Pieter -
Congratulations on what sounds like a win from your perspective... we
sure haven't exhibited much grace lately. I felt like Gore (2000) and
Hillary 2016), despite fighting for transparency and fairness backed
out/down pretty gracefully pretty quickly... absolutely not so in 2020
and possibly never again? I think bad habits might be harder to break
than good ones...
Did I hear correctly that SA was the first (main?) country to ask the
ICC to treat the Netanyahu gov't as war criminals? With the new
President of MX running on that as part of her platform? Was it the
outgoing SA government or the incoming (or new coalition?) who holds
that stance? Was that stance part of the political calculus that
pushed the ANC out?
There are many here who are more politically astute than I am so I'm
asking for feedback on my observations:
1. Parliamentary Democracies. A shallow search tells me that there
are easily a half-dozen variations which are for the most part too
subtly differentiated for me to know what to think about them.
Overall it seems to me that some/many of these systems have been
able to avoid the political lock-in that comes with some of our own
"winner take all" systems. Is this even vaguely accurate, are
there notable exceptions?
2. I sometimes hear that Parliamentary Democracies are "better" in that
they are more able to represent centrist majorities over extremist
populism as it feels we have been courting/experiencing through
modern history. I also sometimes hear that the volatile nature of
the possibility of on-demand elections and reformulation of
coalitions yields "too much" change too quickly to settle into good
governance?
3. I feel as if our Presidential system and style of separation of
powers was well intentioned and perhaps worked well up to a point
but that either evolutionary pressures (over time) have undermined
that separation or perhaps simply that astute (and
aggressive/greedy?) individuals have "gamed" it into ???
4. We have discussed Ranked Choice voting and elimination of
(obsolute?) institutions like the Electoral College to try to remedy
this in the US but I'm not sure how quickly we will get a 'round tuit.
I don't know how many non US (active/interested?) members of FriAM we
have here but I do recognize we have notable engagement from you (SA)
and Germany (JF) and Australia and India and Ecuador (GS) and NL (JQ/DW)
and Egypt/Sweden (Mohammed ex-officio?) with first-hand experience under
various forms of parliamentary gov'ts and the many hear are very well
traveled and have close colleagues globally who must report/confer on
these issues from time to time.
I think of SA as being somewhat unique in a number of ways that might be
salient to the contemporary questions at hand in the world which include
maybe most notably the waning (or ringing) legacy of the colonialism
that started during the age of exploration and then took a strange turn
during modern (golden age of transportation/communication forward?) times?
- Steve
On 6/16/24 8:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
We recently had a general election here in South Africa, and I am
extremely proud to be South African given the current developments.
The ANC, which has been in power since the first democratic election
in 1994, lost their absolute majority, with their percentage share of
the vote decreasing from around 58% to 40%.
What makes me proud is the dignified manner in which they are handling
this significant loss. They negotiated an agreement with the
second-largest party to form a Government of National Unity and are
currently working with various smaller political parties to share
power based on a formula that considers the relative share of votes.
The extremist left-wing parties are rejecting this and will form the
opposition.
While many things could still go wrong, it currently appears that this
is how democracy is meant to function.
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