(no subject)

[liliaeth]

My name's Lore and I'm a socialist.
I'm a member of the socialist union.
I vote socialist and I like many of their ideas.
Yet I'm not a communist (many great ideas, bad execution of those ideas, don't start me on it, I like politics too much ;-) )


I had to go in to vote this morning and it left me wondering about the differences between the Belgian system and the American one. And especially, which of the two is best. Cause honestly I don't know at times...





Overhere you have at the very least nine parties in a region (if not more), most of which have a chance of at least getting some form of representation when it comes down to it. Hell, it's not like the opposition is really ever quiet

The government here often works through compromises, parties forming coalitions and then working together in order to get the majority. This is often not a bad thing, cause it means that you get several different viewpoints working together on things.
Though, I guess, for some people it might also mean that they give in on their own ideas and are forced to compromise to begin with.
For some reason I've never seen that as a bad thing... after all, there's nothing worse than fanatics...

Anyway, this often used to mean that the former CVP(currently CD&V) would work together with the former SP (now SPA). For the record, the first one is the christian folkparty, (probably the largest politic party in Belgium, well it used to be at least), the second one is the Socialist party (not to be confused with the communist party which is the PVDA). SP is also one of the biggest parties. Sometimes one of those two would go in coalition with the VLD (the liberal party) as well. Well until the last two national elections when the VLD got major votes due to the situation at the time, ending us up with a liberal prime minister ;-)

And in case all this is driving you as insane as it is me, there's also het Vlaams Blok (racist national party) which unfortunately is getting way to much of the votes, causing the parties to form even more coalitions. Or that second offshoot of the old SP, that I can't seem to remember the name for at the second...

So yeah, with all that confusion, it has me thinking about the American system, where you got two main parties. Democrate and Conservative. (of course I could be entirely wrong, and there could be much much more political parties when the presidential elections aren't involved.)

The weird thing to me though is that even though you only have two parties, who most of the time aren't forced to work together, that are still way more similar than a lot of our smaller parties.
Are there many differences that I'm missing?
Can anyone explain the American system to me?

Just wondering and trying to stay distracted from the Visual Basic I'm supposed to be studying ;-)

End of ramble

Comments

[itsabigrock.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly an expert on the 'system' mind you, but basically we have Democrats who tend to be fairly liberal, Republicans who are generally speaking conservative, and occasionaly the Independent party, a lot of whom actually belong to the Green party, which is very very liberal and anti-business. We do occasionaly have Socialist and Communist candidates, but mainly on smaller state ballots and I can't think of a single one that has taken office, not even here in Oregon which has a pretty vocal Socialist party. They are a small force here and get to have their say, but rarely if ever take office.

I'm sure there are smaller parties that we don't hear about much. The thing is, is that in order to vote in primary elections (those where the candidates are being whittled down before the major elections) you must be a registered Democrat or Republican. Otherwise you can't vote at all. It's a very biased system, and of course we have a President who didn't even get the most votes so there are some obvious flaws in the system, to put it completely mildly. Our whole electoral college systeme borders on the retarded.

[liliaeth]

That just doesn't sound right. I mean, if there are more parties, then you should be able to register as the party you're a part of right?

Then again, I never understood why people couldn't just directly vote for their choice for president, instead of having to vote a middle (wo)man.

[itsabigrock.livejournal.com]

Oh you can register as whatever you want, you just can't vote in the presidential primaries because you are only voting for your parties candidate and only the Republicans and Democrats get to vote their party nomination in an actually democratic way.

We are completely fucked up. The electoral college system is the thing that riles me the most though, it's like saying if 51 out of a 100 people in your state vote for one candidate all 100 votes go to that candidate. The other 49 people? Their vote doesn't count.

[liliaeth]

just plain weird, then again, there's a 24% of the flemish population that I'd almost wish didn't have to vote either
Almost... too much a fan of everyone's right to vote not too, but 24 bloody percent... It's just insane.