Social Europe: Can the left really stop Salvini?

The turnout in Emilia-Romagna was up more than 20 percentage points from five years ago. This made a huge difference. The strong personal victory of Bonaccini—whose electoral list with his name on it added almost 6 per cent to the progressive tally—could at first sight be explained by the local tradition of good governance. This is represented by the modello Emiliano,characterised by a tempered capitalism embedded in a social-democratic governance with a strong left-wing subculture.[...]

Their full name, ‘Sardines against Salvini,’ tells a lot about their nature and genesis as well as their will to counter a far-right victory in a left-wing bastion. In some ways, they recall the mobilisation of grassroots progressive groups in the United States since the election of Donald Trump as president. This complex and variegated activism, a ‘middle America’ rebooting democracy—made up of Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter, local canvassing, and a spontaneous citizens’ engagement in cities and suburbs of many states—has largely been missing on European soil. [...]

As the resistance of the last bastions against the European populist trend becomes increasingly fragile, it is time for progressive forces to find new forms of mobilisation—without mirroring demagogic nationalism and its policies—and to learn a few lessons transnationally and from Italy. The left needs to regain its capacity to create a shared political culture, to focus on integrative responses and to challenge rising populism with its traditional political weapons: rights, solidarity, equality, democracy.

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openDemocracy: How the Greens won Budapest

On the back of an anti-Semitic re-election campaign that spring, Fidesz had secured 2/3 of the seats in Hungary’s gold-plated parliament building, giving it the right to change the country’s constitution at will – a power they’ve not been slow to use. None of the various progressive parties had managed to even reach second place: they’d also been beaten by another far right party, Jobbik. [...]

It’s not only Roma people. Orbàn has chased much of the Central European University out of Budapest, and attacked gender studies departments as part of his war on feminism. His allied oligarchs have bought out the majority of the press. Last year, openDemocracy uncovered a long list of examples of electoral malpractice in the 2018 election. And in 2018 more than one person said to me that public criticism of the ruling party – including in social media posts – can mean losing your job if you’re one of the many people on the government’s public works scheme. The country is sometimes described by those following the rise of the global far right as a model for social control with the veneer of democracy. [...]

Just as important, though, was a new innovation the party brought to Hungary: door-knocking. In a media environment where people don’t know what to believe, nothing beats meeting them face to face. While Fidesz rely on mobilising a huge database of their own supporters, the Greens knocked on thousands of doors, speaking to people about their concerns. Barabás tells me he personally knocked on 1,500 doors – 40% of the district he now represents, and that this is something other parties haven’t done in the past in Hungary.

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Politico: Iran’s leadership rigs an election — and still loses

The orchestrated vote now looks like a flop in terms of bolstering the regime’s legitimacy, however, thanks to the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history and growing concern that the government played down the scale of a coronavirus outbreak rather than risk empty polling stations. Coronavirus has now killed eight people in Iran, the biggest death toll outside China. [...]

Since Friday night, Tehran has dithered over releasing even the “official” turnout figure in the vote for the 290-seat assembly, but Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli on Sunday put it at a record low of just under 43 percent. This is way beneath 62 percent in 2016 and the 69 percent who turned out in the vote of 2000, which proved a big win for the reformist camp of President Mohammad Khatami. (Turnout in the last presidential election in 2017, when Hassan Rouhani beat the hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi, was 73 percent.) [...]

In the aftermath of the vote, Iran suddenly announced a sweeping crackdown to try to stop the spread of the disease. It announced the closure of schools, universities, cultural centers and cinemas. Several sports fixtures will be canceled while several big sports matches will be played without spectators. Even a Tehran district mayor tested positive for the disease. Turkey, Pakistan, Armenia and Afghanistan have closed their borders with Iran, or limited transport.

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EURACTIV: Crisis-ridden SPD wins state parliamentary elections in Hamburg

With voter turnout at 62%, a large increase from the historic low in 2015, the city of Hamburg delivered a clear win for left-wing parties. While the SPD lost 6% of its vote share from the previous election in 2015, it remains the top party in the city by a wide margin. The election results indicate the likely continuation of the coalition between the SPD and Greens, and lead candidate for the Greens Katharina Fegebank would then continue on as the city’s second mayor.

The two parties further consolidated their majority, receiving a combined 63.2% of the vote compared to 57.9% five years ago. But the Greens will have a more prominent position now, having jumped from 12.3% to 24.2%. [...]

CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak called it a “bitter day for the CDU…there’s no way to sugarcoat it” and admitted that “what happened in Thuringia didn’t help.” Saarland’s state premier, Tobias Hans, called the Hamburg election “a result that must scare us, even as a federal party.” He went further calling the party “an up-to-date picture of lack of leadership,” particularly after the Thuringian crisis.

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FiveThirtyEight: What Defines The Sanders Coalition?

Younger Democrats (those under 45) are more likely to be very liberal than older Democrats,3 and Sanders is very popular where these two groups overlap. But very liberal Democrats under 45 make up a small bloc of the electorate (10 percent of the exit poll sample in New Hampshire and 16 percent in both Iowa and Nevada).

But he’s also popular, though not quite so overwhelmingly, with the nonoverlapping parts of these two groups. The entrance and exit polls in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada showed the Vermont senator either leading or tied at the top among voters under 45 who identify as somewhat liberal or moderate, and in New Hampshire and Nevada, he led with very liberal voters who are over age 45. (In Iowa, he was second only to Warren with older, very liberal voters.4 So Sanders’s coalition is not solely age-based or solely ideological; being either young or very liberal makes you likelier to support Sanders, even if you’re not both. [...]

Still, if we had to say what most defines Sanders’s supporters, we would say age. The left-leaning polling firm Data for Progress, in a survey released shortly before the Nevada caucuses that was fairly close to the final results, found that Sanders was winning 66 percent of somewhat liberal respondents under 45, compared to 38 percent of those who are very liberal and over 45. That suggests that younger voters are Sanders’s strongest demographic, even more so than those who are very liberal.[...]

In Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Sanders was more popular with voters without college degrees than voters with degrees. He was the clear leader among voters without degrees in all three states, but Nevada was the only state where he was well ahead among college graduates. And those two dynamics — Sanders being more popular with non-college-educated voters than college graduates and leading the field among those without degrees — generally also show up in national surveys and polls of upcoming states. In terms of raw numbers, there are probably more Sanders supporters without degrees than Sanders supporters who identify as very liberal, since the former is simply a much larger group. (About half of the voters in the three states that have voted so far didn’t have college degrees, for example, but only 20 to 30 percent of voters in those states identified as very liberal.)

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