And Assad’s actions in intensifying the fighting seem to match his words. In yesterday’s Crikey Damien Kingsbury gave a pessimistic assessment:

With the anti-Assad forces now clearly divided between the Free Syrian Army and the al-Qaeda affiliates and Western support wavering, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers are feeling increasingly confident of turning the tide in the war. It may be, however, that this is but another twist in an increasingly complicated, bitter and prolonged war.

Another twist indeed. This morning there’s again a small note of optimism as Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN mediator for Syria, tells the world that plans for the peace conference are going ahead: “The Syrian people are building great hopes on the conference, as the opposition prepares itself to take part and likewise the Syrian regime prepares to take part in this conference. … The United Nations is working to organise the conference in the best way possible.”

What to think? The Syrian opposition are saying (not unreasonably) that they are not up for any negotiated outcome that leaves the Assad regime in power, but they seem open to talks that involve the regime. Moaz al-Khtaib, who recently resigned as president of the Syrian National Coalition, said that “all opposition forces have no objection to finding a political solution.”

Conversely, the Russians have been insistent that Assad’s removal not form any sort of precondition for talks, but they have not endorsed Assad’s position that the “terrorists” need to disarm first.

It still looks possible that the two sides might be brought to the same table, but whether that offers any prospect of an actual agreement will probably depend most of all on the Russian attitude. Its military aid to Assad seems to be increasing rather than diminishing; in the short term that has obviously strengthened his position, but it also means that a threat to withdraw support could be a very powerful incentive to bring him to some sort of deal if Russia decides that is in its best interests.

Kingsbury suggests that “One reading of Russia’s position is that it will support peace talks in June, but only if it can strengthen the hand of the Assad regime ahead of such negotiations.” I think that may be right, with the additional point that if Russia is the one doing the strengthening (rather than, say, less respectable allies such as Iran and Hezbollah), it gives it maximum leverage with both sides at the peace conference – if it ever happens.

The downside risk is that further militarisation of the conflict could have incalculable consequences. For one thing, Russia’s attitude is clearly a factor putting pressure on the US to help arm the Syrian opposition. And while increased bloodshed sometimes drives participants to make compromises for peace, sometimes it does the opposite, pushing them to revenge what they have already suffered.

And of course there’s the Israeli factor, with another flare-up yesterday on the Golan Heights.

The best one can say is that hope for Syria has not been completely extinguished. But the road to peace is going to be far from easy.

Partly it’s just a problem of timing. Two issues have come to the boil at once: relations with the EU, brought to a head by the strong performance of the anti-Europe UK Independence Party in this month’s local elections, and now same-sex marriage. Either on its own could be dealt with, but the combination is looking deadly.

It’s not so much a matter of fighting on two fronts as having given the same enemy two different lots of ammunition. The fundamental problem in both cases is the philosophical divergence between Cameron and his immediate allies on one hand, and a large slab of backbench and grassroots Tory opinion on the other.

Cameron clearly holds a dim view of his opponents. He’s previously described as full of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”; now one of his senior people has referred to the Tory backwoodspeople as “swivel-eyed loons”. But in the past Cameron has shown full awareness of the need to throw such people a bone every now and then. As I put it nearly four years ago (the issue was where the Tories sit in the European parliament):

Major parties always represent a broad coalition of views, and to play relentlessly to just one side is to court disaster. Cameron has chosen an issue on which he evidently feels he can do something to keep his right wing happy without risking anything important in the main game of domestic politics.

Over time, however, being different things to different people becomes more and more difficult. For a party whose origins are based on religion as much as class, same-sex marriage was never going to be easy, and strong words have been used in recent days. A group of Conservative activists called the bill “flawed, un-Conservative, divisive, and costing us dearly in votes and membership,” and accused Cameron of “utter contempt for ordinary people.”

And yet. No-one should ever have been under the illusion that Cameron’s views were not out of step with a lot of Conservative opinion. He was chosen as a liberal, as an acknowledgement that the party had drifted too far to the right and needed to change course to be able to win government. The membership that elected him made the bargain with their eyes open; one commentator described the party at the time as “trusting, excited, a little terrified of the risk they have just taken, but with a sense that absolutely anything could happen next.”

