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Sweden election continues trend of rising/fragmented left, rising far-right

By Bill Humphrey September 14, 2014 - 11:00 pm September 15, 2014 Arsenal Analysis

In the last 8 years, Sweden became the economy with the fastest growing income inequality in the industrialized world. Will today’s election reverse that trend?

The ruling center-right coalition pursued not just an austerity agenda, like many of their peers (on both sides of the center) across Europe during the recent crisis, but in Sweden they also pursued an aggressive effort to roll back government services and programs and introduce private sector participation in functions traditionally managed by the state. Although some of the policies were introduced in the 1990s, they were ramped up even more in recent years. In particular, Swedish government attempts to privatize and voucherize public education — along the lines promoted by many right-leaning education “reformers” in the United States — devolved into a mess. One recent poll, by Gothenburg University’s SOM Institute (cited by The Guardian article linked above), found that 70% of the country is opposed to the privatization and corporate subsidy schemes of the current center-right government.

After 8 years in opposition, the Social Democrats are projected to win the most seats in today’s election and take control of parliament via a left-leaning coalition. Their party leader and likely next prime minister is a former welder and union leader who has never even been elected to parliament before. But the irony is that this win (though slightly better than opinion polls had projected) will come with one of the party’s lowest vote shares of any election held after the 1909 reform that granted male workers the right to vote. Why? Despite the broad-based opposition to the current, right-leaning government’s policy agenda, the opposition has been diffuse and did not benefit one party (such as the Social Democrats) alone.

Much of the anger has gone toward the even more leftist parties — such as the Green Party, Left Party, and Feminist Initiative — who will likely join the coalition government with the Social Democrats if they win seats. If any of the outlying left parties don’t meet a minimum 4% vote share threshold — and it appears that Feminist Initiative received less than that — those leftist votes could be tossed out, essentially wasting them, unfortunately. That would be less of a problem if it weren’t for the alarming alternative that might take the seats instead when votes for parties below the threshold are eliminated.

On the other side of the electorate, some of the populist anger in Sweden has further fueled the rise of a far-right, anti-immigrant party, the Swedish Democrats. The racist and inflammatory Swedish Democrats — who have attempted to run ultra-populist ads openly accusing Muslims of stealing resources from the welfare system — had no such trouble hitting their vote threshold to remain in parliament, which they entered for the first time four years ago. Here’s an Al Jazeera report:

With all voting districts tallied by Monday morning, the Social Democrat-led bloc won 43.7 percent of the vote while the ruling centre-right coalition, led by the Moderate Party, gained 39.3 percent.

But the anti-immigration far-right Sweden Democrats were celebrating large gains as the party won 12.9 percent of votes cast – more than doubling the 5.7 percent of votes won in the 2010 election.

“Sweden friends, party friends, now we’re Sweden’s third-largest party,” party leader Jimmie Akesson told cheering supporters late on Sunday.

Neither mainstream party will allow the Swedish Democrats into a coalition government, but with the fragmentation that occurred on the left, and the small size of the non-extreme parties on the right, the Swedish Democrats may hold the balance of power in parliament anyway unless a grand left-right coalition or minority government arrangement is worked out. And that would make no one happy, in light of the rebuke given to the center-right in this election.

As we’ve covered before on this site, European mainstream politics right now are facing a very serious challenge from both a splintering but growing far-left as well as a dangerously solidifying, growing, and extreme far-right.

Although the far-right Swedish Democrats won their first seats in Sweden’s national parliament back in 2010, they also won 2 seats in the EU parliament this year, amid a continent-wide wave of sometimes extreme populism. That EU vote share in Sweden of almost 10% for the Swedish Democrats helped their momentum going into this national election and boosted them to just under 13%. And also like we saw across most of Europe at the EU elections in May 2014, the Swedish centrist parties and center-right parties were decimated in the results tonight, to the benefit of the far-right as well as an umbrella of parties on the left.

I spoke tonight with Etienne Borocco, a national counselor of the Union of Democrats and Independents, a centrist party in France, who previously wrote Arsenal For Democracy’s analysis of the 2014 European Union election results and the rising populist tide (both left and right) in Europe this year. Borocco told me the following about the national election results in Sweden today:

The gains by Swedish Democrats are one more demonstration of European apathy and disaffection. The world is very frightening for Europeans now with the economic/currency crisis and the explosive geopolitical context. Moreover, the welfare state is decreasing because of spending cuts. When you mix high unemployment, downgrading the welfare state, and unresolved asylum issues, you have apathy as the result.

