Cross-posted at my blog, Forgotten Countries [/plug]

This is very definitely a bad sign.

Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is reportedly planning to introduce legislation in parliament granting the Turkish military authority to launch sustained military operations into Iraqi Kurdistan against PKK training camps, in response to a series of attacks from that group, which amongst other things killed 13 Turkish soldiers in an ambush in Sirnak province.

Whether or not Erdogan uses this authorisation (and reports are that he may not, being less than sanguine about the chances of such operations succeeding) it would nevertheless do much to destabilise the only region of Iraq where a degree of stability is to be found, poison Turkish-U.S. and Turkish-Iraqi relations, complicate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, present the Turkish military with the opportunity to start a war on their own initiative and endanger the (already somewhat threatened) democratic regime in Turkey.

Before we go any further, some background.

Pervez Musharraf has been re-elected. He won an overwhelming victory, which would point to a truly massive level of popular support, if it wasn't for the fact that the election had slightly less legitimacy than Joshua Norton's claim to be Emperor of the United States.

The President of Pakistan is, in line with the Presidential Election Rules, 1988, elected indirectly. The people of Pakistan do not get to vote for the president they desire. The electorate is instead made up of the Senators, National Assembly Members and members of the four Provincial Assemblies. Elections to the Provincial Assemblies are direct (with some seats reserved for women and religious minorities and distributed through a system of proportional representation) and this is also the case with the National Assembly.

The Senate is somewhat more complicated. Each Provincial Assembly picks 22 Senators, four of whom must be women and another four of whom must be Islamic scholars, whilst the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas select another eight. The final four Senators are elected from Islamabad, of whom one must be a woman and another an Islamic scholar.

In many ways it appears to resemble the U.S. Senate of the late 19th century - no direct election and a massive regional imbalance - Punjab is about eight times as populous as Balochistan, but receives no more representation in this chamber.

This problem is exacerbated in the election of the President. Because even with this electorate of slightly over a thousand voters, it is not one man one vote. Rather there are 702 votes. 442 of these votes come from members of the Senate and National Assembly. The other 260 are divided equally between the four provinces, which benefits the North-West Frontier and Balochistan at the expense of Punjab and Sindh (the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas and the Capital Territory are almost completely marginalised).

Obviously, this is not a fair system. It should clearly be reformed. But that doesn't even rank in the top five reasons why these elections are a "farce, a mockery and a fraud upon the electorate" That quote is from the Electoral Reforms Commission of Pakistan's description of elections in 1956. Read on and I'll tell you why things are no better now.

I wasn't raised to identify with any particular party. That's not to say I wasn't exposed to politics by my parents from an early age, but tribalism of my parents was not to any one organisation. The chief item of my political thought I obtained from my parents was not devotion to any particular ideal (although I was raised within a resolutely leftist/liberal value system,) it was to hate the Tory Party above all else.

As a consequence, I never grew up with an active involvement in political systems. If there was one institution that defined our rough outlook, it was probably, as with so many middle class Britons of the left, the Guardian newspaper.

That changed about three months ago, when I joined the Labour Party. That's not due to any particular loyalty to its current policies. I was against the Iraq War and marched against it in 2003 (although I was briefly for it about a year later before the situation began to really deteriorate), I opposed the introduction of tuition and top-up fees for universities (not just because as a student I'd rather not have to pay fees, but because I don't view it as a scheme that's either financially effective or good for society), I'd like to see the railways renationalised, I think the PFI (Private Finance Initiative) schemes have been a national scandal, rewarding cronies and shafting taxpayers and there are plenty of other smaller policies I can take issue with.

At the same time, while I may adhere to a lot of ideas that Blair's government rejected as out of date and doctrinaire socialism, I was brought up in a very middle class household in a fairly rural area. I'm a supporter of grammar schools and I don't agree with much of the government's policies on field sports and gun control (although that still places me worlds away from American gun control advocates - I'm proud to say that I own a shotgun licence and had no objection to having to be checked out by the police in order to obtain said document.)

Home state advantage has tended to be an important factor in presidential primaries. Since the present system was established in 1972, the only candidates to win a primary or caucus without also taking their home states have been Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Jerry Brown in 1980 and 1992, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Bob Kerrey in 1992 and Wesley Clark in 2004.

All of these events can be explained away. Chisholm and Jackson's powerbase was within the black community, not within their home states. In 1980 Michigan was apparently not seriously contested by anbody aside from Brown and LaRouche. Kerrey's win in South Dakota was probably aided by the state's proximity to Nebraska and his campaign was dead by the time the primary season reached Omaha. Similarly, California was almost dead last in 1992, so Brown's defeat was already assured. Clark's victory in Oklahoma could be put down to the conservative nature of that state as much as anything else, whilst the candidate came from a neighbouring state and had dropped out by the time Arkansas came round.

Clearly home support is important, then. There's no other way to explain, for instance, Dean's victory in Vermont in 2004. Yet if one compares a map of primary/caucus wins from 1972 to the 2004 map you'll see a much simpler picture. Some of this is because campaigns tend to be much more national. Sectional or regional candidacies just aren't viable. But I'd also argue that the power of being a favourite son candidate just isn't what it used to be.

Read on, and I'll use the early-state polling to explain why...

For now in the race for 2008 the focus is squarely on the early primary states, especially Iowa. This is not unnatural, since there's much more in the way of polling data for the earlier primaries and caucuses and they proved so decisive in 2004.

Nevertheless, none of the top three are likely to have dropped out by February 5th and it's entirely possible that some of the lower tier candidates could still be competing, especially if they do better than expected.

With this in mind, it's worth taking a look at the primary calendar and the delegates each state hands out so as to see whether there are any particular strategies that might prove useful to complete a victory or recover from a defeat in an earlier state.

On June 27 Tony Blair will step down as leader of the Labour Party. His successor will be Gordon Brown, as he was the only candidate to receive the necessary nominations from 44 MPs. Brown has been viewed as the heir apparent since 1994 and his victory was all but assured, so no other candidate from the mainstream of the parliamentary party elected to challenge him, although the ultra-Blairite faction toyed with the idea. His only opponents were Michael Meacher and John McDonnell, both from the left of the party. The former withdrew from contention to make it easier for the latter to get on the ballot, but there was little enthusiasm for a contest amongst MPs and few of them seem to have wanted to mark themselves out as members of the awkward squad by voting against Brown, so more than 300 out of 354 MPs nominated the Chancellor, sufficient to prevent McDonnell getting on the ballot.

Disappointing as this was to those like me who favoured a public debate on Labour's future path, there is a silver lining. In the Deputy Leadership Election, six candidates made it on to the ballot, covering more or less all of the ideological range of current MPs, from ultra-Blairites to Brownites to the soft left. Last night the candidates had a televised debate on BBC's Newsnight, hosted by Jeremy Paxman.

The video's here and discussion of the various candidates and their performances can be found in the extended entry.

On May 3 local elections were held in most parts of England outside London, as were elections to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. In the run-up to the elections it had been clear that Labour would do poorly across the board, yet Labour's acceptance of this appears to have changed the expectations game, placing the burden on the Conservatives, the Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru.

The situation now is not absolutely settled, as there have been problems with weirdly high numbers of spoiled ballots in some Scottish constituencies (possibly due to the complicated ballot paper's needed for Holyrood's mixture of proportional representation and first-past-the-post voting). Nevertheless, at present, we can make these deductions: