#assembly by-election

[coline7373]

[cumberbangers]

Hey, everyone, I'm so sorry I've been absent for a while, I've been dealing with some shit that's kept me pretty preoccupied. I promise to be back posting more regularly soon. But I did want to stop by and share a video I found tonight on Threads, because it's absolute perfection. I have no idea who created it, unfortunately, but if I do find out who the genius is, I'll edit this post to give them credit.

[coochiequeens]

Ladies, vote for yourself and those denied the right

Dhurnal (Pakistan) (AFP) – Perched on her traditional charpai bed, Naeem Kausir says she would like to vote in Pakistan's upcoming election -- if only the men in her family would let her.

Issued on: 05/02/2024 - 08:41

In  the village of Dhurnal in Punjab, spread across crop fields and home to several thousand people, men profess myriad reasons why women should not be allowed to vote © Farooq NAEEM / AFP

Like all the women in her town, the 60-year-old former headmistress and her seven daughters -- six already university educated -- are forbidden from voting by their male elders.

"Whether by her husband, father, son or brother, a woman is forced. She lacks the autonomy to make decisions independently," said Kausir, covered in a veil in the courtyard of her home.

"These men lack the courage to grant women their rights," the widow told AFP.

Although voting is a constitutional right for all adults in Pakistan, some rural areas in the socially conservative country are still ruled by a patriarchal system of male village elders who wield significant influence in their communities.

In the village of Dhurnal in Punjab, spread across crop fields and home to several thousand people, men profess myriad reasons for the ban of more than 50 years.

"Several years ago, during a period of low literacy rates, a council chairman decreed that if men went out to vote, and women followed suit, who would manage the household and childcare responsibilities?" said Malik Muhammad, a member of the village council.

"This disruption, just for one vote, was deemed unnecessary," he concluded.

Robina Kausir, a healthcare worker, talks to AFP in Dhurnal of Punjab province, ahead of the upcoming general election © Farooq NAEEM / AFP

Muhammad Aslam, a shopkeeper, claims it is to protect women from "local hostilities" about politics, including a distant occasion that few seem to remember in the village when an argument broke out at a polling station.

Others told AFP it was simply down to "tradition".

First Muslim woman leader

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has stressed that it has the authority to declare the process null and void in any constituency where women are barred from participating.

In reality, progress has been slow outside of cities and in areas that operate under tribal norms, with millions of women still missing from the electoral rolls.

Muhammad Aslam, a shopkeeper, claims a ban on women voting is to protect them from "local hostilities" about politics © Farooq NAEEM / AFP

The elders in Dhurnal rely on neighbouring villages to fill a government-imposed quota which maintains that 10 percent of votes cast in every constituency must be by women.

Those who are allowed to vote are often pressured to pick a candidate of a male relative's choice.

In the mountainous region of Kohistan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province home to almost 800,000 people, religious clerics last month decreed it un-Islamic for women to take part in electoral campaigns.

Although voting is a constitutional right for all adults in Pakistan, some rural areas in the socially conservative country are still ruled by a patriarchal system of male village elders who wield significant influence in their communities © Farooq NAEEM / AFP

Fatima Tu Zara Butt, a legal expert and a women's rights activist, said women are allowed to vote in Islam, but that religion is often exploited or misunderstood in Pakistan.

"Regardless of their level of education or financial stability, women in Pakistan can only make decisions with the 'support' of the men around them," she said.

Pakistan famously elected the world's first Muslim woman leader in 1988 -- Benazir Bhutto, who introduced policies that boosted education and access to money for women, and fought against religious extremism after military dictator Zia ul-Haq had introduced a new era of Islamisation that rolled back women's rights.

However, more than 30 years later, only 355 women are competing for national assembly seats in Thursday's election, compared to 6,094 men, the election commission has said.

Pakistan reserves 60 of the 342 National Assembly seats for women and 10 for religious minorities in the Muslim-majority country, but political parties rarely allow women to contest outside of this quota.

Those who do stand often do so only with the backing of male relatives who are already established in local politics.

