How a misleading YouTube video is stoking fears about Shariah law before the federal election

2019/07/23 Leave a comment

Expect we will see more of this in the lead up to the election:

A short, grainy YouTube video circulating on social media purports to show evidence of an imam claiming that if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is re-elected, he will institute Shariah law, the legal code of Islam, based on the Qur’an.

But the video was taken out of context, according to the man featured in it, and it was created by Sandra Solomon, known for her anti-Islam views.

The video has about 50,000 views on YouTube, a middling amount, but it has been posted on at least three different Facebook groups that are critical of Trudeau. Altogether, the groups have more than 185,000 likes, and posts of the video were shared more than 7,000 times.

The three pages get high engagement in terms of reactions, comments and shares, and they are in some of the most popular groups spreading memes and disinformation online. These groups equal or often exceed many traditional media outlets for engagement on Facebook.

The video itself includes a short section from a speech about Islam delivered by Mufti Aasim Rashid in Kamloops, B.C., in October 2017. It also features a picture of Justin Trudeau praying at a mosque and ends on a clip of Trudeau championing diversity, which is then covered up by a photo illustration of a small child wearing a “Make Canada Great Again” hat.

What’s in the video

In the full-length recording of Rashid’s speech posted to YouTube, he is critical of fears over Shariah, saying it is a principle that underpins Islam, and there is no conspiracy among Muslims to bring Shariah to Canada.

Nowhere in the video does Rashid mention Trudeau or the 2019 federal election. In fact, during the portion of the speech used in the misleading video, Rashid said he was actually referring to the former Stephen Harper Conservative government.

Taken out of context, the section that Solomon excerpted appears to show that Rashid believes the Canadian government wants Shariah law.

“The Canadian government wanted the Muslims to be able to regulate their own issues of marriage and divorce and set up systems of mediation and arbitration to solve their problems amongst themselves through Shariah law so that it’s not a burden on the court system, which is already so bogged down,” he said.

“The Canadian government wanted people like myself to sign off on custody cases, where there was an allegation of parental abduction,” he said in the video, specifying it relates to Muslim countries who might seek the approval of Muslim clerics in such cases.

Reached by phone, Rashid was surprised to find that a clip of his speech was circulating.

“I had no idea that someone would use that clip in that way,” he said.

Rashid told CBC News that his comments on arbitration referred to the Ontario government, which had allowed religious-based arbitration from 1991 until Premier Dalton McGuinty said in 2005 that “there will be no Shariah law in Ontario, there will be no religious arbitration.” The Liberals then passed an amendment to the province’s arbitration act.

Rashid said his second comment concerned the Stephen Harper government, and that representatives of the government had approached Muslim leaders in 2015 to help regarding custody cases where one parent in a couple has taken a child or children to a country whose legal system uses Islamic law. He specified that many countries with Islamic law haven’t signed on to the Hague convention on international child abduction, so according to Rashid, the federal government was meeting with Muslim organizations to see if they could offer endorsements or rulings that would be accepted by those countries, affirming whether a parent had permission to take their child.

Rashid said he was the director of religion for the B.C. Muslim Association when they were approached by the government.

A Senate committee in 2015 did look at the issue of cross-border child abduction, and did focus on the issue of working with countries whose legal systems are based in Islamic law.

Shariah law fears unfounded

Disinformation about the government and Shariah isn’t new — and some of it can be traced to fears around the federal government’s motion to condemn Islamophobia, religious discrimination and systemic racism in 2017.

This year, posters claiming the government wants Shariah were on display at a yellow vest protest in Alberta. Yellow vest protesters often espouse anti-immigration views, and the City of Hamilton is currently investigating the legal ramifications of banning yellow vest protests in front of city hall over safety concerns.

Just this week, People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier accused Trudeau in a tweet of having room in his party for people who want to institute Shariah law. In another tweet this week, Bernier accused both Trudeau and Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer of pandering to people who “promote sharia law.”

Trudeau has been clear on several occasions this year that Canada doesn’t have Shariah law and he is not seeking to implement it.

At a town hall in Ste-Hyacinthe, Que., in January, Trudeau said when asked about Shariah lawthat “Canada doesn’t have it and will not have it.”

The Prime Minister’s Office also referred CBC News to another town hall in Regina the same month, when Trudeau said that “misinformation” was circulating about his position on Shariah law.

“You should be looking into what the facts are, you should be a responsible consumer of information,” he told a woman who claimed to have read a report indicating Trudeau had said Shariah law was compatible with Canadian values.

“I am pleased to be able to tell you that that also is not something that I ever said,” he told her.

A longer clip from Rashid’s speech circulated on anti-Muslim websites last year, but got little traction. Even Solomon’s video, a minute-long clip of his hour-long speech, didn’t get much attention when it was posted on her YouTube page in November 2018. It wasn’t until April this year that it first appeared on a Facebook page called United Conservative Movement of Canada. Then it appeared on two more pages in June and July and began to circulate more widely on Twitter.

Who’s behind the video

Sandra Solomon was investigated by Peel Police in March of 2018 for ripping out pages of a Qur’an and placing them on the windshields of cars parked outside an Islamic centre in Mississauga, Ont.

At the time, police investigated the behaviour as possibly “hate-motivated” but they did not lay charges in the case because “it was determined that no criminal offence has taken place,” a Peel Police spokesperson said.

CBC News reached out to Solomon by phone and email. She did not return emails, and a person who answered a phone number listed on her website said it was a wrong number.

Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said the video plays into two primary fears pushed by anti-Trudeau and far-right groups online.

“That there is a secret Muslim conspiracy to take over Canada is like, their No. 1 thing, and their No. 2 thing is that Trudeau is a secret Muslim,” he said.

Balgord said the video hit on those two points, and since the comments were made by a Muslim man, it has all necessary conditions to be shared widely in outrage.

Source: How a misleading YouTube video is stoking fears about Shariah law before the federal election

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The European Left’s Dangerous Anti-Immigrant Turn

2019/06/10 Leave a comment

Good overview of how far the centre has shifted:
Denmark’s center-left Social Democrats came in first in the country’s June 5 parliamentary elections—the third Nordic country where voters recently backed a left-leaning party in a Europe otherwise marked by social democracy’s decline.

Wednesday’s outcome broke with the past two decades of Danish politics. Social Democrats leader Mette Frederiksen, 41, became the country’s youngest-ever prime minister and the second woman to hold the job. Her party’s success—91 of the parliament’s 179 seats—upended a political landscape long dominated by the right. And on the heels of the European Parliament elections, in which populist, xenophobic parties saw important gains in France, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, the far-right Danish People’s Party saw its votes cut by more than half, after an unprecedented score in 2015.

