The purpose of this page is to give an idea of the political situation in a country. This was inspired by a question in the miscellaneous reference desk about european countries moving to the right,upon which I decided to look this up and give an overview. This turned out to be quite a difficult job. Surprisingly, the coalition partners are rarely mentioned. So I've started a separate overview, starting with the EU, but ultimately this should cover the entire world.
The idea is, for each country, to say which bodies make up the government and how much power each has and then make a list of, if applicable, the coalition partners, with a short description of their place in the political spectrum and the percentage of votes (and maybe the percentage of seats if that is significantly different). In a parliamentary democracy it also mattes who are the major other parties (say, with more than 10% of the votes/seats). And the year of the elections and the projected next elections. And possibly an overview of the major policies of the country.
Preferably, this should be put in a table, for a quick overview, but I'm not sure if that will work well considering the different types of government, which prevents the use of a standardised format.
Another idea is to put this in a table and give the coalitions/presidents and whatever for the last few decades to show how politics have developed. Of course this can only be done per country.
Belgium edit
The 1999 elections led to the formation of what is called the 'rainbow coalition', consisting of six parties:
- VLD, right-wing liberal
Here's my original posting at the ref desk.
I've looked through the politics articles for the European countries and made a rough estimate of how left/right the party politics are. Alas, for many countries, oddly, the composition of the coalition (if any) isn't given and I didn't make such a detailed study of it (yet), so the list below is very tentative, sometimes just based on the distribution of seats and the description of the biggest party (or parties). Feel free to correct it if it's wrong. Like I said, this could be made into an article, although terms like left/right are rather pov. A different terminology would make more sense. The proposed article should preferably also show the development over time, giving an overview of the shift in politics of European countries (and of course this shoudn't be limited to Europe).
| Albania | centre-right |
| Amndorra | right (free market liberal) |
| Armenia | ? |
| Austria | left |
| Azerbaijan | ? |
| Belarus | ? (fraudulous elections) |
| Belgium | centre-left? |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | ? (nationalist SDS) |
| Bulgaria | centre-left? |
| Croatia | ? |
| Cyprus | left (communist AKEL)? |
| Czech Republic | centre-left (minority coalition because the communists weren't included? - unclear) |
| Denmark | centre-right |
| Estonia | centre? |
| Finland | centre-left |
| France | left?? (haven't figured out the system yet) |
| Georgia | centre-right |
| Germany | centre-right |
| Greece | centre-right |
| Hungary | ? |
| Iceland | centre-right |
| Republic of Ireland | left |
| Italy | centre-right |
| Latvia | ? |
| Liechtenstein | ? |
| Lithuania | left (technocratic, former communists) |
| Luxembourg | left |
| Macedonia | ? (parliamentary elections only given for 1998) |
| Malta | centre |
| Moldova | left (communist) |
| Monaco | ? |
| the Netherlands | right |
| Norway | left (red-green) |
| Poland | ? |
| Portugal | left (at first I thought Porugal had no right-wing party to speak of, but that turns out to be the 'Social Democrat' party :) ) |
| Romania | left |
| Russia | right? |
| San Marino | ? |
| Serbia and Montenegro | ? (unclear what's what) |
| Slovakia | ? |
| Slovenia | ? |
| Spain | left |
| Sweden | left |
| Switzerland | centre-right |
| Turkey | right |
| Ukraine | ? |
| United Kingdom | left |
| Vatican City | yeah, right :) |
It seems that there is a reasonable balance between left and right, but even if there were more right-wing governments, those would generally be more centre-right, due to coalitions. It should be noted that usually there is a major centre-left and a major centre-right party and if another party becomes the major party that doesn't necessarily mean a big shift in politics (although exactly that might happen in the Netherlands in 2007). It usually isn't a winner-take-all system like in the US. Most (democratic) countries in the world have parliaments and coalitions. But the fact that the coalitions aren't mentioned in the articles really drove me nuts. That's the best indicator of the politics of a country. The prime minister is often given, but that's just a figurehead with no extra power. I suspect that, as with most of the English speaking Wikipedia, most edits are done by US citizens, who can't wrap their heads around there not being a single person in power :) . An example can be found in Danish parliamentary election, 2005, where the second sentence states that the PM got most seats, when of course it's the party that gets the seats (one person can occupy just one seat :) ). Towards the end I started giving up if I didn't find the info quickly. I'll have to research this later a bit more, but some help will be appreciated.
I now suppose that a list of coalition parties (plus major other parties) would make more sense, possibly with a very short description of its politics, if possible. I've already done something similar in Politics of the Netherlands#Seats per Party, and tables like that would make sense for all countries. Of course in the overview it shouldn't be so extensive. But for the required research a better source is needed because Wikipedia doesn't seem to give this info yet. Or have I been going about this the wrong way?
An interresting thing I noticed is that communist parties seem bigger than I thought they were, especially in Eastern Europe. DirkvdM 16:23, 17 December 2005 (UTC)