Alternate Wikipedia Infoboxes VI (Do Not Post Current Politics or Political Figures Here)
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Turns out a mild USA-screw is also a Habsburg wank...
But, seriously, a different 20th century leads to less emigration (among other things), and a much bigger and richer population in the present day. Germany is doing just fine though... It shouldn't be disheartened.
It's a thicc Bulgaria and a very poor North China. Will provide more information.
The 2010 German federal election was held on the 6th June 2010 to elect the members of the 17th Bundestag. The SPD Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel was running for re-election to a second term, which would be the third of an SPD-led government.
Gabriel had come to power in 2008 after the demise of the left wing ‘red-Heidi-green’ coalition of his predecessor, Heidimarie Wieczorek-Zeul, comprising the SPD, KPD and Greens. During her second term Wieczorek-Zeul had enacted some prominent social reforms such as liberalising abortion and adoption laws and legalising same-sex marriage in Germany, and sought to increase social insurance contributions and the top rate of income tax to help reduce unemployment, which initially met with success but with the onset of the Great Recession received heavy backlash from the public. Despite the generally steadfast support of the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) for Wieczorek-Zeul’s coalition, in the summer of 2008 its members enacted a number of wildcat strikes in response to the government’s failure to act against their employers slashing wages.
This proved the tipping point for the right of the SPD, which had been critical of Wieczorek-Zeul’s policy agenda for many years and had secured legitimisation of its opposition to her because of the wildcat strikes. When the CDU leader Christian Wulff issued a vote of no confidence in Wieczorek-Zeul’s cabinet in September 2008, enough right-wing SPD members abstained to prevent her securing a majority in the Bundestag and forcing her out of office.
There was considerable speculation over whether an election would be required, but the SPD avoided this when party chair Sigmar Gabriel managed to enter negotiations with FDP leader Guido Westerwelle and Green leader Fritz Kuhn, with an agreement being made to form a ‘traffic light’ coalition (the first ever formed at a federal level) and voted into office on the 15th October 2008.
The Gabriel cabinet’s signature goal was to pursue a commitment called the ‘New Market’, aiming to combat the rising unemployment in Germany by liberalizing the economy. Tax cuts were introduced, while cost absorption for medical treatment, pension benefits and unemployment benefits were cut. However, these reforms caused little improvement in unemployment figures; in some cases they actually increased; and deepened socio-economic inequality. The wage share of national income also fell to a 50-year low, and the number of Germans living below the poverty line rose by almost 2% while Gabriel was Chancellor.
Dissent from left-leaning members of the SPD and Greens became commonplace, forcing Gabriel to rely on votes from the CDU/CSU opposition and damaging his reputation. In January of 2009, Oskar Lafotaine, who had served as Wieczorek-Zeul’s Finance Minister for the six years she was in power, resigned from the SPD and declared ‘I cannot bring myself to abandon the left just because the party I was a part of has’. He entered negotiations with KPD leader Gregor Gysi and he and his allies in the SPD formed their own party, the German Labour Party (Deutsche Partei der Arbeit, DPA) that formed an electoral alliance with the KPD, named the ‘New Left’ (Neue Linke, NL) alliance and generally just called NL.
The formation of NL severely damaged the SPD’s support on the left and it soon surged in the polls. As early as October 2009, NL declared Lafontaine would be its Chancellor candidate. It was the first time a party besides the CDU/CSU and SPD had put forward a serious candidate for Chancellor, and for a while he outpaced both Gabriel and Wulff as the most popular potential Chancellor after the next election. Several figures on the SPD’s left even endorsed Lafontaine for Chancellor over Gabriel, though Wieczorek-Zeul was not one of them; when asked her opinion of the NL, she quipped, ‘I think the Netherlands is nice, yes’ and refused to answer any further questions on the subject.
