Latest news with #politicalparty
The Herald
a day ago
- Politics
- The Herald
IEC rejects former ANC MP Boy Mamabolo's ‘Mandela for President' party registration
The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) has rejected former ANC MP Jacob Boy Mamabolo's registration of his new party 'Mandela for President'. The IEC said Mamabolo applied for registration but was rejected due to his failure to meet basic requirements to register a new party and concerns about the name. 'The IEC clarifies the party 'Mandela for President' applied for registration but was rejected for non-compliance with signature requirements and the threshold of required registered voters,' the IEC said. 'Furthermore, the name 'Mandela for President' with associated green and black colours may be construed by voters as connected to founding president Nelson Mandela.' The IEC highlighted inconsistencies with regard to the founding convener's details. 'Discrepancies exist between the party's constitutional documentation and our registration records regarding party leadership. In the preamble of their constitution the party proclaims their founding convener is Mandela Jacob Boy Mamabolo. However, in our registration records in respect of the party leader he appears as only Jacob Boy Mamabolo, which suggests a material aspect in the registration of the party may have been misrepresented. The party remains unregistered.'
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Is that the best you could do? Ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana says she wants the new Jeremy Corbyn party to be called… The Left
Ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana has revealed she wants the new left-wing party she's founding with Jeremy Corbyn to merely be called 'The Left'. The Coventry South MP quit Labour earlier this month in order to launch her new outfit with Mr Corbyn, the former Labour leader. Ms Sultana and Mr Corbyn's movement has the website with a welcome message saying 'this is your party'. But Ms Sultana sowed confusion immediately after its launch by insisting a name had not yet been chosen. She frantically posted on social media: 'It's not called Your Party.' It was explained that members would decide on the new party's name at a later date, but political opponents mocked the 'chaotic' launch. It followed claims Ms Sultana had previously caught Mr Corbyn by surprise by quitting Labour and publicly announcing their plans to found a new party. Mr Corbyn last week insisted the launch of the new party was 'not messy at all' and 'a totally coherent approach'. In an interview with left-wing website Novara Media, Ms Sultana revealed her own thoughts on what the new outfit should be called. 'This obviously will be chosen by the members in the most democratic way possible,' Ms Sultana said. 'Everyone has got an opinion, I do too. I think it should be called "The Left" or "The Left Party", because it says what it is on the tin. That is something I will be pitching.' Ms Sultana had the Labour whip suspended last year for voting against the Government over the two-child limit on benefits. She has also been a frequent critic of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's stance on the Gaza crisis. Ms Sultana branded her former party a 'genocide party' and an 'austerity party' as she hailed how more than 500,000 people had now signed up to her new venture. 'I am very excited to be part of building something new. It has never been done before in British politics,' she added. 'Being able to take half a million people and more... on this journey to shape something truly transformative is so important, exciting and I recognise it as one of the most important opportunities of a lifetime.' Ms Sultana warned 'we can't get this wrong' as she outlined how opinion polls suggest Reform UK could win the next general election. 'We can't get this wrong because in 2029, as the polling currently stands, [Nigel] Farage will be prime minister,' she said. 'Someone like me, someone who looks like me, understands that threat acutely. And so we have to not just organise and build a new party, we have to win.' Quizzed about the accusations of 'chaos' that accompanied the launch of her new party with Mr Corbyn, Ms Sultana insisted that 'we do know what we're doing'. 'Westminster journalists love this idea of drama, they love this idea of the Left not really knowing we're doing,' she said. 'But we do know what we're doing and half a million also recognise that. And the truth is they're rattled, they've never seen anything like this. 'The fact that we're trying to really have democracy, not just this slogan or you just kind of say it and don't mean it, we're trying to have it at the heart of everything we're doing. 'And the idea that members choose the name, people can't get their heads around it. That's democracy for you.'
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Elon Musk is threatening to put third-party candidates on the ballot. Democrats are giddy.