But this week’s vote says less about the far right’s demise than about its steady creep into the mainstream. In something of a paradox, the center left returned to the scene only by lurching to the right. The Social Democrats, faced with waning support in the past two decades, have parroted the Danish People’s Party on immigration, backing hard-line policies they characterize as necessary to save the country’s prized welfare state.

Social-democratic parties across Europe have opted for that strategy, but in Denmark the dynamic is particularly pronounced. “While other social-democratic parties have adopted tougher immigration laws in times of ‘crisis’ and used anti-immigration and Islamophobic language, no party has so openly ran on a nativist and welfare-chauvinist agenda as the Danish Social Democrats,” Cas Mudde, a political scientist at the University of Georgia who specializes on populism, said by e-mail.

Take, for example, the so-called “ghetto package,” a series of policies aimed at improving integration and reducing crime in low-income areas that the state categorizes as “ghettos” because, among other criteria, more than half of their residents are of “non-Western” background. The package, introduced by the Danish People’s Party but backed by the Social Democrats, included measures ethnic minorities consider discriminatory: One law doubles punishments for crimes committed in “ghettos”; another requires “ghetto children” from age 1 to 6, the age when public education is required for the general population, to attend mandatory courses in Danish values and traditions, as well as language courses. Families that refuse to comply risk being stripped of government benefits.

The “ghetto package” is among the slew of policies targeting immigrants—particularly Muslims—that Denmark has embraced in the past few years, often with the Social Democrats’ support. These include a 2016 law that allows authorities to seize cash and valuables from asylum-seekers ostensibly to help the state finance their benefits, or a 2018 ban on the burqa—the full-face veil worn by only about 200 Muslim women nationwide. A law making handshakes a mandatory requirement for citizenship followed, clearly targeting Muslims who refuse to shake hands with the opposite sex. Plans are underway to isolate foreigners who have criminal records and served their sentences—asylum-seekers among them—on a far-off island, currently home to a center for researching highly communicable animal diseases. In 2005, the government required UN resettlement to be based on “integration potential,” and in 2016 it withdrew from the UN resettlement program entirely, with the Social Democrats’ support.

“The Social Democrats have made it very clear: They realize they’ve lost elections since the late 1990s by being outflanked by the right on immigration,” Rune Stubager, a political scientist at Aarhus University, told me. “They knew they’d have to change their position on the issue to win.”

The Social Democrats’ rightward shift has earned it the moniker “Danish People’s Party lite” among some Danes, disillusioned with what they see as the party’s betrayal of its progressive ideals. “There’s no question: They saw that, without anti-Islam as a central part of their platform, they have no chance of success,” Naveed Baig, an imam and the vice-chair of the Islamic-Christian Study Center in Copenhagen, told me, noting that Islam and immigration have become synonymous in current political debates. The climate has become so toxic, he said, that some Muslim families have considered leaving Denmark altogether.

Natasha Al-Hariri, a lawyer and minority-rights advocate, agreed. “It’s disturbing to see Frederiksen in the prime-minister spot,” she said. “She’ll adopt whatever position gets the most votes, even if that means aligning with the far right. When is enough enough?”

The Social Democrats say they’ll stick to their new line on immigration, which they describe as critical to maintaining Denmark’s welfare state, one of the most robust in Europe. “We need to have enough money and enough room in our country, to take care of our citizens,” Nanna Grave Poulsen, a party chairwoman, told me. “All of our immigration policies need to be put in the context of the welfare issue.”

But the number of migrants and asylum-seekers Denmark has admitted has actually declined in recent years, and its overall acceptance rate has been far below the EU average. The country’s economy is strong, and research indicates that strains to the welfare state stem from an aging population, not migrants, refugees, or Danes of “non-Western background.”

The mainstreaming of far-right views—and anti-immigrant rhetoric’s ability to capture the national attention—is evident in the emergence of two new parties to the right of the Danish People’s Party: the Hard Line and the New Right, the latter of which managed to enter parliament, just exceeding the 2 percent threshold. In the months leading up to the elections, the media fixated on Hard Line leader Rasmus Paludan, a lawyer who campaigned on a platform to deport all Danish Muslims. Paludan sparked riots in April when he threw the Quran in the air and let it hit the ground during a rally in a multicultural neighborhood in the capital. Since then, the state has spent around $6 million protecting him at his campaign rallies, during which he burns the Quran or stuffs it with bacon.

Although Paludan’s Hard Line didn’t end up entering the parliament, the media’s focus on his provocations propelled him to national significance. Before the April riots, he had garnered only around 5,000 of the 20,000 signatures necessary to present his candidacy; in the days that followed, he managed to multiply his following and enter the race.

The Hard Line and New Right have both solidified the Danish People’s Party’s position as a mainstream party and undermined its appeal. “It’s terrifying that these Nazis, knocking on Parliament’s door, make the Danish People’s Party look ‘meh,’” Al-Hariri said. “But at the same time, it would be incorrect to say it’s not part of the establishment.”

“All the focus on Paludan squeezed the Danish People’s Party, which suddenly seemed moderate on immigration,” Karina Kosaria-Pedersen, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen, told me. Electorally speaking, the party’s transformation—from the margins to the mainstream—didn’t work in its favor. Its cooperation with major parties and success in dictating immigration policies made it look “more like the elite it had claimed to challenge,” she said. That new dynamic, plus an ongoing scandal over allegations of misused EU funds, have curbed the party’s steady ascent.

The Social Democrats, the clear winners of this political climate, now have to determine just how they will govern. The party has stood fast on its immigration policies. “We don’t want to lose the voters we’ve managed to take away from the far right,” Poulsen, the party chairwoman, told me. But it has also moved to the left on welfare and the environment, two critical issues for Danes. Accordingly, Prime Minister–elect Frederiksen rejected a proposal from the outgoing prime minister to enter a “grand coalition” with his conservative Liberals party, which won 75 seats. Instead, Frederiksen intends to form a minority government, working with parties across the spectrum on an ad hoc, issue-specific basis.

That won’t be easy. “She will be at odds with the left-wing parties, who want her to make concessions on immigration,” Stubager, the political scientist, said. She’s also likely to clash with conservative parties, who seek concessions on the economy; during their campaign, the Social Democrats promised to increase public spending, raise taxes on the wealthy, and make it easier for Danes to take early retirement after 40 years in the labor force. “It’s going to be a lengthy negotiation process,” Stubager said.

Stubager expects left-wing parties to “tie her down,” attempting to block Frederiksen from cooperating with the right on immigration. “They haven’t made it easy for themselves,” he said. “But I’m convinced that without their move on immigration, they wouldn’t have performed as well.’”

