1,000 subscribers: corporate ads, political manipulation or independent journalism
This simple framework helps you to understand what is really going on.
What an explosive few days for Spain, politically! Sánchez has now tied up the top job until 2027 unless the coalition falls apart or unless the right somehow manages to stage a motion of no confidence, which they don’t have the votes for. But where does that leave Spanish politics as a whole?
The right is now angered and in disarray, with Vox and the alt-right taking to the streets and the PP adopting its more conservative strategy. The amnesty bill part of the deal is still to come and there will now almost certainly be a day when Puigdemont comes home to enormous media fanfare. And what will the new government do with its second chance at progressive policies?
Tucker Carlson’s little trip to Madrid this week is not the journalism we need. This is even worse than what happened during the Catalan crisis in 2017 when serious foreign media parachuted reporters in and left us with a sensation that they didn’t really know what they were talking about. In 2023, we get global ideological influencers.
Carlson turned up to go to the protest outside PSOE HQ with Vox leader Abascal, took some selfies with Vox MEPs and social media satellites and sat down for a mechanical interview with Abascal to talk about Abascal’s view on Spain with ideological questions on Abascal’s favourite topics. No constrast, no outside information, no other views, no ciritique, no analysis, not even any other reporting on what the party was doing.
We know we can do much better than that, and independently.
It all fits in with the previous thoughts on what we want from reporters in Israel-Gaza at the minute, where we mostly don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew and don’t understand the finer points of complex regional tribal politics there, or with what we were saying about the regional journalist here in Murcia who, while working for Onda Cero, was a politely critical voice against regional government and power but suddenly got sacked after more than 30 years.
There are still only three basic options for funding journalism, each focused on value for who is really paying: corporate ads, obscure political influence funding or readers who choose to subscribe.
In the first case, media companies are selling your valuable attention to advertisers so that you buy their products and feel emotions for their brands. This is how we end up with ever more sensationalist, emotional and repetitive click bait.
In the second, political parties and their obscure financial backers want to control frames, narratives, stories, labels and opinions so that the next time you argue with your family or friends or go to vote, you do so in their favour, to push their agenda and to give them power, according to their view of the world.
The third case is the only option in which a journalist is working directly with his readers and where the only aim is more and better journalism so that everybody understands things better.
The first two seek to manipulate you. The third only seeks understanding. An imperfect human understanding, as each journalist will do it better or worse over time, and favour some stories and labels over others, and that will interact with your own worldview and background, but he is not seeking office or votes or to sell you a product or brand. Just journalism and analysis.
Once you understand this simple framework, you understand what Tucker Carlson and Vox, or the professional Israeli propaganda machine, or regional political power somewhere, are really doing and why, all while they present themselves superficially as democratic and pro-freedom-of-the-press.
We still have a chance with option three. It’s still possible. The Internet and thinks like Twitter and Substack make it possible.
1,000 subscribers is a real number that is doable for readers and that buys real reporting and analytical independence for a journalist to do serious work and dispatches from events for you. In our case, that’s a number that gets me roving around Spain for you too, with photos and videos and interviews to better illustrate this bit of a global changing reality.
Every reader counts, it all adds up, and we get something that has never really existed before in media history: readers direct to journalists, with no manipulative intermedaries. No ads, no political influence.
Subscribe now: https://thespainreport.substack.com/subscribe
Or zaps for Nostr people.
1/ Sánchez reappointed Prime Minister of Spain, in 179-171 vote.
2/ In favour: PSOE (121), Sumar (31), Esquerra (7), Junts (7), PNV (5), Bildu (6), BNG (1), Coalición Canaria (1)
3/ Against: PP (137), Vox (33), UPN (1)
“We must all read Maquivelli more”, said Sánchez.
The right in Spain needs to change frames, discourses and rhetoric. They lost the general election in July after a personal campaign against Sánchez. The left and separatists voted together to appoint the new Speaker in Congress, 178-172, and now Sánchez PM again, 179-171.
After the local and regional elections in May, the right thought Sánchez was finished. He doubled down and called a snap general election. The right assumed they would win a conservative-far-right coalition. Sánchez sold himself as the antidote to that. Now he is PM again.
