The electoral success of the Svoboda Party - the consequences for Ukrainian politics. OSW Commentary No. 97, 2012-11-26

The All-Ukrainian Association ‘Svoboda’ scored an unexpected success in the parliamentary elections, winning support from over 10% of the voters and entering the select group of Ukrainian parliamentary parties which operate at a national level. Svoboda’s manifesto is nationalist and anti-liberal, in both economic and political aspects. It is in fact the anti-liberal component of this party’s manifesto which it can thank for achieving such a big electoral success. The faction formed by Svoboda’s 37 representatives in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) will have a small impact on legislative work, but their activity may add further to the brutalisation of parliamentary life. Furthermore, Svoboda will attempt to make other opposition groupings adopt a more radical approach, which may trigger the disintegration of the United Opposition Baktivshchyna. A new wave of public protests is likely to emerge in Ukraine in the coming months. Therefore, it can be expected that Svoboda will make efforts to join in or even incite them, in order to promote its social and nationalist messages. This may contribute to increasing the popularity of nationalist ideas and to a further radicalisation of sentiments in Ukraine.

Government failure, opposition success? Electoral performance in Portugal and Italy at the time of the crisis. Jean Monnet Occasional Paper 05/2014

The costs of the crisis in Southern European countries have not been only economic but political. Economic crises tend to lead to government instability and termination while political challengers are expected to exploit this contingent window of opportunity to gain an advantage over incumbents in national elections. The current crisis seems to make no exception, looking at the results of the general elections recently held in Southern Europe. However, this did not always lead to a clear victory of the main opposition parties. In most of the elections, in fact, the incumbent parties’ loss did not coincide with the official opposition’s gain. The extreme case is represented by Italy, where both the outgoing government coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi – setting aside for the moment the technocratic phase – and its main challenger, the centre left coalition, ended up losing millions of voters and a new political force, the Five Star Movement, obtained about 25 per cent of votes. On the opposite side there is Portugal. Only in Portugal did the vote increase for the centre right PSD, in fact, exceed the incumbent socialists’ loss. The present work aims at exploring the factors which might account for this significant divergence between the two cases.