By Tim Haughton (University of Birmingham) Some things never change. The new Czech president will be another man with a five letter surname. Following in the footsteps of Havel, Klaus and Zeman will be either (Petr) Pavel or (Andrej) Babis, both of whom won 35% of the vote in the first round at the weekend. [...]
By Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard (University of Copenhagen) When the exit polls came in at 8pm, they confirmed an expected result from weeks of campaign polling: one in which neither the ‘red bloc’ of left-of-centre parties nor the ‘blue bloc’ of right-of-centre parties would be able to command a majority on its own without the support [...]
By Damir Kapidžić (University of Sarajevo) On October 2nd, 2022, Bosnia and Herzegovina held its ninth general elections since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995. Elections were held for three levels of government under the complex system of governance established through the Dayton Peace Agreement. Apart from the national level these include two [...]
By Teodora Yovcheva (University of Sofia) Sunday’s election was the fourth parliamentary election in Bulgaria for year and a half. Bulgaria came here after the government was brought down by a vote of non confidence in June, the first successful one in Bulgaria since the democratic transition in 1990. The vote was initiated by the [...]
By Ieva Hofmane (European University Institute) On October 1, 2022, the Latvian general election was held. The results awarded seats in the Saeima, the parliament of the Republic of Latvia, to seven parties, including four newcomers. Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš’ New Unity party has captured almost 19% support, while the opposition Greens and Farmers Union [...]
By Bruno Marino (LUISS, Rome) The result of the 2022 Italian general election was substantially in line with pre-electoral expectations and polls: a clear victory for the right-wing coalition [1] led by Fratelli d’Italia (FdI, Brothers of Italy), led by Giorgia Meloni and also made by Matteo Salvini’s Lega (League) and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia [...]
By Jonathan Polk (Lund University) The Social Democratic Party received the most votes in the Swedish parliamentary election held on 11 September 2022.[1] The Social Democrats, in government since 2014, even expanded the party’s vote share (30.3%) from the previous election in 2018 by 2 percentage points. Yet the focus of attention in Sweden has [...]
By Alenka Krašovec (University of Ljubljana) Introduction On 24 April 2022, after a decade of elections being called early, regular elections were again held in Slovenia. The country has had a PR electoral system in place since the democratic transition with quite a low threshold (4% since 2000) and so coalition governments are indeed normal. [...]
By Jan Rovny (Science Po, Paris) The French 2022 legislative elections produced a national assembly without an absolute majority — a first in the history of the French 5th Republic — while a broad left-wing alliance, and the radical right Rassemblement National were the main electoral beneficiaries. Given the rise of these political fringes, and [...]
By Roderick Pace (University of Malta) Malta’s Partit Laburista (Labour Party, PL) won a third general election in a row, with a significant margin over its main rival the Partit Nazzjonalista (Nationalist Party, PN). The election was held on the 26 March 2022. Several months before, public opinion polls by national newspapers had consistently predicted [...]