What happens next in Spain? 4 scenarios for Sánchez's amnesty deal with Catalan separatists
1. Somebody, some other institution, stops it. The King. Europe. The courts. Not happening, at least not before the vote happens. King Felipe is a modern, constitutional monarch, not an ancien régime absolutist tyrant. Constitutionally, as far as I understand it, he cannot refuse to sign a law that parliament has passed. He has no wriggle room to imprint his personal marque on events. If he were to try, the crisis might even go up a level to talk of abdication. This is not national-to-regional constitutional authority like in 2017, this is the Prime Minister himself doing a deal with a fugitive from justice, to stay on as PM. His party, the PSOE, controls Congress, the seat of national sovereignty, via the Speaker and the Speaker’s Committee. Vox petitioned the Supreme Court yesterday for an injunction to stop the debate today, on the grounds of bribery, terrorism and abuse of authority, and the Supreme Court rejected that this morning. Europe doesn’t work on such short timelines. The latest message was from Von der Leyen’s spokesman, Eric Mamer, in a tweet yesterday: “the Commission has received today the draft law from the Spanish authorities and has just started its analysis”. The Polish rule-of-law crisis with the European Commission began…in 2015. A “maximum priority”, “urgent” response from Spain’s Constitutional Court, might be…three months, once appeals start being filed.
So the debate begins at 12 p.m. today. 1,500 police reinforcements have been drafted in to lock down Congress and the surrounding streets.
2. Last-minute political backstabbing. House-of-Cards style, with secret power grabs and behind-the-scenes dirty moves. Maybe García-Page’s eight MPs from Castilla la Mancha will rebel, given his public statements against the deal. Maybe the PP and Vox offer Sánchez some MPs at the last minute to tempt him away from the separatists and the far-left. Maybe some random socialist or Sumar MPs will have a crisis of conscience and an actual independent thought. Maybe Sánchez himself will rip up the deal after being reappointed PM this week, stabbing Puigdemont in the political back. Maybe, but probably, almost certainly, not. Spanish MPs, in Spain’s party political system, do not rebel against the party line and the boss. There is no independence of thought or action when voting buttons are pressed. In practice, you could reduce the number of MPs in Congress in Madrid from the current 350 to about 10 and all the votes would come out with the same result. Likewise, there is no chance of the PP and Vox offering, or of Sánchez accepting, their votes in a European style grand, cross-party coalition. None of them could stomach that. For several years now, in a political environment in which no one has even a majority, never mind a supermajority large enough to change the constitution, Sánchez has always chosen, voluntarily, when faced with the pressure of events, the far-left (Podemos, Sumar) and regional separatists, instead of the constitutional right or even the liberal centre. If he used Puigdemont to get reappointed and then ripped up the amnesty deal, what would he do for a budget and all the other laws he will want to pass for the rest of the parliament, through to 2027?
Last-minute political backstabbing. House-of-Cards style, with secret power grabs and behind-the-scenes dirty moves. Maybe García-Page’s eight MPs from Castilla la Mancha will rebel, given his public statements against the deal. Maybe the PP and Vox offer Sánchez some MPs at the last minute to tempt him away from the separatists and the far-left. Maybe some random socialist or Sumar MPs will have a crisis of conscience and an actual independent thought. Maybe Sánchez himself will rip up the deal after being reappointed PM this week, stabbing Puigdemont in the political back. Maybe, but probably, almost certainly, not. Spanish MPs, in Spain’s party political system, do not rebel against the party line and the boss. There is no independence of thought or action when voting buttons are pressed. In practice, you could reduce the number of MPs in Congress in Madrid from the current 350 to about 10 and all the votes would come out with the same result. Likewise, there is no chance of the PP and Vox offering, or of Sánchez accepting, their votes in a European style grand, cross-party coalition. None of them could stomach that. For several years now, in a political environment in which no one has even a majority, never mind a supermajority large enough to change the constitution, Sánchez has always chosen, voluntarily, when faced with the pressure of events, the far-left (Podemos, Sumar) and regional separatists, instead of the constitutional right or even the liberal centre. If he used Puigdemont to get reappointed and then ripped up the amnesty deal, what would he do for a budget and all the other laws he will want to pass for the rest of the parliament, through to 2027?
