The French municipal elections, covered yesterday, haven’t been the only recent electoral event in Europe. Here’s a quick rundown on what else has been going on.
Slovenia
Slovenia went to the polls last Sunday (previewed here) and got very much the expected result. There was a tight contest for the lead, with the liberal Freedom Movement of prime minister Robert Golob narrowly shading the centre-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), 28.6% to 27.9%, a difference of just under 8,000 votes. But it may not do it any good, since right-of-centre parties will have a majority between them.
In addition to the SDS with 28 seats there are the Christian Democrats with nine, the Democrats, a splitter from the SDS, with six and Resni, a far-right anti-vax party, with five; a total of 48 out of the 90 seats. The incumbent government will have 40 (Freedom Movement 29, Social Democrats six and the Left/Greens five), plus two representatives of ethnic minorities. (Official results are here.)
Golob will get the first shot at forming a new government, and he may try to win the Democrats over to a broad coalition. Failing that, SDS leader Janez Janša will get his turn.
Denmark
Denmark voted on Tuesday (also previewed here), with Social Democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen hoping to take advantage of the patriotic enthusiasm aroused by Donald Trump’s threats to Greenland. It doesn’t seem to have worked very well; all three members of the governing coalition went backwards, falling from 89 seats to 70 between them in Denmark proper, or 93 to 73 (out of 179) counting Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
So the existing centrist majority has disappeared, but it’s not clear what will replace it. The Social Democrats and parties to their left have a total of 87 seats (down three), while the right-of-centre parties have 78 (up five). The Moderates, with 14 seats (down two), again have the balance of power: although far right and far left both made gains, mainstream parties still have a large majority.
Frederiksen has been reappointed as formateur to try to put together a coalition, but negotiations are expected to take some time.
Spain
Only dedicated readers will remember the 2022 election in the Spanish state of Castile & León, but it had some significance because it resulted in the first state government to admit the far right to a share of power. The centre-right People’s Party won 31.4% of the vote and 31 of the 81 seats and formed a coalition with the far-right Vox, which had 17.6% and 13 seats.
The coalition didn’t last: Vox walked out in 2024 due to a nationwide dispute over (of course) immigration. But it didn’t bring down the government; the centre-right continued with a minority government and ran its full term to the next election, held last Sunday. And it looks as if that’s how things will continue, because the result was very much an endorsement of the status quo. (See official results here.)
The People’s Party, Vox and the opposition Socialists all increased their vote slightly, adding two, one and two seats respectively. Those gains came at the expense of the centrist Citizens, which lost almost all of its vote and its single seat, and the far left, which dropped two points and also lost its single seat. The only other parties to win seats were three small regionalist parties, with five seats between them.
Germany
Germany has also been holding state elections: last Sunday in Rhineland-Palatinate, and two weeks earlier in Baden-Württemberg. Baden-Württemberg was previously governed by a coalition between the Greens and the centre-right CDU, while Rhineland-Palatinate had a “traffic light” coalition of Social Democrats, Liberals and Greens. (Last time around they voted on the same day, which I reported on here.)
Both elections saw swings from centre-left to centre-right, and also big gains for the far-right party, AfD. The latter is now the third-largest party in each of the two states, with just under 20% of the vote. (Official results are here and here.) But the mainstream parties remain firm against admitting it to a share in government; the Greens/CDU coalition will continue in Baden-Württemberg, with the two parties now at parity, and a CDU/SPD grand coalition is expected in Rhineland-Palatinate, mirroring the current federal government.
The Liberals seem to be still paying the price for breaking up the last federal government; in both states they lost more than half of their vote and dropped below the 5% threshold. They have also fallen below the far-left Left party, which made gains in both although it remained below the 5% mark.
Italy
Finally Italy – not an election but a referendum, held last Sunday and Monday to vote on proposed constitutional amendments concerning the structure of the judiciary. The proposals were complex and their effects disputed; just the sort of thing where you would expect voters to default to a “No” vote, if indeed they bothered to turn out at all.
In the circumstances it was some surprise that it did as well as it did. But it still went down, with a No vote of 53.2% on a very respectable turnout of 55.7% (official results here). For comparison, the last contested constitutional amendment, in 2016, was defeated with a No vote of 59.1%, leading to the resignation of then-prime-minister Matteo Renzi. (A subsequent referendum in 2020 was carried, but it had bipartisan support.)
So while it’s a defeat for prime minister Giorgia Meloni, whose opponents accused her of trying to dismantle checks and balances in the judicial system, it seems unlikely to do her much lasting damage. Her coalition retains a steady but not overwhelming lead in the opinion polls for the general election due in the second half of next year.
The World is Not Enough 