Another European roundup

Time for a quick look at last month’s electoral news from Europe.

Slovenia
As we noted at the time, Slovenia’s general election, held on 22 March, produced the expected result, with four right-of-centre parties winning a majority between them: 48 seats, as against 40 for the outgoing centre- to centre-left government (plus two ethnic minority representatives). The question was whether centre-right leader Janez Janša would be able to corral them all onto his side or whether one of them would be lured away into a more centrist coalition.

The first option is what happened: negotiations for a centrist government broke down, and a fresh round of consultations produced agreement on a right-wing government. Janša’s SDS, the Christian Democrats and the Democrats will govern in coalition, and the far-right Resni will give them external support. On 22 May parliament confirmed his appointment on a vote of 51 to 36.

This is Janša’s fourth term as prime minister. By European standards he is quite Trumpy, but he is pro-Ukraine and his party has remained within the main centre-right family. The need to keep his coalition partners happy will also work against any major shift to authoritarianism.

Denmark
Denmark voted two days after Slovenia but unlike it has so far failed to settle on a new government. Parties of the left have 87 of the 179 seats; those on the right have 78, and the balance between them is held by the Moderates, with 14 seats.

Moderate leader Lars Rasmussen is therefore the kingmaker. His preference is for a broad centrist government drawing from both left and right, but neither side seems willing to go along. First the outgoing prime minister, Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen, was appointed as formateur, but she was unable to get Rasmussen to agree to support a government that would include the far left.

So then centre-right leader Troels Poulsen had a try, and ran into the same problem: the Moderates weren’t happy with a government dependent on the far right, and the far right wouldn’t back a government with Rasmussen in it. So he threw in the towel, and King Frederick X turned back to Frederiksen, who promised to make another attempt at creating a left-of-centre coalition. Apparently this is already a record for length of time between Danish governments.

Bulgaria
No such record this time in Bulgaria, which in the last few years has suffered from chronic instability and repeated elections. But the election on 19 April produced a solid majority for former president Rumen Radev and his Progressive Bulgaria party, which won 131 of the 240 seats.

Even so, it was two and a half weeks before the new government took office, a sign of the methodical way the Europeans tend to do these things. Radev’s government was endorsed by a parliamentary vote of 124 to 70, with 36 abstentions. It is now engaged in a brawl with Donald Trump, ostensibly over the Americans’ failure to include Bulgaria in its electronic travel authorisation system.

Cyprus
Cyprus is the only country in the European Union with a fully presidential system, so its legislative elections don’t put the government at stake. For the last few years, president Nikos Christodoulides has had to work with a legislature in which his centrist-nationalist party, DIKO, held only nine of the 56 seats, as against 17 for the centre-right DISY and 15 for the far-left AKEL.*

That wasn’t a good starting point, since legislative elections usually swing against the president’s party. And so did this one, held on 24 May, although only slightly: DIKO’s vote fell 1.3% to 10.0% and it dropped one seat. DISY also went backwards a little, falling 0.8% to 27.1%, while AKEL was up 1.4% to 23.9%, but both were unchanged in terms of seats. (See official results here.)

The biggest gains went to the neo-Nazi ELAM, which jumped to 10.9% (up 4.0%), just edging out DIKO for third place, and also won eight seats. But apart from that (which by European standards these days is pretty modest), voters seem generally content with the status quo.

Malta
Finally to Malta, which went to the polls on Saturday. Despite a system of proportional representation à la Tasmania, it retains a rigid two-party system. Almost everyone votes for either the centre-left Labour Party, in office since 2013, or its centre-right opponents, the Nationalists.

And so it was this time, with the two winning 96.5% of the vote between them. The Nationalists gained a respectable swing, picking up 2.9%, but that still left them more than seven points behind Labour, 51.8% to 44.7%. A new centrist party, Momentum, picked up 1.5% while the Greens were down 0.3% to 1.3%. The far right could manage only fifth place on 0.6%.

That gives Labour 36 seats to the Nationalists 31, and prime minister Robert Abela will continue in office. In the last parliament it was 44 to 35, but that was with an extra dozen seats added to compensate for under-representation of women, which apparently will not be needed this time.

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* Notionally the Cypriot parliament has 80 seats, but 24 are reserved for Turkish Cypriots and these have not been filled since the 1960s; since 1974 the Turks have had their own unrecognised state in the north.