One Social Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the party’s slide had cemented Islamophobia into the center of Danish politics, but that Denmark wasn’t alone in this. “When it comes to our debate on immigration, the far right has won,” she told me. “The left has lost. The center has lost. This is true all over Europe.”

Source: The European Left’s Dangerous Anti-Immigrant Turn

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Is unleashing Jason Kenney on Ontario a good idea for the Tories?

2019/05/27 Leave a comment

More commentary on Alberta Premier Kenney’s plans to campaign in the 905 and other immigrant and visible minority rich ridings:

A premier spending days campaigning in a different province for an election of a different order of government: in most cases, it would be political catnip for the opposition back in his province. Alberta in 2019, I cannot say enough, is not most cases. Premier Jason Kenney could gain popularity at home if he ditches Edmonton this fall to hold fundraisers in Markham, Brampton and Mississauga, in service of flipping the federal election away from Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. A typical opposition argument would condemn the premier for wooing Ontarians while a litany of Alberta issues demand attention. But in the minds of many frustrated Albertans, ousting Trudeau is one of the province’s most pressing issues.

This clears Kenney to decamp to Toronto’s populous suburbs for a few brief stretches this fall to stump for Andrew Scheer and Conservative candidates, as the Globe and Mail reports he will. It’s a reprise of the campaign outreach Stephen Harper’s former minister did in immigrant communities in the 905 area and elsewhere in past federal elections. While Albertans will likely stomach their premier’s extra-curricular activities, it’s more of an open question what the net benefit of this would be to Scheer’s Conservatives, whose electoral fortunes could be determined in the roughly two dozen seats that ring Toronto. Will the positives outweigh the negatives?

There’s no clear successor in Scheer’s current caucus to Kenney, the longtime immigration minister and tireless ethnic outreach king who in one weekend would hopscotch from a Chinese banquet hall to a Sikh gurdwara to a Philippine picnic to a Coptic temple, collecting fistfuls of donations, volunteer signups and vote pledges along the way. Plainly, it’s not normal for the Conservatives to have a Jason Kenney, capable of politicking effectively in nearly every shard of Canada’s cultural mosaic and shake loose the Liberals’ traditional grip on new Canadians’ votes; it would likely take a team of outreach workers to accomplish what he did. Kenney has maintained and tended to his contact lists since shifting to Alberta, and retains at least some of his support base out there: members of Toronto’s Chinese community hosted a reception in his honour in March 2018, when Kenney came east to speak at the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership convention.

It took Kenney several years to hone his outreach methods and to persuade communities to abandon the Liberals in favour of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. Now both of the leaders who wooed minorities in the 905, Harper and Kenney, are off the federal ballot, having alienated those communities in the last election with policies like the “barbaric cultural practices” snitch line and bans on face-coverings at citizenship ceremonies. Scheer is an unknown commodity to many; a visiting Kenney would have to reassure voters that the new leader brings the sort of political chops and immigration system improvements they liked in 2008 and 2011, without the warts of 2015—and that Scheer is certainly not the kingpin of a motley band of racists and xenophobes that Trudeau’s Liberals contend they are. It’s no stretch to assume that if Kenney campaigns federally in Ontario, he’ll also hold fundraisers in Lower Mainland B.C. and the Montreal area—both parts of his old familiar ethnic campaign trail.

Kenney seems intent to make time-zone-hopping almost as regular an activity as premier as it was in his federal career, with his lecture and lobbying circuit in favour of Alberta oil and pipelines. On Friday, he was in Toronto to meet Mayor John Tory and speak to the C.D. Howe institute. The scoresheet, four weeks into Kenney’s premiership: two speeches in Hogtown, zero in his native Cowtown.

Will he be viewed now differently within communities he cultivated in years past? And perhaps more importantly, by voters who aren’t the target of his private fundraisers and events, and might be rankled by his fly-in work?

When he was a federal minister, it was much easier for Kenney to tell Ontarians and British Columbians that he was striving for the best results for all parts of Canada. Now, he’s premier of just one part, an Alberta-firster by design. He professes interest in bringing all Canadians the spin-off jobs and redistributed wealth from Alberta oil development, yet campaigned on a jarring proposal to rejig federal health and social transfers in a way that would substantially favour his province to the detriment of others.

Ontarians will reasonably be suspicious as to whether he has their best interests at heart. The extent to which climate change becomes a major issue in this election may influence how warmly the petro-province leader’s insertion into Ontario riding contests is received. If concerns about a warming planet and extreme weather are chief in voters’ minds, the amount of money and support Kenney raises in Brampton may be outweighed by the scorn his policies and carbon-tax opposition attracts in the rest of the province.

Some developments back in Alberta also make Kenney’s travels more of a dubious proposition. The RCMP continues to investigate alleged voter fraud perpetrated by Kenney’s 2017 campaign for the United Conservative Party leadership, and much of the scrutiny concerns Indo-Canadians in Calgary and Edmonton whose information may have been fraudulently used to obtain online voter identities. Should the investigation bear fruit—no charges have yet been laid—it would reveal the most cynical and craven version of ethnic politics in Canada, and a willingness by Kenney to embrace such dark moves. Why would a Sikh business group or a Polish Catholic Church welcome a politician who abuses his entrée into their community?

To be sure, Kenney and the federal Tories have left themselves an escape hatch: his camp says he won’t stump if it’s seen as a political liability, and the Conservatives are currently leading in the polls. But a party that can use help in a part of the country that tends to swing elections—and has no obvious candidate to provide it—Kenney’s walk down Memory Lane (that’s in Richmond Hill, right?) no doubt seems a gamble worth taking.

Source: Is unleashing Jason Kenney on Ontario a good idea for the Tories?

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Kenney will campaign in Ontario during federal election as Tories look to win back immigrant voters

2019/05/24 Leave a comment

As noted, these ridings can flip back and forth (and Doug Ford’s PCs largely won the same 905 ridings that the Liberals had won back federally).

I have considerable discomfort with such a partisan role for provincial premiers in a federal election and vice-versa whatever the party.

It will nevertheless be interesting to see how effective this strategy works with one premier who knows the issues and related limits, and one who appears largely oblivious. And obviously, Kenney will be capitalizing on the close relations he developed with many of the communities he actively courted in the past.

And the obvious question is why premiers are campaigning when they should be governing:

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney will campaign in Ontario during this fall’s general election in an effort to convince new Canadians living in suburban ridings that Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives are a safe choice for their votes.

Mr. Kenney’s journey to the Ontario heartland is a remarkable intervention by a premier in a federal campaign, a move targeted at defeating Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.

