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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, in my opinion, this is a result of our current governmental situation, which is unprecedented: the center-right party won a relative majority, but the center-left party got the Communist Party and the Left-Bloc (an anti-capitalist left-wing party but without just a single guiding ideology) to support it in Parliament and allow it to form government.

This has had many effects, but this bill in particular was introduced by the Left-Bloc, and then voted favorably by all the left (and by the single representative of the party "People, Animals and Nature", which doesn't consider itself left- or right-wing).

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Fun fact: current governmental situation has been dubbed `Geringonça` (something akin to a Rube Goldberg machine) due to its complicated and convoluted structure.

“Contraption” roughly captures the spirit of it

> As a side note, in my opinion, this is a result of our current governmental situation, which is unprecedented: the center-right party won a relative majority, but the center-left party got the Communist Party and the Left-Bloc (an anti-capitalist left-wing party but without just a single guiding ideology) to support it in Parliament and allow it to form government.

In Portugal? It seems to be a pretty common result in central and northern europe, it's also the result of the very recent NZ elections (the right-wing Nationals got 44.45%, Labour 36.89, NZ First 7.2% and the Greens 10.7%, NZF announced a coalition with Labour with confidence and supply from the Greens).

Yes, in Portugal. We're a pretty young democracy for an European country, and historically there was a lot of bad blood between the left-wing parties.

When you say "relative majority", do you mean a plurality (50% or less, so not a majority, but more than any other party), or is this situation more complicated than it seems?

It's a plurality. "Relative majority" is a direct translation from the Portuguese expression "maioria relativa" .

Curiously, I actually searched for the term rather than directly translate. Seems it's (at least somewhat) used in the UK, even if not in the US.

The right wing party (actually a coalition of 2 right wing "mainstream" parties) was the most voted party but fell way short of a majority (they control 102 seats out of 230) and failed to get parliamentary support.

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