Go back and read the piece by Andrew Rawnsley that I quoted back in February – it makes Cameron’s dilemma clear:

Because he was not clear, the enemies of modernisation within his party were never fully confronted and defeated. He campaigned for the leadership on the slogan “change to win”. But it only half-changed and then it only half-won.

In fact, the Tories are not uniformly enemies of modernity (they would never have elected Cameron if they were, no matter how desperate they were), and the current revolt, although widespread, is still probably not fatal for Cameron. Although the media didn’t seem to think so, the vote on the EU referendum could have been a lot worse: the large majority of the party still backed the government’s position.

Nor, on the specific question of same-sex marriage, is it at all clear that Cameron could have done any better. Given the traction the issue has got in the rest of the world there was no chance it could be kept off the agenda entirely. The alternatives were either to embrace it explicitly, or to keep quiet as a government and hope that, with suitable encouragement, a sympathetic backbencher could get it through with cross-party support.

The second option might have worked better, but there’s a pretty good chance it wouldn’t have – that, without endorsement from the top, same-sex marriage would have been overwhelmingly opposed by Tory MPs and as a result would have either (a) been defeated on the floor of the Commons or (b) been carried almost entirely on Labour and Liberal Democrat votes. Either outcome would have cast the Tories as villains in the eyes of the majority of the electorate.

For the Conservatives to purge Cameron as too liberal would be to commit electoral suicide, and most of them know it. They might not like him, but for the foreseeable future they’re stuck with him.

The topic is refugees, and Bianca Hall has the report in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

More than 90 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived by boat were found to be genuine refugees in the March quarter, figures to be released on Monday show. But those who arrived by plane – despite being eligible for release into the community and not having to face years of detention on Nauru or Manus Island – were almost twice as likely to be rejected as refugees.

So far there’s no sign of the figures on the immigration department’s website, but no doubt they’ll appear in due course. In any case they’re totally consistent with past experience; as Hall says, 91% of boat arrivals in 2011-12 were found to be refugees and 93.5% the previous year. But “Of those who arrived in Australia by plane before lodging an application for protection, 33.2 per cent were given initial approval, rising to 54.7 per cent after appeals.”

Given those numbers, you’d think that a government that was primarily concerned about the welfare of people crossing the Indian Ocean on leaky boats would try to get them onto aeroplanes instead. Conversely, if its priority was to stop people who aren’t genuine refugees from coming here, it would focus on the plane arrivals, either sending them to Nauru or adopting some other draconian measure of deterrence.

Since the government shows not the slightest inclination to do either of these things, it’s reasonable to conclude that its real concerns are something other than what it claims.

If you depended only on the political debate (or on the tabloid media) for your facts, you’d probably assume that Australia was being deluged with asylum seekers with dubious claims – so-called “economic refugees” who are just looking to improve their lives rather than fleeing persecution. The latest figures demonstrate, yet again, that this is simply not true. (The UNHCR provides a wealth of statistical material if you want to explore further.)

Immigration minister Brendan O’Connor has a different approach to the figures. Without saying so in quite so many words, he clearly intends to suggest that too many people are having their refugee status approved, and that more should be knocked back. Last week he promised “a comprehensive review of the refugee status determination process to ensure that we continue to meet our international obligations, but also that our final acceptance rates for comparable cohorts are consistent with other countries.”

Hall quotes him saying that “We accept that we need to abide by the refugee convention,” but that “We don’t believe we should be doing more than that.”

But notice how the government’s rhetoric contradicts itself. If crossing the ocean to come here really is an exceptionally dangerous thing to do, it’s surely not surprising that people only do if they are really desperate: that is, if their claims to be fleeing persecution are absolutely genuine. So a high rate of acceptance of those claims is just what you’d expect – higher, for example, than among those who’ve only crossed the Mediterranean and made landfall in southern Europe.

