[pp.int.general] General Elections in the UK

[Boris Turovskiy]

Hi,
first of all I would like to sincerely congratulate on that result - we 
started with less in our first election in Germany and the climate of 
this GE hasn't been friendly to outsider parties (not to say the the 
British electoral system isn't so in general). So it's actually great 
news and a great result - grats everybody!

However, I'd like to comment on one point which seems to have been the 
major topic of many discussions yesterday night and of today's press 
coverage and which you seem to implicate as well - that the election has 
been a "mess" and a "disaster with no one winning". For people who've 
been following the results from, say, Germany, the moaning that arose 
when a "hung parliament" became more and more likely was quite 
bewildering - here, it's a parliament (on federal or state level) which 
has a party with absolute majority that would more likely be a cause for 
consternation. On the other hand, I thought that the Israeli, for 
example, may find the debates about the problems of the emerging 
5-party-system in Germany (hopefully to be extended to 6-party when we 
enter the parliaments^^) equally strange, being used to government 
coalitions of like 8 parties.

Without expanding further on merits and issues of specific electoral and 
voting systems I think this is a great lesson for all of us in the 
international organization which is PPI that even things being taken for 
granted on a national level - like the question "what is democratic" - 
may be very disputed and not in the least obvious across different 
countries and traditions:)

By the way, as democracy is certainly an imoprtant issue to Pirates and 
elections are key to democracy, are you planning to comment both on the 
problems during the election (like people being prevented from voting) 
in the short term and on the topic of electoral reform (as it seems that 
this may become a major topic) in the middle term, as those issues will 
surely be coming up?

Best regards,
Boris