"I have never seen any independent candidates contesting elections on their own," Zara Butt added.

'Everyone's right'

Forty-year-old Robina Kausir, a healthcare worker, said a growing number of women in Dhurnal want to exercise their right to vote but they fear backlash from the community if they do -- particularly the looming threat of divorce, a matter of great shame in Pakistani culture.

She credits part of the shift to access to information as a result of the rising use of smartphones and social media.

"These men instil fear in their women – many threaten their wives," she told AFP.

Robina, backed by her husband, is one of the few prepared to take the risk.

When cricketing legend Imran Khan swept to power in the 2018 election, Robina arranged for a minibus to take women to the local polling station.

Only a handful joined her, but she still marked it as a success and will do the same on Thursday's election.

"I was abused but I do not care, I will keep fighting for everyone's right to vote," Robina said.

[chiekodivine]

new york city is a shit show right now and not because of the students peacefully protesting. i’m so sick of fucking cops. research the history of the police force in america. tear-gassing students and snipers on rooftops. we all know this will escalate. it’s just when. it’s ironic, when you grow up with school shootings and no gun laws you become pretty desensitized. if the government thinks a shooting will scare people then they’re just plain stupid. ivy league students being shot at on the grounds of campus. all i can think about is the kent state massacre. everyone attending protests please be safe and mask up!!! those not attending, if you can, drop off food and water to protestors fighting for our rights. you don’t need to be palestinian to care about the genocide in gaza, you just need to be human. they don’t just want to ban tiktok because of the mass spread of unregulated information. they want to ban tiktok because of the mass spread of empathy. billions of videos depicting the human experience. i have cried so many tears and laughed until my stomach hurt all for strangers i’ll never meet. when we care about each other more than we care about the dollars in our pockets it scares them. it scares them because they feed and live off of human suffering and exploitation. they’ve manipulated our minds so much we believe we are dependent on them when really they are dependent on us. they’ve divided us so much we’ve forgotten what it’s like to love each other. they’ve allowed so much violence and so much hatred that it’s become all we know. but a heart full of empathy and love will always want to share that love. that’s what they fear. capitalism is just a circle jerk of who has the deepest pockets and billionaires can’t exist without the exploitation of the working class. calculate how many hours you’d need to work earning minimum wage in order to be a billionaire. look up the recent layoffs of thousands of hiring recruiters across the country. research the nationwide implementation of AI that accepts your résumé based on buzzwords and not actual experience. did i mention homelessness is illegal and i’m pretty sure social security is like gone now? How many hours would it take to be billionaire?

[justinspoliticalcorner]

As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they’d sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world. They are destroying the American university in order to keep it “safe.” In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony. [...] The most tumultuous week on U.S. college campuses since May 1970 resulted in at least 600 arrests at 15 different schools as of Saturday, with more surely on the way. It’s going to take even longer to tally all the students facing suspension and in some cases expulsion for speaking out on the bloodshed in Gaza, or the now-ruined careers of principled professors who stood between their students and a nightstick. Not to mention the lasting psychological scars for young people who saw their dream college summon cops to arrest them or even fire rubber bullets or canisters of tear gas at them, which would be considered a war crime if used in Ukraine but is apparently OK in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown of Atlanta. The notion of college as the American dream — fostering not just upward economic mobility but a nation of informed citizens taught to think critically — has been steadily dying since the original right-wing backlash against student protest in the 1960s triggered the end of taxpayer support for low tuition, which caused a $1.75 trillion student loan crisis. The maelstrom around the war in the Middle East has given the enemies of higher education — and they are many — a chance to move in for the kill. [...] Their ammunition is the complicated relationship between student protests for Palestinian liberation and against Israel’s current conduct in Gaza, where its more-than-six-month assault has killed at least 33,000 people — the majority of them women and children — and the constant scourge of antisemitism. Even though some advocates lump political criticisms of the state of Israel under an overly broad definition of antisemitism, there’s no question that the despicable harassment and assaults on Jews on or around college campuses have risen since the Oct. 7 start of the war (as they also have for Muslims). A few of the claims linking the worst antisemitism to the student protests have been disingenuous, such as when some journalists cited a nonstudent and well-known antisemite stationed a block from the Columbia University main gate as an example of protester hate speech. At Boston’s Northeastern University, administrators sent in police Saturday who detained 100 students based on a shout of “Kill all the Jews!” that veteran journalists on the scene said came from a Jewish demonstrator waving an Israeli flag, apparently seeking an escalation. But there has also been some instances of antisemitism that are indeed the fault of pro-Palestinian student protesters.