Premiers have involved themselves in federal elections in the past. Danny Williams, when he was Progressive Conservative premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, waged an Anything But Conservative campaign against Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives during the 2008 election in a dispute over equalization formulas.

Liberal Kathleen Wynne, then-premier of Ontario, worked actively in 2015 to defeat Mr. Harper and to make Mr. Trudeau prime minister, going so far as to throw her party’s provincial machine into local fights to defeat both Conservative and New Democrat candidates.

But Mr. Kenney is taking a very different approach, according to a source close to the United Conservative Party Premier; The Globe and Mail granted them anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the Premier’s behalf. Mr. Kenney will be inserting himself into what is known as the 905: the large swath of seats outside Toronto, named after its area code, whose millions of voters often determine the outcome of federal elections.

In many of those ridings, immigrant Canadians make up a majority or a large minority of voters. As immigration minister in the Harper government from 2008 to 2013, Mr. Kenney worked tirelessly and successfully to convince immigrant voters, many of whom are socially and economically conservative in outlook, that the federal Conservative Party best reflected their values.

A swing by 905 voters away from the Liberals delivered a strong minority government for the Conservatives in the 2008 election and a majority in 2011. But many of those same voters abandoned Mr. Harper for Mr. Trudeau in 2015, helping to deliver a majority government for the Liberals.

In a statement to The Globe on Wednesday, Mr. Kenney reiterated his hope that the Liberals would modify their positions on pipeline approvals and carbon taxes. However, if the Liberals do not reverse these policies, he said, “I will openly and vocally campaign here in Alberta and wherever I can make a difference across Canada to elect a Conservative government that will stand up for Alberta and for Canada.

“As I said many times during the recent [provincial] election campaign, if the Trudeau government continues with the destructive policies that undermine Alberta’s vital economic interests and put Albertans out of work, the impact on our province will be disastrous,” he said. “If Trudeau’s policies don’t change, then the federal government needs to.”

The new Alberta Premier has many bones to pick with Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals. In the Throne Speech delivered by Lieutenant-Governor Lois Mitchell Wednesday, the new government vowed to immediately scrap the carbon tax enacted by the previous NDP government of Rachel Notley. The Liberals have imposed a federal tax on any province that does not put a price on carbon. The tax is one reason Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford will also be campaigning to unseat Liberals in the next general election.

Mr. Kenney is also incensed by Bill C-69, which would impose stricter environmental conditions on proposed infrastructure-projects, including new pipelines, and Bill C-48, which would ban tanker traffic along British Columbia’s north coast. Both bills have been passed by the House of Commons and are currently before the Senate.

The federal Liberals have accused the federal Conservatives of catering to nativist voters, pointing to a pro-pipeline rally that Mr. Scheer attended at which far-right-wing activist Faith Goldy was also present, along with “yellow vest” protesters, many of whom oppose Canada’s open-door immigration policies.

The Conservatives have fought back against these accusations. “There is no home in the Conservative Party of Canada for anti-immigrant or racist sentiment,” Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel said earlier this month. “Anyone who harbours those beliefs does not have a political home in our movement.”

But Mr. Kenney’s appeal to immigrant voters may carry special weight. As immigration minister, he was indefatigable in his efforts to woo visible-minority voters, earning the nickname “minister for curry in a hurry.”

The source close to Mr. Kenney said the Premier will only campaign in Ontario if his participation is welcomed by the federal Conservatives. Some observers might speculate that looking to Mr. Ford and Mr. Kenney for help only illustrates the weakness of Mr. Scheer in the key battleground of Ontario.

But Mr. Kenney’s supporters will say that the more allies Mr. Scheer has during the campaign, the better.

At press time, Mr. Scheer’s office had not responded to a request for comment.

Liberal supporters will assert that having Mr. Kenney and Mr. Ford campaign in support of the federal Conservatives will strengthen Mr. Trudeau’s claim that only he can be counted on to fight global warming, which threatens the environment and human habitations.

But Conservatives at all levels believe that voters will join them in opposing carbon taxes as a tool to fight climate change. The outcome of the next election could hinge on which side suburban voters in Ontario choose.

Source: John Ibbitson writes

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Australia: Migrant groups hopeful for new dialogue after Fraser Anning’s political demise

2019/05/20 Leave a comment

Some reactions to the Australian election results, beyond the overall result:

With some of Australia’s most divisive politicians unsuccessful in this election, Australia’s Islamic community are hoping it will mean more productive political discussions around race.

Peter Doukas from the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia said his impression is that there has been a change in approach and he hopes the government will seize a new opportunity.

“We believe that this government has now an opportunity to embrace a more diverse agenda,” he told SBS News.

“We don’t want to see a return to the rhetoric that led to the Section 18C debates. We are hopeful that the departure of Fraser Anning and the reduction of Pauline Hanson’s presence in parliament will result in a more open and accepting debate of Australian multiculturalism, so we are looking forward to working with the Government to that effect.”

Bilal Rauf from the Australian National Imams’ Council said it would be important, going forward, the government leads for all of the country and promotes a more inclusive stance.

There’s also a sense of hope for a more rational debate, and narrative and dialogue in parliament with the departure of divisive political figures.

“There’s a sense of relief that some of the voices that have been there in the past that have really exploited an Islamophobic platform, will not be there going forward,” he said.

Mr Doukas has high hopes that progress will be made with the new parliament.

“The departure of the more extreme voices from the last parliament is encouraging. I believe Australians are decent people, and generally we are a multicultural country and a country that is accepting of multiculturalism and we look forward to the debates that will emerge from this parliament.”

But some Chinese leaders say they’re concerned their voices won’t be heard.

“If you look at the rhetoric of the Liberal party and the scare campaigns around immigration, I am myself the daughter of refugees, and for them, they’ve often feel like they’ve been shunned,” Cindy Tan, from the Chinese Australian Forum said.

“Surprise! Anyone was assuming that Labor would win, and here we have the other party, the government, winning with a big margin. It was a surprise,” Surinder Jain, the national vice president of the Hindu Council of Australia said.

Mr Jain says that within the Hindu community there have been mixed reactions to the news.

“Our community has people in both the camps. Most of the new migrants, they go for Labor. But once they’ve bought a house and a mortgage and economics becomes important, they go for Liberals, whereas some stick with their initial loyalties. So we have people in both camps. Some are happy, some are shocked, surprised. Some are elated.”

But Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s population plan to cut the permanent migration program from 190,000 to 160,000 places per year has Mr Doukas worried.

