French presidential election preview

France holds its presidential election on April 22 and May 6, 2012, the ninth in the history of the Fifth Republic. A double-digit number of candidates will enter the first round (twelve entered in 2007; French Wikipedia names seventeen potential contenders this time around), with the top two advancing to the second round, held a fortnight later. (No second round would be necessary if a candidate won a first-round majority, but this has never happened.) Typically, the second round will involve a Gaullist and a Socialist, although the neo-fascist National Front made it into second place in 2002, and could conceivably do so again this time.

Incumbent President Nicholas Sarkozy (of the [Gaullist] Union for a Popular Majority) faces an uphill battle in his re-election bid. The three polls taken so far this month (merci beaucoup, Wikipedia) give him between 24.5% and 26% of the first-round vote. His Socialist challenger, François Hollande (former party president and former partner of the party’s 2007 candidate, Ségolène Royal), attracts between 31.5% and 35% in the first round, and between 57% and 60% in a second round battle against Sarkozy. Earlier in the year, it looked as if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the only potential Socialist nominee who could defeat Sarkozy, the sitting President has become increasingly unpopular and now looks to be gone.

Sarkozy also faces the prospect of finishing third behind the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, but the latest poll shows an increase in his first round vote at the expense of hers. She has fallen back, and could even finish fourth, as François Bayrou of the centrist Democratic Movement appears to be catching up to her. Also in the running, and polling in the single digits, are the candidate of the Left Front (Jean-Luc Mélenchon), a Green (Eva Joly), a Christian democrat with a social conservative streak (Christine Boutin), a Gaullist eurosceptic (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan), a former defence minister whose centrist party has split with Sarkozy’s coalition (Hervé Morin), a former prime minister trying to regain his former relevance (Dominique de Villepin), a left-wing eurosceptic (Jean-Pierre Chevènement), a Trotskyist (Nathalie Arthaud), a centrist green (Corinne Lepage), and an anti-globalisation leftist (Philippe Poutou).

Sarkozy appears to be caught between a centre-right which no longer trusts him, and a far right which found him not to be as sympathetic to their cause as they had hoped. His parliamentary majority has been weakened by the defection of centrist and centre-right parties such as Nouveau Centre (Hervé Morin’s party) and the Parti Radical, while some traditional Gaullists have rallied behind Dominique de Villepin’s candidacy. His government has been beset by scandals (the latest one involving arms sales to Pakistan), and it looks like many voters who supported him the last time will desert him, some going directly to Hollande, while others go to Villepin, Boutin, Morin, or Bayrou in the first round before backing Hollande in the second round.

The next five months will be interesting to watch. Sarkozy has some ground to make up on Hollande, while Le Pen and Bayrou both threaten to make the second round. (Le Pen would certainly lose, while Bayrou could unite the centre and right against the left to win easily…or the centre and left against the right to win easily.) I’m hoping that Hollande wins, and that Bayrou and Morin do well, but I suspect that the margin between Hollande and Sarkozy will narrow between now and then.

That ad featuring Robert Mugabe and friends

Here’s a YouTube link to the Nando’s ad which is causing controversy in South Africa for its portrayal of Robert Mugabe fooling around with Muammar Gaddafi, Mao Tse-Tung, Saddam Hussein, P. W. Botha, and Idi Amin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYnL5oUePM8&feature=related

2012 Prediction

Thanks to the calculator at USElectionAtlas (and borrowing liberally from polling data on Wikipedia), here is my prediction for the 2012 presidential election, assuming a two-way contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney:

Romney takes Florida [29], Maine’s second congressional district [1], New Hampshire [4], Virginia [13]; Obama takes Arizona [11]; Nevada [6] is a toss-up (the only poll taken there in the last few months has Obama and Romney tied). Obama leads in enough swing states to hang on to the White House, and takes 317 electoral votes (323 if Nevada goes his way) – down from his tally of 365 in 2008, but still well over the 270 needed.

All other potential Republican candidates fare much worse than Romney in state-by-state polls against Obama, so it’s safe to assume an Obama victory by a larger margin if the GOP settles on a non-Romney nominee. There is, of course, the specter of a Michael Bloomberg independent candidacy. For this, I made an educated guess that Bloomberg could win New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, and Florida, and that he would eat into Romney’s numbers elsewhere, delivering Obama a few more states (Alaska, Georgia, Maine’s second district, Montana, New Hampshire, Virginia, as well as tipping Nevada into the Democratic column).

The result: Obama 258, Romney 146, Bloomberg 134, so the election would go to the House of Representatives.

