Electoral Epidemic: The Political Cost of Economic Crisis in Southern Europe, 2010–11

Abstract

This article introduces a collection of essays on the elections of 2010–11 in Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Cyprus and the Turkish Cypriot community. It examines the impact of the European sovereign debt crisis on electoral trends in the era of the Greek and Portuguese bailouts. After briefly examining the crisis economies, it investigates patterns of abstention, incumbent punishment and opposition success, including the rise of regional, anti-party, far-right and racist parties. The article concludes, following Krastev (Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 39–53), that the crisis is creating ‘democracy without choices’ in Southern Europe with potentially destabilising consequences throughout the region.

Keywords:

• Eurozone Crisis
• Sovereign Debt Crisis
• Incumbent Punishment
• Challenger Parties
• Abstention
• Southern Europe

Notes

 [1] The last elections had been held on 27 September 2009 in Portugal, 4 October 2009 in Greece and 13–14 April 2008 in Italy. It should be noted that the parliamentary term is five years in Italy and four years in Portugal, Greece and Spain.

 [2] For Internal Market (1995–99) and Competition (1999–2004).

 [3] The party concerned was the radical right LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally), which campaigned on a nationalist, anti-immigrant and soft Eurosceptic platform.

 [4] The European Commission's spring 2010 forecast, published in the month in which the Greek bailout was signed, predicted a 0.5 per cent drop in GDP for 2011. The autumn forecast, when there had been ample time to take into account the effects of the austerity programme, revised this to three per cent. Even the latter was startlingly wrong. The real GDP decline in 2011, at 7.1 per cent, was 130 per cent higher than the Commission's autumn 2010 prediction.

 [5] We warmly thank Mustafa Besim for providing data on the Turkish Cypriot economy and helping us to interpret them. See also Besim and Mullen (2009, p. 94).

 [6] There was one popular vote in Malta: a referendum on 28 May 2011, which resulted in the passage of a bill later in the year, permitting divorce in this country for the first time. The Maltese referendum has not been included in this volume, as the theme concerned a significant social issue, views on which were strongly influenced by religious beliefs, and hence was not regarded as relevant to our study of the potential decline in the legitimacy of party systems in the region.

 [7] Specifically, New Democracy (ND) lost an 8.4 per cent of the total vote, falling from 41.9 per cent in 2007 to 33.5 per cent in 2009.

 [8] That is, 592,977 out of 5,988,678 total votes cast. Figures from the Greek Ministry of the Interior elections site, www.ypes.gr/el/Elections/

 [9] As explained by Verney (2012) in this volume, the peculiarities of the Greek system for local government elections, in which parties are forbidden to run under their own names, result in electoral lists running under a kaleidoscope of different banners across the country. This makes it impossible to gather nationwide figures for party support. In 2010 the only exception to this was the communist party, which ran under the same title everywhere. In addition, due to the 2010 reform that redrew the territorial map, party scores are not generally comparable with the previous local government elections in 2006.

[10] The Spanish proportional electoral system—based on small districts and the D'Hondt electoral formula—has a strong majoritarian representational bias that overrepresents the two largest parties, underrepresents smaller nationwide ones and offers proportional representation to regional parties with geographically concentrated bases of support. For this reason, the emergence of regional parties is easier than that of state-wide parties. In the Congreso de los Diputados the number of parties has always been lower than 13, with two exceptions: the 1979 and 1989 elections, which resulted, respectively, in 14 and 13 parties.

[11] Officially, three political parties and a group of Kurdish candidates, running as independents because of the ten per cent national electoral threshold for political party representation.

[12] This was a rather different case from the ‘independent’ candidacy of a well-known socialist party member running against the wish of his party in 2006.

[13] The historical high of 42.0 per cent in the parliamentary election did not mark a particularly significant rise over the 40.3 per cent of 2009 and can be partly attributed to administrative problems in the management of electoral registers. In the presidential election, a 53.5 per cent abstention rate seemed significant when compared with the 38.5 percent of the previous presidential contest in 2006. However, it was comparable to the 51.3 per cent of the 2001 presidential election and can be attributed to the lack of excitement about an election that the incumbent was widely expected to win.