Elon Musk is promising to shake up the midterms with his own political party. Democrats aren't sweating it. Musk's yet-unfulfilled plans to form an 'America Party' could threaten Republicans already fighting to defend their seats by razor-thin margins in next year's midterms elections, Democrats argued, by siphoning off more disgruntled conservatives from Republicans than disaffected liberals from the Democrats. 'I think it leads to a better position for Democrats in what I think was already a pretty good position going into 2026,' Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel said. Musk was one of President Donald Trump's biggest benefactors in the 2024 election, spending hundreds of millions to help get him and other Republicans elected. But since his break with the president, Musk has publicly called for primary challengers to Republicans who voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in addition to promising to launch his own third party. Democrats and Republicans have long complained about the spoiler effect of third parties — like the Greens or Libertarians — in close battleground races. But neither of those parties have been able to muster resources like Musk's. And new polling this week from Marquette University Law School found that 40 percent of Republicans say they would be somewhat or very likely to support an America Party candidate in their state or congressional district, as opposed to just one in four Democrats. Christina Bohannan, an Iowa Democrat who is challenging Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) for the third time next year, said adding another candidate into the mix could play a potentially decisive role in the rematch. 'This race was so close in 2024 — it came down to just 799 votes out of 413,000, and so it was literally one of the very closest races in the country,' Bohannan said. 'So anything that alters the shape of the race in terms of third-party candidates could have an impact.' The party, which Musk has not yet taken major formal steps to establish, still faces several procedural and strategic hurdles. But should he go through with it, the former Department of Government Efficiency chief suggested his party could 'laser-focus' on two to three Senate seats and eight to 10 House districts to give the third party a sizable enough presence to exercise influence over contentious legislation. Because of that narrow mandate — and Musk's particular focus on hitting Republicans on fiscal irresponsibility — the third-party bid could be a vulnerability for the GOP, said Heath Mayo, an anti-Trump conservative activist and founder of the advocacy group Principles First. 'My first reaction was, it seems pretty confined in substance,' Mayo said. 'And because of that, I think it pulls some of the following that he has that has sort of found its way into the Republican Party base.' Musk did not respond to a request for comment sent via email. Voters regularly overstate how likely they are to vote or join a third party. But recent polling suggests Americans are at least theoretically open to it. While nearly half of voters say they would consider joining a third party, only 17 percent are interested in joining a Musk-led option, according to polling from Quinnipiac University from earlier this month. But that party could pull disproportionately from the GOP, per the survey, which found that nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats would consider joining Musk's proposed third party. Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in Arizona, cautioned that a libertarian-minded candidate backed by Musk could attract support from either direction, putting Democrats in battleground districts at risk too. 'If anyone can be a spoiler or at least put up a candidate who has a chance to in either direction, it's Elon Musk, because he has the drive and financial wherewithal to match it,' Marson said. Still, Musk's ability to successfully field third-party bids will be highly dependent on the particular districts he targets and the candidates he puts on the ballot, said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based GOP operative. 'Elon Musk's money is enough to sway a significant number of elections,' Gerow said. 'But you have to look at the individual candidates and the message they run on. There's a lot of factors that will play into whether or not he's successful. I think at this stage it's hard to predict the outcome when we don't really know what he's going to do.' Even if Musk fails to get candidates on the ballot, his bad blood with Trump will be sorely felt by Republicans, who benefited massively from his largesse in 2024. Ultimately, Democrats are still confident the effort would more than likely play out to their benefit should it come to fruition, said Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey, who is gearing up for one of the most competitive Senate races next year. 'I think if something has Elon Musk's branding on it, that you're not going to attract Democrats, and you're not going to attract many independents,' Bailey said. 'I think if it's got Elon Musk branding, you're likely to attract the vast majority of right-wing Republicans, so I don't think those voters are probably that gettable for us anyway.'
