Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The People We Give the Car Keys To

So I stumbled across a list on Wikipedia - well, it's most of a list. Whoever compiled it seems to have gotten bored near the end of the alphabet. It attempts to list all the political parties currently forming governments worldwide, either by themselves. And a careful scan reveals that there are some parties out there who really know how to name themselves.
  • Argentina seems to be ruled by a two-party coalition: one with the exciting name 'Front for Victory' and the other with the clearly made-up name 'Justicialist Party'.
  • For Belarus, Wikipedia just describes the coalition as 'parties loyal to the president'. clicking through that link, though, reveals that one is quite awesomely called the 'Belarusian Socialist Sporting Party'.
  • In Benin, the ruling party is called 'Cauri Forces for an Emerging Benin'.
  • In Chad, the ruling party has the decidedly dramatic name 'Patriotic Salvation Movement'.
  • In Colombia, we've got the rather bland 'Social Party of National Unity', but their other name, 'Party of the U', is pretty cool.
  • In Comoros, we've got the rather bizarre 'Camp of the Autonomous Islands'.
  • In the Czech Republic, they've clearly got no idea how to name parties, as we get the well-whatever 'Civic Democratic Party', but in addition we get 'TOP 09' and 'Public Affairs'. What?
  • In Estonia, one of the two partners has the esoteric name 'Pro Patria and Res Publica Union'. They like the Latin langugae in Estonia.
  • If you happen to know about Finland, it's not actually as strange as it seems, but superficially 'Swedish People's Party of Finland' is one odd name.
  • In Guatemala, they've got the very optimistic 'National Unity of Hope'.
  • Iran's not exactly democratic, but their one real party has a charming name: 'Alliance of Builders of Islamic Iran'.
  • It's only slightly cool that in Kenya there's the 'Orange Democratic Movement'. What's cooler is this quote from Wikipedia: "The name 'orange' originates from the ballot cards in the referendum, in which a 'Yes' vote was represented by the banana and a 'No' vote was the orange. Thus the parties claim successorship to those who did not support the referendum at the time."
  • I was curious what Latvia's 'ZZS' stood for, so I clicked the link. Turns out it's the rather incongruous 'Union of Greens and Farmers'.
  • In Malaysia, the dominant party has the rather unforunate name 'National Front'.
  • In Poland, the party in power has the rather Czech-like name of 'Civic Platform'.
  • In Samoa, the dominant party has the classy name 'Human Rights Protection Party'.
  • The Serbian government appears to be a coalition of six (!) parties, but two are noteworthy: 'Party of United Pensioners of Serbia' and 'Hungarian Coalition'.
And these are just the parties in government. Just think how many awesome party names there must be out there, waiting for me to find them...


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