Klaus: Good for Ireland and good for Europe

No sooner does Václav Klaus turn up in the Irish Republic, hobnobbing undiplomatically with local eurosceptics during a ‘private’ part of his presidential visit then polls appear showing Irish voters may back the Lisbon Treaty. It certainly can't be because of the ruling party's 'Yes' campaign, whose worthy but soporific efforts can seen by clicking the image above.

So, rather than being the EU’s leading ‘dissident’ as he suggests, a sort of Andrei Sakharov of European integration silenced and held under house arrest in Prague Castle, by totalitarian europhiles, the Czech President, it seems , is be more the Gorbachev of the eurosceptic movement. As soon as he turns up to show a little fraternal encouragement, things go spectacularly belly up Just think Mikhail Sergeyevich’s efforts to promote democratic socialism on visits to China and East Germany in 1989.

Polish elections: SSEES roundtable debates Civic Platform's (uncertain?) prospects

Meanwhile, before you can say ‘Jaroslaw Kaczynski’ there is a (well attended)roundtable on the Polish elections at SSEES, where Aleks Szczerbiak struck an interestingly sceptical note about the durability of Civic Platform’s victory. Donald Tusk’s party has, he thinks, perhaps put together an unfeasibly broad electoral coalition based more of rejection of the incumbent government than support for a liberal-consevative centre-right. It had hoovered up votes of those who incline to more to the post-communist left, which was wrongfooted by the speed with which early election were called. Moreover, the Kaczynski’s Law and Justice (PiS) party remained, he thought, remained a poweful force having gained both voters and voters in a way not wholly reducible to taking over the electorate pole-axed radical parties Self-Defence and the League of Polish Families (LPR) (cut loose by Radio Marija, which backed PiS). PiS, it was suggested also had a powerful and coherent conservative-national narrative based on the project of a ‘Fourth Republic’ cleansed of the pervasive influence of an informal establishment (Uklad) of left-liberal communists-turned-capitalists and shady characters. Tusk’s PO, by contrast, travelled rather light in terms of ideology stressing modernity and decency. The idea of young, educated migrants and the emergeny middle classes turned on conservative, rural Poland was something of a myth: only about 30, 000 of the 750, 000 Poles in the UK voted and thir liberal votes were probably counted out by the Law and Justice inclined ballots of a similar number of Polish Americans in the US. Moreover, any coalition with the Peasant Party (PSL) would be tricky, given the latter’s inclination to play hardball on all kinds of issues, ruthless extract policy concessions for their rural base and use state posts as patronage resources to sutain their party (Civic Platform want to decentalize and clean up, but I wondered can you really build or sustain a party in CEE these days without a dose of clientelism and patronage?). Civic Platform and its new government might like so many previous Polish election winners fall apart all too soon.

Others speakers, including my SSEES economist colleague Tomasz Mickiewicz who doubles as astute poltical analyst, saw PO as having better prospects. There was ample scope for privatization – about 20% of Poland’s GDP is still in the state sector, second only to Russia among post-communist states, apparently. (Ironically, Law and Justice’s Gaullist dislike of privatizition had deprived it of resources for its social spending commitments). Moreover, its rhetoric of European modernity and a free market with functional welfare, he thought had been effective – the party had managed to reinvent itself as something else other than a elite, secular liberal party indifferent to national tradition and religion. Mass emigration to the UK and Ireland had given Poles a clear sense of just how this could work – migrants might not count much electorally, but they were cultural vectors for change in small town and rural Poland, perhaps enabling PO to puncture PiS economically populist warnings of impoverishment all round. Apparently, some Poles also see Ireland's political model of two (broadly speaking) right-wing parties and a rump social democratic left as as desirable as its Celtic Tiger economic policies. Ireland's chronic patronage and clientelism probably also offer an (unintended) parallel...

The roundtable was finished off by a very fluent and engaging review of Polish foreign policy by Nat Copsey, who foresaw a change of tone in Poland’s EU policy as well as its external relations with Russia and Ukraine, masking a lot of underlying continuity. In part this was because the Terrible Twins’ foreign policy, while less than comptently managed, were less terrible in practice than their public comments often suggested.

Young academics to back Mečiar?

Even in its current much diminished, more moderate form Vladimír Mečiar’s populist-nationalist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) is not known for its intellectual qualities, so it is interesting to see that it has just founded a Young Politcal Scientists Club for sympathetic adademics to advise and feed in ideas. The rationale, reports Sme, is to counter the heavy bias in Slovak political science community towards liberal, pro-market parties. This I suspect does exist, although ,that said, Slovak political science is of a generally rather high quality with less obvious and uncomfortable partisianship creeping in than (for example) in the neighbouring Czech Republic. It will be interesting to see whether this initiative develops and contributes to the modernization of HZDS, whose vagueness plus loyal base of voters remembering the bad/good old days when VM dominated Slovak politics may be an asset for future growth. In Croatia the broadly similar Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), for example, took Ireland’s Fianna Fáil as its model of thoroughly modern small country nationalism. HDZ founder Franjo Tudjman did, however, have the decency to die at a poltically opportune moment…

