Jacob Christensen

I have no further comments.

Today’s Swiss anti-minaret referendum (summary of the issue on Wikipedia) raises a number of interesting questions to a political scientist:

1. Political institutions play a role in the way politics are made: We would generally assume that the Swiss rules on referendum and voter initiative on the one hand is another veto point in the political process (i.e. it makes it harder to pass political decisions). On the other hand popular initiative and easy access to calling referendums also open for issues that the political elite would prefer to keep off the political agenda get on the agenda. So, more issues are politicised but less decisions passed.

2. There seems to be a relatively clear ethnic cleavage in the voting on the anti-minaret proposal: The French-speaking parts of Switzerland were less enthusiastic about banning minarets than the German-speaking parts. Now, if I remember correctly, this pattern was also seen in relation to UN membership, trade agreements with the EU and immigration policies in general. Geneva and St. Gallen may be in the same country, but they are very different places.

3. Democracy and individual rights are two different things: It is perfectly possible for a majority to vote against basic individual freedoms. Political theorists have been struggling with this issue since Locke.

4. As Norman Geras has pointed out, the campaign rests on the assumption that opposition to one form of unjustified discrimination (in particular the treatment of women in Muslim culture) is an acceptable argument to uphold another (discrimination of Muslims). But no matter how we twist or turn this, the calls for the banning of minarets and mosques (and even gender equality arguments) are proxies for a general anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.

5. The campaign of the SVP is almost perfectly mirrored by a campaign by the Danish People’s Party to prevent the building of a mosque in Copenhagen. Note that DF also wants to use referendums as a means to block the building of mosques (which, rather than the minarets, is the real issue) – however the different constitutional rules makes the DF strategy much less likely to succeed.

6. A ban on minarets raises some intriguing judicial issues. If I’m correctly informed, Switzerland like Denmark does not have a constitutional court or (unlike Denmark) rules allowing for courts to repeal unconstitutional courts, so there will be an conflict between the freedom of religion and the proposed legislation. Then there is the issue about national legislation and the European Convention on Human Rights. For a discussion, look here). At this point we may also remember that parties like SVP and DF often hold a negative view of international law.

(This is a slightly different issue, but if we look at the UN system, I will just note that countries with a – to say the very least – questionable human rights record like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and China are represented in the UN Human Rights Council. Needless to say, this is a problem for the UN).

Oh, and as we all know, the Russians have been trying to invade Denmark since the 1880s.

Official statements by the Swiss federal council: 1, 2.

No, nothing rhetorical or sarcastic here: It’s the real deal. On Tuesday, 1 December 2009, a distinguished team consisting of Lene Rimestad and yours truly will be cross-examining the political leader of the Social Liberal Party (aka Radikale Venstre) Margrethe Vestager between noon and 2 pm. in front of a no doubt enthusiastic audience of journalism and polsci students at SDU.

There’s even a Facebook page to celebrate the event.

I told you so.

That Connie Hedegaard was nominated as the Danish candidate for the next European Commission was hardly surprising to anyone, but at least we can now speculate about how her future portfolio will look like. By “we”, I mean people who know something about the internal workings of the commission-to-be, so I will leave this aside and speculate about something else that I really don’t know anything about.

1. Why a minimalist reshuffle?

Just about anybody and his grandmother are expecting a more substantial reshuffle, and that somebody would be leaving the government in favour of Brussels was 110 per cent certain, so why didn’t Løkke go straight for the real deal?

Good question: When Henning Christophersen left the Finance Ministry in 1984 to become Budget Commissioner, there was actually some reshuffling of the major portfolios (Conservatives took finance from the Liberals which got Social Affairs in exchange, obviously a loss for the Liberals). In 1994, Ritt Bjerregaard wasn’t a minister and in 1999 there was a minor reshuffle when Poul Nielson became commissioner. 2004 is interesting because the nomination of Mariann Fischer-Boel led to a medium-sized reshuffle which included the return of Connie Hedegaard to the national political arena.

One guess is that the Conservatives want a higher (or an easier) profile for Lene Espersen and throwing her into the deal might take some of the attention away from her.

2. Lykke Friis as minister

Lykke Friis has been linked with the Liberals before and there were rumours that she was to have been the party’s leading candidate for the 2009 European Parliament elections. If we look at the Liberal Party, it has always had an obvious problem in producing first-rate female politicians (let’s see … thinking … thinking … Louise Gade and … nowletmesee … Britta Schall Holberg … aaaaand … … Helga Petersen. Well, perhaps), and it has faced problems in attracting female voters – especially among urban women with a higher education. So besides her technical competences, Friis could be as useful to the Liberals as Hedegaard was to the Conservatives – euh, hold on: Does anybody really know how useful Hedegaard was to the Conservatives? Well, maybe she kept one or two per cent of the voters from defecting to … what was that party’s name again? … in 2007.

