Word: referendum
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...most popular political group is the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP). It won nearly 29% of the vote in the 2007 election with anti-immigration posters showing white sheep kicking black sheep off a flag-clad outline of Switzerland. The SVP is also driving a Nov. 29 referendum to ban the construction of new minarets. Listen to its leaders, and you would assume that the picturesque Swiss landscape now bristles with minarets. There are actually only four in the entire country. The fifth, to be built near the capital, Bern, got planning permission in July...
...light of the House of Representatives’s passage of universal health-care legislation on Nov. 7, Rove’s analysis looks particularly foolish. The notion that the results of two local races constitute a national referendum on the president’s agenda is preposterous and is not in line with the conventional wisdom for off-year elections...
...gubernatorial contests, particularly the race in New Jersey, were defined largely by local issues. In New Jersey, defeated Democratic Governor Jon Corzine carried voters citing health care as their number-one priority 78 percent to Christie’s 19 percent—quite the reverse of the referendum on health care that Rove envisioned. Voters citing parochial issues such as property taxes and corruption, on the other hand, favored Christie more than two to one. The most obvious rebuttal, however, is the fact that President Obama is still popular in New Jersey, with an approval rating of 57 percent...
...coup leaders insist Zelaya was ousted because he had defied a Supreme Court ruling against holding a referendum on constitutional reform, which they claim sought to lift a ban on presidential re-election - although this was not stated in the referendum question. The U.S. joined the international community in condemning the coup as an affront to Latin America's fledgling democracies, and demanded Zelaya's reinstatement. To back that position, it cut off more than $30 million in aid to Micheletti's de facto government, suspended U.S. entry visas for the coup's supporters and threatened not to recognize...
...Predictably, victorious Republicans tried to spin their wins in Virginia and New Jersey as a referendum on the man who, almost exactly a year before, had won both states handily in the 2008 presidential election. "This is the first time since 1997 that the Republican Party has swept all three top state offices in Virginia," GOP chairman Michael Steele crowed as the first results came in. "The Republican Party's overwhelming victory in Virginia is a blow to President Obama and the Democrat Party. It sends a clear signal that voters have had enough of the President's liberal agenda...