Elections in various countries

[Linguoboy]

When it comes to interesting names in US elections, I'm not sure you can beat the 2018 Nevada Gubernatorial election

Our previous mayoral election was between two guys named "Rahm" and "Chuy".

Pretty sure Nevada is holding our beer about now.

[tiramisu]

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[tiramisu]

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[mèþru]

I think Balad should be banned for accepting Qatari funding, but I also think many of the current Jewish MKs should be banned for fomenting hate against Arabs, Reform Jews, refugees, LGBT and disabled people.

Also, I think out of all MKs in favour of a one-state solution, only those who are against both a Jewish and an Arab state should be allowed. I think all other forms of the one-state solution are racist.

[tiramisu]

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[M Mira]

A legislative (parliament) by-election will take place in Taiwan this weekend to fill 4 vacant seats: 3 of which were due to the incumbent being elected to their respective local office last November, and the last one was due to a corruption conviction.

The ruling DPP did a pretty poor job over the past 2 years, and it showed in the ballots: merely 2.5 years after the landslide victory in the national election, and securing an absolute majority in the parliament for the first time in DPP history, it suffered a landslide defeat in the local election last November. DPP went from 13 seats to 6, while KMT went from 6 to 15. The results are also record low and high since all local offices were opened for free election in 1994.

It seems like the avalanche is still rolling down the hill: Tainan #2, a solid DPP stronghold where the DPP candidate beat the KMT candidate 76.47% to 18.67% - by a margin of 57.8% in 2016, is now shaking so badly that the former DPP mayor of Tainan and Premier (until 2 months ago) showed up to campaign for their candidate for a 8 month tenure of a constituency where the other side requires a >50% swing to win. A DPP dissident is also contesting the same seat on her own, but in every poll so far, she has merely ~10% support, and even if you add all of her support level to the official DPP candidate, DPP would only win by 1~2%. If KMT really wins this seat, it will be the highest swing since democratization.

And President Tsai has a >99% chance of becoming the first president who failed to be reelected since democratization, unless the very unpopular KMT chairman Wu decides to nominate himself. However, KMT is not guaranteed to win, because Ko, the very popular independent mayor of Taipei who enjoys nation wide support, can defeat both KMT and DPP in a three-way contest consistently in every poll so far.

[mèþru]

What happened that made her so unpopular?

[Raphael]

In unrelated news, the current Hungarian government, known for all kinds of not-so-nice things, is introducing some kind of new family-related policy. In order to promote that policy, they're running a poster ad campaign featuring stock photos of a happy couple. The problem? The happy stock photo couple is apparently the very same stock photo couple already famous on the internet as the stars of the "distracted boyfriend" meme.

[mèþru]

Could be worse - they could have repeated the infamous "traditional lesbian couple" fiasco

[Raphael]

? ?

Edit: Just googled it. Yeah, that would have been embarrassing.

[mèþru]

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/st ... rriage-ar/

[M Mira]

What happened that made her so unpopular?

Cutting civil servant pensions while approving a huge spending plan.

The government would have a solid argument if it enters full austerity mode, but the selective treatment pissed a lot of current and retired government employees off. Although they are mostly KMT supporters to begin with, so this one probably didn't contribute much.

And before the reform, the civil servant pension fund would last about another decade, while labor pension fund is projected to go under in 7 years, yet the government didn't address the latter with the same eagerness as the former.

Weird choice of people in the government

Some are plain dumb: Tsai made one of her cousin the Minister of Labor during a series of controversial Labor Standards Act amendments. While she is a experienced civil servant, she has no portfolio in labor affairs, and during press conferences she only gave unhelpful formulaic responses. After she resigned due to "health reasons", she was immediately made the CEO of a state enterprise, but media backlash forced her to resign the very next day.

Some seems to be bribes: Many activists entered the government during the current administration. While it seemed to be a good direction, people found that most of the usual protester organizations during Ma administration don't show up anymore when the Tsai administration is pushing similarly controversial bills. And there were some grossly incompetent people as well.

The most notorious one was the CEO of Taipei Agricultural Products Marketing Corporation, a partially state- and municipal-owned business, Wu Yinning (Pinyin, probably not the official spelling). She was a writer and agrarian activist, and not the champagne variant - she went to Mexico to interview the Zapatistas once. Unfortunately, she didn't appear to have the necessary knowledge. When a Taipei City councilor questioned her if she can read the company's financial statement, she answered that she was "learning to", and she was memed as the "$2.5 million NTD intern" (~$83,000 USD, about 5 times the average Taiwanese yearly income)

And there are ones with clear ulterior motives: The former Magistrate of Hualian County was convicted of insider trading when he was in another position. Because it happened a few months before the November election, the remaining term was less than two years and the central government may appoint an acting magistrate to serve the rest of the term. Now usually the appointee would be from the same party, is already a deputy magistrate, or at the very least have the experience of being a mayor or magistrate, but instead the person DPP appointed is a Deputy Minister of Justice. Basically everyone knew that he was sent to dug up dirt in the Hualian County Government instead of doing his job, and he failed to find anything in the end.