3. The radical right does something stupid. At other moments in Spanish history, with grave national risk perceived by conservatives or the far-right or the old establisment, with no apparent mechanisms to stop or slow events, a general would be found to ride to Congress on a horse or with a bus-load of soldiers to try to put a stop to the left and regional separatists “destroying Spain”. It has happened several times before, from the mid 19th-Century onwards. One of those episodes, although the systemic causes were much more complex, ended very badly in the Civil War and 40 years of Francoist dictatorship. The last attempt was “only” in 1981, with Tejero shooting at the ceiling of the chamber in Congress where today’s debate will happen. Just yesterday, in constitutional terms. In 2023, a military or general officer option is not going to happen…but there is a chance the radical right might attempt a Trump- or Bolsonaro- style Jan 6. assault on parliament, which is more in vogue as a desperate protest measure. Tucker Carlson was in Madrid this week, smiling alongside Vox leader Abascal outside PSOE headquarters. Alt-right Telegram channels and influencer channels in Spain have been buzzing for two weeks with ideas about different levels of protest in different places. There are even some among them who are annoyed at the King and the whole 1978 constitutional system. The main group behind them, Revuelta (linked to Vox), last night told all its supporters to get down to Congress this morning. This is the reason there are 1,500 extra police around parliament in Madrid today. And sometimes these things snowball out of hand, once people start interacting in real life and others start finding out about it.
4. It all just blows over. Basically what we have here, underneath it all, is Puigdemont sees his chance to come home without going to jail and Sánchez gets to be Prime Minister for another four years. The rest of it is fluff to make that core exchange happen. As we have seen, respect for the rule of law in Spain is not as stringent on principle as it might be in some other nations or cultures. Does anybody really care about the thousands of political corruption cases at all levels over the past 20 years, beyond using it as polarised ammunition to lob at the other side? And as we are all seeing, if you have political mates in the right places, pesky judges and even whole chunks of criminal law and entire crimes can be made to go away if you have a few votes someone needs to stay in power. Get the wording and the frames right in the language in your bill, pound it home with friendly talking-heads on TV for a couple of months so that everybody just shrugs after a few growls, and job done, people will move on to the next big story, or to enjoying Christmas, which is just around the corner. The other institutions won’t stop it, the political parties won’t stop it, the radical right won’t get anywhere even if they do try to storm parliament, Sánchez gets his votes this week in Congress, the amnesty bill goes through, enough to be published in the official gazette, which means it becomes law, some people file some appeals but courts take months to decide, Puigdemont comes home, spends a triumphant couple of days on TV smiling and by Easter, all the fuss has died down. Sánchez is still PM and the right is stuck in opposition until 2027.
Hopefully it will pick up if I keep posting stuff here.
Tucker Carlson turned up in Madrid with Spanish alt-right leader Abascal (Vox) at the protest outside Socialist Party (PSOE) HQ last night and confirmed to @okdiario that he was here because "the world isn't seeing it enough and that's why we wanted to come, because it's not getting the coverage it deserves".
"Anybody who would violate your Constitution, potentially use physical violence, to end democracy, is a tyrant, is a dictator". That's political activism, not journalism. Vox related people were overjoyed.
Two Spanish government ministers, Belarra (Social Rights) and Montero (Equality), as well as Jeremy Corbyn (UK), have signed a petition for an ICC investigation into Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz et. al for genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza. https://justiceforgaza.info
A summary of Sánchez's proposed amnesty law for Catalan separatists in English for you:
🔴Vox: to file criminal complaint against Sánchez
🔴Vox: to seek urgent Supreme Court injunction
🔴PP: Sánchez "has filed the paperwork to become a totalitarian"
1. Applies to all crimes related to Catalan separatist, independence or secession process
2. Between 2012 and 2023
3. Judges get two months to put it into practice, "urgently"
4. With a special mention for the 2014 referendum (Artur Mas) and the 2017 referendum (Puigdemont)
5. All crimes related to promoting, procuring, organising or executing any kind of independence of Catalonia, or collaborating or assissting to do so in any way
6. All crimes related to money, the misuse of public funds, or abusing the authority of public office
7. Contempt of court, public order offences, attacking police officers, resisting arrest, blocking police ofciers, abuse of authority, public criticism of authorities
8. NOT INCLUDED: murder, serious assault, torture, inhumane traetment, terrorism, treason, crimes against the financial interest of the EU, racism, antisemitism, anti-gypsyism
9. Amnesty means: crimes do not exist, release from jail or detention, elimination of criminal record, arrest warrants and search orders expire immediately, bail conditions expire immediately, no administrative fine processes
10. Amnesty also means any public workers involved also get their jobs back with full rights and a clean record
11. There is a paragraph on page 16 that makes sure to point out that there will be no restrictive bail measures of any kind, or jailing of anyone on remand, even if someone appeals the process, or tries to argue it is unconstitutional
12. Amnesty bill modifies Criminal Code, adding "amnesty" to list of reasons criminal responsbility is extinguished.
13. Amnesty bill modifies Accounting Tribunal Act, adds "amnesty" to list of reasons financial responsibility is extinguished.
