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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1417 thread views

Transnational Thursday for July 4, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Britain is going to the polls today. All signs point to Labour's Keir Starmer getting Britain's largest ever landslide on one of the smallest vote shares. I'm hesitant to change the system of voting we've had for centuries on the basis of one election but it's very awkward that Labour is likely to get approx. 450 seats on 40% of the vote while Reform UK is expected to get approx. 10 seats on slightly under half that.

Poll of polls is here: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

A couple of interesting phenomena:

  1. Reform UK suddenly doubled its vote share in the last month, drawing even more strongly from (the left-wing) Labour party than from the right wing Conservatives. This can be pretty much purely attributed to Nigel Farage entering the race and shows how important a single charismatic figure can be IMHO. The great forces theory of history has much to recommend it, but it's also true that Right Man in the Right Place historical contingencies have more effect than I think is commonly credited to them.
  2. Reform UK suddenly dropped in the last week, and all the freed voters go to the Conservatives. I would bet good money that this resulted directly from Farage saying* that eastward expansion of Nato had provoked Putin and given him an excuse to invade Ukraine - something he had predicted ten years ago. Not sure whether he would have done better to lie like Marine Le Pen, but he seems to have paid a price for honesty.

*Quote:

"It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man a reason to his Russian people to say, 'They're coming for us again' and to go to war,"

He's probably used to people not taking what the media says about him at face value and so isn't too worried about negative media portrayal. That appears to have been a miscalculation when it came to comments about Russia/Ukraine. Or it could be that he's simply a very honest person.

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