Notes of a trailer park political scientist
I’ll be updating the software to WordPress 2.3. This also means that I have to update the theme I use – and a couple of other things. If the blog doesn’t quite look its usual sharp self or behaves in a weird way, this is why.
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John Quiggin asks why the U.S. as one of the only countries in the world holds elections on ordinary weekdays and not on a Sunday (or equivalent holiday). Sto (this guy? 
) beat me to it with the comment that Denmark traditionally has held elections on Tuesdays – though election days have drifted a bit during later years: Elections have been held on Thursdays and even Wednesdays.
And as a matter of fact, the 2004 European election was held on … tadaa … a Sunday. Not that that did anything to increase the dismal turn-out. Turn-out was down 2,5 percentage points compared with 1999.
I can’t say with any certainty why Tuesday became the traditional election day in Denmark – in the Danish case, the suspicion that holding elections on a working day would reduce turn-out doesn’t really make sense. The only good explanation I can come up with, would be that town markets were held on Tuesdays, meaning that farmers would go to the nearest town anyway. In that way choosing Tuesday instead of Sunday would actually have increased turn-out in the 19th Century.
Norway and Sweden hold elections on Sundays, but we should note that a) some Norwegian districts have the opportunity to hold election stations open on both Sunday and Monday and b) Sweden has a highly developed system of postal voting which means that the actual day is of minor importance.
Update: Post-posting proof-reading.
As I’m under contractual obligations to support Fulham F.C.’s struggle to stay in the Premier League, I’ll just note that the said team drew 0-0 against Chelsea F.C. earlier today.
Or should that be al-Fayed 0-0 Abrahamovich?
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I should be doing something about Burma and the convention of the Danish Conservatives but for now you’ll have to do with a photo of how things look in this part of the world. The trees will have lost all of their leaves in 1-2 weeks time. And then it’s just dark.
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I’m sure that there are in fact people out there who would actually splash out 400 USD just in order to get a cool looking USB stick carrying the Steve Apple logo.
But I’ll stick to my 2 GB for now.
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What do Swedish moose do when they aren’t preparing suicide attacks against drivers or shooting hunters? Answer: They go to a restaurant.
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Actually, the bells tolled for Centrum-Demokraterne back in 2001 when the family-run party lost its seats in the Danish parliament. What we’ve witnessed since then has been a kind of dance of the undead.
The party started its life in 1973 as a refuge for right-wing Social Democrats who were frustrated by that party’s left-leaning strategies in economic and foreign policy following 1968. So, CD were pro-NATO, pro-EEC, pro-home ownership, pro-cars and anti-modern education.
And they had Erhard Jakobsen as an energetic political communicator. (During the 1960s and early 1970s, Jakobsen was the mayor of my hometown, the Copenhagen suburb Gladsaxe – back then the place was considered one of the Social Democratic model councils, especially with regard to education).
During the turbulent 1970s, CD’s complete lack of ideology and organisation was less of a problem. The party was always needed to put together a majority in crisis agreements, and during election campaigns Jakobsen always performed some kind of stunt that would catapult his troop over the 2% cutoff.
As times changed, so CD changed its image – and its electoral appeal. In short, instead of being the nasty, paranoid social democrats, the CDs became the nice liberals, especially when it came to immigration policy. And the party managed to live on for another fifteen years.
The party’s weaknesses began to be obvious in the early 1990s following the exit of Erhard Jakobsen, the fall-out from the Tamil refugee scandal which brought down the Poul Schlüter’s government and the fall of the Soviet empire. That CD entered Poul Nyrup Rasmussen’s government in 1993 made sense in the parliamentary arena, but not in the electoral arena. Also, pro-NATO and pro-EU policies were uncontroversial by then and the party was left with tax benefits for home services as its shtick.
It was not enough. In 1996, CD left the government after a budget agreement which was supported by the Socialist Party and in 2001, the party simply slipped under the 2% cutoff and was reduced to a political sideshow, appearing then and now.
Today, CD shed what was left of its political identity and credibility by accepting Louise Frevert as a member. Until the next election, she will be representing the party in the Danish parliament.
Frevert is, to put it mildly, a loose cannon who burst onto the public stage in the 1980s as a belly-dancer, then became a member for the local council in Copenhagen for the Conservative Party before moving to the Danish People’s Party in 1999. No doubt to the endless relief of the Conservatives.
She added a parliamentary chair to her political portfolio in 2001 and was slated to be the leader of the Danish People’s Party in Copenhagen in the 2005 local elections when things took a nasty turn. It emerged that Frevert had published a number of statements about Muslim men on her homepage which, again to put it mildly, could only be categorised as offensive. She managed to get herself tangled into ever more confusing explanations before settling on a version according to which her webmaster had written and published the texts without her knowledge. (See also this old post from November 2005). The top brass of the Danish People’s Party were no doubt relieved when Frevert finally left the party.
In any event, Louise Frevert’s latest stunt has put her on the frontpages of Danish newspapers yet again and made me write a far too long blog-post about an event of little political significance. Perhaps the best assessment of today’s developments was made by Søren Espersen from the Danish People’s Party who simply called Frevert’s and CD’s move surreal.
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