14. In very long preamble, government argues the law is constitutional because it is "singular" and applies very spefically to a well-defined set of circumstances.
15. Government argues that the bill is needed to deal with an "exceptional situation" in "the general interest" in order to foster greater political and social coexistence in Spain.
16. Government argues that if the amnesty were not to go ahead, social and political tensions with Cataln separatists could continue into the future.
17. Spanish government argues that other European countries and European law back the principle of amnesty. Cites Italy, France, Portugal, Germany, UK, Austria, Belgium, Ireland and Sweden.
Just a quick comment today. Given the rapid development of events on the streets and with political rhetoric since the weekend, in terms of the political narrative and where things might go, I think it would no longer be implausible for there to be an attempted assault on Congress by the Spanish alt-right during Sánchez's confidence debate in parliament (still without a date set by the also socialist Speaker of the lower house).
That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It just wouldn’t be implausible or illogical, having suddently gone from boring normality to 39 people injured and police charges with rubber bullets and tear gas in the Spanish capital in four nights of “spontaneous” protests. The amnesty deal with Puigdemont is now done and the right is fuming.
The alt-right sees Sánchez as a traitor. The confidence debate will be the point of maximum psychological and political tension, when the hated Sanchismo gets to renew its mandate in the Prime Minister’s office, Moncloa, for another four years, through to 2027, thanks to the widely criticised amnesty agreement with the even more hated Puigdemont, who is still a fugitive from Spanish justice, with both of them, in the eyes of the right, trampling all over the Constitution, and with a strong perception of democratic impotence among the protesters, without judicial protection and with the clock ticking down against them.
All the elements are there.
1/ Well, that escalated even quicker than the quick escalation the other day. The former PP leader in Catalonia, and a founder of Vox, Alejo Vidal Quadras, was shot in the face on a street in Madrid.
2/ The last report on his condition, yesterday evening, was that he was stable in hospital with no risk to his life, although his jaw was smashed twice.
3/ Initial suspicions on social media, given the very tense political climate this week, were that it must have been someone on the left, but police are investigating an Iranian connection and a professional hit job.
4/ His last tweet before being shot was: "The infamous deal between Sánchez and Puigdemont that crushes the rule of law in Spain and ends the separation of powers has now been done. Our nation will thus cease to be a liberal democracy and become a totalitarian tyranny. We Spaniards will not allow it".
5/ A local PSOE leader in Sanlúcar (Cádiz, Andalusia), Victor Mora, was assaulted on the street by a man shouting “traitor!”, “you’re ruining Spain!”.
6/ Sánchez and Puigdemont did their amnesty deal (pdf), the get-out-of-jail-free card for Puigdemont and votes for Sánchez to repeat as PM.
7/ All four Spanish judges’ associations came out against the deal.
8/ Three Spanish prosecutors associations rejected the deal.
9/ Tax inspectors rejected the deal.
10/ The judicial council issued another statement rejecting the deal.
11/ PP leader Feijóo called for “more democracy” in response and a “responsible, firm, serene” approach to opposition to the deal.
12/ The PP is sticking to its pre-Sunday-lunch protest plan, which won’t have any effect on the amnesty deal at all.
13/ Alt-right led protests outside PSOE HQ continued for a seventh night and tonight there are even more planned, around the country as well as in Madrid.
14/ Vox leader Abascal went along again. He said during a press conference earlier in the day that “this is a new black period in the history of Spain, today a coup against the nation began”.
15/ There were scuffles and violence again, with 24 arrests and seven officers injured, after some pople in the 8,000 strong crowd started chucking objects and flares at them.
16/ The Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) is now on board. They get even more regional powers and negotiations on the recognition of the Basque nation.
17/ ABC: "PSOE humilliates the state"; editorial: "PSOE abandons the Transition".
18/ El Mundo: "Sánchez hands the state over to Puigdemont"; editorial: "A deal against everyone living together".
19/ El País: "PSOE and Junts do deal for PM in exchange for amnesty for Catalan separatists"; editorial: "a new phase in Catalonia".