The Ideology of Robert F. Kennedy

During his four-year career as the junior Senator from New York, and particularly during his whirlwind three-month campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assailed by parts of America’s liberal establishment for his supposed ideological heresies. His emphasis on stopping the wave of rioting which plagued American cities at the time, and on reforming the welfare system, led to attacks from the New York Times, who viewed this as pandering to racism. Many liberals agreed with Ronald Reagan, serving in his first term as Governor of California, when he compared Kennedy’s rhetoric to his own, and Theodore White, author of the Making of the President series of books, said that Kennedy’s policy positions were no different to those of Richard Nixon. It seemed that many were more comfortable with the professorial, Adlai Stevenson-esque tones of his opponent, Senator Eugene McCarthy.

The attempts to frame Bobby Kennedy as a centrist or conservative didn’t end with his assassination: Bill Clinton, in his autobiography My Life, called him “the first New Democrat”. A number of problems stand out with these attempts, however. Kennedy’s support in the 1968 campaign came from working-class white ethnics, African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americas; he and McCarthy split the student and anti-war activist vote. That isn’t a conservative coalition – it’s a patchwork of groups who felt ignored by the Democratic Party’s elite. It was McCarthy who got substantial Republican cross-over votes in the primaries, and it was Hubert Humphrey who received the support of Southern governors, big-city machine bosses, and the leadership of the AFL-CIO (which would go on to endorse Nixon four years later). Moreover, the supposed conservative Kennedy was endorsed by America’s most prominent socialist, author Michael Harrington, while reactionaries such as Clyde Tolson (J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy) and reporter Westbrook Pegler called for his death.

The source of this confusion lies in Kennedy’s use of ‘law and order’ rhetoric on the campaign trail in 1968, his belief in tax incentives to promote development in the ghettoes, and his opposition to the removal of people from the ghettoes to the suburbs. These ideas, however, were coupled with support for greater federal involvement in urban policy. When he helped set up a public-private partnership to promote urban renewal in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he did so because only one ghetto per city could receive federal aid (Harlem was chosen as New York’s), and he tried to involve federal agencies, but President Lyndon Johnson’s suspicions of Kennedy’s motives made this difficult. (Jack Newfield’s article ‘Robert Kennedy’s Bedford-Stuyvesant Legacy’ in the December 1968 edition of New York Magazine is online, and provides a good account of the establishment of the Bed-Stuy project.) The act of starting a quasi-private corporation to demonstrate the efficacy of one’s ideas has a parallel in American history – Alexander Hamilton’s involvement in setting up the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, and so predates the neoliberal idea of the public-private partnership.

Kennedy’s pragmatic yet visionary policy prescriptions seem alien to modern-day American politics. Partly because the large, urban states are no longer swing states in presidential elections, Washington now focuses more on suburban and rural areas, and has let its cities decay to the point where part of Detroit is set to be given over to agriculture. His ideas live on, however, in some of the initiatives of Brazilian Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff. As this 2006 Financial Times article shows, Lula reversed the policies of previous Brazilian governments, who sought to disperse slum-dwellers into soulless, suburban estates, and instead set about turning slums into proper city districts, with water, electricity, and street names, and with the inhabitants given legal title to their dwellings. This is very reminiscent of Bedford-Stuyvesant, as well as Kennedy’s remark in a debate with Gene McCarthy prior to the California primary, that you can’t “take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County”.

While the Democratic Party may have been taken over in recent decades by the institutionally conservative, Wall Street-friendly triangulation of the Clintons and Obama, the ideas that Bobby Kennedy embraced are helping Brazil rise to its rightful place in the world order.

In Defence of the European Union

The European Union isn’t exactly the flavour of the month right now – just ask Greek voters or rebellious Conservative backbenchers. So, since I like playing devil’s advocate, I thought I’d outline the positive impact of the EU, as well as suggesting how it can overcome its shortcomings.

I tend to think of the EU as the modern equivalent of the early United States. It lacks a national party system (which the U.S. developed at some point between 1800 and 1840), a full monetary union (which the U.S. had from the start), and the European Council is eerily similar to the government under the Articles of Confederation. Its political norms are still evolving, but are evolving in a democratic direction: witness the Parliament’s 2004 rejection of one of the nominees for the Commission, or the Lisbon Treaty’s provision calling for the composition of the Commission to reflect the various party groups’ seats in the Parliament. The eurosceptics who label the EU’s institutions ‘undemocratic’ are missing the point – it is evolving in much the same way as other federations have throughout history.