“Australia’s been built on immigration. Scott Morrison was an immigration minister at one point in his career and he would know as well as anyone else that the value of Australia is in its people and we would encourage the Government to review all policy which reduces our immigration impact as it has an economic impact,” he said.

Mr Jain says that while Australia’s transition to a multicultural community over several decades has been a challenge, he feels that there is a great deal of support for it – both from political parties and from the general public.

“From monoculture to multiculturalism has been a big change in Australia. I have seen over the last forty years how things have improved for us. There’s a very genuine desire in both the parties to make multiculturalism a success and most Australians are behind it.”

Source: Migrant groups hopeful for new dialogue after Fraser Anning’s political demise

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Nanos: Liberals, Conservatives playing in politically ‘dangerous field’ by using racism as tool to mobilize their support bases, says Nanos

2019/05/01 Leave a comment

More commentary encouraging the parties to cool the language:

The governing Liberals and opposition Conservatives are playing in a politically dangerous field by using the divisive issue of racism as a tool to mobilize their support bases for the next election, which could backfire resulting in “mutually assured destruction” for both federal parties, says a leading political analyst.

“We’re seeing an increase in weaponization of racism as a political tool to mobilize voters in Canada,” said Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founder of Nanos Research in an interview with The Hill Times.

“If we stick with our analogy, if they weaponize this, like in the old Cold War, basically, it’s mutually-assured destruction, where if either or both of those parties go too far, not only could they destroy their enemy but they could destroy themselves in the process. So, it’s a very dangerous field to play in.”

Mr. Nanos said both political parties are using this issue as a “dog whistle” where, by implication, Liberals are saying that anyone who disagrees with their stance of open immigration, including “irregular” immigration, is a “racist.” And the Conservatives are using this to tap into Canadians’ anxiety about the impact of new immigrants on their economic security, jobs, and personal security. The “subtle implication” from the Conservatives, he said, is that anyone who disagrees with them doesn’t care about Canadians and Canadian jobs. He said social media platforms have made the politically-polarized situation even worse, where now people have numerous outlets where they can express their frustrations by using racist language, openly or by remaining anonymous.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been blasting Conservative Party Leader Andrew Scheer, not pictured, accusing him of not being tough enough on racism issues. But, pollster Nik Nanos says, both the Liberals and the Conservatives should be careful not to play politics with racism. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade

Mr. Nanos said the best way to address the issue of racism is by making a case to Canadians that more immigrants are good for the future strength of the economy. Also, he said, the political leadership needs to create an environment where hard-working Canadians can earn a decent living to take care of their families.

“The reality is that probably the best policy is somewhere in the middle, where we can balance Canadian economic interests and anxiety with our needs of the country,” he said.

…

Source: Liberals, Conservatives playing in politically ‘dangerous field’ by using racism as tool to mobilize their support bases, says Nanos

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Québec 2018 : les raisons du vote

2019/02/15 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis of the recent Quebec provincial election with some good exit polling analysis that suggest immigration and head coverings were not as significant as the desire for change compared to overall impressions of the respective parties:

Chaque campagne électorale donne lieu à des stratégies de la part des partis pour convaincre les électeurs de leur accorder leur vote. Toutes s’accompagnent également d’analyses de chercheurs et de chroniqueurs relatives au succès ou à l’échec de ces approches. De même, les sondeurs posent des questions sur les enjeux considérés comme les plus importants, en employant habituellement des questions fermées. La campagne électorale québécoise de 2018 n’a pas fait exception. Mais on a tout lieu de se demander : Les stratégies partisanes fonctionnent-elles ? Sont-elles déterminantes dans le choix fait par les électeurs ?

Pour examiner ces questions, nous avons collaboré avec la firme Ipsos pour réaliser un sondage postélectoral auprès des répondants au dernier sondage préélectoral mené par la firme entre le 26 et le 28 septembre 2018. Ipsos a pu joindre 842 (67 %) des 1 250 répondants au sondage préélectoral. De ce nombre, 592 ont répondu en ligne et 250 par entrevue téléphonique. Le sondage était court, demandant aux répondants s’ils avaient voté et pour qui. De façon à obtenir une information non dirigée sur les raisons du vote, il contenait aussi une question ouverte : « Quelle est la principale raison qui explique votre vote ? » Ensuite étaient posées deux questions liées aux enjeux de la campagne : l’une sur l’immigration — vue comme un enjeu majeur à tout le moins pour les deux principaux partis —, l’autre sur l’appui à l’indépendance du Québec — considérée comme un « non-enjeu » dans cette campagne.

Les avantages de poser une question ouverte sont connus : cela donne accès à l’opinion spontanée, sans filtre, du répondant. Par contre, ce type de question est exigeant pour le répondant et, dans les entrevues téléphoniques, également pour l’intervieweur. Dans notre sondage, 70 % des répondants ont été joints par sondage Internet, ce qui rend encore plus direct l’accès à l’opinion.

Les raisons mentionnées du vote pour un parti

Notons au départ que le sondage postélectoral d’Ipsos, montrant qu’il y a eu un mouvement important vers la Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) en fin de campagne, reproduisait presque parfaitement les résultats du scrutin, sauf pour une légère sous-estimation du vote pour Québec solidaire (QS).

Les répondants ont donné des réponses plus ou moins élaborées à la question ouverte. Celles-ci étaient constituées soit d’un seul groupe de mots — « le changement », « l’environnement », « c’est mon parti » — soit d’une ou plusieurs phrases. Ipsos a effectué un premier codage des réponses : elle a élaboré un plan permettant de regrouper l’ensemble des raisons mentionnées en un nombre réduit de codes thématiques et a codé la première raison mentionnée par chaque répondant. Nous avons vérifié et validé ce codage initial. De plus, pour nous assurer d’avoir le portrait le plus complet possible de toutes les raisons mentionnées, nous avons codé une deuxième raison lorsque cela était justifié, en utilisant les mêmes codes que ceux élaborés par Ipsos. En codant cette deuxième mention, nous avons tenu compte de toute mention d’enjeux — immigration, environnement, etc. — qui n’aurait pas été codée au départ. Nous avons ajouté un code spécifique lorsqu’un répondant mentionnait les « valeurs du parti » comme raison de son vote.

Au total, 673 personnes ont déclaré avoir voté, et plus de 97 % d’entre elles ont indiqué au moins une raison pour expliquer leur vote. En additionnant les premières et deuxièmes raisons mentionnées, 739 réponses en tout ont été codées. Le tableau ci-dessous présente les raisons données par les répondants en fonction de leur choix politique. Comme nous avons codé jusqu’à deux raisons, la somme des pourcentages pour chaque parti dépasse 100 %. Les raisons les plus fréquemment mentionnées étaient l’appréciation positive du parti pour lequel les répondants ont voté (25 %) et, à l’opposé, la volonté de changement et de « se débarrasser des libéraux » (25 %). Il existe toutefois de multiples autres raisons, dont les proportions variaient fortement selon les partis.

