Questions About Other Countries' Politics that You Were Too Afraid To Ask

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Why do NUPES/Die Linke parties that hate the US for being a hypercapitalist imperalist power without government-run healthcare like Russia, a hypercapitalist imperialist power without government-run healthcare?

Describing Russia as hypercapitalist is an absurdly stupid statement.

Why do NUPES/Die Linke parties that hate the US for being a hypercapitalist imperalist power without government-run healthcare like Russia, a hypercapitalist imperialist power without government-run healthcare?

Russia is undoubtedly imperialist, but it is not “hyper capitalist” (which is a dumb term to use to begin with, but certainly not true of Russia), and it does have government run healthcare. As does the United States, incidentally.

55% of Russian wealth is controlled by the top 1%. 85% is controlled by the top 10%.

I was not aware that the definition of capitalism is "% of 'wealth controlled' by the 1%." By this standard, I guess Maoist China and Bourbon France were both "hypercapitalist" too. Thank you very much for this thoughtful analysis. You do real credit to us all with your presence.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

Why do NUPES/Die Linke parties that hate the US for being a hypercapitalist imperalist power without government-run healthcare like Russia, a hypercapitalist imperialist power without government-run healthcare?

Describing Russia as hypercapitalist is an absurdly stupid statement.

Why do NUPES/Die Linke parties that hate the US for being a hypercapitalist imperalist power without government-run healthcare like Russia, a hypercapitalist imperialist power without government-run healthcare?

Russia is undoubtedly imperialist, but it is not “hyper capitalist” (which is a dumb term to use to begin with, but certainly not true of Russia), and it does have government run healthcare. As does the United States, incidentally.

55% of Russian wealth is controlled by the top 1%. 85% is controlled by the top 10%.

I was not aware that the definition of capitalism is "% of 'wealth controlled' by the 1%." By this standard, I guess Maoist China and Bourbon France were both "hypercapitalist" too. Thank you very much for this thoughtful analysis. You do real credit to us all with your presence.

I don't know why a disagreement over a single word is cause for wanting me kicked off the forum. Seems a bit much.

[Not Me, Us]

One thing that I've recently learned through the whole Truss debacle is that former PMs usually don't resign from Parliament after they lose the premiership. Why is this? I would think that going from being PM to just a random MP would be such a huge downgrade that it wouldn't be worth it , but both Theresa May and Boris are still in Parliament. Even Churchill stayed in office for almost a decade after he stopped being Prime Minister.

[Ethelberth]

One thing that I've recently learned through the whole Truss debacle is that former PMs usually don't resign from Parliament after they lose the premiership. Why is this? I would think that going from being PM to just a random MP would be such a huge downgrade that it wouldn't be worth it , but both Theresa May and Boris are still in Parliament. Even Churchill stayed in office for almost a decade after he stopped being Prime Minister.

Ted Heath was MP for 25 years after his premiership.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Why is the President of France so stupidly powerful?

I mean, our President is stupidly powerful as well but America is an exceptional country that shouldn’t be emulated.

[parochial boy]

Why is the President of France so stupidly powerful?

I mean, our President is stupidly powerful as well but America is an exceptional country that shouldn’t be emulated.

On a consitutional level - precisely because of the semi-presidentialism that people often think would make the president weaker. All the more so since the shortening of the presidential term from 7 to 5 years aligned the presidential and parliamentary terms to the point that the parliamentary elections (and single member constituencies) normally hand the party of the victorious president a majority that then confirms his agenda. No need to deal with a division of powers and no need to worry about pesky coalitions and junion partners.

Of course, 2022 throws a spanner in the works here - and past cohabitations eg Chirac under Mitterrand and Jospin have actually led to weaker presidents as technically most domestic politics falls under the remit of the national assembly, and in both cases the Prime Ministers did manage to push through their domestic agenda at the expense of the president's.

Remains to be seen quite how this parliament works out - Macron is fragilised, and they are having the mother of all fights about the pensions reform right now, even if ther are certain consitutional mechanisms - such as article 49.3 that would allow him to push his agenda through (which would not be the possible under a genuine cohabition with an opposition figure as Prime Minister).

There are also some other factors, eg the way constituencies are drawn, the not exactly independent constitutional court, the functioning of the senate. But these are probably less fundamental.

