OFFICIAL 2016 Foreign Elections Thread

birdman said:

The first part is correct, but the referendum vote for Scottish independence that failed a few years ago had to first be approved/permitted by Parliament in London. So all Johnson has to do is block the vote on a Scottish/Northern Ireland independence referendum. That's what my Scottish friends told me this past summer when I was over there.

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Any chance the Scots might just say to hell with it and work for independence or hold a vote anyway, and dare Johnson or Parliament to do something about it? In normal times it wouldn't happen, but as events keep showing, we're not living in normal times.

Highland Deac said:

Any chance the Scots might just say to hell with it and work for independence or hold a vote anyway, and dare Johnson or Parliament to do something about it? In normal times it wouldn't happen, but as events keep showing, we're not living in normal times.

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My prediction is that the Scots will go along with the UK and Brexit, at least at first. I think if the economy collapses and the people have to endure significant hardship because of southern racists and politicians lied about the economic benefits, there will be considerable unrest in the North. But, actually separating from the UK will be incredibly hard. Scotland and England have been more or less unified since James the 1st in 1603; Northern Ireland has been apart of British Crown since 1175. I think you'll see some unrest but ultimately it is much harder to separate from 4-9 centuries of unification in the UK than from 4 decades of association with the EU, which has been pretty hard itself.

tiltdeac said:

I'm sure you know a ton more about this than I do, but I thought there was pretty clear evidence he fixed the election. And this was after he attempted to have term limits abolished, the people voted that down, and then he just ran anyway?

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I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the climate there in the past few years, but what you said sounds right. He added an additional term while he was President (saying the first didn't count because it was under an old constitution), then he tried to abolish term limits altogether which was voted down in a referendum, then their Supreme Court ruled it a violation of his human rights to ban him from running again. There were a variety of issues with the most recent election including power outages, missing votes, etc. Morales allowed the OAS to investigate and agreed to new elections, but the military essentially said enough is enough as protests grew and forced him out.

He's an interesting character. His first years he did some celebrated work with poverty, indigenous rights and gender equality but he grew increasingly dictatorial and never allowed the chance for others to continue his original values. That said, western governments have been trying to get him out of power for years, so I take a lot of the representations of him with a heavy grain of salt. It wouldn't be the first/fifth/tenth left wing Latin American leader the US has strong armed out of power in exchange for a puppet.

Chile's long running protests resulted in a referendum on creating a new constitution to replace the Pinochet version from the 80's. Early results show overwhelming support in favor of creating a new one - positive news for a country that's been working on reforms for ages.