Le vote pour le Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ) est un vote positif, d’appréciation, pour 36 % des répondants qui ont appuyé ce parti. Les répondants parlent de leur opinion favorable à l’égard des politiques et des idées du parti comme de son chef, de même que du gouvernement sortant. On peut ajouter la mention de la santé de l’économie et de la gestion des finances publiques (13 %) parmi les raisons positives. Le PLQ est aussi perçu comme le parti qui protège les droits des anglophones (7 %). Par ailleurs, il y a 7 % des répondants qui mentionnent « avoir toujours voté pour ce parti », et encore 7 % pour qui le candidat local est la principale raison du vote. On peut ensuite regrouper ceux qui ont voté contre les autres partis ou par élimination (en choisissant le parti « le moins pire »), soit 12 % des répondants. Qu’en est-il des enjeux considérés comme majeurs ? Le fait que le PLQ soit un parti fédéraliste est mentionné par 7 %, et l’immigration — un vote à l’encontre de la proposition de la CAQ de réduire le nombre d’immigrants — par 5 %.

https://e.infogram.com/989c7136-530d-4a88-b65a-bb8a38d14e19?src=embed#async_embed

Passons maintenant au deuxième parti « traditionnel », le Parti québécois (PQ). L’appréciation positive du parti ou de son chef est mentionnée par 20 % des répondants ; 13 % indiquent avoir voté pour ce parti par habitude, parce que c’est « leur parti ». L’appréciation du candidat local (20 %) est presque aussi fréquente que l’appréciation du parti. Le vote par élimination, contre les autres partis, est mentionné par 13 % de ceux qui ont appuyé le PQ. Seuls 4 % indiquent la volonté de changement. Qu’en est-il des grands enjeux ? La souveraineté est mentionnée par 14 % des répondants, et l’immigration, par aucun. Tout comme pour le PLQ, très peu nomment l’environnement. Le PQ apparaît malgré tout comme le parti pour lequel la question nationale est la plus importante.

Pour ce qui est de QS, le parti se démarque par une forte appréciation positive de ses positions et politiques en général (33 % des répondants), qui est presque aussi prononcée dans le cas du PLQ, suivie de la volonté de voter « à gauche » (9 %) et de l’appréciation du candidat local (7 %). La volonté de changement est mentionnée par 16 % des répondants. Par contre, le vote par élimination, contre les autres partis, rejoint 7 % des répondants. Pour ce qui est des grands dossiers, QS se distingue par le fait que ses supporteurs sont préoccupés par l’environnement (21 %), un enjeu qu’ils sont presque les seuls à mentionner. Pratiquement aucun ne nomme l’immigration ou l’indépendance du Québec. Les répondants qui ont soutenu QS sont proportionnellement les plus nombreux à mentionner les valeurs défendues par le parti comme raison de leur vote (10 %).

Comment se caractérise le parti qui a pris le pouvoir dans cet univers ? Le vote pour la CAQ apparaît d’abord et avant tout comme un vote négatif. Près de 55 % des répondants qui ont appuyé la CAQ invoquent la nécessité d’un changement et la volonté de chasser les libéraux du pouvoir, et 8 % déclarent avoir voté pour « le moins pire » des partis ou contre les autres partis. À peine plus de 17 % indiquent une appréciation positive du parti, de ses politiques et de son chef. Les autres raisons — candidat local, économie et finances — ont retenu peu d’attention. L’immigration, perçue par certains observateurs comme « la question de l’urne », n’est mentionnée que par cinq répondants. La question nationale n’est pas du tout mentionnée. Après avoir recherché toute réponse relative à l’enjeu de la laïcité, nous avons trouvé une seule mention de la laïcité et deux mentions relatives à la chrétienté, mais aucune du port de signes religieux.

Les répondants qui ont appuyé un autre parti indiquent surtout le vote par élimination, contre les autres partis (47 %), et dans une moindre mesure l’appréciation positive du parti qu’ils ont choisi (31 %). Notons enfin que la santé et les bénéfices pour la famille se trouvent dans la catégorie « autres », vu la très faible fréquence de mentions.

Que conclure de ces données ? Les répondants font surtout une appréciation globale des positions des partis, plutôt qu’une appréciation liée à un enjeu en particulier. L’immigration ne se révèle pas un enjeu premier dans la décision du vote, pas plus que la laïcité de l’État. La question nationale n’est pas non plus une question centrale, et elle est mentionnée presque exclusivement par les électeurs du PQ et du PLQ. L’environnement constitue le premier enjeu exclusif des répondants qui ont voté pour QS. Enfin, ceux qui ont appuyé la CAQ sont les plus homogènes dans leurs raisons de vote : c’est le changement et le vote par élimination qui sont les plus fréquemment mentionnés. Les enjeux mis en avant par ce parti ont été « avalés » par la volonté de changement. Comment ces réponses spontanées se comparent-elles aux réponses aux questions fermées ?

Les deux enjeux majeurs qui ont été sondés directement

Les répondants se répartissent presque également entre ceux qui pensent qu’il faut réduire l’immigration (44 %) et ceux qui disent qu’il ne faut rien changer (42 %). Moins de 14 % considèrent qu’il faut augmenter le nombre d’immigrants. La figure 1 montre, comme on peut s’y attendre, que la réduction de l’immigration est nettement plus populaire chez les électeurs qui sont en faveur de la CAQ (61 %) que chez les autres, et un peu plus populaire chez ceux qui ont voté pour le PQ (50 %). Tant les supporteurs du PLQ que de QS sont majoritairement favorables (54 %) à un maintien de la situation actuelle. À peine 20 % de ces électeurs se prononcent pour une réduction de l’immigration et un peu plus de 20 % pour une augmentation. Il n’y a pas de différence significative sur l’enjeu de l’immigration entre ceux qui ont appuyé QS et ceux qui ont voté pour le PLQ. Notons qu’environ le tiers des répondants qui ont choisi la CAQ et le PQ sont également favorables à un maintien de la situation actuelle.

https://e.infogram.com/1223e48b-9330-4f0a-b168-b2200d703f45?src=embed#async_embed