As for the why on a - well - philosophical level, the short answer is Charles De Gaulle. As in, the mechanisms of the fifth republic were more or less designed to underping his presidency, and the man himself governed by "plebiscite" - as in regularly holding referendums on a variety of topics with the threat that a rejection of the proposal would mean him resigning, and which he was able to use to force through his agenda. Until the very end that is, when he was booted out essentially by losing a referendum on regional decentralisation of all things.

The rest rolled off of that, the powerful presidential figure eventually creating a highly personalised political lanscape with certain similarities to the US. Well, many similiarities, but a noticeable one is the (ever increasing) institutional weakess of political parties, even if this manifests itself in a different way to how it does in the States. At any rate, in France what this means is that the parties are particularly dependent on individual figures for their political relevance, meaning loyalty to the person often comes before the party.

As for why a republic was set up for De Gaulle. Well that's more complicated, but it is in part down to the chronic instability of the 4th (and previously the third) republic, as well as France finding itself bogged down in an increasingly volatile war in Algeria leading to even more political instability up to an attempted coup and so on. In the face of this, De Gaulle managed to be the hero of the nation figure, an almost Bonapartiste figure who could stand above politics, command the loyaly of the people and offer stability.

[Aurelius]

Why do NUPES/Die Linke parties that hate the US for being a hypercapitalist imperalist power without government-run healthcare like Russia, a hypercapitalist imperialist power without government-run healthcare?

Knee-jerk "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-ism. Seeing America as their enemy in the first place is a Cold War-brained cognitive bias that the dinosaurs in charge of most of these types of parties just haven't bothered trying to overcome.

I would say also that at least some seem to be under the impression that modern Russia is still the Soviet Union under Lenin.

Putin does seem to want to restore the Soviet empire, I suppose.

No. He wants to restore the Russian empire.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Why do NUPES/Die Linke parties that hate the US for being a hypercapitalist imperalist power without government-run healthcare like Russia, a hypercapitalist imperialist power without government-run healthcare?

Knee-jerk "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"-ism. Seeing America as their enemy in the first place is a Cold War-brained cognitive bias that the dinosaurs in charge of most of these types of parties just haven't bothered trying to overcome.

I would say also that at least some seem to be under the impression that modern Russia is still the Soviet Union under Lenin.

Putin does seem to want to restore the Soviet empire, I suppose.

No. He wants to restore the Russian empire.

What Putin wants is to preserve his own power, and "losing" Ukraine ("Little Russia") to the perfidious West is a potentially fatal blow to both him personally as well as the dominant Russian national narrative. He and his advisors (and many others in Russia--and outside of Russia, unfortunately) genuinely believe, or find it convenient to believe, that Color Revolutions = CIA regime change ultimately aimed at Moscow. Zombie Cold War narratives aren't just a thing in the US or UK!

As deranged as it sounds on so many levels, I think Putin really believes he is acting in "self-defense" in Ukraine--and in a way, he is. But, like so many hubristic, isolated authoritarian leaders before him, Putin has confused his own survival with that of his country's. And that is a true tragedy, for the Russian people first and foremost.

[Sweet kiss of liquid modernity]

The rest rolled off of that, the powerful presidential figure eventually creating a highly personalised political lanscape with certain similarities to the US. Well, many similiarities, but a noticeable one is the (ever increasing) institutional weakess of political parties, even if this manifests itself in a different way to how it does in the States. At any rate, in France what this means is that the parties are particularly dependent on individual figures for their political relevance, meaning loyalty to the person often comes before the party.

It isn't as though the Third Republic had particularly strong parties either, to be fair. In a way this is a return to the norm.

[parochial boy]

The rest rolled off of that, the powerful presidential figure eventually creating a highly personalised political lanscape with certain similarities to the US. Well, many similiarities, but a noticeable one is the (ever increasing) institutional weakess of political parties, even if this manifests itself in a different way to how it does in the States. At any rate, in France what this means is that the parties are particularly dependent on individual figures for their political relevance, meaning loyalty to the person often comes before the party.

It isn't as though the Third Republic had particularly strong parties either, to be fair. In a way this is a return to the norm.

True, but there was a period where (particularly but not limited to the PCF) parties had an institutional strength and an existence that was more independent of the big notables. The 5th republic put an end to this, starting with VGE's decision to split from Chaban-Delmas in 1974 and which has been snowballing ever since.

To the point that these days it's almost laughable when french pollsters ask about "partisan loyalties" that barely even exist.

[Sol]

Why exactly do some Australian trade unions have such a socially conservative culture?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why exactly do some Australian trade unions have such a socially conservative culture?

