In Spain the campaign starts 15 days before the election day and ends at the 00 hours of the day before the election. The day before the election is called “reflexion day” and is illegal to run campaign ads or have any event.
Election day is always on a Sunday.
That’s gotta be the world’s shortest. How do people get to know the politicians and their platforms in that time?
There’s a period of pre-campaign were they can’t run ads but they start appearing in media more than usual. Everyone knows the parties anyway, and more or less what each stands for.
In the US it’s pretty much a full year and it’s fucking awful. We start seeing political ads for an election in November in the first couple months of the year, thought hey don’t really start pouring it on heavily until late spring/early summer. I really wish we’d just limit that shit to the calendar month of November.
More like continuous and never ending. It is fucking exhausting.
Honestly as an outside observer, like the 2nd month into the US election memes I was like “it hasn’t happened yet??” Hah :3
A big problem is that it is on a schedule that can be planned around. Also, because of elected party primaries, which doesn’t seem to be a thing in other countries, the schedule gets stretched out even further.
Lol you don’t need to explain how long the US election cycle lasts. The rest of the world is aware.
I don’t make assumptions like that, I just answer the question.
Fair enough, though in this case it feels like it’s not making assumptions, but showing unawareness of the one-way nature of American controlled media.
That’s fair. I imagine very few Americans pay much attention to foreign news. Personally I try to regularly check places like BBC, Al Jazeera, etc, but I know I’m an outlier there.
Norway here. Election campaigns are usually around a month, and they’re almost fully focused on parties and their platforms, as opposed to the representatives themselves.
So do you vote for a party then? And the party head may or may not be changed?
Kind of, yeah. We vote for parties, and the parties (yes, plural) with the most votes build a coalition that have enough of the votes between them to form a government. And the head honchos like prime minister and similar, are usually the party leaders. If they were to die or quit or whatever, the government agrees on a replacement.
Here in lithuania, at least in my area generally I’ll see people handing/mailing out the pamphlets for the election around a week before the first round of voting, and the 2nd round is usually held a week after that :3… giving some margins for errors I’d say overall the whole thing lasts about a month
Wow. That’s short.
We’re a people of few words I suppose haha :3
I’ll note that I live in a pretty rural area tho, and this is just my personal experience, I imagine in the capital you may see more events and ads focused on voting prior to the election
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the UK is quite similar to Canada in this regard. There’s also a convention known as “purdah” during the period beginning six weeks before the election and ending upon the formation of the new government. Under it, civil servants are expected to maintain public political neutrality and governments (national and subnational) are not to take or announce more policies/decisions than necessary
