3 ms·

Exactly! While our (Czech Republic) voting system is far from perfect (the current president is rather controversial and the prime minister is a populist with s

Exactly! While our (Czech Republic) voting system is far from perfect (the current president is rather controversial and the prime minister is a populist with some rather shady financial deals) political parties regularly go out of business if they fuck up strong enough. And this system will likely also fix the current problems over time, resulting in possibly less bad state. Having just two parties is insane, that simply means they can get away with anything & just take turns once in a while as voters have no other choice.

aerovistae 6y ago
I was under the impression from recent reading that the situation in Czechia is really bad with mass protests and serious problems. You're happy with the system though?
- m4rtink 6y ago
  There were some protests against anti covid measure a few weeks ago that got quite a bit of publicity due to taking place on the iconic Old Town Square in Prague - but nothing relly major or really ongoing. The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september. I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year. Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I assume that you guys have some version of proportional representation. The US doesn't. It would take a complete rewrite of the US constitution to get rid of the two party system.
- humanrebar 6y ago
  Re-empowering electors could help with respect to presidential elections. Popular election of senators really ties our hands at the senate level, though. Point being, it is difficult to turn a plurality into a compromise majority without either a runoff or a delegated negotiation of some sort. Parliamentary systems have that baked in, of course.

aerovistae 6y ago

I was under the impression from recent reading that the situation in Czechia is really bad with mass protests and serious problems. You're happy with the system though?

m4rtink 6y ago
There were some protests against anti covid measure a few weeks ago that got quite a bit of publicity due to taking place on the iconic Old Town Square in Prague - but nothing relly major or really ongoing. The situation is not perfect and the protest not without merit, as the government preatty much squandered any success we had handling the first wave of covid by doing preatty much no preparations, releasing almost all restrictions and then failed to respond in time when things turned for the worse in september. I guess it can make people angry, if their livelyhood is in danger due to the restrictive measures needed after you fuck up the initial response to the second wave like we did here. Still violent protest is not really an answer and it was indeed an one-off so far. Hopefully people will remeber at least a bit of they not to vote the populist currently in power during the next elections next year. Also there are regular protests in Belarus and now even in Poland these days that are bigger by many orders of magnitude that what we managed to pull off here since the Velvet Revolution when indeed preatty much everyone was in the streats, which resulted in the fall of the soviet aligned comunist regime back then.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago

I assume that you guys have some version of proportional representation. The US doesn't. It would take a complete rewrite of the US constitution to get rid of the two party system.

humanrebar 6y ago
Re-empowering electors could help with respect to presidential elections. Popular election of senators really ties our hands at the senate level, though. Point being, it is difficult to turn a plurality into a compromise majority without either a runoff or a delegated negotiation of some sort. Parliamentary systems have that baked in, of course.