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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Off My Chest
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We don’t have ranked choice voting either and don’t directly vote for prime minister. It’s a proportional system. If anything this should reduce the effect that a leader has on the popularity of the party compared with first past the post jurisdictions.
Given that the US does directly vote for President, personality and popularity have much more weight, and therefore a more popular candidate could turn it around. How likely that is I’m not sure, as I don’t know a huge amount about the alternatives other than AOC and Sanders, but Jacinda did show that it’s possible.
The U.S. president is not directly elected.
That’s splitting hairs. Notice I said “vote” rather than “elect”. I’m well aware of how the electoral college functions and that you can lose the “popular vote” but still become president (e.g. Bush Jnr and Trump).
The fact remains that on ballot you directly cast a vote for the president.
Hey, you got any openings there in the New Zealand? Heck - Old Zealand, whatever, something with less heavily armed, grossly unhealthy authoritarian fetishists? Looking to start, say, in about five months?
Unfortunately we’re no socialist utopia and we recently swung to the right in the election last year. The deputy prime minister is a noted xenophobe, pay-to-play corruption is on the rise, and most of the social policies of the last 6 years are being rolled back and then some.
These changes aren’t necessarily popular, lots of people voted against the incumbents rather than for the new government, but the next election is 2 years away and the electorate has a short memory.
It’s also worth knowing that much of our international reputation is a smokescreen. We’re not clean and green despite what our tourism marketing says. Almost every party in our parliament subscribes to neoliberalism to varying degrees and thinks deregulation will solve our productivity problems. We have one of the worst housing markets on the planet which is more like a Ponzi scheme thanks to a lack of capital gains tax and incentives for speculators. Finally the cost of living is extreme due to a lack of competition in the food, banking, petrol, electricity and water markets.
We have been falling in the OECD rankings on most metrics since the late 80s when we embraced Thatcherism/Reaganomics.
And yet.
B-but terminally online ~~Redditors~~ Lemmy users (Lemmists?) tell me that every single country in the world has a perfectly functioning election system and that the US is the only one with problems??
The preferred demonym (preferred by me) is “Lemmunists,” or “Lemmunistas” if you’re nasty.