THE
ELECTIONS: THE DAY AFTER: If you're not interested in politics (or
the future of Spain), skip this, rather long, section.
MY VIEW:
- So, no one won. Everyone lost. Fascinating. The people of Spain have spoken. And have confused and disappointed absolutely everyone, with the possible exception of left-wing Podemos.
- Is this the final end of Francoism and of a 'centre-right' party (PP) with far-right elements??
- Will we see the resignations of the leaders of both the PP and the PSOE parties??
- Oh, the irony of having the party that has given Rajoy one of the biggest headaches of his premiership – President Mas of Cataluña - now possibly holding the key to Spain's stability.
- Naturally, the stock market fell.
THE LOCAL
2: SPAIN WILL NO LONGER BE SUBORDINATE TO GERMANY
THE LOCAL 3: While Spain’s main parties may be scrabbling to form a pact after no clear winner emerged from Sunday’s general election, one group who can surely bask in victory are Spanish women, who will enjoy their biggest representation ever in the country’s parliament.
THE LOCAL 3: While Spain’s main parties may be scrabbling to form a pact after no clear winner emerged from Sunday’s general election, one group who can surely bask in victory are Spanish women, who will enjoy their biggest representation ever in the country’s parliament.
THE
TELEGRAPH 1: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
THE
TELEGRAPH 2: POLITICAL UPRISING: Spain risks months of political
paralysis and a corrosive showdown with Germany over fiscal austerity
after insurgent movements smashed the traditional two-party system,
leaving the country almost ungovernable.
THE OVERVIEW OF EL ESPIA EN EL CONGRESO: For readers of Spanish.
THE TIMES
1: AN END TO CRONY POLITICS: The
Spanish general election has called time on the country’s two-party
system. Although the incumbent Popular party of Mariano Rajoy has won
a slender majority of votes, he will struggle to form a stable
government. Two insurgent parties, the centrist Citizens party and
the left-leaning populists of Podemos, now control almost 110 seats
in the 350-seat lower chamber. They can block or enable any new
government line-up.
The result
thus marks the death of Bipartidismo, the bipartisan order, by which
Spain has been governed since the end of the Franco dictatorship in
the 1970s. Many older Spaniards will be uneasy with this outcome. The
alternation between the Popular party conservatives and the
Socialists has made out of Spain a stable and important member of the
western alliance. It has also, however, encouraged cronyism and
corruption; the two big established parties still hold sway in the
countryside but to young urban voters, they stifle new ideas and are
bywords for stagnation.
Pressed by
Berlin and Brussels Mr Rajoy took an axe to public spending and in so
doing made it impossible to repeat his landslide victory of 2011. His
showing on Sunday reflected this dismay: the Popular party’s share
of the vote has dropped from 44.6% to 28.7%. That is
too thin a basis to run a minority government in a country whose
system awards the largest party remarkable clout within the
legislative process. The prime minister in his rush to retain power
may be tempted to offer the Socialists a grand coalition such as the
one run by Angela Merkel in Germany. The Socialists show, however, no
enthusiasm for such a deal and it would not serve Spain well.
Spain’s
interests are best met by a governing coalition that continues to
exert fiscal discipline and that does not allow the country to
disintegrate chaotically. It should be a government that starts to
overhaul the politicised judiciary and that puts an end to the
unacceptable delays in investigating corruption. The Spanish
constitution must be reformed and the electoral system changed to
reflect the electoral drift away from a two-party carve-up. Policies
have to be more closely focused on alleviating unemployment, which
still hovers at about 21 per cent of the workforce. For young people,
the mainspring of the upstart parties, Podemos and the Citizens,
unemployment is particularly severe and many are choosing to
emigrate.
Podemos
and Citizens, movements born out of frustration, agree on many points
but not at all on the management of the economy. The Citizens party
has an affinity with European liberals: it wants to minimise the role
of the state, rejects an industrial policy and has strong ideas on
modernising the economy. Podemos wants to end or roll back privatisations. A more natural alignment could be between the Popular
party, perhaps with new leadership, and the Citizens but in the
complex post-election arithmetic, this would still need the help of
separatist members of parliament.
A
government that made any major concession to the breakaway of
Catalonia would present problems for King Felipe of Spain. It might
spark a constitutional crisis. The horse-trading has begun, a new
election in February may well be needed but it would be wrong to read
the vote as a call for a Syriza-style revolution. The Spanish vote
was not a declaration of bankruptcy of the political class but rather
an urgent call for it to enter the 21st century.
THE TIMES
2: THE 4 MOST LIKELY ELECTIONS: The party
which gains the most votes forms a minority administration which
seeks to pass legislation with the help of smaller parties. Polls
suggest this will be Mariano Rajoy’s conservative Popular Party
(PP), which would mean an austerity agenda would prevail.
If the PP
fails to gain enough seats to form a minority government, it may make
a pact with Ciudadanos (Citizens). Albert Rivera had ruled out a pact
with the PP or the Socialists but the Citizens leader said on the eve
of elections that he would not stand in the way of the party which
gained the most votes — which analysts took to mean he might favour
the PP. Citizens supports continued reduction of the country’s debt
and economic reforms.
More
worrying for the markets, and investors, would be an alliance between
the Socialists and Podemos, on the far left. Pablo Iglesias, the
Podemos leader, has attacked the Socialists and the PP as part of la
casta (the elite), but if he fails to form a pact with Pedro
Sánchez, the Socialist leader, it may allow the PP to return to
power. Many fear that a pact between Podemos and the Socialists would
unravel labour reforms designed for growth.
A less
likely outcome might be a coalition between the Socialists and
Citizens. To have enough seats to attain a majority — 176 — this
coalition may have to include Podemos. This would also threaten
labour reforms and fiscal discipline, which economists suggest are
essential for Spain’s economy to grow.
And now to
something completely different . . . .
XMAS
SHOPPING: I went into town to do mine yesterday. I only buy books, on
the grounds that everyone should be forced to read more, and because
I like the idea of trees being cut down. As ever in Spain, the shop I
went to was chaotic – no apparent order to the books and so a need
to ask the (busy) assistants everything you want to know. And when
you've been pointed to the right section(s), you then have to
constantly move your head from side to side to read the titles, as no
one in Spain has realised it'd be a good idea to have these all
written either from top to bottom or vice versa. Nonetheless, I
managed to do all my shopping in around 30 minutes.
There were
longish queues outside 2 shops and I wondered what was being sold in
them. I should have guessed it was tickets for the 2 huge lotteries
of the year, one of which will be held this morning. Though the
chances of winning – unless you're a corrupt politician – are
infinitesimally small, huge sums are spent on this. An average of €60
for each person in Galicia, the local press said yesterday. The
politicians, by the way, buy the winning tickets as a way of
laundering black cash. One such claimed in court he'd won 8 times. Not that he expected anyone to believe this, just accept it as true.
THOSE 3
WISE MEN: They came from Spain, says the Catholic church.
Specifically from the centre of global wisdom back then, Andalucia
(Al-Andalús). So says Pope Benedict XVI in his 2012 book Jesus of
Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. Last time I looked, this wasn't
exactly east of the Middle East. But who really cares? Is there any intelligent person left who believes everything the Bible records?
FINALLY .
. . RT TV: It's been amusing to see the change of the channel's focus
(target?) since the downing of the Russian jet by Turkey. It's become
the latter state, of course, and there's been no limit to the scorn
and the number and variety of accusations hurled at it. These include
the insistence – by Putin, no less – that it was done to somehow
assist the USA. The previous target of the West (particularly the
USA) has, temporarily no doubt, been relegated to also-ran status.
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