When the Bundestag was dissolved in May 2010, Guido Westerwelle immediately made it apparent the FDP would form a coalition with the largest party rather than committing to continuing allying with Gabriel. This kingmaker position, as well as Westerwelle’s personal popularity, helped keep the FDP’s numbers in the polls strong. By contrast, the SPD and Greens polled consistently poorly during the campaign due to left-wing voters seeing them as betraying their values.
The CDU/CSU ran a strong campaign, helped by Wulff’s popularity and focus on the key issue of unemployment, citing his experience as Minister-President of Lower Saxony to evidence his skills in improving the state’s unemployment rates by enacting economic reforms. Ironically, his policies had been quite similar to those of the Gabriel cabinet, a point on which Lafontaine aggressively attacked him.
Once the results came in, it was clear that a CDU/CSU-FDP coalition would be the most viable option thanks to the strong results achieved by both. The left-wing vote was heavily divided, as the SPD fell to its worst voteshare and its fewest seats since the Weimar Republic while the NL became the first party besides the CDU/CSU and SPD to win over 100 Bundestag seats, topping the polls in six states in the list vote; however, its narrow failure to pass the SPD’s seat total was a major disappointment to the party. The Greens took their smallest seat and vote count since first entering the Bundestag in 1983, and in a surprise result the German Pirate Party managed to win a handful of list seats including electing the former Green minister under Anke Fuchs and LGBTQ activist Herbert Rusche, the first time since 1980 more than five parties were represented in the Bundestag and the first time a pirate party had ever been represented in a national parliament.
With 372 of the 638 votes, Wulff’s coalition was voted in by the Bundestag in June 2010.
(Note that the PPD had a much easier time getting seats in TTL because TTL’s Germany allocates list seats with a 5% threshold by state rather than nationally, so if you get over 5% of the vote in a state you are entitled to at least one seat from that state’s list unless you won all the constituency seats. This is how the DBD and BP stayed in the Bundestag at a low level for so long, and how the smaller parties have never been excluded from the list seats even when they got less than 5% of the vote like in 1994 and the Greens here. I probably should’ve explained this change sooner, but oh well.)
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THE MILLENNIUM IN THE MORNING
"And so tonight I do not promise the millennium in the morning."
-Richard Nixon
"And so tonight I do not promise the millennium in the morning."
-Richard Nixon
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His alcoholism and drunken escapades with DC-area strippers were exposed after the convention by Nixon’s operatives, so he withdrew from the ticket and was replaced with Ribicoff
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Oh, I forgot about that. I'll change it to something more innocuous.
Apologies, I was mixing it up with the DNVP.
Do the different shades of red have a specific meaning? Because it seems like some of the different factions (with different names in parentheses and all that) seem to have the same colour to my eyes.
The Chinese Revolutionary Party, also shortened as the Revolutionary Party, or just The Party, traces its history to the Third United Front, formed between Jiang Jieshi's (AKA Chiang Kai Shek) Guomindang (GMD) and Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in the wake of the disastrous Second Sino-Japanese War. While official party history portrays this union as a match made in heaven, the truth is, Jiang and Mao despised each other, and each side only consented to the formal union of their parties due in part due to pressure from the Americans and Soviets respectively, and the bitter truth that only trying to fight each other would leave no winner but Japan. That said, the presence of a common enemy didn't mean the President and Premier wouldn't find areas to outmaneuver one another. Land reform. Industrialization. Xinjiang and Tibet. The guerilla war in Occupied China. While they didn't officially exist on paper, the GMD and CCP continued to exist in the minds of its members and the policies of its leaders.