Most Australian trade unions (like most trade unions everywhere) are controlled by small cliques, who often have views that are not reflective of their members: after all, joining a trade union is an act of collective self-interest, not a political statement and most members don't care about the latter. It happens that in Australia some (certainly not all!) of these cliques are Catholic ones. This goes back a long way - it was a major factor behind the famous split in the ALP in the 1950s - and is related to the prestigious position that the labour movement held in Australian public life during the first decades after Federation and the desire of the country's Catholic population to attain equal social status and the desire of the country's Catholic hierarchy to attain social prestige and also serious political influence: Daniel Mannix (Archbishop of Melbourne from 1916 until 1963) was a particularly important figure in encouraging this process.

[pikachu]

Not a specific question, but how much name rec do politicians have in other countries? E.g. in the UK, what politicians would >50% of the public be able to recognize? Hard to get a sense of this sort of thing just from the internet.

[ingemann]

One thing that I've recently learned through the whole Truss debacle is that former PMs usually don't resign from Parliament after they lose the premiership. Why is this? I would think that going from being PM to just a random MP would be such a huge downgrade that it wouldn't be worth it , but both Theresa May and Boris are still in Parliament. Even Churchill stayed in office for almost a decade after he stopped being Prime Minister.

Why shouldn’t they continue? It’s a free wage and as a backbencher they don’t really need to do a lot of work, and it doesn’t stop them from making money on the side.

[AustralianSwingVoter]

Why exactly do some Australian trade unions have such a socially conservative culture?

Most Australian trade unions (like most trade unions everywhere) are controlled by small cliques, who often have views that are not reflective of their members: after all, joining a trade union is an act of collective self-interest, not a political statement and most members don't care about the latter. It happens that in Australia some (certainly not all!) of these cliques are Catholic ones. This goes back a long way - it was a major factor behind the famous split in the ALP in the 1950s - and is related to the prestigious position that the labour movement held in Australian public life during the first decades after Federation and the desire of the country's Catholic population to attain equal social status and the desire of the country's Catholic hierarchy to attain social prestige and also serious political influence: Daniel Mannix (Archbishop of Melbourne from 1916 until 1963) was a particularly important figure in encouraging this process.

The most socially conservative union being the SDA, which ironically has one of the youngest union memberships thanks to all the spotty teenage cashiers and shelf stackers. Eternally amusing.

It isn’t a coincidence that the most radical unions hark from historically Anglo-Protestant industries. Maritime workers and the progenitors of the CFMEU come to mind.

The death of Mannix in ‘63 can be viewed as a turning point in the Australian Catholic community. The distinctly Irish character of Australian Catholicism fades as they assimilate and outnumbered by Southern and Eastern European immigrants (the Italians and Maltese being most influential in the Melbourne diocese). Mannix handing over the reins to his protégé B. A. Santamaria reflects this well.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

This is a more general question, but Political activists do seem to very underrepresented as political candidates compared to those from other professionals looking to branch out into politics ?

Why is this the case ? Why aren't activists more heavily represnted among political canidates and elected officals.

[Lechasseur]

Apparently Italy doesn't have a minimum wage? Is this common in southern Europe?

I don't know if its common in Southern Europe in general, but I can confirm that there is no minimum wage in Italy, or at the very least it's very low.

A good job in Northern Italy (or in Rome) pays about as well as its equivalent in France, but for the lower qualifications/lower pay jobs, they pay maybe half the amount that the equivalent job in France would pay.

[Lechasseur]

I'll start: what it would it take for the political position of Plaid Cymru to seriously improve, as occurred for the SNP?

1.5 million people wake up one day to discover that they have suddenly become fluent in Welsh.

This is an interesting one, there were those in the early days of organised Scottish Nationalism in the inter-war years who wanted the Gaelic language to be a central part of the new movement's identity despite it only actually being spoken by a small minority of people. That they lost that battle was very likely helpful to the SNP long term.

I wouldn't say they're quite the same situation though.

I believe 15-20% of the Welsh population can speak Welsh, and as late as the 19th Century Wales was still majority Welsh speaking, while in Scotland Gaelic has been in very serious decline since at least when Bonnie Prince Charlie was defeated, and that's only speaking of the Highlands.

In regards to the Lowlands (for non-Britons, that's basically where all the major cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh are), the Lowlands actually switched from Gaelic to Scots (the English dialect traditionally spoken in Scotland) back in the Middle Ages. By 1450 the Lowlands were very, very clearly Scots speaking and no longer Gaelic speaking.

