Green politicians from across Europe on Friday called on U.S. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to withdraw from the race for the White House and endorse Democrat Kamala Harris instead.
“We are clear that Kamala Harris is the only candidate who can block Donald Trump and his anti-democratic, authoritarian policies from the White House,” Green parties from countries including Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Estonia, Belgium, Spain, Poland and Ukraine said in a statement, which was shared with POLITICO ahead of publication
This is to elect the President. In a presidential system, as in the US, you choose the leader of the executive portion of government separately from the legislative leader. In a parliamentary system, as many countries in Europe use, the public doesn’t choose the leader of the executive portion of government. Instead, they just vote for representatives in the legislative portion, and then those legislators form a coalition (if necessary) and choose a leader of the executive (the prime minister). The closest analog to coalition forming in the presidential election is doing exactly what the Greens are proposing above – having a candidate drop out and endorse another, with the hopes that they can sway their supporters. It’s basically what JFK Jr did, for example, with Trump.
While hypothetically the US could form legislative coalitions, in practice, due to the way the US electoral system works, US parties are essentially equivalent to electoral coalitions in parliamentary systems already – we already form “big tent” parties necessary to control a house. In the US, the closest analog to this sort of thing actually happening after the elections is when you hear about something like “an independent legislator who caucuses with the Democrats”. The US also has weak party discipline compared to many countries in Europe, so legislators are much less constrained to vote along party lines anyway.
Different systems, function kinda differently.
But I keep hearing how the American system isn’t democratic since you don’t directly vote for the president, you vote for some middle person who promises to vote for your president? Those people might not be members of the parliment but they can still form coalitions after the fact by voting for who has a chance to win
Well, okay, so, the US does have the electoral college, and strictly-speaking, you’re choosing electors that choose the President, but the election is and has for a long time functionally been a direct one. That is, you know the person that you are voting for in voting for the elector. Some states don’t even constitutionally let electors vote for anyone other than the person they have pledged to vote for, and in any case, the electors are chosen by the parties, who have no incentive to choose someone likely to vote for anyone other than the candidate that they’ve pledged to vote for, so it’s not really an aspect of the electoral system in the normal case. While false electors exist, normally as a protest vote if they know that their candidate can’t win, they’re rare and have never altered the outcome of an election.
This came up this year in some discussion in the context of what happens if a President drops out after being placed on the ballot but prior to becoming President, which I assume is what you’re thinking about, so that the electors cannot vote for the person on the ballot, and in that situation, yeah, they’d have to find some kind of fallback.
But that’s a pretty limited corner case. That is, they don’t just have a blank check to go out and build coalitions and select someone.