The original idea of the EU is a brilliant one, and Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and the other founders deserve to be remembered by history as the trans-Atlantic equivalents of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and co. They prevented a resumption of the Franco-German rivalry which had led to two world wars, and gave western Europe a supranational structure which could hold its weight against the United States and the Soviet Union. Today, the existence of the EU gives workers from eastern Europe (the famous ‘Polish plumber’ stereotype) the chance to ply their trade in the west, and makes it easier for British retirees to live in the warm climate of Spain and southern France.

Perhaps the most important advantage of the EU lies in the influence it has on the extremist, anti-democratic politics all too common in today’s Europe. The prospect of EU membership is a cause behind which liberal, decent people outside the EU can rally. In Serbia, for example, it is the demagogic nationalists who oppose integration; in Turkey, it is the AKP, corrupt opponents of the nation’s secular traditions and recipients of funding from questionable sources in the Arabian Gulf; in the Ukraine, it is the pro-Kremlin elements who opposed the EU- and American-supported Orange Revolution. And, of course, euroscepticism is common among extremists within the EU: both on the right (the BNP, Front Nationale, Jobbik, etc.), and the Moorite-Chomskyite left.

The thrust of my argument in support of the EU is not, however, based on listing its positive achievements, but in pointing out that it isn’t exceptionally centralised among large, democratic federations. Eurosceptics talk about regulations enforcing straight bananas, but such things can just as easily be issued from Washington, Ottawa, Canberra, New Delhi, or Brasilia (or from Westminster). They portray Brussels as some giant bureaucracy sucking up the continent’s economy, but the EU is actually rather cheap, costing only 1.05% of its Gross National Income. They whinge endlessly about the fact that European courts can overturn national legislation, but a federation isn’t workable if its constituent parts can nullify federal laws. In fact, EU member states have a lot more protections against majoritarianism than the states or provinces of any other federation.

All this is not to imply that the EU is not without its faults. Its Parliament is prevented from introducing its own legislation, its seats are malapportioned in favour of smaller countries, and it has yet to develop continent-wide parties. The Commission is selected without strict reference to the composition of the Parliament, and too many decisions are made by the heads of government (in effect, Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel). But the European ideal contains within it the possibility of establishing a pluralistic, supranational democracy, which might serve as the model for a global confederation. Rather than focusing on straight bananas or Greek bailouts, Europeans should remember this ideal.

On Compulsory Voting

William Galston has a piece in the New York Times about introducing compulsory voting in the United States. He has the right reform, but uses some odd logic to justify it.

He offers three justifications. The first is a complaint that American citizenship is “strong on rights, weak on responsibilities”. I would point out that compulsory voting is about protecting people from being prevented from exercising their right to vote, not imposing some onerous burden on them. His second point is insightful, namely that the decline of political machines and organised labour has reduced the ability of interest groups to mobilise voters, although as Jonathan Bernstein notes, modern get-out-the-vote operations are no less successful than the older methods.

For his third argument, Galston repeats the usual line about American politics being too polarised. I have two issues with this: firstly, some of us like a good old-fashioned ideological stoush, and secondly, there are virtually no ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans in this technocratic, fiscally conservative age. Moreover, compulsory voting won’t lead to some magical centrist utopia – independents often have high turnout, parties will simply adapt their appeals to new voters, and political scientists are divided over whether negative advertising increases or decreases turnout.

In general, the arguments against compulsory voting are unconvincing. It doesn’t constitute a massive infringement of civil liberties, especially when compared to other civic obligations such as jury duty, and it’s rather unsavoury to hear people argue for the right to avoid participating in the democratic process. Plus, you can always make up an excuse, cast a blank vote, or spoil your ballot paper. Perhaps most importantly, compulsory voting (and compulsory registration) prevents the disenfranchisement of disfavoured groups (although not always – the Howard government’s changes to electoral registration laws prior to the 2007 federal election were clearly an attempt to disenfranchise young voters). Under compulsory voting, African-Americans in the South wouldn’t have been able to be intimidated into not exercising their right to vote for decades.

On the other hand, there aren’t many appreciable differences between countries with compulsory voting and those without. Australia doesn’t have a significantly more politically engaged citizenry or a completely different political culture than the United States or Britain. Groups that would have much lower turnout (young people, indigenous Australians, etc.) under a non-compulsory regime are not noticeably more free or better off. Compulsory voting won’t bring about better democracy by itself – it is just one of many necessary improvements such as campaign finance regulations, non-partisan redistricting, ending the malapportionment of upper houses, and primaries.

