The 2021 Canadian snap election couldn’t possibly yield a more accurate clone of the 2019 election. The Liberals led by Justin Trudeau had a minority government and they wanted a majority. A successful Covid-19 vaccination campaign, reports that more than half the country was satisfied with Trudeau’s handling of the pandemic, and various survey results indicating that the Liberals had a significant chance of winning back the majority they lost in the 2019 might have been too tempting to resist for Trudeau. He may also have been inspired by history – his father, former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, gained a majority in a snap general election in 1974, two years after losing his majority.
Justin Trudeau certainly has secured a mandate to lead another minority government – which may or may not be called a ‘victory’. His decision to call a snap election was deeply criticised by political opponents – and even allies. The election had not been mandated since the government wasn’t defeated. There was no immediate danger to the government, or even in the near future. Consequently, the opposition Conservatives accused Trudeau of engineering a “quick power grab”.
Incidentally, no one really got what they wanted in this election. While Trudeau was eager to encash on his good work during the Covid-19 pandemic, this was possibly an election that nobody wanted. An Ipsos poll conducted during end-August found 58 per cent of those surveyed agreed the country should not be holding an election. And this percentage was on the rise. The early vote call backfired as it was mostly seen as “wrong” and “greedy” by electors. Thus, the gamble to call a federal election during the fourth wave of the pandemic didn’t pay off. Although a status quo of overall power-sharing was maintained, three of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers failed to win re-election. “In fact, Canadians sent him [Trudeau] back with another minority at the cost of $600m,” the opposition leader Erin O’Toole said.
In a 2021 research article in the ‘Journal of Representative Democracy’, with respect to some Canadian snap elections, Jean-Francois Daoust of the University of Edinburgh and Gabrielle Peloquin-Skulski of the Universite de Montreal didn’t find evidence that calling an early election reduces citizens’ likelihood to vote. “However, when they do decide to vote, citizens that resent the decision to call an early election are substantially more likely to punish the incumbent government,” they commented. One may get tempted to validate this research finding by using the results of the 2021 Canadian elections, which were held a few months after this article was published.
Did Trudeau misuse the potential political benefit of his praiseworthy performance of handling the pandemic, which he could possibly have capitalised on more profitably during the election originally scheduled in 2023? Eventually, he just earned two additional two years for his minority government, which certainly could not have been his objective in calling a snap election.
Ideally, one may think that if the electorate has given the mandate to run a minority government, so be it. In some democracies, however, the ruling party is allowed to call a ‘snap’ election before the end of its term. Since the power to call snap elections usually lies with incumbents, they try to call it strategically at an advantageous time, to maximize chances of re-election. However, snap elections may sometimes also backfire. The majority may be reduced, or opponents may gain power.
The Canadian elections widely drew their parallel from the UK snap elections just over four years ago, when Theresa May dissolved parliament and triggered an early general election that seemed a safe bet for the Conservatives. “I think the next election will be in 2020… I’m not going to be calling a snap election,” Mrs May told the BBC’s Andrew Marr in September 2016. But, just after the following Easter, after only two years in power, Mrs. May addressed the country: “If we do not hold a general election now, their [the Labour, the SNP, and the Lib Dems] political game-playing will continue and the negotiations with the European Union will reach their most difficult stage in the run-up to the next scheduled election.”
However, while navigating Brexit was her declared reason, many political commentators believed that Mrs. May sensed an opportunity within a divided opposition and a comfortable Tory poll lead. In fact, just before she called the snap election, a flurry of polls showed a mammoth 20-percentage point gap between the Conservatives and Labour. This was an opportunity too tantalising to resist.
Unfortunately, few things in politics are ever certain. Eventually, Mrs. May’s apparent ‘safe’ gamble on a snap election turned out to be a very poor decision. In fact, it was catastrophic for her own political career as well – she lost her majority in the snap elections and her premiership never recovered from that downfall. There is little doubt that her exit in July 2019 was scripted in the 2017 snap elections.
The Indian experience of a snap election in this millennium may be reviewed in this context. Massive victories in the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh were possibly the immediate stimulators for the BJP’s premature dissolution of the 13th Lok Sabha in 2004. However, it was reported that then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was not in favour of advancing the 2004 Lok Sabha elections as he feared defeat. Vajpayee’s long-time aide Shiv Kumar Pareek spotted two reasons behind BJP’s 2004 defeat: “First, the slogan of ‘India Shining’ went against us. The second was the decision to hold early polls.”
However, it’s not that all recent major snap elections backfired for the incumbent. In the backdrop of Japan’s 2021 elections, it might be worth remembering that the previous Japanese election was a snap poll. In 2017, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called that snap election to overcome “a national crisis” amid rising threats from North Korean nuclear weapons programmes. His decision came at a time when his approval rating had just rebounded from a record low over the summer, and with the political opposition largely in disarray. The fact that North Korea had test-fired two ballistic missiles over northern Japan really helped Abe in this quest to win the snap elections. “We must not give in to North Korea’s threats,” Abe said. People relied on Abe when he said: “By gaining a mandate from the people with this election, I will forge ahead with strong diplomacy.”
So, there should be more caution and political judgment in calling a snap election as it is very unpredictable how public opinion evolves even over a short period of time. Just before the recent Canadian elections, David Moscrop wrote in ‘The Guardian’: “Over the past few weeks, everyone has become a bit more cynical, tired and frustrated. Perhaps hopeless. Expect low turnout and another election within 18 months as the voting will continue until morale improves.” An attempt to draw a snapshot of the future, possibly.
The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.