So between apathy with the system / existing parties and enthusiasm among those seeking easy but dangerous answers, we have the left growing but splitting its votes and the extreme right-wing unifying into a dangerous political force. It’s similar to some of what we have seen in recent years in the United States but is perhaps much more visible in a multi-party system with far higher rates of voter participating (in some cases, mandatory). And as he pointed out, the depth and duration of the economic crunch in Europe, crossed with the resulting cutbacks of government spending and jobs, has put a lot of voters in the mood to vote for anybody but the mainstream parties when they head to the polls. That is the space exploited to allow parties like the Swedish Democrats to make big gains.

Parliament House in Sweden. Credit: Holger.Ellgaard via Wikimedia

Ongoing tolls of past US air campaigns: Laos

By Bill Humphrey September 13, 2014 - 4:34 pm September 13, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

As we approach another American bombardment, expanding from Iraq into Syria — the latest in a history spanning more than two centuries — it’s important to remember and reflect upon the continuing casualties of past cross-border bombardments by United States forces.

As the Laotian Civil War (1953-1975) spiraled out of control by the late 1960s and came to involve everyone in the region and the United States, the government and military of Laos attempted to drop out of involvement in the Vietnam War and wider Indochina struggle. But the North Vietnamese Army, opposed by the United States, continued to maintain a presence there and was using the country as a supply line to communist rebels in South Vietnam.

In response, from about 1969 to 1973, the United States military dropped 260 million cluster bomblets on the country a little over forty years ago. As many as 80 million of these munitions remain unexploded and potentially live, across the Laotian countryside, which is one reason why Laos has lagged so far behind the region in economic development. (It’s hard to expand or upgrade farms, let alone build infrastructure and communities when there are armed bombs everywhere, going off unexpectedly all the time). 20,000 people have been killed or injured in Laos by unexploded cluster bomblets since the end of the cluster bombing campaign in the early 1970s. Al-Jazeera recently reported on some of the local teams trying to clear areas of bombs.

Caption: Unexploded cluster sub-munition, probably a BLU-26 type. Plain of Jars, Laos. | Credit: Seabifar – Wikimedia

Ferguson prosecution now some kind of Agatha Christie choose-your-own-adventure

By Bill Humphrey September 12, 2014 - 10:27 pm September 12, 2014 Arsenal Pulse

Dana Milbank examines whether a grand jury might refuse to indict Officer Wilson in Mike Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri last month. It doesn’t look good, in large part because grand jurors are essentially now being asked to become detectives in a real-life crime novel:

October is when a grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict the white police officer, Darren Wilson, who killed an unarmed black teenager by firing at least six bullets into him. It’s a good bet the grand jurors won’t charge him, because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn’t want them to.

The latest evidence that the fix is in came this week from The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, who discovered that McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.

McCulloch’s office claims that this is a way to give more authority to the grand jurors, but it looks more like a way to avoid charging Wilson at all — and to use the grand jury as cover for the outrage that will ensue. It is often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. But the opposite is also true. A grand jury is less likely to deliver an indictment — even a much deserved one — if a prosecutor doesn’t ask for it.

I’m sorry — are we basically now relying on 12 randos who didn’t find a way to get out of jury duty to pore over the evidence on their own, without help from the experts, and then decide if it’s safe to ask another jury if it was, in fact, “Officer Wilson in the Conservatory with the Candlestick”?

Apparently, McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, has had a lot of family members on police forces (including a father who was killed in the line of duty) and has (coincidentally?) declined to prosecute any of a dozen police officers involved in questionable fatal shootings in his jurisdiction over the twenty years he has been in the office. He has actually excused some pretty horrific wrongful shooting deaths by police, as Milbank reports.

Beyond gerrymandering: Other geographic challenges for Democrats nationally

By Bill Humphrey September 12, 2014 - 10:13 pm September 12, 2014 Arsenal Analysis

I received some criticism for my suggestion earlier this year that Democrats’ top medium-term priority should be recapturing state legislatures before the next redistricting after the 2020 Census to prevent gerrymandering, on the basis that other factors were causing bigger problems for Democrats’ abilities to win legislative and Congressional districts. I still think gerrymandering plays a large role in current electoral hurdles facing Democrats across the country — and one that is being downplayed by some analyses — but I accept that there are other factors.

To that end, I wanted to pull together some extended passages from two recent articles that I think effectively discuss those political demographic challenges.