It's a lot harder to sell a language as essential to your country's identity when to a large degree the language had already been abandoned during its heyday as an independant kingdom.

While in Wales the Welsh language had survived far better (and thus can actually be preserved and even grown rather than needing to be revived) and logically would be a bigger factor in the country's identity.

[Lechasseur]

One thing that I've recently learned through the whole Truss debacle is that former PMs usually don't resign from Parliament after they lose the premiership. Why is this? I would think that going from being PM to just a random MP would be such a huge downgrade that it wouldn't be worth it , but both Theresa May and Boris are still in Parliament. Even Churchill stayed in office for almost a decade after he stopped being Prime Minister.

PMs often (but not always) retire at the first General Election after losing power (Thatcher left office in 1990 and retired at the 1992 election, Major left office in 1997 and retired at the 2001 election, and Brown lost office in 2010 and retired at the next election in 2015.

Traditionally, and still theoretically, MPs are not allowed to resign. The reason for that is back in the day, you were not paid to be an MP, and too many MPs were quitting after being elected so they could continue doing their jobs and earning money. Resignation from parliament was thus banned in order to prevent the Commons from refusing to do the job they were elected to do and resigning en masse, given many of them didn't even necessarily want to be there. This ban has been in place since the reign of James I, in 1624.

Even today, an MP technically doesn't resign. They use a legal fiction mechanism in order to leave parliament. This mechanism is being appointed to ''an office of profit under the Crown". There are two that still exist purely for this reason : "Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, and Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead" (source : Wikipedia).

So for an MP to resign, they need to request appointement to one of these two offices, which automatically disqualifies them as an MP.

So even if there is a mechanism for resignation, I think the reason it generally didn't happen until recently was due to a convention of MPs not being supposed/allowed to resign.

Afaik, it was Tony Blair who broke the convention (in terms of PMs leaving office, MPs ofc had resigned via the aforementioned procedure previously).

Gordon Brown basically was just following the old convention of retiring at the next general election. Cameron resigned like Blair. I'm not sure why May didn't resign or retire. But I suspect in regards to Johnson and Truss it's because they believe they have unfinished business in parliament.

[Lechasseur]

Why is the President of France so stupidly powerful?

I mean, our President is stupidly powerful as well but America is an exceptional country that shouldn’t be emulated.

On a consitutional level - precisely because of the semi-presidentialism that people often think would make the president weaker. All the more so since the shortening of the presidential term from 7 to 5 years aligned the presidential and parliamentary terms to the point that the parliamentary elections (and single member constituencies) normally hand the party of the victorious president a majority that then confirms his agenda. No need to deal with a division of powers and no need to worry about pesky coalitions and junion partners.

Of course, 2022 throws a spanner in the works here - and past cohabitations eg Chirac under Mitterrand and Jospin have actually led to weaker presidents as technically most domestic politics falls under the remit of the national assembly, and in both cases the Prime Ministers did manage to push through their domestic agenda at the expense of the president's.

Remains to be seen quite how this parliament works out - Macron is fragilised, and they are having the mother of all fights about the pensions reform right now, even if ther are certain consitutional mechanisms - such as article 49.3 that would allow him to push his agenda through (which would not be the possible under a genuine cohabition with an opposition figure as Prime Minister).

There are also some other factors, eg the way constituencies are drawn, the not exactly independent constitutional court, the functioning of the senate. But these are probably less fundamental.

As for the why on a - well - philosophical level, the short answer is Charles De Gaulle. As in, the mechanisms of the fifth republic were more or less designed to underping his presidency, and the man himself governed by "plebiscite" - as in regularly holding referendums on a variety of topics with the threat that a rejection of the proposal would mean him resigning, and which he was able to use to force through his agenda. Until the very end that is, when he was booted out essentially by losing a referendum on regional decentralisation of all things.

The rest rolled off of that, the powerful presidential figure eventually creating a highly personalised political lanscape with certain similarities to the US. Well, many similiarities, but a noticeable one is the (ever increasing) institutional weakess of political parties, even if this manifests itself in a different way to how it does in the States. At any rate, in France what this means is that the parties are particularly dependent on individual figures for their political relevance, meaning loyalty to the person often comes before the party.