Things are a lot different today. Zhao Ziyang's ascent to the dual posts of Chairman of the Revolutionary Party and President of the Republic of China in 1988 symbolized the true unification of the two parties, and the subsequent events of the 90s only solidified the union. The old GMD-CCP divide is, for all intents and purposes, gone, reduced to a game of personality and symbology rather than any meaningful policy debates. Aside from nationalism, the party has no coherent ideology, instead choosing to govern day-to-day affairs pragmatically via the use of technocrats who are shuffled in and out of positions every several years. The Democracy Party, a child of Zhao's Chinese Spring and initially a star of hope for change, lost what protection they enjoyed following his assassination in 2002, and has been largely shut out of power by the Party's machinery and underhanded tactics since. While recent protests have raised hopes of democratization, the need to reintegrate the Eastern Regions following decades of Japanese rule, all while continuing to confront the IJN-holdout regime on Taiwan, will mean that the Party will likely continue to hold onto power in the near-to-mid future.
I started this idea ages ago and only just got to make wikiboxes for it, but behold, a weird little thing about an alternate NI Parliament/Troubles!
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The 1969 Northern Ireland election was held on Monday the 24th February 1969, and was called by Prime Minister Terence O’Neill to try to quell dissent over his policy agenda. Since the last election, O’Neill had begun to institute reforms to try to modernise Northern Ireland’s industry and quell sectarianism. This had been controversial both with unionists, who were angry at the compromise with nationalists, and after street demonstrations by groups like the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and People’s Democracy had been subject to police brutality by the RUC, he lost sympathy with nationalists too.
While there was no doubt the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) of which O’Neill was a part would win an absolute majority of the seats, several MPs ran in opposition to O’Neill, making it unclear whether a clear majority of Unionist MPs would be elected in support of O’Neill. Ultimately the UUP emerged with 33 seats, 10 of which were anti-O’Neill; with 5 independent pro-O’Neill unionists elected, some of which defeated UUP candidates opposed to him, and Ulster Liberal MP for the City of Londonderry constituency Claude Wilton all declaring their support for O’Neill, he retained a clear, if unorthodox, majority of 29 out of 52 MPs supporting him.
The opposition also fragmented at this election, as the Nationalist Party had its worst result since 1921 and the Labour Party lost over half its vote and its leader Tom Boyd lost his seat to a pro-O’Neill unionist.
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The 1971 Northern Ireland election was held on the 9th September 1971. It was called by Prime Minister Terence O’Neill due to a dispute within the government over the issue of the proposed reintroduction of internment.
O’Neill had used the small coalition-based majority he had to try to push for the continuation of his reforms to Northern Irish society. He also sought to ingratiate non-Unionists into his government, such as by inviting Labour MP David Bleakley into his Cabinet and offering chairmanship of new committees at Stormont to the opposition. In a major speech he gave in the autumn of 1969, he declared, ‘If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness, they will live like Protestants. The authoritative nature of their church does not matter; if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets, and not jobless, hopeless men living in hovels.’ This speech was met with major international attention, and although his condescension towards Northern Irish Catholics is today seen as unjust, it was considered a sympathetic display from a Unionist leader at the time.
Furthermore, the opposition had coalesced more since the 1969 election, and now had a somewhat more coherent makeup. In 1970 a group of independent nationalists and members of Republican Labour had founded the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which functionally served as a united party representing the Catholic civil rights movement. Several of the Independent Unionist MPs and the Ulster Liberal Party had coalesced into the new Alliance Party, a nonsectarian unionist party aligned to O’Neill’s wing of the UUP.
The anti O’Neill side of Northern Irish politics had also grown, though; the Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) led by the ardently conservative and Unionist Reverend Ian Paisley, had almost beaten the UUP at the South Antrim by-election in 1970 and Paisley and his followers remained vocal and implacable critics of O’Neill and the Catholic and nationalist movements. Worse still, paramilitary violence had occurred, such as a series of bomb explosions the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) loyalist terrorist group committed on Belfast’s water supply.
What precipitated O’Neill’s decision to dissolve parliament, however, was a nationalist-led killing: on the 10th March 1971, the IRA led three Scottish soldiers to a remote lane outside Belfast and murdered them. The brutality of the killings was condemned across the political spectrum, especially by unionists (including those supporting the UVF). O’Neill met with British Prime Minister Edward Heath to discuss his options and it was agreed for a further 1300 troops to be deployed and the minimum age to join the British Army to be increased to 18.
