It was an issue more appropriate to a different blog, but I have done a bit of writing about the situation regarding dual citizenship in Lithuania. But assuming you’ve not had need for my Guide to a Passport, you’ve probably not followed the story carefully. In which case, here’s the short version: The Lithuanian constitution [...]
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I’m on the road until next week, so any sort of map-based reflection on the second round of Seimas elections will have to wait. Which is fine, since the results are both not shocking and still in a bit of a holding pattern themselves. Before the second round of run-off voting, I was reading that [...]
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A friend looked over my recent posts and said, basically, that this analysis of things that had already happened was all find and dandy, but might it be possible to predict the results of the second round? On Tuesday, I speculated that a coalition of the Labor Party (Darbo partija), Social Democrats, and Order and [...]
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In my previous post, I provided links to fancy interactive maps from the Lithuanian Election Commission. They map turnout, how people voted on the referendum, and other fun things. But they also map something completely useless, namely the party that “won” each constituency in the vote to decide how many proportional seats the party will [...]
Continue reading about Actually useful maps of the Lithuanian Seimas (parliamentary) elections
About five percent of Lithuanians voted early with me during the course of the week. The bulk of the electorate, at over 50% turnout, voted on Sunday to promote a different direction in the Lithuanian Parliament. Out are the conservatives and liberals. In are the populist/centrist Labor Party and Social Democrats, who will likely form [...]
Continue reading about First glance at Lithuanian Seimas (parliament) results
I voted today in two separate elections in two separate continents. So that’s “often.” Both election days are also in the future, so that’s “early.” So hooray for me for getting my democracy on. The first election was, rather obviously, the US election. I’m still registered in Massachusetts, so I had to send a letter [...]
My concern trollish ways got the better of me. In my previous post, on Mélenchon as a pedagogue, I expressed worry that he was serving to bring workers over from the Front national to the Front de gauche only to later have troops available to follow Mélenchon into pushing for a Hollande victory over Sarkozy [...]
This early February speech, by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the presidential candidate for the Front de gauche, a left-wing coalition in France, has been helpfully subtitled in English: Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa If you only have time for one part of the speech, I recommend [...]
From the headline, “Eastern Europe’s Hitler nostalgia,” Michael Goldfarb’s cross-posted article in Globalpost and Salon (where I read it) feels like link bait. And maybe flame/trollbait. The subhead promises an article about “pro-Nazi sentiment” in “Lithuania and Latvia.” What follows is an article dispatched from, and largely about, Poland.1 It’s easy to say about an [...]
I was in New York this weekend, and I decided to spend part of Friday afternoon at Zuccotti Park. I had been told that there was nothing going on there, so I expected to see ruins of a political movement in tatters, the kind of romantic fantasy of an unexperienced nostalgia that has yielded us, [...]