Australia is in a different position to almost all other refugee destinations; because it’s difficult and dangerous to get here, we attract very few bogus claimants (except, of course, those who are able to get visas to get on a plane). That’s not a sign that our processing is too lax, it’s just a function of our geography.

O’Connor would not dream of making this sort of comparison when it comes to other aspects of the refugee problem. If the test, for example, were to be refugees admitted per square kilometre of arable land, Australia would be close to the bottom of the table. He only wants to resort to international comparison when it might work against accepting refugees.

Refugees are a hot political topic in many places; Australia is by no means unique in that regard. What distinguishes our problem is both how small it is and how effective our geographical position is at winnowing the field of claimants. The huge majority of those who reach our shores are genuinely in need of help.

It reflects poorly on us that we seem so reluctant to give it to them.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s election results are now pretty much final, with 262 of the 272 constituency seats declared. (Earlier report here.) Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League has won 125 of those – just short of a majority, but with no expected difficulty in adding enough independents and minor parties to be able to control the parliament. (There are 28 independents, plus another ten parties with only one or two MPs.)

The incumbent Pakistan People’s Party finished second with 31 seats, closely followed by Imran Khan’s Movement for Justice on 27. It’s not at all clear how well those totals reflect the  total votes received; I haven’t gone through the time-consuming process of compiling the vote totals from the electoral commission’s website, and I can’t find anyone else who’s done it either.

Another 70 seats are to be allocated to women and minorities, in proportion to the parties’ electoral support by province. There is an opportunity for independents to join one of the parties before this happens (although they have to swear an affidavit to do so), so that process is likely to boost Sharif’s strength.

Of the four provincial parliaments, Sharif’s party and the PPP have clear majorities in Punjab and Sindh respectively; Movement for Justice is the largest party and expected to be able to govern in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and Baluchistan is a mess of small parties and independents.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria’s results are now also final. Late results (incorporating voters from outside the country) favored the liberal Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which is based in the ethnic Turkish community, but otherwise things are very much as I described them last week. The incumbent centre-right party GERB topped the poll with 30.5% of the vote, but is well short of a majority.

My inability to read Bulgarian led me to misrepresent the system slightly in the previous post: apparently the first-past-the-post constituency seats have been scrapped. It’s now just a single proportional allocation (D’Hondt system) for 240 seats across the whole country. That slightly improves the position of the far-right Attack party at the expense of GERB, but it leaves unchanged both the order of the parties and the key fact that the Socialist Party and the MRF have exactly half the seats between them (84 and 36 respectively).

Despite being the largest party, GERB has protested against the results, claiming to be the victim of a fake ballot paper scandal just before polling day and seeking fresh elections. GERB leader and former prime minister Boyko Borisov says that failing that he is willing to propose a minority government, but he knows this will not win parliamentary approval.

Yavor Siderov in the Guardian laments Bulgaria’s dysfunctional political culture and traces its origins to various features of its recent history – it’s well worth a read. Fundamentally, however, this is something that could happen just about anywhere. (Every country’s politics looks dysfunctional if you look closely enough.) You have a far-right party that no-one else wants to co-operate with, a heavily discredited incumbent and a plausible coalition that just happened to win exactly half the seats.

The Socialists have proposed a non-partisan government of technocrats as the best way to overcome the impasse. No doubt they will soon get their chance to try to make that work.

Malaysia

Further to the scandalous Malaysian election of two weeks ago, Adam Carr at Psephos has now compiled a complete set of figures. (No doubt in due course he’ll have them by constituency as well.) I’m pleased to say they agree almost exactly with mine: he says the opposition won by 50.9% to 47.4% (I had said 50.7% to 47.6%), despite being deprived of victory by the electoral system.

Kenya

Another recent election, in Kenya, is now the subject of a very interesting briefing from the International Crisis Group. It’s reasonably positive, pointing out that “A number of factors contributed to a predominantly peaceful election, including a general consensus between the political elite and the citizenry not to bring Kenya to the brink of civil war again.” But it stresses that “a number of vital, more overarching reforms addressing systemic and structural conflict drivers … have yet to be implemented.”