While this initially seemed to quell public unrest over the tragedy to some degree, two Catholics were murdered in Derry/Londonderry by British soldiers that summer and the SDLP responded by boycotting the parliament until new elections were called. O’Neill met with Heath in August 1971, and Faulkner and Heath suggested the introduction of internment (prison without trial) for terrorists. O’Neill and Heath agreed that internment must be non-sectarian and applied to loyalist terrorism as well as nationalist terrorism, though many UUP MPs falsely asserted there was no evidence of loyalist terrorism.
Since the SDLP was continuing to boycott the NI Parliament and O’Neill believed the internment policy might shore up the UUP’s support, he decided to dissolve Parliament to seek a mandate for it. The parties fought the election on distinctly different platforms, but the main focus was the internment policy. The UUP officially supported non-sectarian internment but its MPs largely focused on the prospect of nationalists being interned; the Alliance Party asserted it would push to make internment non-partisan; the SDLP and the rump of Republican Labour ran in vocal opposition to internment; and the PUP ran asserting it would ensure internment applied only to nationalists, notably recruiting many of the UUP MPs who had been anti-O’Neill as its candidates.
Like in 1969, the parliament elected was very fragmented. What was particularly striking about the election was that O’Neill lost his Bannside seat to the PUP. Ironically, the UUP, Alliance and the two pro-UUP independents did win enough seats to hold a majority in the Parliament (31 out of 52), but the result was by far the worst in the UUP’s history. The SDLP made massive gains, taking 13 seats (more than half the UUP’s total), while the PUP, despite the massive coup of unseating O’Neill, only won four seats. James Chichester-Clark served as interim Prime Minister and O’Neill until returned to Parliament in October by winning a by-election in neighbouring Antrim Borough after Heath intervened to instruct its incumbent MP Nat Minford (ironically a hardline anti-nationalist despite his allegiance to O’Neill) to stand down in O’Neill’s favour.
Soon after returning to power and passing the non-sectarian internment policy, O’Neill also passed a ‘one person one vote’ reform and changed the Parliament’s electoral system back to single transferable vote with the support of the nationalists. Consequently, this was the last Northern Irish Parliament election to use first-past-the-post.
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The 1969 Northern Ireland election was held on Monday the 24th February 1969, and was called by Prime Minister Terence O’Neill to try to quell dissent over his policy agenda. Since the last election, O’Neill had begun to institute reforms to try to modernise Northern Ireland’s industry and quell sectarianism. This had been controversial both with unionists, who were angry at the compromise with nationalists, and after street demonstrations by groups like the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and People’s Democracy had been subject to police brutality by the RUC, he lost sympathy with nationalists too.
While there was no doubt the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) of which O’Neill was a part would win an absolute majority of the seats, several MPs ran in opposition to O’Neill, making it unclear whether a clear majority of Unionist MPs would be elected in support of O’Neill. Ultimately the UUP emerged with 33 seats, 10 of which were anti-O’Neill; with 5 independent pro-O’Neill unionists elected, some of which defeated UUP candidates opposed to him, and Ulster Liberal MP for the City of Londonderry constituency Claude Wilton all declaring their support for O’Neill, he retained a clear, if unorthodox, majority of 29 out of 52 MPs supporting him.
The opposition also fragmented at this election, as the Nationalist Party had its worst result since 1921 and the Labour Party lost over half its vote and its leader Tom Boyd lost his seat to a pro-O’Neill unionist.
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The 1971 Northern Ireland election was held on the 9th September 1971. It was called by Prime Minister Terence O’Neill due to a dispute within the government over the issue of the proposed reintroduction of internment.
