Laws forbidding political parties based on ethnicity, religion, region, or language prevented the major opposition group, the Islamist Nahḍah ("Renaissance") Party, from being granted legal status, and many of its leaders were jailed or exiled.
One pattern seen in the Brexit results was a disconnect between party leaders — in all of the major parties — and their bases.
This forces the major parties to keep their base happy, as the base can then credibly defect to an ideological near-neighbor if they feel their own party has not served them well, without hurting their own ideological interests.
Investigative journalism is declining, the public service is being weakened and politicised, and a shrinking membership base in major parties is making them less representative and open to branch stacking.
"Both major parties had strong commitments to carbon pollution reduction based on a range of conditions," he said.
That may be true, but the two major parties have always preferred that their bases follow the leaders, rather than the other way around.
Unlike the other major parties, it has maintained a large base of individual donors, who are limited to giving 1,100 Canadian dollars each, and would be affected far less by a loss of public money.
At the base, the two major parties are even more different than the speeches are apt to indicate.
Instead, both major parties compete to offer their overlapping bases false substitutes for economic and social development.
In this context, the working- and middle-class bases of both major parties act rationally when they prefer low taxes on their stagnant incomes to increased taxes for innovations that have an established track record of passing them by.
