The NA and US Party can be considered the big winners of Monday’s elections, although UP remained the biggest party. It nevertheless lost one seat each to NA and US Party, while the DP maintained its two seats, so that the 7-4-2-2 seat division of 2014
has now become 5-5-3-2.
Another government with NA, US Party and DP would have a two-thirds majority of 10 of the 15 Parliament seats. The same goes for a UP/NA as well as a UP/US Party/DP coalition. Both NA and UP could also work only with the US Party, based on a minimal majority of 8 seats.
The turnout was almost five per cent lower than two years ago, which brought down the seat quota despite an increase in eligible voters. This may indicate some are fed up with politics, possibly because of the many changes government facilitated by so-called “ship-jumping” in the legislature, which was basically the reason citizens had to go back to the polls after two years instead of the normal four.
Another concern remains the relatively large number of invalid votes at 373, despite efforts to explain the process and the fact that filling in only one circle with a red pencil doesn’t seem that hard to do. Two years ago several of these votes were still declared valid on review, so this may well happen again.
None of the parties currently without representation in Parliament earned a seat, although one came fairly close. This shows that breaking into the existing political establishment is never easy, but perhaps if more of them had joined forces they could have made it.
Undoubtedly the best news is that the election was again practically incident-free. Most parties had also removed their roadside campaign materials by Saturday midnight as Justice Minister Edson Kirdindongo ordered and their supporters generally kept a reasonable distance from the voting bureaus too.
The people have spoken and elected their representatives. How the latter continue in the sense of governing the country is now up to them, but it takes both the legislative and executive branches to do so.
