Paris will host one of the most important sporting events this year – the Summer Olympic Games. And the race is already on, with nearly half of all voters worldwide expected to go to the ballot box this year. Nine parliamentary elections will occur or already have occurred in European countries alone, with thousands of candidates competing for 720 seats in the European Parliament.
Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI) presented “The Election Book. Mandate for Leadership”. The publication discusses the problems of state governance and the economy and provides recommendations for a breakthrough. As the patron of the event, Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, Speaker of the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania, underscored the unique value of the “The Election Book. Mandate for Leadership” for political parties.
On June 9, Hungary held the elections for the European Parliament along with its local elections to choose mayors and councilors. The elections saw a record turnout of 58.1 %, but the most interesting election, the Budapest mayoral election with a turnout of 60.51%, resulted in a very high number of spoiled ballots, at 2.98%.
On June 4 and 18, 1989, partially free elections for the Sejm and fully free elections for the reconstituted Senate were held in Poland. As a result of these elections, a democratic political system was established, and decisive economic reforms were initiated between 1989 and 1990, which included stabilization and free-market changes. Poland was the first socialist country to begin departing from the system imposed by force, which was flawed.
2024 is a turbulent year in Hungarian politics, and this is especially true for the capital. New alliances have been formed, while at the same time, some previous cooperation has so broken down that the parties are running against each other.
On April 7, 2024 millions of Polish citizens went to the voting commissions to cast their ballots in this year’s local elections. Following the recent triumph of the “democratic coalition” over Law and Justice and a subsequent change of government in December, many got their hopes up for a landslide victory in early spring.
This year will undoubtedly be crucial for the future of democracy. As Professor Timothy D. Snyder, specializing in this area, says, it could be a year of either a breakdown and further prolonged recession of democracy worldwide or a breakthrough and the defense of these democracies. They will manage to confront the growing populism, disinformation, and tremendous pressure from authoritarian systems.
Can Hungary be considered a democratic country? What challenges does the potential Donald Trump’s victory in the United States pose to democracy? And what is it that the Action for Democracy aims for?
Why do the recent election results in Poland, the Netherlands, and Spain matter? What do they mean for Europe? And what is to be expected of the forthcoming elections in Portugal and the European elections? We are starting the new season of the Liberal Europe Podcast with a thought-provoking conversation between our two hosts, Ricardo Silvestre (Movimento Liberal Social) and Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!).
I present a brief analysis of the key factors that influenced the opposition’s victory in the parliamentary elections in October. The order of the points does not imply a hierarchy of importance. In these elections, there were no radical party like Razem, which would claim that it would not cooperate with other parties and would take votes from the main parties, while not entering the Parliament due to not crossing the 5 or 8 percent threshold.
