Hi folks. I’m temporarily residing in Prague and recently we had nation-wide municipal elections. While other parties performed strongly nation-wide, Czech Pirate Party did really well in the capital Prague (Pirates are 3rd or 4th biggest party in Czechia).
Today we got the news that the next Mayor of Prague will be a Pirate! Congrats to Zdeněk Hřib!
Should we perhaps have some sort of congratulation sent on behalf of PPAU?
international@pirati.cz or info@pirati.cz should be suitable.
@jedb , @JRQ Yet, you must not hold the entire focus on the whole nation as a political party, but decentralize/federalize on single lands.
CZ Pirates succeeded only because each major city’s party did their own part without asking the central committee of their methods of achievement(s).
Another point is that they all concentrated, as a whole political party, on the capitol, because the capitol has the most civically trained people than the rest of the country.
.
If you want to win, focus all your energy on Canberra, and that’s about it. It would take a lot of years, though.
ps - i am genuinely asking here, i have very little experience with the nuts and bolts of these matters. I’d have thought, based on nothing, that Canberra would be the go but maybe not?
The way the system is constructed with a ton of independently counted divisions, to actually win seats as a tiny party it is massively advantageous to have all your voters in one area. If the focus ends up being on too many divisions or too great an area then all that happens is a bunch of low percentage losses even if overall there are a lot of supporters.
To actually get a lot of voters in one area, we would need to champion issues specific to that area. Basically, even though for a federal party you would think it would make sense to focus on federal issues, the best strategy is actually to be politically regional as much as possible. It’s weirdly paradoxical like that.
This problem is part of why our policy on electoral reform is like it is.
Palmer is an example of what happens when you spend a huge amount of money to run candidates and promote and advertise absolutely everywhere without much of a base of support to work with. The only success he managed was in Fairfax where he barely scraped a win. His Senate vote was probably buoyed a lot by literally having House of Reps candidates in every division, but it’s still telling that he only won a seat in Queensland (where Fairfax is) and the 6th seat in Tasmania (so very probably preference quirks and shenanigans). I’m admittedly not too sure how he got the 5th seat in the WA special 2014 election.
Pauline actually illustrates my point when you compare One Nation to the Xenophon Group. If 2016 hadn’t been a double dissolution, One Nation would have only obtained 1 seat. However Xenophon would have still ended up with 3. This is because Xenophon has nearly all his support concentrated in SA, while ON is much more spread out. He’s very regional.
The Nationals and Greens show the problem even clearer in the House of Representatives. The Nationals always have <4% of votes yet manage to keep a stranglehold on their seats because of voter concentration, while the Greens get 8-10% and only win 1.
Of course, none of this matters if we had a ton more people voting for us, but in that case we would be a major party.