[...]

The biggest driver is right-wing authoritarianism. Red-state governors like Abbott in Texas or Georgia’s Brian Kemp have watched the new hero of U.S. conservatism, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, make crushing his homeland’s once freethinking universities the centerpiece of his strongman governance. Now they are importing the strategy. The Gaza protests have given governors and their fellow travelers on Capitol Hill a golden opportunity to squelch the notion of a liberal education while squeezing out a few more tax-cut dollars for their billionaire donors, and creating a nightly Two Minutes Hate of young people on Fox News that distracts from the 88 felony counts against their presidential candidate. [...] The complexities of never-ending conflict in the Middle East is what allows the cynical Greg Abbotts of America to get away with this. Too many would-be Democratic critics are too wedded to years of deep support for Israel, ignoring that a) the right-wing extremism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies is not your father’s Israel and b) the assault on campus free speech has much deeper implications than the current crisis. Too many college presidents have displayed extreme cowardice, caught in the headlights between Republican bullying and billionaire donors, who likely fear the protesting students might eventually question the brand of capitalism that made them billionaires.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on the violent crackdowns of student protests against Israel's genocidal campaign against Gaza on college campuses orchestrated by police (04.28.2024).

Will Bunch wrote a solid column in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how the recent violent crackdowns on student protests against the Gaza Genocide and Israel Apartheid are a prelude to the fascist hell that America will be under should Donald Trump be elected come November. The violent crackdowns on student protests are also an excuse for right-wing reactionaries to wage war on higher education, academic freedom, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Personally, I think if you describe yourself as a socialist and also have a bust of Vladimir Lenin's head in your house, I should be allowed to smash that bust over your head with no consequences.

[sissa-arrows]

Some white women voted for the far right just because they thought he was hot… I’m trying to wrap my mind around women voting for a man who will reduce their rights just because they think he is hot…

The only good thing is that if some voters are that stupid then we can sway them… So we’re making edits and thirst trap of leftist candidates…

[tomorrowusa]

After a surge in far right support in the EU Parliament elections, President Emmanuel Macron abruptly called a snap election for the French National Assembly.

From the start, polls had been predicting that the far right National Rally (RN) would win the largest number of seats or even an overall majority in the chamber.

But France was in for a pleasant surprise when the polls closed. The RN didn't win. In fact, it came in third behind a new leftest alliance of parties called the NFP and also behind a Macron-aligned group called Ensemble (ENS). ENS had been running a poor third in the polls.

In addition to celebrations in Paris, there were sighs of relief in Brussels, Washington, London, Berlin, and Kyiv. Like most far right parties, the RN has taken a pro-Russia position. RN leader Marine Le Pen likes to pal around with Vladimir Putin. So the Kremlin must be feeling emo today.

No bloc obtained a majority in the National Assembly and each bloc is made up of up to four parties. So it's not clear who will form a government or how long it will take. While the media oversimplifies with references to the three largest blocs, there are actually about 14 separate groupings in the just elected National Assembly.

In terms of percentage, the RN and its ally (represented by EXTD above) ended up with less than a quarter of the seats in the National Assembly – a far cry from the majority they had hoped to get.

One key to the RN defeat has been the turnout – about 2 out of every 3 voters cast votes in Sunday's election. That was the biggest turnout for a French parliamentary election in decades.

Prime Minister Gabriel Attal submitted his resignation to President Macron but Attal will stay on as a caretaker until some combination of factions can put together 289 votes to form a government.