Another issue is the "professional resigners", people designated to take the fall and resign, but appointed to a higher position a few months later after things died down. This was pretty pointless, and makes the resignation look insincere and irresponsible. The chairman of the state-run CPC (formerly called Chinese Petroleum Corporation) resigned after a natural gas power plant maintenance accident that caused island-wide blackout. Less than 3 months later, he was appointed the acting magistrate of Yilan Country, though he was at least a legislator from Yilan once.

After the Kaohsiung gas explosion accident in 2014, Wu Hong-mo, the deputy mayor of Kaohsiung (and a few others) resigned. While it happened only months before the election, the DPP mayor was successfully reelected, and the people who resigned came back again. Now that we still acceptable, but he keeps getting promoted and last year, he became the Minister of Transportation, and has the misfortune of witnessing the worst train derailment accident in the history of Taiwan. He resigned again, but now he's known as a meme professional resigner.

There are some miscellaneous ones like the presidential Justice Reformation Committee (can't find the official translation) having a first degree murderer in their ranks. He stabbed his girlfriend to death in broad daylight in the streets in front of her mother, and was sentenced to just 12 years, and served merely 8 years. While he was indeed a lawyer and probably have the necessary knowledge for the job, he's not really a good example of justice, especially not with the actual time he served in comparison of what he has done. There are also a large number of people who committed DUI in the government and party positions, which doesn't help the party's image.

... and there are a lot more problem in other aspects

[mèþru]

None of that seems to find its way into Western news. All I hear about her from the news is little more than what the English Wikipedia article on her covers.

[M Mira]

None of that seems to find its way into Western news. All I hear about her from the news is little more than what the English Wikipedia article on her covers.

Energy Policy:

DPP holds its anti-nuclear power policy as gospel. Before they won the election in 2016, they claimed that the energy supply crisis was fabricated by KMT and that they're "hiding" the power. In addition, they promised that they can replace nuclear power with green energy without raising the price of electricity, but it was busted in the summer of 2017. As I've mentioned above, a maintenance accident caused a major gas power plant to shut down and triggered an island-wide blackout. The last time a island-wide blackout happened was in 1999, and was the aftermath of an earthquake. After the accident, DPP still refuse to start the #4 (Longmen) Nuclear Power Plant despite that it was ready and didn't enter service due to political reasons (and the fallout of the Fukushima incident). Instead, we have the world's second largest coal fired power plant running at max capacity during the summer, with plans to rebuild a decommissioned one.

Their detailed 2025 energy plan looks pretty unconvincing too. Currently, the energy supply is around 45% coal, 35% gas, 10% nuclear, 5% oil, and 5% renewable. The plan is to make it 50% gas, 30% coal, and 20% renewable. Not only does that require many new gas power plants, we need a lot more gas storage facilities as well, because we can't connect ourselves to the pipe network on the continent for obvious reasons.

The characteristics of many of the renewable energy sources aren't in our favor either. We've already exploited most of our hydro and geothermal sources, while wind power and solar has the problem of supply/demand mismatch. Our peak energy demand occurs during summer, mostly due to the high temperature that leads to high air conditioning usage, but our windy seasons are fall and winter, and our rainy (and thus shady) seasons are summer and fall, so they really aren't that helpful during the peak season.

And now they have somehow went all in on the issue, still trying to push through their plan even though the "No nuclear power by 2025" clause they added into the Electricity Act was repealed by a referendum (60% to 40%) held on the same day as the local election last November, clearly showing that the people are against the idea.

Labor policy:

Besides several faux pas like Tsai's "Don't complain to us, talk to your bosses yourselves" and Premiere Lai's "You may think the wage is low, but think of it as good karma", the biggest problems with the Tsai administration were the Labor Standards Act amendments during '16-'18. While the most prominent change was reducing the legal work hours from 84 hours biweekly to 40 hours weekly, there were a lot of less popular changes as well, such as the reduction of national holidays, changes to the maximum consecutive work days, minimum time off between shifts, and more relaxation in many regulations. Honestly it's so complicated that I don't think I fully understand it even to this day, but if it's truly great and not trying to get crap past the radar, why did they barricade government facilities as if martial law has been declared? They clearly anticipated people to be outraged about the changes. I went through that area a few times every month at that time, and I think those lasted for weeks. Outside of that, razor wire trailers and stacks of barricades are often sighted near government facilities for the last few years.



