last few months.  In chronological order they are Liechtenstein, Djibouti, Kenya and Bulgaria.

First out of the gate with an election at the beginning of February was Liechtenstein, the only country in the world to be named after its owners.  Four political parties were vying for seats in the Liechtenstein Landtag thus making it the only country with more political parties than registered voters.  Counting was completed about twenty seconds after the poll closed and the news was not good for the incumbent Patriotic Union Party.  The Patriotic Union lost five of its thirteen seats.  This left the Progressive Citizens Party with ten seats (a loss of one) holding the whip hand while two minor parties picked up seven seats between them.  That's it; twenty five seats for a national parliament.  One gets the impression Liechtenstein doesn't need a lot of governing.  Or possibly seeing as how the reigning prince has the right to veto legislation, dismiss the government and appoint judges the people of Liechtenstein don't feel the need for any more government.  The prince, incidentally, gained these powers in a 2003 constitutional referendum when 64% of the population voted to give themselves less say in government.

Not much larger but considerably poorer, Djibouti went to the polls on the 22nd of February for their parliamentary elections.  For those of you who don't know Djibouti is a small country in the Horn of Africa which is very unfortunate in its neighbours.  Djibouti is bordered by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia (or whatever the bit of Somalia bordering Djibouti is currently calling itself).  Its coastline is on the Red Sea, pirate central.  Not surprisingly the governments attempts to stimulate the tourist trade have had mixed results.  Pretty much the only return visitors have been the French Foreign Legion and the US Marine Corps.

So to the elections, this years poll promised to be more interesting than most due to the novel presence of opposition parties contesting the ruling Union for the Presidential Majority Party's 100% control of parliament.  To be fair it is difficult to defend a 100% majority when you actually have competition so it will come as no surprise that the UMP took a bit of a hit.  When the dust had settled the UMP kept forty three of sixty five seats, still enough for a majority.  The opposition cried foul, possibly with justification but their revised poll result claims only resulted in the UMP gaining forty seats so one can probably say that the result reflected the will of the people if perhaps not quite in the method the people expected.

Just while we're in Africa Kenya had a general election for pretty much everybody over the position of local dogcatcher.  So many civil servants resigned to contest seats that it is amazing the country managed to function at all in the lead up to the results.  The presidential candidates seemed to spend as much time begging their supporters not to initiate violence as they did attempting to lay out their vision for Kenya's future.  To be fair if you can't manage an election without violence your future is probably pretty dusty at best anyway.  Despite what was euphemistically referred to as "unrest" in several regions last year the elections themselves were remarkably violence free if we excluded the six police officers murdered by separatists who don't want to be part of Kenya at all and probably don't care who the president is.  Just in case you care the president is Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya's first president, who won 50.51% of the vote just narrowly avoiding the need for a second round of voting.  Mr Kenyatta is now settling down to run Kenya and is confident of clearing himself of those pesky charges of crimes against humanity brought by the International Criminal Court.

The last election on our list is Bulgaria.  Time have been tough on Bulgaria ever since the collapse of the  Soviet Union caused a follow on collapse in the market for Bulgaria's principal export, poisoned umbrellas.  This was reflected in the election itself.  For starters it was held two months early because massive protests against poverty and utility prices prompted the president to dismiss the government and order an early poll.  The election itself was a glorious melange of phony ballot papers, invalid political parties and accusations of electoral fraud from all sides.  Voter turn out was the lowest since the collapse of communism and the result was a hung parliament (from the sounds of it they were lucky it wasn't a lynched parliament).  The until recently ruling GERB party won the most seats but not a majority and none of the other parties would return their phone calls so the president called on the leader of the next largest party to form a government.  Some indication of the difficulties he is currently facing can be determined from the fact that his cabinet appointments generated street protests before they had even been formally announced.

Possibly the most interesting election so far this year took place in a country that isn't even a democracy (sit down Venezuela, I'm talking about Iran).  Iranians went to the polls to determine which of the ruling ayatollah's hand picked placemen was going to take the place of outgoing nutbag Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.  The decision, with over 50% of the primary vote went to Hassan Rouhani.  Already various giddy eyed people in the west have labelled him as a moderate and a possible reformer.  They're almost certainly wrong.  Rouhani, like all the other candidates was the personal selection of Supreme Ruler Ali Khamenei and that guy doesn't do either reform or moderation.  Still the election is significant.  Offered a choice between six hardliners more than fifty percent of the Iranian people selected the one they thought was the least hardline.  As an election its meaningless but as an opinion poll it might be very interesting indeed.