A party desperately looking for its electoral result

I’ve just talked to a friend and he didn’t believe me, so I imagine you are finding it difficult to believe, but I have to tell you the truth: The votes of F! were not counted yesterday. All we have is a survey published the very moment when the voting stations were closing, according to which F! would have obtained 1%. But I insist: this is a survey, not real counting. And nothing will be said officially until Wesnesday. I agree this is not easy to believe, but let me tell you about it.

   
This is what newspapers say today, as it can be seen in the table below: with practically 100% of votes counted, the Alliance of four right wing parties (M, C, Fp and Kd) has 48% of the votes, while 46.2% went to the Coalition of the Social democrats, Green Party and Left Party (S, V and Mp). The box ‘Others’ (Övriga in the table) has got 5.7% (2.8% more than in 2002 election. - these figures are in parenthesis).

 

26.1% 97 (15,2) M

7.9% 29 (6,1) C

7.5% 28 (13,3) Fp

6.6% 24 (9,1) Kd

35.2% 130 (39,8) S

5,8% 22 (8,3) V

5.2% 19 (4,6) Mp

5.7% 0 (2,8) Övriga

No surprising that newspapers don’t care about who they are, those Övriga. But the thing is that the Election Authority didn’t even count them either. Yesterday, when the voting stations closed, people there started counting. They made eight boxes and were ticking on them. One of these boxes was Övriga: Others. These are simply the parties which are not currently in the parliament.  Yes, like that! I showed it with my own eyes, as we say in Spain, and this has just been confirmed to me on the phone by the Central Electoral Office. They have told me that they started counting and separating Others this morning and they will have been finished by Wednesday. There will not be official estimations before that.

            
It seems almost sure that no party below 'Others' will arrive to the 4% of votes which anyone would need to enter the Parliament, but you will agree anyway that the system is not very nice to small parties: It makes them non-existent in the very day of the elections by not counting their votes, which means also not talking about them that very day where people care about elections. Then the cake of seats is distributed among the big ones without even referring to the (at least theoretical) possibility that one of them could arrive to 4%. Isn’t this arrogant?  It is so weird that one can only look for technical reasons to explain such nonsense. And, as the much less developed Spain counts much more small parties, and it is done in the same night of elections, it is easier for Spanish people to think that poor Maria is crazy. It is easier for Swedish people to think that poor Maria is a foreigner, and that’s why she says crazy things. But no! Dear Spanish and Swedish friends, dear friends in the entire world, it is as I tell you: Logic is one thing and the logic of the system is another thing. Systems are not logic sometimes. By the way, all the electoral systems I know penalize the small parties, only that they do it in different ways (In Spain, for instance, with the D’Hont method of distributing seats), but maybe this is less obvious.

            
The after-election party at F! was a bit plain. We had the survey that gives us 1%, but that survey hadn’t been that accurate with the big parties, as we were seeing. At one point in the evening, we arrived to that figure of 5.7% for 'Others'. This could give F! the 1% needed to be considered a ‘real’ political party for next elections (and then the system, instead of F! militants, would be responsible for providing the voting bulletins and have them available in all voting stations, but still F! would be in the box Others when counting). Maybe that 5.7% of 'Others' gives F! the 2.5% necessary to have back some of the money spent in the campaign. This is possible but less probable, as looking to the counting at this time in the afternoon it seems to me that some of the Other votes are going to the extreme right wing party. This party is Others. We are Others. I don’t like to be in the same boat than these people, but it seems that the system has put us together. We are obliged to stand in this weird company until Wednesday. Then we’ll have F! individual result and maybe some newspapers will refer to it in one line, or maybe nobody will talk about; after all, elections are already over today. This is a smart way to protect the Ones against the Others. Gosh, I say! It is quite a way!

       
Feminist Initiative will continue to build itself anyway. There are many people here that have taken the decision to go forward, whatever the obstacles we find in our way.

María