So Bluesky is pretty dead, then. Just like Nostr, Notes, Threads and Mastodon. Even after Musk has spent a year doing stupid, destructive things at Twitter, it is still livelier than the rest.
Somebody launched friend.tech, a new ETH social network.
Hmmm, don't know. Doesn't seem as lively or slick as in the spring.
What happened to revolutionary Nostr with the instant zaps excitement that just worked. People gave in because of the Apple Store demands..? What kind of revolutionary fuck-the-system, let's-build-something-different culture is that..?
Helped a local author friend @Rayoplateado translate his futuristic science-fiction thriller into English this spring if you're into that kind of story and want to read something this summer:
https://www.amazon.com/Only-Truth-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B0C8TSVW7F/
Game of Seats: Will Sumar beat the Socialists in Spain? We are only two weeks into a brutal eight week political fist fight.
Maybe Sánchez will get lucky. A poll out today in El Mundo suggests the Socialist Party (PSOE) has gone up a few seats in voters’ appreciation over the last few days, although the conservative Popular Party is making strides on the right, supposedly to the detriment of Vox. The next government might depend on one or two seats on either side.
The PSOE is suffering intense internal disarray that smells of the end of an era, though. Three senior regional socialist barons, sitting regional first ministers, protested the direction Sánchez is driving the party in by not turning up for a key national meeting to approve the electoral lists for the general election: the actual names that go on the ballot paper in Spain’s closed-list proportional representation system in each province.
Senior regional barons protesting publicly about electoral lists is something of a death cross in Spanish politics. Remember what suddenly happened with Feijóo and Casado in the PP last year. Depending on the number of votes a party gets, three or four or N names from the list in that constituency get to become MPs. So the closer your name is to the top of the list, the safer your seat. The order of the names on the lists and who gets to go to parliament is therefore dependent not on voters but on party bosses at each level.
What were the regional bosses outraged enough about to kick up a media fuss this week, when image and loyalty are all in Spanish politics because it’s the party boss at the next level up who decides if your name goes on the list? Sánchez has booted out people that were already on the regional election lists to shove in his own people from the national level. (Also in regional socialist politics this week, the PSOE chairwoman in Seville, Amparo Rubiales, resigned after calling a senior conservative leader “a Nazi jew”).
Further to the left of the socialists, phoenix-like destrucion and renewal has occured in the same week, with the messy assortment of Life-of-Brian regionalist minority far-left parties—I would bet no Spaniard could name them all—finally coming together, if only in name for now, under the Sumar (“Add Up“) umbrella, which means that the communist Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Díaz, has been successful in imposing her strategic will on that chunk of the whole, although looking at the spineless opponents in her path and the backstabbing that has taken place this week, not much operational nouse was needed to achieve that victory. Her brand, her leadership and, very importantly, her framing for the media battle through to election day on July 23 will now prevail. Media report that her face will also be appearing on the Sumar ballot paper, which seems a little totalitarian.
Whatever the results of that vote, her far-left brand will now have a chance to grow its roots futher during the next parliament. More Game of Thrones or House of Cards moves will slowly strangle all of the mini Peoples Fronts of Judea to their last breaths.
United Left, Podemos and all the rest have now bent the knee. The supine Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón, nominally the leader of United Left, gave up his castle without a fight. The House of the Sea Monsters of Valencia (Compromis) managed to get Díaz to agree to a long, waffling name on the electoral banner in exchange for their troops. The nonsense mouthful translates as: “Commitment-Add Up: Let’s Add Up To Win”. The antagonistic militant feminist Equality Minister, Irene Montero (Podemos, Pablo Iglesias’s partner), who believed herself heiress to the Red Throne but who now resides in one of the poshest parts of Madrid and last year succeeded in passing legislation that got hundreds of rapists and child abusers out of the dungeons early, has not been included in the Sumar electoral lists. Cheers could be heard from the lines on the right. Her supposedly loyal partner at the top of Podemos, Ione Belarra, the Social Affairs Minister, is on the list, in the number five spot, a safe seat. When the horses’ hooves banged on Casterly Purple, she caved and took whatever Díaz offered for a comfy safe seat in the next parliament.