In addition to, of course, getting the electoral machinery to work properly, one of the things it particularly points to is the importance of carrying through the devolution of power to the newly-established county governments. Further evidence that, as I said the other week, Australia keeps degrading federalism “at just the time when other countries are discovering the virtues of federalism and trying to revitalise or reinvent it.”

Iran

Iran goes to the polls in just under a month, on 14 June, to elect a new president: two-term incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ineligible to run again. (There will be a runoff a week later if no candidate wins a majority.) The previous election, in 2009, was widely regarded as fraudulent, but despite (or perhaps because of) that, this one seems to be attracting a lot of interest. When nominations closed at the beginning of last week there were 686 would-be candidates.

It’s the job of the Guardian Council to whittle down that list, and it in turn is under the thumb of Iran’s real ruler, theocrat Ali Khamenei. Last time it excluded all but four out of 476 nominees. It’s expected to release its decision tomorrow, although we’ve already learned that women are pre-emptively banned.

Particular interest centres on whether or not the Council will rule out former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who at the age of 78 has nominated as a pro-reform candidate. Quoted in the Telegraph, Iranian expert Meir Javedanfar says that if reformist candidates “can demonstrate real support and that barring them from taking part will hurt stability more, Khamenei will let them run. Whether they would then be allowed to win or not is another question.”

Videla seized power in a coup in 1976 and proceeded to conduct a ruthless campaign against his real and supposed enemies that became known as the “Dirty War”. Originally directed, at least in theory, against armed left-wing guerrillas, it quickly became a reign of terror against activists and dissidents of all sorts. Estimates of the number of people killed range from about 9,000 to 30,000.

Nor was it confined to Argentina: in alliance with neighboring dictators such as Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay (and with the tacit support of the United States), “Operation Condor” targeted subversive influences across the continent. It’s the era that turned “disappear” into a transitive verb.

In 1982 one of Videla’s successors, General Galtieri, made the mistake of starting a war with the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands. The military regime collapsed as a result and the new democratic government began inquiries into its activities, eventually putting its leaders on trial. Videla was pardoned as an act of reconciliation in 1990, but the Supreme Court later ruled the pardon unconstitutional and he was returned to prison.

You can read more about Videla in the New York Times and at Al-Jazeera and the BBC. But what none of them quite seem to convey is just how normal a dictatorship like Videla’s seemed at the time.

With hindsight, Videla’s rule took place at a time when dictatorship was already on the way out. Greece, Portugal and Spain were all moving back to democracy, and as the Cold War thawed out the United States was starting to pay more attention to human rights issues.

But no-one really predicted how quickly and completely military rule would go out of fashion, especially in South America. The continent was regarded as the natural home of tinpot military despots, where intervals of civilian government were brief and unsuccessful. (Chile had long been an exception, which was why Pinochet’s rule was especially traumatic.)

In the 30 years since Argentina’s generals gave up power, democracy has bloomed in any number of unlikely places. Back in 2006, when I compiled the Crikey dictators list, I could find only 16 remaining examples of “a species that dominated the history of the 20th century” – and six of those have since given way to something like democratisation.

No doubt the world still has many problems, and there’s a lot still to be done to secure peace and freedom to its people. But the fate of General Videla serves as a reminder of how far we’ve already come.

And sure enough, Tuesday’s election in British Columbia was absolutely fascinating. You can get all the results here, but they don’t tell you what was fascinating about it: they just show an incumbent government winning a comfortable majority with very little swing either way, beating its only serious rival by about 5% in the primary vote.

The remarkable thing is that this was completely contrary to the unanimous prediction of the opinion polls, which all said the Liberals would go down to the New Democratic Party.

I’ve written about it at some length in today’s Crikey, wondering if there’s a lesson for Australia: “could it mean the Gillard government, which has never been as far behind in the polls as Clark’s Liberals were, is still in a position to stage a comeback before September 14?”

