Four quick updates

As foreshadowed last week, I’m going to be busy with another job for about the next three weeks, so blogging will be light to non-existent. Time now though for a quick run through some stories that have been making news.

Catalonia. We haven’t looked at Catalonia since Easter, when its regional parliament had just been dissolved for another early election. That election was held on 12 May, and resulted in the expected swing against the pro-independence forces. Their combined vote fell to 43.6% and they won 61 of the 135 seats. But although the four anti-independence parties won a clear majority between them, they were (like their pro-independence counterparts) deeply divided on ideological lines.

That made forming a majority coalition something of a challenge. Eventually the two centre-left parties – the Socialists (anti-independence), who had topped the poll with 42 seats, and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), who had dropped back to 20 seats – came to an agreement, and with the support of the far-left (but anti-independence) Comuns Sumar and its six seats, that yielded a one-seat majority.

So the week before last, Socialist leader Salvador Illa duly won a vote of confidence to become premier, 68 to 66 (one MP was absent). But the vote was overshadowed by the surprise return of former premier Carles Puigdemont, leader of the other main pro-independence party, who has lived in exile since 2017. He addressed a rally on the same day as the vote in parliament before evading police attempts to arrest him and eventually returning to Belgium.

Puigdemont did a fine job of making the Spanish authorities look foolish. But this moral victory cannot disguise the fact that Catalonia has an anti-independence government for the first time since 2010.

Japan. Japan is set for a new prime minister after incumbent Fumio Kishida announced last week that he would be stepping down next month. His Liberal Democratic Party will choose a new leader, and since it has a clear majority in parliament that person will become prime minister and presumably lead the party into the next election, due in the latter part of next year.

Kishida took the job just before the last election, in 2021, and although he won that without much trouble his tenure has not been a happy one. A major scandal over party slush funds, which first brought down some of Kishida’s factional opponents but then spread to his own faction, has badly dented the LDP’s image. Polls show that its support has dropped sharply, with “none of the above” now holding a commanding lead.

Craig Mark at the Conversation and Justin McCurry in the Guardian give useful surveys of the possible replacements for Kishida. My post on the 2020 leadership contest provides some background on the tangled politics of the LDP.

France. With the Olympic games over, France has gone back to trying to find a new government, and the French left has gone back to its time-honored pastime of fighting among itself. Last weekend Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of LFI, the largest and most intransigent component of the New Popular Front left-wing alliance, threatened impeachment proceedings against president Emmanuel Macron if he refused to appoint the left’s nominee, Lucie Castets, as prime minister.

Mélenchon’s partners were horrified. The Socialists and Greens both dissociated themselves from the idea, as did those close to Castets. Between them, they have a lot more seats than LFI, and if they were to deal with Macron separately it would be possible to put together a parliamentary majority – albeit a narrow one – without having to rely on far right, centre-right or LFI.

Macron would prefer to draw the centre-right into the mix as well, which would provide a more comfortable margin, but getting elements of the left to deal with him at all is going to be difficult enough. Co-operation with the centre-right might be a bridge too far.

United States. Finally another look at the year’s big story, the American presidential election. A few weeks ago I drew attention to an apparent disconnect between the polls and the betting market, suggesting that perhaps “the people with more money than sense are disproportionately likely to be Trump supporters.”

For a time, the disconnect seemed to go away. Kamala Harris drew level and then took the lead in the polls; according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregates she now has a national lead of 2.8 points, with leads in four of the six most critical states. (And virtually tied in a fifth, North Carolina, where Donald Trump leads by just 0.2 of a percentage point.) And the betting market followed suit, installing her as favorite with an implied win probability that peaked last week at about 55%.

But then, for no apparent reason, the movement in the odds went into reverse. Over the last few days they’ve shifted back to the point where the two sides are now given basically even chances: in fact, as of this morning the Republicans are fractionally ahead, 50.0% to 49.7%, despite the lack of any corresponding movement in the polls.

It looks as if one-eyed Republican gamblers, having been momentarily caught off guard by the changed circumstances of the race, have now rallied and marshalled their forces. But perhaps someone will have an alternative explanation.