So Sánchez has had to impose his will on the Socialist Party from the national level to ensure some of his friends are in the top safe spots on the regional electoral lists. That speaks of dissent, bitterness, infighting and collapse, with a PM still nominally in charge but losing momentum daily. Díaz has imposed her will on Sumar in a more subtle, less destructive manner on the far-left and her star is rising. There is now a certain degree of renewed hope in that camp. Who has been the cleverer of the two politicians over the past year? Clearly she has. And she has set her sights on the top job.
In theory, with the weight of existing Socialist Party electoral machinery at the local and regional level, Sumar will not surpass the PSOE as the leading party on Spanish left on July 23. But there are six long weeks of brutal mutual punishment left until the general election. We are only two weeks into this. The local and regional elections were only a fortnight ago. Pablo Iglesias once said that his real goal was for Podemos to become hegemonic on the left in Spain. Might Díaz now be better placed, faced with a declining PSOE, to attempt that? She will spend the next six weeks talking to left-wing voters around the nation in dulcet tones about feminism and healthcare and education and doing things together and caring for everyone…and their chance to elect a first female Prime Minister of Spain. How many will be tempted by that tale?
Are we still doing ⚡ journalism? Will post a couple of columns.
Could the right win a historic victory in July? Some polls start to suggest support for Vox might fall...in favour of the PP?
The image below is the graph of shifts in Spanish politics since the transition to democracy in the 1970s following the death of Franco, in percentage of the vote for each party. Right-wing parties are at the bottom, centre parties are in the middle, then left-wing parties and the regional nationalists at the top. The numbers for all previous years are real, from general elections. The numbers for 2023 are from the latest GAD3 poll in ABC. GAD3 has a good reputation as a pollster in Spain. The white dotted line is 40%, which is when the right moves into overall majority territory: Aznar in the year 2000 and Rajoy in 2011. The latest poll gives the Popular Party (36.6%) and Vox (12.4%) the highest combined share of the vote for the right for the last 46 years: almost 50%.
After five years of a socialist-communist coalition government and the global Covid pandemic, if those poll numbers end up being correct, that would be a historic shift of the electorate towards a new victory for the right in Spain, this time with conservatives in coalition with the far-right. 12.4% for Vox is also about three points lower than where Abascal’s party has been polling consistently for almost a year now. Which is to say, GAD3 is forecasting a drop in support for the far-right in the weeks running up to the general election, and a drop that would break that long-running flat trend line at 15%. GAD3 is not the only one: Sigma Dos also has Abascal on 12%. How many Vox voters are looking at the state of play, faced with a sudden chance of getting rid of Sánchez and the left, and deciding to switch back to Feijóo’s PP to give him more seats? Is Feijóo now the winning horse in this election race?
Have been working on a drone project more than writing over the past two or three months. Here is one of the results. Mavic 3, printed on A2 size paper on a Canon Pro-1000 printer. Gobsmacking level of detail and tonal range possible.
Whoa, now we've got AI bots writing logical, reasonable, on-topic comments on posts as soon as something is published:
Vote buying cases rock the end of the local and regional election campaign in Spain
The going rate for a local vote in Spain, in such a highly fragmented and untransparent market, appears to be in the €50-200 range.
Spaniards vote today in local and regional elections. Water and the drought situation for farmers, housing and sqautters, the former terrorist murderers in Basque separatist election lists and the Vinicius racism in football scandal have all been major national points of contention over the past two or three weeks. The campaign has ended on an ugly democratic note, though, with an explosion of reports of vote buying taking place at the local level.
A non-exhaustive list of the places where some form of electoral fraud has been reported during the final days of this election campaign includes: Melilla (North Africa), Mojácar (Andalusia), Albudeite (Murcia), La Gomera (Canary Islands), Moraleja de Sayago (Castilla y León), Bigastro (Valencia), Las Hurdes (Extremadura), Pozuelo de Calatrava (Castilla la Mancha), Carboneras (Andalusia), Castro Caldelas (Galicia), Paterna del Campo (Andalusia), Mazarrón (Murcia), Vallalba del Alcor (Andalusia), Jaén (Andalusia), Arona (Canary Islands), Valverde del Camino (Huelva).
Some of them are still just accusations between parties but many have already reached the courts, with arrests by the Civil Guard. The price per vote, even with such an untransparent, highly fragmented market, seems to be in the €50-200 range. The methods involved are postal voting and online voting and many include the pressuring of immigrants, the poor or the elderly, for whom €150 means a lot but which is really cheap for a candidate looking to gain access to tens of millions of euros in juicy municipal contracts over the next four years.