While DW poses the question "Is France still governable?" because of factionalism, I would point out that 1968 was a year of chaos in France despite the fact that the government was firmly under the control of President Charles de Gaulle and his party in the National Assembly. The more responsible non-fascist leaders in the Assembly understand that they will be more successful through cooperation than by squabbling.

Paris is host to the Summer Olympics. So the international media will be in town while horse trading goes on at the National Assembly.

But the important thing is that groupings which normally would have little to do with each other did cooperate electorally to prevent fascism. This is a lesson which needs to be learned in other countries – including the United States.

[albonium]

leftist union politicians have made an asmr video about their program 😭

[afniel]

Maaaaaaaaaaaan, come on.

(the post has ended up in the tags btw. I am not changing this and I need you to understand that it is just me talking to myself semi-publicly)

[without-ado]

2024 South Korea's 22nd General Election

Update:

SEOUL, April 11 (Reuters) - South Korea's liberal opposition parties scored a landslide victory in a parliamentary election held on Wednesday, dealing a resounding blow to President Yoon Suk Yeol and his conservative party but likely falling just short of a super majority. more at Reuters

Pan-Opposition won 189 seats out of 300: Democracy party & its satellite party 175 l the Rebuilding Korea Party(leader: Cho Kuk) 12 l New Future 1 l Progressive Party 1

______________

SEOUL, April 10 (Reuters) - South Korea's main opposition Democratic Party and its allies were projected to retain a majority by winning up to 197 seats in Wednesday's elections for the single-chamber, 300-seat legislature, an exit poll conducted jointly by three television networks showed.

According to the exit polls, Democratic Party(blue) is expected to win an overwhelming victory for the election;

민주당 압승 예상 l 조국혁신당 12-14 예상(비례)

[gender-euphowrya]

in other news what i can only describe as our local 'fox & friends' tv channel which was significantly responsible for normalizing & popularizing the far right has not been renewed and is no longer allowed to use the signal it broadcasted on so 🎉

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Lizz Toledo

Cuba's government officials do not fear the people they represent. It is truly a government by the people and for the people. When we visited the Capitol in Havana on May 12, there were no armed guards surrounding the building where the National Assembly of People’s Power meets. At the entrance were two guards who waved our delegation of LGBTQ+ activists from the U.S. right in. We were escorted through the building by Sergio Martínez, a deputy of the assembly, who met with us and explained the Cuban political process.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Olivia Little at MMFA:

Last month, pastor Micah Beckwith secured Indiana’s GOP lieutenant governor nomination in an unexpected upset against gubernatorial candidate Mike Braun’s pick for running mate. Beckwith is a right-wing podcaster, promoter of Christian nationalism, and suburban pastor at an Indianapolis-area church affiliated with the Pentecostal network Assemblies of God. The network describes same-sex marriage as “symptomatic of a broader spiritual disorder that threatens the family, the government, and the church" and discourages "divorce by all lawful means and teaching.” Beckwith has spent years blasting his extreme positions to the world on his podcast Jesus, Sex and Politics, as well as in Facebook livestreams. In this content, Beckwith has claimed that God was behind the January 6 insurrection and Trump’s rise to power, dabbled in numerology, and talked at length about his “prophetic calling."

Beckwith has been trying to immerse himself in the right-wing culture war for years

In 2021, Beckwith bragged on Facebook about giving out hundreds of religious exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccine. In May 2022, Beckwith’s church hosted a Turning Point USA Faith event with founder and right-wing troll Charlie Kirk, which was posted on The Charlie Kirk Show. During the show with Beckwith, Kirk spouted conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum, fearmongered about “globalists trying to squeeze the American way of life,” and told audience members that “college is a scam for most young people.”  Earlier this year, Beckwith resigned from his local public library board of directors. He spent his time on the board championing a controversial book removal policy that author and Indiana resident John Green later criticized after his book The Fault in Our Stars was removed from the young adult section.

Indiana Lt. Gov nominee Micah Beckwith (R) has been a promoter of Christian Nationalism, along with other far-right conspiracy theories.

[theokusgallery]

Trying to explain the current French politics to people who aren't French is a nightmare