But presidents don't realign American politics; they consolidate realignments whose complex sources lie elsewhere.
New realignments in parliament could allow for a unity government … It is rumoured that the [National Forces Alliance] and the Justice and Construction party are in back-channel negotiations.
On the other hand, as Jun Okumura, a political analyst, points out, the Diet is already twisted, in the sense that the DPJ is beholden to smaller parties for its upper-house majority.So I bet that talk of grand coalitions and political realignments will be on the rise again.
He foresees instead a protracted period of chaotic realignments.
So allow me to push back a little and make the case that, as with past pronouncements of political realignments, much of the fulminating about a Republican demographic Waterloo is overblown.It certainly seems odd to declare a realignment when the result of the election is the maintenance of the status quo, including Republican control of the House.
The quiet re-enlistment of Baathist officers, who had been sacked wholesale early in the occupation, has also worked to restore a measure of Sunni confidence though there are few Iraqi units where the insurgency is fiercest.At the same time, subtle realignments are changing the shape of Shia politics.
Occasionally, as in the strange death of the Liberals in the first decade of the last century, big realignments do occur in British politics.
Realignments have come to seem inevitable, and a fragmentation of the CIS with them.This week Mr Yeltsin, having sacked his disgruntled defence minister, Igor Rodionov (see article), was due to set one such realignment in motion by co-signing on Friday a "union charter" with the president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenka, a lone advocate of full integration with Russia.
"He thinks that changes to the economy, generational changes, mean that people are less attached to political parties now and that political realignments can happen more quickly".
WHEN partisan political realignments take place, they tend to come not subtly but swiftly.
For instance, many Germans are unaware that millions of Poles were uprooted and dispossessed by the boundary realignments after the war, or that the depredations of the Red Army were not limited to Germans as they swept through Central European countries "liberating" them.As for the Dresden tragedy, among the civilian casualties was a large forced-labour population.