The first looks, mathematically, at how Democratic vote share and turnout can be increasing (which helps in presidential and Senate races) but Republicans can hold so many Congressional districts. This focuses on urban versus rural districts. Nate Cohn, NYT/The Upshot, “Why Democrats Can’t Win the House:”

The gap between staggering Democratic margins in cities and the somewhat smaller Republican margins in the rest of the country allows Democrats to win key states in presidential and Senate elections, like Florida and Michigan. But the expanded Democratic margins in metropolitan areas are all but wasted in the House, since most of these urban districts already voted for Democrats. The result is that Democrats have built national and statewide majorities by making Democratic-leaning congressional districts even more Democratic, not by winning new areas that might turn congressional districts from red to blue.
[…]
The role of partisan gerrymandering in all of this is hotly debated. It has indeed allowed Republicans to squeeze extra districts out of states like Michigan and Virginia, and strategically reinforce vulnerable incumbents. Those additional districts might make the difference between an insurmountable Republican advantage or a merely significant one. But gerrymandering is not responsible for the entire Republican edge in the House.

The political scientists Jowei Chen, of the University of Michigan, and Jonathan Rodden, of Stanford University, estimate that gerrymandering costs Democrats about six to eight seats in the House. Even so, “by far the most important factor contributing to the Republican advantage,” Mr. Chen says, “is the natural geographic factor of Democrats’ being overwhelmingly concentrated in these urban districts, especially in states like Michigan and Florida.”

To retake the House, Democrats would not just need another great election year, like 2006 or 2008; they would need to build a much broader coalition than the one they currently focus on in presidential elections. They would need to attract the voters that some liberals thought they could abandon: the conservative Democrats of the South and Appalachia, where the vanquished Blue Dogs once reigned.
[…]
If Democratic losses in that part of the country are irreversible, Democrats might be forced to wait for demographic and generational change to spread beyond urban centers and suburbs, giving the party a chance to build a more decisive majority. Until that happens, the long-anticipated Democratic majority has little chance of enacting the most ambitious elements of its agenda.

One puzzle not answered there: If districts are being drawn reasonably fairly and reasonably numerically evenly, why are urban voters (a group gaining strongly in size relative to rural voters) not getting more districts drawn in their areas? Are those districts simply voting more heavily than before, without actually gaining more residents? Seems unlikely.

On another note, Cohn repeatedly emphasizes that the Democratic Party focus on presidential politics and urban interests — and the unusual antipathy against President Obama specifically — has hurt downballot conservative Democrats in non-statewide-level races in rural areas.

On the one hand, I’m highly sympathetic to the criticism that the Democratic Party (and to a lesser extent the Republican Party) has become increasingly obsessed over the past half century with short-term, single-candidate-personality-centered presidential campaigns at the expense of strategic, broad-based, long-term party-building activities. (Read James MacGregor Burns’ book Running Alone: Presidential Leadership from JFK to Bush II for a history of how and why this came to be.) This has also made it more complicated than ever to define the party and what it stands for since any candidate can take the label and then run on his or her own personalized platform.

On the other hand, I also think that conservative Democrats have gotten more conservative in recent years, which is making it difficult for Democrats from those urban areas and more liberal-leaning states to get excited about helping them with volunteer effort or contributions. One could debate whether they have become more conservative out of sincere belief or to try to catch up to a general frame shift in what center-right voters consider acceptably conservative (much like Republican primaries endlessly drifting more and more toward the extreme right), but I don’t think those conservative Democrats have simply been left behind by the rest of the party liberalizing. Support for moderate healthcare reform and protection of Social Security and other government programs popular among older voters and Appalachian White voters used to be core planks even among more conservative Democrats. Some still support those positions/policies, but a lot of the remaining or new rural Southern Democrats have been running away from those old touchstones.

Again, the reasons are probably debatable, but as the overall Democratic Party trends more socially liberal and economically liberal and then watches these non-urban candidates not only not catch up but actively move backward on some of these issues, it becomes very difficult to explain how they are even members of the same party or whether they will even vote for the (liberal) rest of the party’s priorities if elected to be part of a majority together.

Obviously there are a lot more advantages to being in the majority than not, especially in the House where the minority gets almost no power even when the margin of seats is very close, but it’s frustrating to expend energy and money electing people who may not just vote against but actively block key priorities for the majority of the majority. And it’s true that’s not entirely a new problem either, given that rural Democrats famously blocked things like civil rights legislation for decades. But the country is also significantly more urban now than previously … yet the rural districts and rural members, who are increasingly out of step and falling behind the party’s internal majority, continue to wield a substantial veto.

The second article examines whether a hypothetical evolution/catching-up of non-urban voting patterns and issue beliefs — cited at the end of that Cohn article passage above — is actually likely to occur and thereby make Democrats nationally a stable majority. This focuses on the role of migration between red and blue states. Harry Enten and Nate Silver, Fivethirtyeight.com, “Migration Isn’t Turning Red States Blue:” Read more

Ted Cruz successfully tests new levels of condescension, is booed off stage

By Bill Humphrey September 11, 2014 - 4:50 pm September 11, 2014 Arsenal Analysis

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz seems to have decided to take the opportunity of a speech to Middle Eastern Christians to attack Arabs broadly (and Palestinians more narrowly) for the benefit of his 2016 presidential aspirations. This didn’t go over very well.