Antony Green asked the same question yesterday. We both agree that the differences between electoral systems in the two countries make this sort of upset much less likely here. I don’t discount the possibility entirely, since “upsets tend to happen — by definition — without warning.” But for a variety of reasons our pollsters have a much better track record than their Canadian counterparts.

And spare a thought for Éric Grenier, trying to make a name for himself with the Canadian equivalent of Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com. In a long post overnight he tries, without much success, to explain what went wrong:

British Columbians collectively woke up and changed their minds and swung about 13 points towards Christy Clark. Or, more likely, something disastrously wrong occurred in the polling industry. …

There is no question that seat projection models like mine work. They are an effective way to translate poll results into seats. This is not voodoo magic, it is a rather simple endeavour. The challenge is being the least possible amount of wrong, which is the best that forecasters can hope for. But the models are only as good as the available information.

I have to admit that my confidence in the quality of that information – polling – has been profoundly shaken. …

This site was meant to be a way to cut through the confusion in polling and give a good idea of what, as a whole, the polls are saying. The site can still do that, but if what the polls are saying is not reflective of reality, what use is it?

I feel his pain. We all know the sorts of inaccuracies that polls are liable to, but at a fundamental level we still depend on pollsters being able to do their job. In the developed democracies that confidence is generally well placed. British Columbia turned out to be a striking exception.

It’s by Anne-Ruth Wertheim, a Dutch journalist and scholar. She’s trying to explain the “Islamophobia” or anti-Muslim racism promoted especially by Geert Wilders (whom we’ve come across before) in her homeland of the Netherlands. In doing so, she distinguishes between two different types of racism, which she calls (using terms pioneered by her father) “exploitation racism” and “competition racism”.

“Exploitation racism” is the attitude people take to those that they think are inferior, and whom they can use but need to keep in their place. Typical cases are the native peoples exploited by colonialism and the blacks who were victims of chattel slavery. As Wertheim says, “These workers are usually spared mass violence, since they have to be kept in good enough shape to do the dirty, hard labour.”

“Competition racism” comes when people suspect that the target group might actually not be inferior, but might be a threat to jobs and status, making it more important to demonise them. Examples include the Asians in Idi Amin’s Uganda, the Chinese in South-East Asia, and of course the Jews in Europe. “It is not uncommon for their centuries of life in a country to end with expulsion or extermination.”

Wertheim’s argument (which she has been developing for a while) is that attitudes to the Muslims in Europe have been moving from the first category to the second. From initially being guest workers to be exploited, they have begun to arouse more dangerous passions:

As long as they knew their place, it was fine for them to do the work the established population felt was too poorly paid or too unpleasant. But step by step, their descendants are qualified for all the work there is. So they are increasingly formidable rivals, especially with a recession going on.

Characteristic of the shift, she says, is that cultural factors become more important than purely racial ones. This gives a certain deniability to those who are inflaming opinion against the target population. But it also suggests that they are being disingenuous when they claim to support assimilation, since their real goal is the disappearance of the competing group (although of course assimilation can be a means to disappearance).

Do read the whole thing: it’s one of the most thought-provoking pieces I’ve read on racism. I’m not entirely convinced – I’m not sure it’s invariably true that “The driving force behind racism is economics.” (For one thing, the shift to actual genocide against the Jews of Europe was marked by greater rather than less emphasis on strictly racial criteria.) But at the very least Wertheim has an important angle on a serious and troubling issue.

Since yesterday afternoon’s update, late counting favored the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, a liberal party based in the ethnic Turkish community, at the expense of the two major parties. The centre-right GERB retained its overall lead with 30.7% (down 9% from 2009) , followed by the Socialist Party on 27.1% (up 9.4%) and MRF 10.5% (down 3.5%). The only other party to pass the 4% threshold to enter parliament is the far-right nationalist Attack, with 7.4% (down 2%).

The MRF also picked up two more of the first-past-the-post constituency seats (at the expense of GERB), bringing it to five – the same number it won in 2009.

