Easter roundup, part 2

Continuing with the election news that there wasn’t room for in last week’s roundup.

Turkey

Turkey went to the polls on Sunday for nationwide local elections. Five years ago, these elections were a big morale boost for the opposition. Although the AKP, the party of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won more votes and more district council seats overall, it was defeated in the prestige races for mayor in the country’s biggest cities, especially Instanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

Erdoğan subsequently won re-election last year despite a dire economic situation, and having reversed course economically to try to bring inflation down he was aiming to recover some ground in the cities. Instead, his party went backwards. The opposition CHP has won a stunning victory, outvoting the AKP in total, 37.8% to 35.5%, and winning in the country’s five largest cities. In the most important race, Istanbul (where Erdoğan himself was once mayor), the CHP incumbent, Ekrem İmamoğlu, won a landslide victory, 51.1% to 39.6%, a margin of more than a million votes.

The opposition will now control 17 of the thirty metropolitan municipalities, putting a severe dampener on Erdoğan’s tenure. Term limits prevent him from running again in 2028; there had previously been suspicions that, like many another authoritarian ruler, he would try to find a way around that, but it now looks most unlikely.

It’s also a lesson in economic policy. Erdoğan won last year because the consequences of his inflationary policy had not yet reached their worst; he lost at the weekend because his new anti-inflationary policy had not yet had time to work. With inflation, the pain comes later, so get the election over with quickly if you can.

Venezuela

In another authoritarian state, Venezuela, the opposition is having a much harder time of things. When we last looked, a few months ago, government and opposition had reached a sort of agreement, supposed to facilitate opposition participation in this year’s presidential election, and the main opposition alliance had held a primary to select its candidate, María Corina Machado, to challenge incumbent Nicolás Maduro.

The election has now been set for 28 July, considerably earlier than expected. Maduro has a stranglehold on the institutions of power in Venezuela, and the prospects of a genuine democratic contest seem slim. The government refused to lift the disqualification imposed last year on Machado for trumped-up charges, and last week when the opposition tried to register a replacement candidate, Corina Yoris, it was blocked by the electoral commission’s website.

An extension was eventually granted and the opposition was able to register another substitute, Edmundo González, an obscure ex-diplomat. Other candidates from smaller opposition parties have also been registered, including Manuel Rosales and Luis Eduardo Martínez, although all the andi-Maduro parties pay lip service to the need for unity. No doubt there will be much haggling before it is established just who will appear on the ballot.

In the circumstances it seems hardly surprising that the most acute political commentary on the country comes from a giant bipolar capybara.

Catalonia

Readers may remember that back in November, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez was confirmed in office for another term, some months after calling a snap election. He had succeeded in getting the support of the Catalan separatist parties, in return for the promise of an amnesty for the leaders of Catalonia’s independence bid in 2017.

After a false start, the amnesty was finally approved last month. But by then Catalonia was going back to the polls: its separatist government was defeated in a vote on the budget on 13 March, and premier Pere Aragonès promptly dissolved the regional parliament for an election on 12 May.

At the last Catalan election, in 2021, the separatists won a narrow majority of the vote, 51.6% in total, and 74 of the 130 seats. But the two main separatist parties, the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Together for Catalonia (Junts), subsequently had a falling out, and for the last year and a half the ERC, Aragonès’s party, has survived with the ad hoc support of Sánchez’s Socialists, which of course are anti-independence.

If last year’s national election is any guide, support for independence in Catalonia has fallen sharply. But that doesn’t mean putting together a new government will be any easier, since the anti-independence forces are divided between left and right, who will have great difficulty co-operating either with the separatists or with each other.

Bulgaria

Finally to Bulgaria, which went through a sort of election hell in 2021-23, with five elections held in the space of two years. After the last one, just on twelve months ago, the two largest parties – GERB (centre-right establishment) and PP-DB (liberal-reformist) – agreed with some difficulty to work together and form a pro-Ukrainian government, in which they would take it in turns to provide the prime minister.

Nickolay Denkov, a scientist and former education minister nominated by PP-DB, took office last June. After nine months in office, he stuck to the agreement and offered his resignation, whereupon GERB nominated foreign minister Mariya Gabriel to replace him. From there, things should have been straightforward, as they were last year with a similar arrangement in neighboring Romania.

Instead, the two parties fell into dispute about the shape of the new government, culminating last week in Gabriel withdrawing her nomination and calling for a fresh election. President Rumen Radev, who is aligned with the centre-left but pro-Russian opposition, will now explore other options, but unless GERB and PP-DB can patch up their differences it looks as if Bulgaria will be heading back to the polls.