On the other hand, Friis lacks political experience: Just as in football (sorry!) there is a heck of a lot of difference between being an armchair manager and being on the pitch. She has some executive experience from her time as vice-president of the University of Copenhagen, though, and that could come in very useful here. Løkke’s task will be to decide exactly what role Friis will be playing and make sure she is prepared properly – as COP15 Minister Hedegaard will be helping Friis from any serious criticism during the next month or so, but come 2010 and the gloves are off.

At the same time, putting an attractive face on unattractive policies is not a strategy, that is very likely to succeed. To a large degree, the problem is that the Liberals appeal to people in the private sector while many women either work in or depend on the public sector one way or another.

Incredible but true: They are still negotiating in some of the local councils. Today, Kerteminde much to everybody’s surprise got a new mayor (the term “suicide mission” comes to hand, given the state of Kerteminde) and Nordfyn also suddenly looks shaky.

Or perhaps I should say: Everything is going as usual. In many places, the distribution of posts and spoils went relatively fast and smoothly, but there were the usual hiccups. Hiccup type #1 is when a party decides to enter an agreement with another set of parties than announced before the election, while Hiccup type #2 is when a councillor leaves his or her party in order to become mayor or head of one of the committees or whatever.

The Bondam incident in Copenhagen was a Type #1 Hiccup: Nobody left their parties but that the Social Liberals (RV) should form an electoral group with the Danish People’s Party (DF) was … not expected. The issue here was of course that RV are fierce critics of DF’s immigration and value policies and vice versa.

So, why did they do it? The answer is not simply personal aspirations as all signs are that Klaus Bondam could have had a less exposed and just as economically profitable post had he and RV stayed with the Social Democrats. On the other hand, this would have left the Social Liberals less visible politically during the coming term – for better or for worse: The party could always take a bet on collecting the disgruntled vote in Copenhagen in 2013 and find a new leading candidate.

Trying to reconstruct a negotiation of this kind is not entirely easy, because there was more than the seven mayoral portfolios in play. As said, the negotiation also included a number of board memberships, committee memberships and chairs, etc, etc. We should also remember that local councils are limited in their powers which means that the ideological dimensions which control national politics have less power in controlling local parties.

But what we had in the end in Copenhagen were two technical coalitions: One consisting of the Social Democrats, the Socialists, the Red-Green Alliance and – ca-chinnngg! – the Conservatives and another consisting of the Liberals, the Social Liberals and the Danish People’s Party. The first coalition controlled 41 of the 55 seats in the City Council and took five of the seven portfolios, the second controlled 14 seats and took two portfolios. If we break this down, the distribution was: S 2, SF 2, EL 1, V 1 and RV 1.

(I’m not sure it gets any easier, but you can look at the spreadsheet with the calculations of some of the possible combinations I have made here. Sorry about the layout but I’m not a professional city council negotiator).

Now, if we compare with a situation without alliances, the final result meant that S “lost” one portfolio while RV “won” one. The only combination which would have given S three mayors was an S-SF-EL-RV-KF alliance. As far as we know KF was the first party to defect from its initial alliance (V-DF-KF) but the question is how much S would have had to pay for RV to accept to stay in the five-party alliance.

A V-DF-KF alliance, on the other hand, would have yielded two portfolios – but as DF was the bigger party in terms of votes, one could argue that that party should have had the second of the portfolios available to the alliance. Apparently, this was not acceptable to KF which could then choose between not getting a portfolio in the right-wing alliance or join the left-wing alliance. KF would still not get any portfolios but it is possible that there were other spoils available.

However, with KF in the left alliance RV stood to gain by defecting to the right, while DF couldn’t lose by including RV compared to V-DFm even if V-DF-KF would be DF’s preference compared to V-RV-DF, This is because RV is larger than DF and would then take the second portfolio. Note that V-RV-DF-KF would have had the same benefit for RV, but KF would have been even further away from the portfolio so neither DF or KF would probably have had any motivation to include RV as long as KF was on board. With KF out, the gains for the right were more obvious.

Biut why did KF get away with defecting, while RV took all of the blame? Here we need to consider the ideological variable but even that doesn’t solve all problems. Neither the S-SF-EL-KF or the V-RV-DF coalition are ideologically connected – unless the Copenhagen Conservatives are placed to the left of the Social Liberals. It helps if the distance between S and KF is smaller than the distance between RV and DF – but then the question we need to answer is if RV’s main aim during the coming term should be to minimise DF’s influence rather than to maximise its own influence. (Remember: This is an “either-or” here).