As for why a republic was set up for De Gaulle. Well that's more complicated, but it is in part down to the chronic instability of the 4th (and previously the third) republic, as well as France finding itself bogged down in an increasingly volatile war in Algeria leading to even more political instability up to an attempted coup and so on. In the face of this, De Gaulle managed to be the hero of the nation figure, an almost Bonapartiste figure who could stand above politics, command the loyaly of the people and offer stability.

This is spot on. The system was a lot more interesting, and healthier, back when the presidential term was 7 years. But since it got shortened to 5 years and was made to coincide with parliamentary elections, parliament ended up becoming a body to rubberstamp the president and cabinet's agenda and decisions. I suspect this is the main reason the traditional parties have collapsed, due to the overpersonification of the political sphere. What's the point of parties if they're just there to rubberstamp the president's agenda.

The reason why this parliament is different is because it's a hung parliament, and the reason it's a hung parliament is because Macron didn't have a mandate when he was reelected, imo he would have lost had there been any viable alternatives other than Mélenchon or the RN/Le Pen. So he was basically reelected simply to keep Le Pen out of the Elysée, but didn't have enough political support to win a majority at the parliamentary elections. However, no one else was liked enough to become the largest party.

And yes, the current system was created for De Gaulle. That being said, I think the 5th Republic for the first 44 years of its existence worked quite well. It was the most functional republican system France has ever had. There was a strong president and cabinet ensuring stability, but parliament and the parties still had a say. Things really started going downhill after the shortening of the presidential term in 2000 (in effect as of 2002).

[Lechasseur]

After the defeat of the Scottish independence referendum, will Scottish nationalism go the way of Quebecois nationalism?

Time will tell, but my general feeling is Scotland either gets its independance by about the end of the decade, or it doesn't happen.

I think the main driving force behind the strength of the Scottish independance movement in recent years has been dissatisfaction with Tory rule. However, I think those days are numbered, and with non-Tory governance and less hostile relations with Europe probably dissipate the movement.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Tbh being a backbench former MP seems like a pretty sweet job, especially if you like the casework obligations. You can pick a few token causes for your constituency and get an unusual amount of attention for them, you get given the treatment elder statesmen normally get and you can hopefully escape the rat race of ambitious power plays. at least that's what probably motivated May and Heath (well, that and you get to publicly gloat at internal party rivals who once made your life a misery).

[lfromnj]

Why is former Sudetenland the most populist part of Czechoslovakia while the parts of the German empire that are now Polish generally are more liberal(even if urban rural polarization has hit Poland)

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why is former Sudetenland the most populist part of Czechoslovakia while the parts of the German empire that are now Polish generally are more liberal(even if urban rural polarization has hit Poland)

This came up the other week, and...

The difference isn't the economic history of the regions in question, but the parties concerned: right from the very beginning PiS has appealed to the idea of wiping out as many traces of the Communist period as possible and creating instead a 'real' and 'organic' Poland, rooted in Catholicism and some form of re-imagined traditional social order. Babiš is a former Communist and represents something quite different. 'Populism' in this sense is a euphemistic label for a particular style of politics rather than a euphemistic label for a particular political ideology.

In other words, it makes perfect sense that a politician like Babiš would find his greatest appeal in the most rootless parts of the country, and it also makes sense the a political force like PiS would find its greatest appeal in the least rootless parts of the country: the same being true of e.g. the AKP in Turkey, which is a lot weaker in repopulated ethnically cleansed regions than the areas with a stable (for the region...) population history.

[palandio]

Why is former Sudetenland the most populist part of Czechoslovakia while the parts of the German empire that are now Polish generally are more liberal(even if urban rural polarization has hit Poland)

Kaczyński is not Babiš, Tusk is not Klaus.

When the ČSSD (which is basically the only not post-communist social democratic party in the former Eastern bloc) was still relevant, it was strongest in the industrial areas of Northwestern Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia. The (post-communist) SLD was strongest in Western Poland. So there may be some similarities. At the same time Western Poland was to large degree settled by expellees from areas that had to be ceded to the Soviet Union and which in a certain sense constituted a broad population spectrum. The Sudetenland on the other hand had to be repopulated by specialist workers and civil servants that had to be attracted by better opportunities, but also by social strata that were not needed in their places of origin and basically deported to their new homes, cynically speaking particularly rootless people.

There is no area like Eastern Poland in Czechia. Eastern Poland is not only extremely Catholic, but unlike in other Easter Bloc countries there was few collectivization of small landholders and generally its society was less transformed during the Communist area.