By Michał Kotnarowski (Polish Academy of Sciences) In mid-2014, a year before presidential and parliamentary elections almost everything looked good for the ruling party PO (Civic Platform), which had been governing the country together with its junior coalition partner PSL (Polish Peasant Party) for seven years. Economic indicators were very good - a continuous increase [...]
By Gabriela Borz (University of Strathclyde) On Tuesday the 17th of November, a new technocratic government led by Dacian Cioloş was approved by the Romanian Parliament with 389 votes in favour and 115 against. Invested with a short mandate of one year, it is the third technocratic government Romania has had in the last 25 [...]
By Dimitris Sourvanos (London School of Economics) and Kyriaki Nanou (University of Nottingham) Last week Euclid Tsakalotos gave a talk at the LSE discussing from his own experiences – as (the current) finance minister in Greece and as a lifelong Marxist – the difficulties that left-wing parties are faced with when governing under severe constraints. [...]
By Ilke Toygur (Autonomous University of Madrid) The November elections were a huge gamble for Turkey: A gamble wagered and won. President Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) put all their cards on the table and in turn got what they wanted: a single party rule. After failing to form a coalition in [...]
By Ömer Faruk Gençkaya (Marmara University) The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a landslide victory at the “renewed” elections of November 1st. This is a big surprise for the AKP itself. All scenarios predicted a coalition or minority government options. Therefore, the AKP announced that another election was also possible. However, shortly before the [...]
By Daniel Bochsler (University of Zurich), Marlène Gerber (University of Bern) and David Zumbach (University of Bern) Switzerland has just experienced one of the most stable elections, even by Swiss standards, with net volatility of just over 4% of the votes. The authors explain, why it is still perceived as a landslide victory of the [...]
By Ömer Faruk Gençkaya (Marmara University) After an uninterrupted 12-year period of running a majority government, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) faced a real challenge in the latest parliamentary elections on June 7, 2015. The AKP, which lost its primary objectives of democracy, pluralism and accountability, had fallen short to form a majority government [...]
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, [...]
