Election season

Well it seems like there’s still a small trickle of people checking the blog once in a while, so I’l try to keep posting sometimes, but I;m running out of things to post about… 🙂

So for this week I’ll talk about politics since we’re deep into election season. Last December the Prime Minister stepped down, which was pretty unexpected given his popularity. Within a week we had a new one, which was pretty incredible for us.

In the parliamentary system here the party in power calls for an election, so in March they called for an election to happen in September. In another difference, you’re only allowed to campaign during the three months prior to the election. I don’t have to say how nice that is compared to the never ending cycles in the US. So far there hasn’t been much to give away that there will be an election soon. Some discussions on the public radio mainly. We’ve seen our local candidates at the farmers market or the supermarket. We’ve gotten a couple of mailings and had a couple of canvassers ring our doorbell. But otherwise, no TV ads, no yard signs, no bumper stickers, no massive amounts of poster-size mailings flooding your mailbox for weeks on end. People are still friendly and it doesn’t dominate every (or any yet) conversation. It’s a nice change, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes as it gets closer. And in case you’re wondering, no we can’t vote yet, but I think after we’ve been here a year we might be able to.