How the Andorrans voted and "not voted"

international | politics / elections | other press

Sunday April 24, 2005 13:43

by endevant!

a lesson to us all.

Andorra is a small country, official language catalan, which sits in the pyrennes between Catalonia and France.
It's a great place to hide papyrus, do banking, buy cheap tobacco, ski, and pick wild flowers.

Today it's 16,022 registered voters have been called to exercise their democratic right to vote, regardless of ethnicity (they're all andorran), gender, creed, in secret, and they don't get their thumbs inked, so you don't know if an andorran has voted by looking at their paw afterwards.

the Liberal Party of Andorra held the government with 15 seats, against the three other parties the social democratic party 6, the democratic party 5 and uniólauradianna 2 at the last elections in 2001.

There are 28 seats in the Andorran executive.

So far over 40% of voters have exercised their franchise, so it looks like being completely legitimate. one of the seven administrative regions (they're called parishes) has recorded 69% participation at mid-day, which just goes to prove microstates seem to have more genuine democratic participation. But when you consider the resident population is 70,000 approx it means lots of andorrans "don't vote".

Jimmy Carter isn't there though to point out this unfairness. He only does big states.

The parties competing for this years general election are -

The Liberals
The Social Democrats
The Democrats
The XXI party
The Greens
The democratic reform party

The Andorrans are pretty much like anyone else.
They have websites and television, and have good food. They are a mysterious mountainous sexy people, with a beautiful and ancient language (which technically isn't theirs). That's because they forgot their ancestral tongue, after it was beaten out of them by catalan monks and nuns and troubadours in the XIII century.

here is an andorran website which declares today's election to be "the moment of truth"
http://www.bondia.ad/artman/publish/article_2721.shtml
Just to prove that they still meddle in the affairs of their neighbours here is a catalan news-site offering an election special
http://www.vilaweb.com/www/noticia?p_idcmp=1257324

here is the official government election result site-
http://www.eleccions.ad/

here is the official state site-
http://www.andorra.ad/

here is the indymedia site which in our unique style confuses the frontier issues by sharing its psycho-geography with "la seu d' urgell" a region of the catalan pyrennes with the same sort of social and ecological problems. You will note it gets lots of flotsam and "spam" sort of articles that get edited elsewhere. This is very useful. You might remember the last time we had problems with the FBI ("project why don't you fuck off now agent smith") I put on my merrovinginvanjan hat and told you they were after the list of ------ which was there, and that's why they fucked up its server longer than anyone elses, but no-one believed me they blamed the swiss and mossad and berlusconi instead.

http://andorra.indymedia.org/
http://laseudurgell.indymedia.org/

the results of this crucial and pivotal election will appear in the comments tonight or tomorrow with expert comment and analysis on how this will effect Europe, peace in the middle east, the search for WMD, and the cost of ski-ing weekends.