The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Keir Starmer will fight Corbyn's new party by copying Emmanuel Macron
It is easy to mock the new party launched in a struggle between its joint figureheads, but that is no reason to pass up the chance. It takes a special skill for one figurehead (Zarah Sultana) to announce the founding of a new party only for the other figurehead (Jeremy Corbyn) to deny, a day later, that it had happened (' discussions are ongoing '). Then, when Corbyn, three weeks later, announced that it was indeed ' time for a new kind of political party ', which appeared to be called Your Party because that was the name of the website, Sultana snapped on social media: ' It's not called Your Party!' It turned out that Your Party was a placeholder name and the real name will be decided democratically at the inaugural conference, details TBC. Mockery is always useful, because it reminds us how incapable the Corbynite tendency usually is at organising anything more complicated than a split. But it cannot be the whole story, because we know two other things. One is that there is a big pool of potential support for soft Corbynism, if it can suppress the doctrinaire Marxism, the disdain for Britain and the accusation of antisemitism (denied by Corbyn, of course) that is never far from the surface. The other is that Corbyn's allies showed that they could, briefly, run a competent general election campaign when they came close to unseating Theresa May in 2017. So the Not-Your-Party could be a force to be reckoned with. According to some opinion polls, it would take most support away from the Green Party, but it would also siphon votes away from Labour. It is all very well Peter Kyle, the science secretary, describing his former leader as ' not a serious politician ', but Labour has to take the threat from the new party seriously. It is doing so. Keir Starmer has been criticised – not least by Sultana – for copying Farage and thereby pushing Labour voters who are repelled by Reform in her direction. But I think this is to get Starmer's strategy the wrong way round. He knows that part of Labour's electoral coalition is repelled by Farage, but he wants to use that force of magnetic repulsion to try to keep hold of those voters, not to drive them away. This is what might be called the 'Emmanuel Macron' strategy. Macron twice fought off a threat from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French equivalent of Corbyn-Sultana, by becoming the leading candidate against Marine Le Pen, the anti-immigration candidate of the party formerly known as the Front National. In 2017, and again in 2022, Macron came top in a divided field (winning just 24 per cent and 28 per cent of the vote) in the first round, forcing voters to choose between him, a centrist with roots in the Socialist Party, and Le Pen, regarded with horror by polite French opinion. Each time, he won the run-off vote comfortably. By running against Le Pen, Macron was able to unite a coalition stretching from Mélenchon through Macron's former socialists to the remnants of the establishment conservatives. Starmer wants to fight the next general election as, in effect, a presidential run-off contest between him and Farage. He knows that the threat of Farage as prime minister is his most powerful weapon. Presenting the election as a contest between Starmer and Farage is the best way of squeezing not just the Corbyn-Sultana vote, but the Green Party vote and even that of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. The one point on which apologists for the Corbyn-Sultana party become evasive is when they are asked if they would be helping to let Farage in. That is the irresistible logic of the first-past-the-post voting system, but they have to try to deny it to keep their dream alive. Most longstanding Corbynites understand this very well. That is why Corbyn was so reluctant to launch the new party, which some of his acolytes were keen to do the moment he won his Islington North constituency as an independent last year. He knows that the only reason he nearly succeeded in 2017 was that his supporters had taken over the Labour Party. An outfit outside the party, on the other hand, will quickly discover that support for Gaza and anti-capitalism, however wide, is not deep. If Farage's popularity holds up, the next election will be decided in seats that are contested between Labour and Reform; in those seats, a vote for the new party will be a vote for Farage. It will be time, as Macron said in France, for all good people to rally to the cause of defeating anti-immigrant authoritarianism. That is a message that could work for Starmer here with voters otherwise tempted to vote Tory, Lib Dem, Green – and with voters attracted to whatever the Corbyn-Sultana party ends up being called.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Green Party MP responds to surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn's new party
Ellie Chowns of the Green Party defended her party after LBC's Henry Riley highlighted the rapid sign-up rate of Jeremy Corbyn's new political party. Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana's newly formed party is reportedly attracting a significant number of members, with 500 people signing up per minute. Green Party leadership candidates have cautioned against the party becoming a 'Jeremy Corbyn support act'. A divide has emerged within the Green Party as Zack Polanski expressed openness to collaborating with Corbyn and Sultana's new political venture. Watch video above.
