MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
A repeat of the Corbyn surprise in United States?
By Gwynne Dyer - Jeremy “Jez” Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are very much alike - and so are their ambitions. Corbyn wants to lead Britain's Labour Party into the next election and become prime minister; Sanders wants to win the Democratic Party nomination and become the next President of the United States. And then each man plans to turn his country sharply to the left. Read full article
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Disclaimer & comment rulesFederal Labor in Australia also has started 'experimenting' with electing its leader like UK Labour. They are now stuck with a pretty uninspiring leader who would have won the next election only because our PM was pretty terrible. Now we have a new PM and Labor are stuck with Shorten who isn't looking like that great a choice now.
Sep 29th, 2015 - 11:06 am - Link - Report abuse 0Labor in the UK are stuck with Corbyn because they were stupid enough to change a system that worked.
Thankfully the centre-right parties won't be so stupid.
Sanders and Corbyn's increasing popularity are a testament to the failure of corporatist leaders to make a difference.
Sep 29th, 2015 - 04:29 pm - Link - Report abuse 0The U.S. would leap ahead as a country under the leadership of Sanders. In too many fields, the country remains deeply backward, and Sanders is acutely aware of the need to come up to speed with other developed and more balanced countries such as the Scandinavian ones.
The U.S. is alone among developed countries that does not provide comprehensive health care to all its citizens; its numbers of incarcerated in relation to population are the highest in the world, and the disingenuous emergence of for-profit, privately owned prisons has not helped.
Yes, the world needs more Sanders and Corbyns to forge ahead.
Sanders and Corbyn
Sep 29th, 2015 - 06:38 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Hilary Clinton and Diane abbot
David Cameron and Angela Merkel
Cristina Kirchner and the pope,
Hey,
It’s the rainy season,
It will soon pass…lol
.
Enrique
Sep 29th, 2015 - 09:40 pm - Link - Report abuse 0I'm not sure where you get this notion that these politicians are “popular” unless you mean they are attractive to their own party.
The task of getting elected isn't to make yourself solely attractive or popular to the people that will already vote for you. It is to avail yourself to those that might not vote for you. In these cases, to those Conservatives and Republicans that might find you palatable to their more centrist position.
UK Labour, by letting any party member vote to help choose their leader have elected someone that appeals to them. Solely them. Corbyn doesn't appeal to the right faction of his own party and he doesn't appeal to wavering centrists that change their vote frequently. And he definitely doesn't appeal to the left faction of Conservative voters.
So Corbyn is popular within only a narrow segment of the electorate. A party's task is to appeal to the widest segment of the electorate.
As for the US, the same problem is evident. Anyone too far to the left or right wing appeal to the centre and will lose their votes.
As neither of these countries have compulsory attendance at elections, you will find that many of these swinging voters will simply choose not to vote at all if no one is taking the centre.
@2
Sep 29th, 2015 - 10:34 pm - Link - Report abuse 0Enrique, Corbyn didn't win an election to become leader of the labour party, he was chosen by his own party members. He is currently flowering himself up in an effort to appeal to the British public, but take it from me, his policies and beliefs are deeply disagreeable with most of the UK electorate. For example, agreeing to work with that Scottish bitch to do away with our nuclear weapons is not going to win him many votes at all, not to mention doing away with the monarchy and sharing sovereignty of the Falklands with Argentina. Trust me, they are not vote winning policies in the UK and the Labour Party will probably get rid of him before the next general election.
It is ironic that all Sanders is advocating is a watered down New Deal.
Oct 02nd, 2015 - 01:41 am - Link - Report abuse 0And it will be soaked in corruption.
Oct 02nd, 2015 - 06:29 pm - Link - Report abuse 0http://en.mercopress.com/2015/09/29/a-repeat-of-the-corbyn-surprise-in-united-states#comment416047: The sort of corruption represented by, for instance, Jack Abramoff or Tom DeLay?
Oct 07th, 2015 - 01:53 am - Link - Report abuse 0Commenting for this story is now closed.
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