Welcome

I thought I’d start a blog in order for me to write down my thoughts on politics, elections, and whatever else I feel like writing about. So here it is. My first two posts are my two recent contributions to the blog of the United States Studies Centre, re-posted here.

Making Way for the Radical Centre (August 22)

In a 2006 New York Times article, columnist Thomas Friedman outlined his hope that the American two-party system would soon be swept away by an insurgent third-party movement, and went as far as to outline a vague platform for this party (which he called the ‘Geo-Green’ Party) to run on. He published a similar column last month, providing details of a new organisation, Americans Elect, which seeks to provide voters with a web-based virtual presidential nominating process leading to the selection of a bipartisan ticket.

At a recent guest lecture at the University of Sydney, Friedman sounded a similar note, declaring that the democratisation of information which has been wrought by the Internet would soon lead to the unravelling of the Democratic-Republican duopoly. His enthusiasm for third-party movements is commendable, if misplaced. The rise of the Tea Party movement has reiterated that any insurgent group in American politics must gain a foothold in one of the major parties in order to wield power effectively. We don’t remember the Progressive movement, for example, for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential run on the Progressive ticket, rather, we remember the influence Progressives held as factions in both major parties during the same era. Whether it’s because of Duverger’s Law or the ability of the primary system to draw third-party movement into either of the two major parties, no third party has got to the stage of electing a president since the GOP’s rise between 1854 and 1860.

The ‘Americans Elect’ group, which Friedman describes, isn’t the first attempt that has been made at using the Internet to subvert the two-party system: Unity08 tried it in 2008 with a modus operandi that sounds eerily similar to that of Americans Elect (including web-based polling to reveal voters’ top concerns, and a requirement that the ticket consist of one Democrat and one Republican). Despite a high-powered group of backers, including two senior officials from the Carter White House, the group never made it to the 2008 primary season, due to a lack of support and the departure of some of its key backers to a movement to draft New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It is for these reasons that Friedman’s most recent article on the prospects of a third party challenging for the presidency gave me a sense of deja vu. In addition, his statement that Americans Elect is financed by “serious hedge-fund money” also makes a mockery of his characterisation of it as some sort of grass-roots movement. In his final paragraph, Friedman compares the potential impact of Americans Elect on the two-party system to the effect of Amazon.com and iTunes on the publishing and music industries. I would extend the analogy a little bit – just as people still buy books and CDs despite the existence of Amazon.com and iTunes, we can confidently predict that Americans will still buy the Democratic and Republican parties at the polls in 2012.

The End of Gerrymandering? (September 22)

Fourteen ordinary Californians were recently given the opportunity of a lifetime – they were chosen at random (allowing for a suitable balance between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) to serve on the Citizens Redistricting Commission, which was tasked with redrawing the state’s fifty-three federal House districts, eighty state House districts, forty state Senate districts, and four Board of Equalization districts. The Commission has recently completed its work, but its maps may face potential legal challenges, both from the state’s Republican Party and from Mexican-American civil rights groups (the latter concerned about potential negative affects on the representation of Latinos). Whatever the outcome of these challenges, California has set an example that may spread to other states.

The Commission was created following the passage of Proposition 20 in 2010, which had the support of electoral reformers and a bipartisan coterie of politicians, including then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his predecessor, Gray Davis. It is intended to tackle gerrymandering, an unfortunately common aspect of the American political landscape which regularly sees congressional districts assuming oddly-shaped spurs running narrowly along highways and rivers to connect otherwise disparate communities. The authors of the proposition hoped that a panel of average citizens could do a better job than elected officials.

While a handful of other states employ non-partisan commissions to do the work of redistricting, California’s experiment is unique in its use of randomly selected members of the public. This is an unusual way of staffing a slate of officials, but one which has precedents in some of the most notable democracies in history, such as ancient Athens and medieval Venice. The Golden State suffers from a gerrymandered electoral map designed to protect incumbents – only one has lost a congressional seat there within the last decade – as well as to protect the level of representation of minorities. A look at the new maps shows that many members of Congress are indeed in danger, hence the legal challenges.

It remains to be seen whether the process initiated by California will spread to other states. Already, the Florida chapter of the ACLU is attempting to qualify a measure for the ballot that would limit gerrymandering in that state. If the American public is tired of partisan gerrymandering, but unwilling to trust the job of redistricting to unelected bureaucrats, as is the case, for example, in Australia, other states would do well to copy the Californian model. Random selection would tap into Americans’ traditional anti-elitism, as well as their current lack of confidence in their political class, while providing them with a serious solution to the issue of uncompetitive and oddly-shaped legislative districts.