It's not the time that's the issue. It's the eye-watering sums of money you cunts donate to let a politician run a campaign.
What the fuck does someone need $450m for?! Use that to provide support for the homeless, feed the poor, and protect children that need a stable home. You could do so much with that money.
if it was up to the average american, we wouldn't have that shit. unfortunately our society is puppeted by the rich to a very unhealthy degree at the moment. i hope that changes soon and maybe give us the opportunity to revolution some of them away.
And Americans only have to pick one out of two opposing parties. How hard can it be?
The problem is two-fold. The majority of Americans are passively informed, and the majority of our news publications are compromised by wealthy owners.
Also, it’s two months, not three. Early voting ballots go out in the end of September.
and the majority of our news publications are compromised by wealthy owners
This is true in the vast majority of European countries too. If anything, you usually find an exception in a public broadcasting channel, which may or may not be influenced by political officials.
The US has NPR and access to foreign news services, they are just absolutely disgustingly lazy.
You have way more faith in NPR these days than I do. If you haven't noticed the massive decline in quality of journalistic integrity there I don't know what to tell you.
Passively informed is an understatement, also we're supposed to be available to work at a moments call, with limited time off availability. Am I gonna just tell my boss I'm leaving early to go vote?
I mean.... Yes?!??... If it's normal for a boss to chew you out for voting, then they're being more transparent about voter suppression than I thought.
It goes deeper than that. Those same news Publications are financially incentivized to prolong and protract the election seasons. They work incredibly hard to not talk about policies are issues but to focus on process stories. They've created this notion that there's not enough time for an election.
That's why you seem to think two months isn't enough time. When it's plenty.
You can get rid of your prime ministers pretty easily if they suck. We’re electing what is now essentially a king for at least the next 4 years.
Or hopefully, this time around, a Queen
Let the Americans have their fun. They love plot twists, a bit of pageantry and pizazz. While they certainly don’t NEED a year-long election cycle, most Americans actively seem to enjoy it.
It creates opportunities to vigorously debate the opposition, run some nice smear campaigns, do a bit of backstabbing, schmooze the big donors, kiss a few babies and add in the odd assassination attempt. You just can’t fit all that drama in a one month cycle like we Europeans like to do.
I wish it was only a year. Lately it’s been about a 4 year cycle for the presidential race
my favorite UK shitpost was liz truss, very funny.
Lasting shorter than a letuce
lettuce liz baby!
And then there's Belgium, which apparently holds the world record for longest time without a government. At least introduce time limits for negotiations, guys…
One positive on the Dutch coalition talks. We can always say that our southern neighbours take even longer...
On a more serious note, the last three coalition talks in the Netherlands took over 200 days, with one taking 299 days. Sure, not even close to over 500 days in Belgium, but how the hell does this happen?
It is kinda trolling how you can just call an election when you think your party will do best
But it can also go horribly wrong. For example, Cameron called the Brexit referendum without wanting Brexit, which did not go as planned
If american democracy was good, other countries would be using it.
More education, please. I'm American.
How does this process function?
How does it change the ratchet right effect seen in the US?
In a parliamentary system, Prime Ministers aren't elected by popular vote, but instead chosen by Parliament. It's basically like if the Speaker of the House were also the President.
Fun fact: the US system was originally designed to work sort of that way, except they wanted the President to be chosen by all the state legislatures instead of Congress, for extra Federalist separation of powers. That's what the Electoral College is for: they couldn't do "one state rep = one vote" because each state has different numbers of constituents per rep and such, so they needed a "compatibility layer."
Then states immediately fucked up the plan by holding popular votes for Electors instead of having the legislature appoint them, and the rest is history.
Also, in most European states (France is similar to the US in that point), the head of state (president, king) is not the head of government (prime minister, chancellor). The former may be elected by popular vote, and has mainly representative tasks, the latter usually is elected by the parlament and drives the political decisions.
Actually France is a semi-presidential republic, unlike the US. Its President shares the executive power with the Prime Minister.
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