But, as they say on Facebook: It’s complicated. And it definitively ain’t over ’till it’s over.

The story about the agreement in Bondam’s own words.

1. There are ten twitters in Odense. c|net thinks that Twitter is dead. (Well, almost) … hey, I’m part of the twelite!

2. There are ten types of blog commenters. And yes, I was very much in Unfogged mode Sunday.

3. The Metropolitan Region was something of a mess during the past week. Occasionally, the Monty Python Region felt like a more accurate name.

4. On Wednesday, the Socialist Party had five mayors and one regional chairman. On Sunday, the Socialists had one mayor. How do you think this looks? Professional? I mean: Losing one is what happens, but five out of six?

5. Denmark is officially f***ed. It more and more looks like Anders Fogh got away in time.

I’m in no way a football fanatic (and never have been) but I recall discussing the resignation/sacking of Brian Clough as Nottingham Forest manager back in … 1993 with my dad who would never knowingly miss one of the Saturday matches from the English Division I which the Danish TV channel used to screen during the 1970s and 1980s. “I never liked him,” Dad commented, “but Nottingham were brilliant”. To appreciate the comment, you should know that my dad a) had a working class background (what I mean by this is, that problem was not that Clough was somebody with a working class background who had made it) and b) was born and grew up in Vejle. (In case you are clueless about this, look here for explanation).

While The Damned United includes a number of factual inaccuracies, it offers more than a glimpse into the mind of Brian Clough, famous for making lowly Derby a force in English football in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then repeating the feat with Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s and early 1980s and for never becoming England manager. The film is based around Clough’s doomed tenure as Leeds Utd. manager in 1974 which ended with his sacking after a mere 44 days, but the real issue is Clough’s rivalry with former Leeds manager Don Revie and his relationship with his former (and later) assistant Peter Taylor.

Why did Clough have such an issue with Revie? The film claims that Clough felt slighted by Revie when Leeds played Derby in an FA Cup tie years earlier, but I suspect that the real problem was that while both Clough and Revie were groundbreaking in their approach to football managing, their aims were different: Revie wanted to win and did so by meticulously recording the strengths and weaknesses of the opponents – and if it took brute force on the pitch to destroy the opposition, so be it.

Needless to say Clough also wanted to win, but he wanted to win in style. No kicking and rushing here. Passing the ball was his game. Quite an ambitious approach to football when you consider the state of the pitches mudfields available. Strangely, bullying players and talking big, very big, was also part of Clough’s approach to managing a team. But it worked, just as Revie’s approach had worked.

The film? Oh, it’s brilliant. If you have any memories of the 1970s, they are brought back vividly. Everything from the awful wallpapers to the terrible football pitches are there. I even suspect that my dad, had he lived, would have been endeared to Michael Sheen’s portrayal of Clough (while still hating every single inch of the man’s guts). I fear that this Clough would even be able to sell me a used car.

If I should point to a weakness in the storyline, then is it that we never really get an explanation of why the Leeds Utd. board chose Clough as their new manager (it is easy to understand why Clough wanted that job even if a wiser and more self-assured man would have turned the offer down). Pundits have pointed out that the Leeds squad Revie had assembled was nearing its sell-by date in 1974 and needed rejuvenation – Revie in all likelihood knew this which was one reason for his taking the England job – but surely a sensible board would have asked itself what the impact of Clough would be. But then again, Clough was a bit of a hurricane.

That said: You don’t have to have an obsession with football to enjoy the film.

Brian Clough endears himself to the Leeds Utd squad on his first day at work:

And here is a clip from what must surely be one of the most awkward football-related interviews ever. Brian Clough meets … Don Revie in the studio after his sacking (yes, it really happened):

Oh, and is it possible to find a Danish parallel to Brian Clough? As it is, I think so.

Web designers love Flash. I don’t.

DSB’s goal is to provide reliable passenger transport on rail. Well, okay: DSB has messed up the commission and delivery of new long-distance trains in an epic way, the engines on IC3-trainsets catch fire and we shouldn’t even begin to talk about Kystbanen (even if that is technically run by a company called DSBLast – er DSBFirst).

So what to do? Concentrate on providing passenger transport or concentrate on discrediting media which reports on public transport.

Silly me: Discrediting reporters, not providing services for passengers are at the centre of attention for DSB’s management. The people who work at the delivery points and have to deal with frustrated passengers must feel pretty let down.