Ireland's transfer season

Taking a break from marking, I sat up late reading throughthe Irish election results with the help of the Irish Times election special. After a few scares along the way, dominant incumbent party – indeed dominant party in Irish politics full stop – Fianna Fáil scored a convincing victory, although its coalition partners the small liberal Progressive Democrats, like so many liberal parties in CEE, were finally whacked almost into parliamentary nothingness (2 deputies, TDs (Teachtaí Dála) I should say. Commentatrors suggest that, however, that in the Irish case the demise of PDs was more due them being victims og their own success in spreading the free market gospel, rather than victims of Fico-esque or Catholic nationalist populism. The Greens, support concentrated in Dublin, stood still and Sinn Fein – powersharing deal with Ian Paisley in the North - failed to make the anticipated breakthrough, probably because voters distrusted their left-of-centre economic policy (scaled back during the campaign) and they were squeezed by the two big parties, Fianna Fail and Fianna Gael, the latter (historically less nationalist) party making gains but still coming behind FF and having litle prospect of forming another ‘rainbow coalition’ with the Greens and previous coalition partner the Irish Labour Party, one of the few mainstream European social democratic parties to be a long-time minor party in its own national political system. An FF-Labour coalition isn’t apparently ruled out.

The best thing about Irish politics from the lecturer’s/anorak’s point of view, however, is Single Transferable Vote system, which is not only appealingly complex in istelf with its quotas, multiple transfers of voters from losing candidates (and sometimes winning candidates with a surplus), but offers incredible strategic permutations: how many candidates to field, how to manage the splitting of first preferance votes between candidates, ‘losers’ on first preferences being elected as transfers gradually increased their score, candidates hanging on across multiple rounds (up to 13 this election) in waiting for a big transfer from a popular losing candidate, competition between candidates from the same party in multi-member constituencies and, of course, the personal voter for personalities and politicians with a local following. STV Irish style is not super proportional due to the (constituionally fixed) size of constituencies (3-5 members) but it does offer ample scope for local independents to come through. There were 14 in the outgoing 166 member parliament, 5 in this. Interestingly, and perhaps for this reason, there were almost no extra-parliamentary minor parties standing. Sitting up till 1.00am looking over the results from bits of Dublin where various aunties and uncles life and trying to work out why Sinn Fein failed to get a TD elected in Donegal despute getting 20% of first preferences, I became an instant STV groupie.

ie-politics: putting Sinn Féin in comparative context

Came across an interesting discussion on placing Sinn Féin in comparative context on the equally interesting ie-politics blog. Odd that no one seems to think of placing SF in a category of nationalist/regionalist irredentist parties, but I guess that just my British/big state perspective, which takes no account of SF’s all-Ireland organization and its status in the Republic as an extremist pariah party preparing to duck under the cordon sanitaire and become a coalition player in the Republic, rather than the incomprehensible but no longer threatening peripheral irritant it seems viewed from London.

Irish angles

I had always assumed that Ireland’s Single Transferable Vote (STV) electoral system – a form of PR rarely used in West European contexts, except for things like British student union elections – was adopted on Irish independence to balance out political forces in a new democracy and give weight to local notables in rural areas, whose clientelistic networks tended to structure Ireland’s parties. In fact, today’s Irish Times reports in an article abour gerrymandering (easy to do with multi-member constituencies electing small numbers of MPs - TDs, I should say) - that STV was actually an parting gift of the British, enshrined in the Government of Ireland Act 1920 to protect the Ulster Unionist minority (yes, minority) in the island of Ireland – a political experiment that, of course, never took place as the Unionists (predictably) took the option of partition to make themseleves a local majority and adopted British style first-past-the-post guaranteeing them dominance in a religous-ethnic illiberal democracy until the suspension of direct rule.

Interesting, how once again there is a symbiosis between the politics of British Imperial retreat and Irish republicanism. This is neatly illustrated in the new play by Mary Kenny offering a fictionalized account of a meeting over brandy and cigars of Michael Collins and Winston Churchill (played by Mel Smith), which is currently in the news because cigars not lit on stage in Edinburgh under Scottish anti-smoking laws. British policy and the logjam around Irish Home rule effectively created Irish Republicanism as a political force, derailing the very different constitutional tradition of the Irish National Party. This was one of the few stories that the IT had in common with the Murdoch Times, which I also bought today.

The Irish Times mixture of old fashioned high quality journalist, interest - and very good coverage of East European politics (how many British newspapers had an editorial onthe Slovak elections?) and small country feel - restored my faith things Irish after an awful time seeing someone off an RyanAir flight to Brno at Stansted. RyanAir, surely the unacceptable unecological face of the Tiger economy, made its passengers, including families with small children kids stand sweltering in 60-70 long queues for a whole hour while very small number of staff slowly checked them all in. Naturally the flight was late being called and late taking off

When they finally made it to the front of the queue passengers were greeted by the slogan “Ryan Air – the On-time Airline”. I just about enough Irish to distinguish the Taoiseach from the Tánaiste , but I think Póg mahone is more or less the right response here. Not an expression, you'll find in the Irish Times, I suspect...