By Luís de Sousa (University of Aveiro) and Fernando Casal Bértoa (University of Nottingham) On the morning of the 5th of October 2015, the 115th birthday of the implantation of the Portuguese Republic (5th October 1910), one of the bank holidays that have been eliminated by the centre-right government during the troikian period, the Portuguese [...]
By Ilke Toygur (Autonomous University of Madrid) Turkey held parliamentary elections on 7 June 2015. More than 47 million voters were called to the ballot box to elect 550 members of Parliament.[1] The results brought the country the possibility of a change after 13 years of single-party rule, with growing fears of autocracy and a [...]
By Natalia Timuş (Maastricht University) The failure of yet another government in the Republic of Moldova, after only five months since its creation, has proven that a minority government is an unrealistic scenario (as predicted before by the author)[1] for an emerging post-Soviet democracy, even for one of the promising pro-democratic reformers since early 1990s, [...]
By Helene Helboe Pedersen (Aarhus University) The result of the Danish national election on June 18 2015 has already been interpreted in several ways as a wake-up call to the urban political elite from the rural areas or as the election with only one winner who did not wanted to win. Up until Election Day [...]
By Jan Sundberg (University of Helsinki) According to the procedure it is the biggest party in Parliament election who is given the role to form cabinet. The previous period from the last election in 2011 was a turbulent time. Ministers resigned, Left Wing Alliance left in protest, the Katainen cabinet resigned in June 2014, a [...]
By Philip Cowley (University of Nottingham) In the early hours of 8 May, during his victory speech at Conservative Campaign Headquarters, David Cameron described the 2015 general election as one where ‘pundits got it wrong, the pollsters got it wrong, the commentators got it wrong’. It was a fair complaint. A couple of months before, [...]
By Vello Pettai (University of Tartu) Estonia’s March 1 parliamentary elections were a victory for the incumbent prime minister, Taavi Rõivas, and his center-right (liberal) Reform Party. Capturing 30 out of 101 seats in the Riigikogu, the Reform Party (RP) came out on top, edging out the left-leaning Center Party, which got 27 seats. After [...]
By Kyriaki Nanou (University of Nottingham)
By Natalia Timuş (Maastricht University)
By Sorina Soare (University of Florence)