Repeating the calculation that I made yesterday now gives the following seat totals:

So GERB and MRF still have a clear majority between them; the problem is that according to news reports all of the other parties, including MRF, have ruled out joining or supporting a GERB government.

But the alternative, a BSP-MRF coalition, would be just short of a majority, having exactly half the seats in the National Assembly. Its best bet might be to try to pick off a defector or two from GERB, but that would still leave it in a precarious position.

Socialist leader Sergei Stanischev is quoted as saying he “was ready to meet with all parties” except GERB. But even if the Socialists were able to do some sort of deal with Attack, that would not produce a majority either. And it’s utterly unthinkable that Attack and the MRF could ever co-operate, since anti-Turkish racism is the centrepiece of Attack’s platform.

So unless MRF is willing to swallow its distaste and come to an agreement with GERB, Bulgaria could well be headed for fresh elections in the not-too-distant future. But with turnout already down to a record low

Don’t bother looking for any of this in the Australian media, but the international outlets have a bit of coverage. Unfortunately it’s less useful than it should be because of their unwillingness (or inability) to translate votes into seats.

Here’s the New York Times, for example; here’s the BBC, here’s Al-Jazeera, or Deutsche Welle, or the London Telegraph. Only the last of those even mentions the seat totals, and it gives GERB a lead of twelve seats over the Socialists, whereas on my reckoning it’s 14. (Granted they might be right and I might be wrong, but since they give no indication of where the number comes from I think I’ll stick to mine.)

The BBC report (just to pick on my usual target) is dated 1.26pm yesterday GMT: that’s 11.26pm in eastern Australia, seven hours after I posted the preliminary results and about the same time as the Bulgarian electoral commission was making its last update. Yet the key facts about the new parliament – which combinations of parties will have a majority and which won’t – appear nowhere in the report.

Instead all we get is the remark that “In order to form a new government, Gerb will need the support of parties that have already declared their opposition to another Borisov-led administration,” and that “it will be hard for either main party to form a credible coalition.” Quite true, but tantalisingly incomplete.

Is it that the BBC doesn’t know how the Bulgarian electoral system works? It’s explained on Wikipedia, or if you don’t trust that you can confirm it by reverse-engineering from the 2009 results. Or if you can read Bulgarian I’m sure it wouldn’t be hard to find an official description. Or is there no-one at the BBC who can do a D’Hondt calculation? (That’s on Wikipedia too, although I think my explanation is neater.)

Or do they just assume the readers are only looking for local color and don’t care about what’s actually happening?

The Bulgarian electoral commission is publishing the results here. The notation at the top tells you the time and the proportion of polling places reporting – currently “Резултати за страната към 06:15 часа при обработени 69.389% протоколи на СИК в РИК.” So it’s 6.15am in Bulgaria (i.e. 1.15pm eastern Australian time) and 69.4% have reported. That hasn’t changed for a while; it’s quite likely that electoral staff, having counted all night, have now gone to bed and will resume sometime later today.

The column graph then tells you the percentage of the vote gained so far by each party. The numbers key to the list below, which of course is in Bulgarian, but 15 is the ruling party, GERB (it stands for Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria, but they just use the acronym); 5 is the opposition Socialist Party (running as “Coalition for Bulgaria”); 40 is the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the liberal Turkish-based party; and 14 is the far-right party “Attack”.

The threshold for representation is 4%, so only those four look like getting into parliament. Two others are close: the nationalist National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria (number 4) on 3.7% and the centrist Movement of Bulgaria for the Citizens (number 33) on 3.4%.

A D’Hondt calculation* of the percentages for the top four should then give you the allocation of 209 of the seats in the National Assembly. I make it GERB 87, Socialists 76, MRF 25 and Attack 21.

The remaining 31 seats are allocated on a constituency basis by first-past-the-post. The constituencies are listed down the left-hand side of the page, in alphabetical order. (Ignore the first line, “страната” (country), which takes you back to the national totals, and the last one, “ДКП”, which I think is for voters from abroad.) By clicking on them you’ll find that GERB is currently leading in 17, the Socialists in eleven and the MRF in three.