Pour ce qui est de la question nationale, 12 % de l’ensemble des répondants se disent « très favorables » et 20 % « assez favorables » à l’indépendance du Québec, « c’est-à-dire que le Québec ne fasse plus partie du Canada », comme précisé dans la question posée, pour un total de 32 %. Comme le montre la figure 2, les indépendantistes se trouvent surtout au PQ (78 % des répondants qui ont voté pour ce parti si on additionne les « très favorables » et « assez favorables ») et dans une moindre mesure à QS (47 %). Les supporteurs de la CAQ favorisent cette option à 33 % et ceux du PLQ à 5 % à peine. On constate, tout comme dans les réponses aux questions ouvertes, que la question nationale différencie d’abord et avant tout les partis traditionnels, le PLQ et le PQ. Les deux autres partis regroupent à la fois des électeurs favorables et défavorables à l’indépendance.

https://e.infogram.com/03a3f35a-3322-482e-9179-25abe05838eb?src=embed#async_embed

Il est possible de tirer plusieurs conclusions des résultats de notre enquête. Lorsqu’ils révèlent spontanément les raisons de leur vote, les répondants sont peu enclins à mentionner des enjeux précis. L’appréciation positive globale d’un parti, de ses politiques, de sa direction, est caractéristique de ceux qui ont appuyé le PLQ et QS, alors que le vote « contre » est caractéristique de ceux qui ont voté pour la CAQ. L’attachement au parti — le vote « parce que c’est mon parti », celui « pour lequel j’ai toujours voté » — est plus fréquent chez les électeurs favorables aux partis traditionnels, le PLQ et le PQ. Pour ce qui est des enjeux, celui qui différencie le plus les partis est l’environnement, l’enjeu de prédilection de QS. Ni l’immigration ni la laïcité n’apparaissent importantes parmi les raisons spontanées du vote.

Pour ce qui est des réponses aux questions fermées, l’immigration différencie les partis, mais pas de façon absolue. On trouve des supporteurs de la CAQ favorables à un maintien du nombre d’immigrants et des supporteurs du PLQ favorables à une réduction, et ce, dans une proportion non négligeable. La similitude des positions des répondants qui ont appuyé QS et le PLQ sur cette question doit être soulignée. Enfin, en ce qui concerne la question nationale, elle continue à différencier le PLQ et le PQ mais pas vraiment les autres partis. Il faut souligner que l’appui à des positions précises de certains partis ne constitue pas une raison nécessaire ou suffisante pour voter pour ces partis, comme en témoignent les différences entre les raisons spontanées mentionnées pour expliquer le vote et l’appui à certaines politiques phares des partis.

Nos conclusions sont similaires à celles de Charles Breton et Justin Savoie qui utilisent une méthodologie très différente — une analyse conjointe — et un échantillon panel Web de convenance pour étudier l’impact d’enjeux prédéfinis sur le vote. Eux aussi concluent que la question nationale est l’enjeu qui différencie les électeurs libéraux et péquistes. Pour ce qui est de l’immigration, ils estiment que l’appui à la proposition d’augmenter le nombre d’immigrants est celle qui diminue le plus les probabilités de voter pour la CAQ. Nos données montrent que cette proposition recueille à peine 22 % d’appuis chez les électeurs qui ont voté pour le PLQ.

Cet article fait partie du dossier Élections Québec 2018.

Source: Québec 2018 : les raisons du vote

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Sex abuse cases color immigration debate before Finnish election

2019/01/16 Leave a comment

Likely impact on upcoming April election:

The parliamentary heads of two of Finland’s largest parties have called for action after investigations against 19 foreign-born men on suspicion of sexual abuse of minors.

The issue has boosted the support of the anti-immigration, populist The Finns Party, whose popularity jumped two points to over 10 percent in the latest poll published by the national broadcaster YLE ahead of a parliamentary election on April 14.

Police have said there were foreign-born men among the 16 investigated for rape or other sexual abuses of adolescent girls in the town of Oulu over the last two months. On Sunday, police in Helsinki said they had arrested three foreign-born men on similar charges.

Antti Kaikkonen, parliamentary head of the coalition-leading Centre Party, called for a meeting of all the parliamentary party heads, tweeting: “Everyone who comes to Finland has to follow the local laws.”

Antti Lindtman, parliamentary head of the main opposition party, the Social Democrats, said: “The question is, are there measures we could take now – even during this term – to prevent cowardly crimes like these? Yes, there are.”

Prime Minister Juha Sipila tweeted that the government would discuss the “inhuman and reprehensible events” twice next week.

The topic is shocking for many in Finland, which sees itself as one of the safest and happiest countries on earth.

A citizens’ initiative to withdraw asylum from people convicted of a sex crime has doubled its signatures in just a few days and reached 25,000 on Sunday – half the total needed to force parliament to consider the issue.

The country of 5.5 million people has historically had very few immigrants. But the issue has become more fraught since the European refugee crisis of 2015, which caused the number of asylum seekers to almost quadruple to 28,208 in 2016.

Statistics Finland says around 1,200 cases of sexual abuse of minors are reported to the police each year, and that foreigners were involved in 18 percent of the cases that came to trial last year.

Lindtman proposed toughening the penalties for sex crimes against minors and withdrawing asylum from people convicted of serious violent or sexual crimes.

Source: Sex abuse cases color immigration debate before Finnish election

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Visible minorities form majority in 41 federal ridings, but experts say immigrants are politically diverse

2019/01/14 Leave a comment

Overview of some of the issues:
Abdikheir Ahmed vividly remembers casting his ballot for the first time in Winnipeg’s 2010 municipal election. Not only was he excited, he had an entourage.

“I brought my family. I brought my kids. I brought everyone,” Ahmed said. “It was the first time in my life that I voted.”

The 39-year-old Winnipeg resident arrived in Canada from Somalia as a refugee in 2003. It took several years before he could legally vote as a Canadian citizen, but he was eager to do so.

“I feel that I have a responsibility to decide the direction that this country goes in,” said Ahmed.

Now, he runs Immigration Partnership Winnipeg, an organization that helps immigrants and refugees get settled in that city. Visible minorities make up one-quarter of the population in Winnipeg, according to Statistics Canada, though not all are recent immigrants.

Volunteers with Immigration Partnership Winnipeg launch the ‘Got Citizenship? Go Vote!’ campaign in August 2018. (Submitted by Immigration Partnership Winnipeg)

It’s become conventional wisdom in Canadian politics that immigrant voters can have a powerful influence in elections.

According to Ahmed, immigrants — new or long-settled — are a potentially powerful block of voters.

“It actually makes sense to court the so-called immigrant vote because that is the determining factor, and it’s a growing population,” said Ahmed.

But as the battle begins for this year’s federal election, experts say no party has a monopoly on any particular ethnic group or religious minority.

Myth or reality?

