There is an election looming, with two very different possible outcomes. Readers will have already made up their minds, and most of us can’t vote in Spain anyway, but these are the two strains:
The conservatives want to lower taxes and lower services. They would adjust Spain’s military spending towards the 5% of GDP, as demanded by President Trump (preferably with American-made weapons). The banks, industry, the Church, the Judiciary, the Military, most of the media, the nostalgics for Franco and so on will support them.
The progressives (as they call themselves) want to tax the rich, increase social services and aid, are against war and if all went well (as per the CIS poll), they would be in the majority.
The conservatives are two parties (or two-and-a-half if you count the Catalonian secessionist Junts per Catalunya). These are the Partido Popular and Vox. The PP is led by the rather grey Alberto Núñez Feijóo (hard to pronounce, hard to remember) while Vox has the dashing Santiago Abascal, who likes to be seen on horseback or wearing military garb (although he was never in the army or indeed in any civilian job beyond briefly running a bar as a teenager). He is friendly with both Trump and Netanyahu.
(My picture is a cartoon from the summer hols).
The PP has been losing support towards Vox, which is an unashamedly fascist party, and is a member of the European ‘Patriots for Europe’.
The One can’t win the elections without the Other. This would include – in a conservative government – Vox’s leading claims, which include a discriminatory Spaniards First agenda (possibly illegal under European law) called National Priority.
To add to the excitement, a small and eccentric far-right party called Se Acabó la Fiesta might conceivably gain a seat (there are a total of 350 up for grabs).
The Junts would be a useful but disagreeable ally for the conservatives – more so since Vox would like to see it and other secessionist parties banned, even though Junts has taken under its wing the far-right Aliança Catalana, a Catalonian version of Vox.
Vaguely in the centre would be two other regional parties – the PNV and Coalición Canaria.
On the other side, we have Pedro Sánchez (worth five legions just by himself), his PSOE social workers party, and what has turned into a large number of splinter groups from the far left which one could head under the title (with a nod to Monty Python) ‘the Judean People’s Front’. The title for alliance of the left has long been taken by Izquierda Unida, a coalition which includes (or included) the Partido Comunista de España, the Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña, the Partido de Acción Socialista, the Partido Carlista, the Partido Humanista and the Izquierda Republicana. Over the years, the coalition evolved from a multi-party alliance into a unified political movement organized through regional federations (such as Izquierda Unida-Verdes and Esquerda Unida). With me so far?
Then there is Podemos, which came in strong in 2015 with 69 deputies and has withered ever since (as often as not due to aggressive tactics from the right-wing media and the judiciary) down to just four in the outgoing government. Other groups on the left of the PSOE include the regional ERC (with the shooting star of Gabriel Rufián who… almost… managed to bring everyone together), the Basque EH-Bildu party, an Andalusian one called Adelante Andalucía, plus the survivors of the departed Sumar party – now called Frente Amplio, a coalition of various lefty groups: the above-mentioned Izquierda Unida, plus Más Madrid, Catalunya en Comú (Comuns), Compromís Regional (Valencian Community) and the Verdes Equo. Add to this heady mix, the far-left nationalist Galician BNG.
Trying to get them all together – as everybody on the left was hoping, has turned out to be as hard as herding cats. With all the small lefty parties presenting candidatures, clearly many votes will fall between the cracks, and thus lower the chances for Pedro Sánchez to return as prime minister. Of them all, Podemos has proved the most intransigent.
The elections are for the Congreso de los Diputados (350 seats) and el Senado (266).
Furthermore, there are the – I’d call them joke parties: Pacma (the pets’ party), Democracia21 (Miriam González, the wife of Nick Clegg), and at least a dozen others…
The elections are on Sunday, November 29th. There will be two weeks of active campaigning, which means posters everywhere with ‘Vote for Me’ slathered across them, which starts on Friday November 13th. Right now, we are in ‘pre-campaigning’ times.