So adding the two sorts of seats together gives us the following:

If those results hold up with further counting, then GERB and the MRF between them would have a working majority. Co-operation between, however, them is by no means assured, since GERB is badly on the nose – the discovery of a consignment of unregistered ballot papers just before polling day is only the latest in a string of scandals.

But since none of the other three will work with the far right, the only other option for a parliamentary majority would be some sort of understanding between GERB and the Socialists, and that looks even more unlikely.

* How to do a D’Hondt calculation: on a spreadsheet set out the percentages for every party that’s above 4%; divide each figure by some common divisor (try 0.0036); add up the results that you get, ignoring all remainders. If the total is 209, you’re done; if it’s not, keep adjusting the divisor up or down until it is.

The Pakistani electoral commission has the bad habit, presumably copied from the British, of only releasing figures once counting in a seat has finished. Of the 272 constituencies (there are also 70 seats for women and minorities, allocated proportionally), just on half had been declared by late this morning (about 6.40am Pakistan time).

Of those, the PML(N) had won 71, a narrow majority but well clear of its rivals. Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf, or Movement for Justice, had 18, the outgoing Pakistan Peoples Party had 14, a coalition of fundamentalist parties had seven and the liberal Muttahidda Qaumi Movement five.

Unofficial results, widely reported by the media, show Sharif’s party ending with somewhat less than half the seats, but in a position to assemble a majority with minor parties and independents. Talks to that effect are said to have already begun.

It was reasonably clear prior to the election that the PML(N) was the only party with a chance of getting to such a strong position, so it made sense for voters to rally to it in the interests of stability. (See last week’s preview here.) Nonetheless, as is usual in Pakistan, the vote was geographically divided: Sharif’s strength is overwhelmingly in the Punjab, the country’s largest province, while the PPP remains strong in Sindh and Khan’s Movement for Justice looks like being in a position to govern in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province).

There is also an element of the same rural-urban divide that we saw last week in Malaysia. While Khan’s party finished well back in second place, it is disproportionately popular with the urban middle class and evidently with younger voters. That, together with Khan’s status as a cricketing legend, helps to account for its prominence in the media.

Whether Sharif is the best person to bring a divided country together will depend a lot on how much he has learned since he was last in power. His two terms of office in the 1990s were troubled at best, being marked by corruption scandals, constitutional crises and a small-scale war with India. In 1999 he was removed in a military coup led by his army chief, General Musharraf. Musharraf’s original intention was apparently to have Sharif executed, but he settled for exiling him to Saudi Arabia, where he remained until 2008.

Since Pakistan’s history has been plagued by military interference in politics (and in foreign policy), the fact that Sharif has been at the receiving end of it himself is probably a good thing. As Ben Doherty puts it in this morning’s Age, “he has never forgiven the military for forcing him from office”:

Gone is the man who was seen as the protege of Pakistan’s generals, and who conspired with shadowy army chiefs to bring down the government of Benazir Bhutto. … Most importantly for Pakistan, a country that has spent half its independent existence run by the military, Sharif says he will champion democracy and the rule of law.

In addition to the military, Sharif had also in the past been seen as close to the Islamist side of Pakistani politics, and it may be that one of the ingredients in his success on Saturday was the way that the campaigns of his more secular rivals (particularly the PPP) were paralysed by the threat of Taliban violence. But in that respect also he seems to have mellowed, and it was Khan rather than Sharif who played the anti-American card when it came to the “war on terror” and the worsening morass in neighboring Afghanistan.

If anyone has the experience and the wiliness to steer safely between the competing demands of the Americans and the Taliban while trying to modernise Pakistan, Sharif is probably the one.

But possibly more important than the direction of the new government is the fact that Pakistani voters, despite the violence and the confusion, have shown their commitment to democracy. Turnout was reported to be more than 60%, the highest since 1970, and for the first time in the country’s history one civilian government will transfer power peacefully to another.

In countries like Australia we tend to take democracy for granted; it takes somewhere like Pakistan to bring home to us what a remarkable thing it is.