Two early elections

What otherwise looked like being a fairly thin autumn (northern spring) in electoral terms is being enlivened by three elections held out of time: the deferred presidential election in Romania, now scheduled for 4 May, which we’ll look at another time soon, and early elections in Canada and Portugal.

Canada goes to the polls in just over a month’s time, on 28 April: the announcement was made at the weekend by prime minister Mark Carney, who has been in the job for less than a fortnight and is still not a member of parliament. As I noted when Carney took the Liberal leadership, his strategy is to present the election as a choice over whether or not to stand up to Donald Trump’s imperial ambitions for Canada.

That makes life difficult for the opposition leader, the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre. He doesn’t want his country to be swallowed by the United States either, but he can’t escape the fact that he is identifiably the more Trumpy of the two contenders. As a result, opinion polls in the last fortnight have generally shown the Liberals in the lead, even though at the beginning of the year the Conservatives were ahead by more than twenty points.

Perhaps in the coming weeks Poilievre will succeed in pulling voters’ attention back to their accumulated dissatisfaction with the Liberal government and away from the distraction to the south. Or perhaps the voters, after some reflection, will decide that appeasement rather than confrontation is the best way to deal with Trump, in which case the Conservatives are probably the better bet.

The other thing to remember is the role of the electoral system. Canada votes in single-member districts by first-past-the-post, and in a multi-party system with huge regional differences that can produce bizarre results. Two elections back I produced a table showing that the left had outvoted the right in nine successive elections, but had only formed government five times.

But a more polarised two-party vote tends to favor the Liberals. Canadian psephologist Éric Grenier suggests that with a vote in the neighborhood of 40% the Liberals are quite likely to win a majority in their own right, while the NDP, now down around 10%, could be all but wiped out.*

Meanwhile in Portugal, centre-right prime minister Luís Montenegro didn’t have much choice about calling an early election. Two weeks ago, embroiled in a scandal over conflicts of interest with a family consulting firm, he decided to call a vote of confidence, which he lost badly: 142 to 82. After a brief round of consultations, president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa dissolved parliament, with the election to be held on 18 May.

Montenegro’s main problem was that he lacked a parliamentary majority in the first place. At the last election, just over a year ago, his Democratic Alliance topped the poll with 30.1% of the vote and 80 of the 230 seats; the centre-left Socialists were only fractionally behind, with 29.3% and 78 seats. The far-right party, Chega, held the balance of power with 18.9% and 50 seats, while five small centre and left-wing parties shared the remaining 22 seats.

To his credit, Montenegro refused to deal with Chega and instead formed a minority government, depending in practice on the indulgence of the Socialists. Last October they abstained to allow the government’s budget to pass, but this time their patience had run out and they voted with both far right and far left to bring down the government.

So far the opinion polls show very little change from last year’s result: centre-right and centre-left neck-and-neck, and Chega in the mid-teens, well back but well ahead of anyone else. If that holds up, either the two major parties are going to have come to terms in some way, or else the centre-right will have to break the taboo on talking to the far right.

But with the best part of two months to go, and the Trumpian whirlwind wreaking havoc in Europe, there could still be surprises to come.

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* Since the last election there has been a redistribution, so the notional starting point for the parties is a bit different to where they were in the old parliament; that’s benefited the Conservatives a little, since they tend to be stronger in the growth areas. Out of the slightly larger total of 343 seats (up five), the Liberals notionally hold 157 (down three), Conservatives 126 (up seven), Quebec Bloc 34 (up two), NDP 24 (down one) and Greens two (unchanged).