O’Neill had used the small coalition-based majority he had to try to push for the continuation of his reforms to Northern Irish society. He also sought to ingratiate non-Unionists into his government, such as by inviting Labour MP David Bleakley into his Cabinet and offering chairmanship of new committees at Stormont to the opposition. In a major speech he gave in the autumn of 1969, he declared, ‘If you treat Roman Catholics with due consideration and kindness, they will live like Protestants. The authoritative nature of their church does not matter; if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets, and not jobless, hopeless men living in hovels.’ This speech was met with major international attention, and although his condescension towards Northern Irish Catholics is today seen as unjust, it was considered a sympathetic display from a Unionist leader at the time.
Furthermore, the opposition had coalesced more since the 1969 election, and now had a somewhat more coherent makeup. In 1970 a group of independent nationalists and members of Republican Labour had founded the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which functionally served as a united party representing the Catholic civil rights movement. Several of the Independent Unionist MPs and the Ulster Liberal Party had coalesced into the new Alliance Party, a nonsectarian unionist party aligned to O’Neill’s wing of the UUP.
The anti O’Neill side of Northern Irish politics had also grown, though; the Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) led by the ardently conservative and Unionist Reverend Ian Paisley, had almost beaten the UUP at the South Antrim by-election in 1970 and Paisley and his followers remained vocal and implacable critics of O’Neill and the Catholic and nationalist movements. Worse still, paramilitary violence had occurred, such as a series of bomb explosions the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) loyalist terrorist group committed on Belfast’s water supply.
What precipitated O’Neill’s decision to dissolve parliament, however, was a nationalist-led killing: on the 10th March 1971, the IRA led three Scottish soldiers to a remote lane outside Belfast and murdered them. The brutality of the killings was condemned across the political spectrum, especially by unionists (including those supporting the UVF). O’Neill met with British Prime Minister Edward Heath to discuss his options and it was agreed for a further 1300 troops to be deployed and the minimum age to join the British Army to be increased to 18.
While this initially seemed to quell public unrest over the tragedy to some degree, two Catholics were murdered in Derry/Londonderry by British soldiers that summer and the SDLP responded by boycotting the parliament until new elections were called. O’Neill met with Heath in August 1971, and Faulkner and Heath suggested the introduction of internment (prison without trial) for terrorists. O’Neill and Heath agreed that internment must be non-sectarian and applied to loyalist terrorism as well as nationalist terrorism, though many UUP MPs falsely asserted there was no evidence of loyalist terrorism.
Since the SDLP was continuing to boycott the NI Parliament and O’Neill believed the internment policy might shore up the UUP’s support, he decided to dissolve Parliament to seek a mandate for it. The parties fought the election on distinctly different platforms, but the main focus was the internment policy. The UUP officially supported non-sectarian internment but its MPs largely focused on the prospect of nationalists being interned; the Alliance Party asserted it would push to make internment non-partisan; the SDLP and the rump of Republican Labour ran in vocal opposition to internment; and the PUP ran asserting it would ensure internment applied only to nationalists, notably recruiting many of the UUP MPs who had been anti-O’Neill as its candidates.
Like in 1969, the parliament elected was very fragmented. What was particularly striking about the election was that O’Neill lost his Bannside seat to the PUP. Ironically, the UUP, Alliance and the two pro-UUP independents did win enough seats to hold a majority in the Parliament (31 out of 52), but the result was by far the worst in the UUP’s history. The SDLP made massive gains, taking 13 seats (more than half the UUP’s total), while the PUP, despite the massive coup of unseating O’Neill, only won four seats. James Chichester-Clark served as interim Prime Minister and O’Neill until returned to Parliament in October by winning a by-election in neighbouring Antrim Borough after Heath intervened to instruct its incumbent MP Nat Minford (ironically a hardline anti-nationalist despite his allegiance to O’Neill) to stand down in O’Neill’s favour.
Soon after returning to power and passing the non-sectarian internment policy, O’Neill also passed a ‘one person one vote’ reform and changed the Parliament’s electoral system back to single transferable vote with the support of the nationalists. Consequently, this was the last Northern Irish Parliament election to use first-past-the-post.
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