Updates and Twitter

Israel and Ireland inch closer to coalition agreements. In Israel it seems likely the government will consist of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition, but adding Benny Gantz's Hosen party, and likely members of Derekh Eretz and Gesher as well. Ireland looks set for a FF-FG 'grand' coalition, and the coalition document seems to have been written specifically to get support from both the Green party and Labour. a FF-FG coalition would be 8 seats short of a majority; Labour has 6 seats and the Greens have 12. A number of Independents could also be brought on board.

South Korea meanwhile is holding elections today. Covid has slowed down in the country, with only 27 new cases reported yesterday out of a total of 10,591 cases. Should South Korea be able to pull off the election without a spike in cases it could see other elections around the world, especially ones currently under delay, take place. Info about the election follows below in this post.

First, however, I want to let everyone know that I've been locked out of my Twitter account. Twitter seems to think I'm a robot, and to prove I'm not, it wanted me to click a "I am not a robot" button, which was easy, and to receive a text message from them, which, unfortunately, is impossible as I have no cell phone.
I've been debating a twitter break for a while now, so, am not in any particular rush to unlock the account, but am working to unlock it, and, even if I have to borrow someone elses cell phone, I will do so. I will, eventually, be back on twitter.

Back to South Korea.

There are two main parties contesting the election. the Democratic Party, which is centrist and somewhat left; and the United Future party, which is Right-Wing and Conservative.

Both parties have also set up satellite parties in order to abuse a loophole in the election system regarding the distribution of proportional seats. The country will elect 253 members via first past the post, 30 via a traditional proportional list, and 17 via a parallel list. The effect of these 'fake parties' is to bump the number of parallel seats to 47, and eliminate the traditional PR seats.

The United Future party is expected to win about 15 of the PR seats, while the Democratic Party will win 14. To be more specific, their satellite parties will win these seats. What is interesting is that the Open Democrats will win 6. They are a semi-satellite party of the Democratic Party, made up of members who feel the party has gone too far to the right in recent years, and wish to push it back in a more progressive direction. I will be counting them as a separate party, but will otherwise be counting all satellite parties as simply part of their home party.

The progressive Justice Party is expected to take about 6 seats, while the liberal Peoples Party will take 3. One seat each will be won by the conservative Korea Economic Party, the far right Our Republican Party, and the centrist Party for People's Livelihoods.

This is what polls suggest for the 47 proportional seats.

The First Past The Post seats are harder to project without a specific projection spreadsheet. In its place, a simple formula will be used of simply squaring the popular vote, and using that to determine the share of seats won. It is very rough, but generally gives results that are at least in the ballpark of reality. Doing so, and adding in the list seats, suggests the following final result:

195 - DPK (government, liberal)
85 - UFP (main opposition, conservative)
9 - JP (progressive)
6 - OD (pro-DPK, progressive)
3 - PP (liberal)
1 - PPL (liberal)
1 - KEP (conservative)
1 - ORP (far-right)

This would give the government a majority, an increase from its current minority status, and see it gain roughly 70 seats, while the main opposition would see a loss of around 40 seats. The biggest losers would be the PPL, whose predecessor parties took over a quarter of the vote in the PR list in the last election.