Civic awareness in Taiwan has really taken off after the students occupied the parliament in 2014, and people are now much better at reading the fine print and remembering what the government did, yet DPP chose to act as if they're still in the last century.

[mèþru]

I'm grateful then that Taiwan's third-parties could get stronger - especially as it seems Hakka linguistic issues are just completely ignored

[M Mira]

The avalanche was halted for now: DPP kept Tainan #2 with 46.85% against KMT's 44.31%, down from 76.47% v.s. 18.67% in 2016. While turnout was low, as expected for a by-election, more people came out to vote for KMT on Saturday than in 2016.

I'm grateful then that Taiwan's third-parties could get stronger - especially as it seems Hakka linguistic issues are just completely ignored

The challenge Hakka faces is that there's no Hakka settlement anywhere near the size of a city, which means that it's effectively mandatory to learn Mandarin or Hokkien to get a job, and a large of number of Hakka parents encourage their children to speak Mandarin and/or Hokkien for better economic prospects. This has been an ongoing process for at least a century: Tsai's father, born 1918, had a Hakka father and a Paiwan aborigine mother, but he was a Hokkien speaker, and no one can attest he ever spoke Hakka. The other problem is that the two man branches of Taiwanese Hakka have tones that are realized almost exactly opposite from each other, which is an irreconcilable difference that makes it impossible to establish a mixture/compromise standard that covers both. See #1 Sixian 四縣腔(苗栗) and #3 Hailu 海陸腔 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/臺灣客家語#聲調

The current election system is very unfriendly towards third parties. After DPP and KMT amended the constitution together to halve the number of seats in the parliament and changed constituencies from multi-member districts to single member districts, it's essentially impossible for a third party to establish itself, and the high threshold for PR (5%) doesn't help either. Currently, aside from DPP and KMT, the only parties that have seats in the parliament are People First Party (no constituencies, 3 PR seats (6.52%)), New Power Party (3 constituencies, 2 PR seats (6.1%)), and Non-Partisan Solidarity Union (1 aborigine seat).

PFP is essentially "James Soong and his merry men", a one man party with no remarkable people other than its leader, and Soong is already 76, so it doesn't seem to have a bright future, or a future at all.

New Power Party was formed after the 2014 Sunflower Movement. They are the only relevant party in Taiwan that implemented weak party discipline like the parties in the US, but that might have cost them. The party has split opinions on several occasions, and perhaps the most critical of which was the split into pro-Ko (anti-DPP) camp and anti-Ko (pro-DPP) camp after DPP broke up with Ko and fielded their own candidate against him. While the party didn't break up because it wasn't their ideal to enforce a single opinion in the party, I think it will aversely affect their PR votes because the voters will have doubts whether the candidates in the party list match their opinions at all, and 6.1% is barely above the 5% threshold. Their 3 constituencies were all traditionally KMT turf that they won because DPP didn't contest and instead supported them. With KMT back on its feet again, it doubtful if they can keep any of them in 2020.

NPSU is a loose "party" whose purpose is to allow independents to form caucus in the parliament or local councils, and its members came from diverse backgrounds, it had politicians from outlying islands, aborigine, and even mafia. Currently, it has only one Manchu-Atayal aborigine member in the parliament, who's part of the PFP caucus because a parliament caucus needs to have at least 3 members.

[mèþru]

Polls show Zehut actually has a chance of joining the Knesset. I am afraid; the welfare state is a big part of what made Israel strong enough to resist most of the Arab world and Kahanism is a threat to the soul of Israel. Moshe Feiglin should also be banned from running.

I wish Balad was banned, but my reason is that it is funded by Qatar. I agree with the Supreme Court that the reason given by the coalition is invalid.

[mèþru]

Nursultan Nazarbayev resigned!

[Linguoboy]

Nursultan Nazarbayev resigned!

Goddamn, why is American news coverage so crap? I had to dig to find the story (Google News apparently thinks it much more important that I know what critics think of Weezer's new album) and WaPo story didn't even mention who's taking over from him. Apparently he's been thinking about this for some time--even going so far as to ask the Constitutional Court how to do it--and yet I never heard so much as a whisper about it.

[mèþru]

Shit:

In July 2018, Nazarbayev signed a decree making him chairman of the Security Council for life. The decree gave the Security Council significant constitutional powers, which could allow Nazarbayev to maintain power even if he vacates the presidency