The brand of conservative, American evangelicalism that Cruz often champions—one that often aligns itself with the state of Israel’s interests—did not sit well with everyone in attendance. Cruz was keynoting a gala for In Defense of Christians (IDC) […] a conference bringing together a range of Middle Eastern Christians—Orthodox, Catholic, Coptic, Syriac, Lebanese, Assyrian, to name a few—to foster a new sense of unity in the midst of a politically fraught season.

Sidebar: Not everyone in those various Christian sects are ethnically Arab, but they are generally of the various Semitic populations of the region. Anyway, he clearly seemed to suspect they weren’t “real” Christians — which is a pretty sore spot given the history of intra-Christian feuding over 2,000 years — and wanted to tell them about their own history.

He then told them they were “consumed with hate,” as they started booing his blind defense of Israel and insisted that Israel was the region’s greatest friend of Arab Christians — as if Christians pushed out or occupied by Israel might not have some pretty strong, unaddressed grievances with Israeli policy.

“…today Christians have no better ally than the Jewish state.” His audience at the Omni Shoreham Hotel began to boo. At first, Cruz continued undeterred. “Let me say this: those who hate Israel hate America. And those who hate Jews hate Christians.” The booing got louder.

Cruz pressed on, adding that his heart “weeps that the men and women here will not stand in solidarity with Jews and Christians alike who are persecuted by radicals who seek to murder them.”

Weird, because this year’s conference was focused on the ISIS expulsions of Christians and the organization is quite focused on persecution by radicals.

Later on Facebook, he suggested they were anti-Semitic because of how they responded. Leave it to Ted Cruz to call a room full of Middle Eastern Semitic peoples “anti-Semitic” because they disagree with his views on Israel. Knee-jerk hatred of Arabs, which Cruz clearly has, seems way more anti-Semitic.

American Evangelical Conservative Christianity isn’t even good for actual Christians around the world, let alone anyone else, including Jewish Israelis. It’s always condescending and patronizing and ignorant — constantly trying to lecture and “save” people with no regard to their history or life experiences.

An event leader tried to brush off the booing as an inappropriate reaction by a minority of the audience, as if the speech and his reaction to being heckled had not been the problem. Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Charlie Dent, who has a large constituency of Syrian-Americans and Lebanese Americans, strongly criticized the speech (which he was present for) and Cruz’s response to the heckling:

“I support Israel, but what Senator Cruz did was outrageous and incendiary,” Dent said. “He showed a true lack of sensitivity for the people he was speaking to, especially the religious leaders who were there. It was a political speech, inappropriate and, overall, an uncomfortable moment.”

Dent added that Cruz seemed to be speaking “for another audience” beyond the ballroom that would later watch the video.

“He was speaking to people outside of the building,” Dent said. “It was a willful and deliberate confrontation, and very self-serving.”

Middle Eastern Americans were a Republican-leaning constituency in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Between this kind of insulting rhetoric/baiting and the anti-Muslim/anti-Arab hate crimes that increased after 9/11 (but began much earlier), it’s no wonder Republicans have lost touch with this potential base.

Nusra Front releases Fiji peacekeepers held in Syria

By Bill Humphrey September 11, 2014 - 3:54 pm September 22, 2016 Arsenal Pulse

Qatar has “negotiated” (paid the ransom?) for the release of 45 Fijian UN peacekeepers deployed in Golan Heights being held by Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda branch.

Oddly, one of the (presumably unmet) demands reported by the Fijian troops was that Nusra Front wants to be de-listed as a terrorist organization…which, you know, is a tough sell when you’ve just kidnapped United Nations troops and held them for ransom. Nusra Front is a member of the disparate assembly of Sunni Arab rebel forces opposing both ISIS and Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s three-way civil war. They are likely to benefit inadvertently from President Obama’s and Congress’s proposed increase of weapons and funding for anti-ISIS/anti-Assad forces.

In related news, Philippines peacekeepers who had refused to surrender at two separate locations on the same day the Fijian troops were captured managed to break out successfully, with some help from Irish peacekeepers. The UN forces are stationed permanently in Golan Heights, between the Israeli-occupied zone and the Syrian zone, in an arrangement implemented in 1974. The increasing active danger due to the Syrian civil war, including these hostage episodes, has prompted a number of peacekeeper-supplying nations to withdraw or consider withdrawing their troops from Golan Heights.

Still image from a Nusra Front video of Fijian peacekeeper hostages shortly before their release.

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