Canada’s major parties have been competing for immigrant voters since the 1960s, according University of Toronto political science professor Phil Triadafilopoulos.

“The main sources of immigration were different then, but the dynamics were very similar. It’s an urban Canadian story,” said Triadafilopoulos.

In the 2019 federal election, ridings in Toronto and Vancouver are considered key battlegrounds that can make-or-break a party. Both have high Chinese and South Asian populations.

But they aren’t the only cities where politicians are courting ethnic voters.

Certain very racist policies, like the Barbaric Cultural Practices Act and tip line … woke up communities to actually say, ‘We cannot tolerate this in our country.’– Abdikheir Ahmed, Immigration Partnership Winnipeg

Andrew Griffith, a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and the Environics Institute, says data on immigration and ethno-cultural diversity from the 2016 census shows many Canadian communities now have a larger percentage of visible minority residents than in 2011.

Of 338 federal ridings in Parliament, 41 have populations where visible minorities form the majority, compared with 33 five years earlier.

“Parties, when they’re developing their electoral strategies, take that into account in terms of how they advocate policies and programs to attract them,” said Griffith.

What’s more difficult is pinning down whether immigrant voters have partisan preferences.

New Canadians could once be counted on to vote Liberal, ever since Pierre Trudeau opened the door to more immigration in the 1970s, but that unwavering endorsement became less pronounced over the past decade.

Griffith says recent polling data suggests some ethnic communities still lean toward certain parties. Sikh-Canadians, for example, have a “general tendency” to vote Liberal and NDP, while Conservatives enjoy more support among Chinese-Canadians.

But, Griffith cautions, “We should never make the assumption that all members of the community are identical and behave the same way, whether it be in the polling booth or in other aspects.”

Encouraging newcomers to vote

In Winnipeg, Ahmed says it shouldn’t even be assumed new immigrants will exercise their franchise. He’s working to mobilize visible minority and newcomers who have earned citizenship to vote in this year’s federal election.

“Many newcomers have never voted in their own countries or have engaged in electoral processes that are not transparent, so do not actually trust the process and don’t see the importance of voting in it,” said Ahmed.

To encourage refugees and immigrants to vote in last fall’s municipal election, Ahmed’s non-partisan group launched a electoral campaign with the slogan “Got Citizenship, Go Vote.”

Immigration Partnership Winnipeg developed posters and videos on how and where to vote that were translated into 12 different languages, and concentrated on ethno-cultural community organizations to get the message out.

Ahmed’s impression is that immigrants don’t vote in blocks, but he says ethnic communities will respond electorally if they feel targeted by an issue.

For example, when the federal Tories campaigned in 2015 on policies such as banning the niqab at citizenship ceremonies or setting up a “barbaric cultural practices” tip line, Ahmed says it spurred newcomers to vote against them.

“The messaging from the Conservative Party came across as anti-immigrant,” said Ahmed.

“Certain very racist policies like the Barbaric Cultural Practices Act and tip line … woke up communities to actually say, ‘We cannot tolerate this in our country.'”

It’s a point echoed by Triadafilopoulos, who suggests large numbers of immigrant voters is one of the reasons Canada has not experienced the same kind of xenophobic populism sweeping Europe and the United States.

“The demographic and institutional facts [in Canada] just make it a losing proposition,” he said.

Source: Canadian politicians will court the ethnic vote, but will it benefit any one party?For years, the Liberals could count on votes from immigrant communities, but with visible minorities a majority in 41 federal ridings, experts say that newcomers are politically diverse — and offer no guarantees for any one party.Cross Country Checkup |3 hours ago|

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Germany’s election and the educational polarisation of voters | Times Higher Education (THE)

2017/09/28 Leave a comment

Interesting analysis:

Germany has voted. Angela Merkel is weakened, but she remains chancellor and is now seeking new coalition partners for government.

Instead of focusing on what the election means for German higher education and research policy – which probably won’t become clear until months of coalition negotiations have concluded – I want to highlight some interesting voting patterns among German graduates.

In the United States and the UK, it’s now a commonplace observation that voters seem increasingly divided by levels of education rather than traditional cleavages like levels of income. In the ballots of 2016 and 2017, graduates tended to take the side of more open, pro-cosmopolitan parties and politicians (Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, Hillary Clinton, Remain in the UK’s EU referendum) against more closed, nationalistic forces (Theresa May’s Conservatives, Leave, Donald Trump).

You can certainly quibble with these groupings, but the overall trend is unmistakable.

For example, in this year’s UK general election, graduates were 10 percentage points less likely to back the Conservatives, and nine percentage points more likely to vote for Labour, than the broader voting public.

The divide was even starker last year during the EU referendum, when 68 per cent of graduates voted to remain.

Meanwhile, in the US election, Clinton won college graduates by a nine percentage point margin, while Trump won everyone else by eight points. “This is by far the widest gap in support among college graduates and non-college graduates in exit polls dating back to 1980,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Is the same thing happening in Germany? Ostensibly not – German graduates seem more in line with their fellow citizens than in the UK or the US. This is most clearly visible when you look at the graduate vote share for Germany’s political parties arranged on the left to right political spectrum:

In terms of the bigger parties, graduates were a little less likely than other voters to vote for Merkel’s conservatives (CDU/CSU) – but exactly the same was true of the social democrats (SPD).German graduates voting patterns

Graduates were both more likely to opt for the radically left-wing Die Linke – and the almost diametrically opposed (at least on economic matters) Free Democratic Party (FDP). This feels very different from the US and UK, where graduates have come down heavily on one side or the other in the votes of the past two years.

Why might this be? A couple of potential reasons spring to mind. Germany is famed for the quality of its vocational education, which, although under pressure, still offers the hope of a well respected and remunerated life course that does not require university. Non-graduates are perhaps less likely to be economically “left behind” than in other countries.

There is also still no real equivalent of the Ivy League, Oxbridge or the grandes écoles in Germany, meaning that attending (a certain type of) university is arguably less of a prerequisite for power and influence.

But have a look at the chart again – there are nonetheless signs that educational polarisation is beginning to take root in Germany.

Graduates heavily backed the Greens, who, aside from their environmental policies, are known as supporters of multiculturalism, and have several high-profile leaders with a Turkish family background. The AfD on the other hand are emphatically against multiculturalism and have leaders who have made a series of brazenly racist statements; they were largely shunned by voters who have been to university.

As the AfD’s entry into parliament shows, Germany is not immune from the divisions afflicting the UK, the US and many other European countries. It will be interesting to see if the country becomes just as polarised on educational grounds as well.

Source: Germany’s election and the educational polarisation of voters | Times Higher Education (THE)

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