If any convictions come out of all the investigations and arrests, the guilty parties could face up to three years in jail. Most of the headlines and media attention have gone to the vote buying involving Socialist Party (PSOE) candidates but looking at the lists of cases, there are several electoral fraud complaints involving Popular Party (PP) candidates too.
Vote buyers in Albudeite (Murcia) showed innovation, offering joints alongside the money. News also broke about a socialist mayor in Maracena (Andalusia) and a senior regional socialist leader being investigated for the kidnap of another socialist councillor, after the judge lifted the secrecy on that investigation; and in Valencia, a socialist candidate resigned after he was arrested and found to be a member of the Latin Kings gang.
Even though the list looks long and generates scandalous headlines and talking points in the last days of the campaign, it’s still only a couple of dozen towns out of over 8,000 that are voting today, and the Spanish voting process itself is normally pretty spotless. Are the two dozen towns just typical dirty local politics, far-removed from national campaigns and ideological aspirations but now more visible thanks to the speed of technolgy and reporting, or are they representative of a broader problem in local politics in Spain, the tip of an iceberg that limited policing resources have only managed to investigate in those few places? What would we discover if we had access to all the Whatsapp messages from all the local candidates across the country? Is there more of this going on than meets the eye and could systemic improvements be made to the voting process to stop it happening again in the future, or is it not worth the effort because it only happens in a few random towns?
Is Spain about to get a bunch of regional coalitions between conservatives and the far-right?
Centre party Ciudadanos is set to disappear and Podemos is mostly being replaced by Sumar.
Right then, the election campaign for Spain's local and regional elections is now underway. In two weeks, voters go to the ballot boxes across most of the country for the first time since the Covid pandemic. These elections will precede the national general election by about six months, depending on when the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez (PSOE), decides to call it. So these elections are a key national test for all the parties after four years of a socialist-communist coalition governing the nation and five years since Sánchez ousted the former conservative leader, Mariano Rajoy (PP), in a motion of no confidence in 2018. Political power is up for grabs in 8,000 town or city halls and 12 Spanish regions.
The general tenor of the polls seems to be that Spanish conservatives (Popular Party, PP) will mostly hold on to their current positions or make some gains. Notably, with two weeks to go, there is Isabel Diaz Ayuso (PP) in Madrid, who might achieve an overall majority, and Fernando López Miras in Murcia, where the Popular Party has somehow managed to remain in government continuously for the past 28 years, with not even a single courtesy parliament for anyone else to have a go. In Valencia, the Balearic Islands, La Rioja and Aragón, the PP might push ahead of the socialists although whether or not that will be enough to allow them to govern is another matter.
Also notable this year, after the explosion of new political options over the past ten years, is what is happening to the smaller parties on both sides. Podemos looks set to become an even more minor player in almost every region and Ciudadanos is now on course to lose all of their seats in the regional parliaments where voters are casting a ballot. It looks like those votes are going to the PP and Vox on the right, which means Santiago Abascal's far-right party will increase its seats almost everywhere, perhaps even doubling their current numbers. That will allow them to pressure PP candidates who win but short of an overall majority and stoke the polarised ideological debate going in to the national election later in the year, against the left but also in terms of whether or not the PP should be doing coalition deals with the far-right.
Would a series of regional wins for the right now, but split between the conservatives and the far-right, thus forcing coalition deals to be done, lead straight to the same conclusion nationally in December or energise the left and regionalists to vote against the idea?
Nationally, the PP is on 30-33% of the vote, far from a majority, and Vox for some reason is still flatlined on 15%, which is where they were at the last general election. They have been stuck at that level for the past nine months, after the PP rose once more under the new leadership of Feijóo. It was only just over a year ago that Abascal and his crew had begun to overtake a sinking PP on the right, then under the deficient captaincy of Pablo Casado. The abrupt swapping out of Casado for Feijóo has clearly worked from the Popular Party's point of view.
On the left, some polls are giving Yolanda Díaz's new party, Sumar, up to 12% or 13% of the vote, which would put them almost level with Vox and destroy what's of left of Podemos, pushed down to 4-6%. One poll in (right-wing) La Razón this week has the PSOE dropping to 22%, which would be a disaster for Sánchez. Generally speaking in the Spanish closed list proportional representation system, the more split the vote is on either side, the worse that side does in terms of seats overall, so the two-way split on the right (PP and Vox, with the disappearance of Ciudadanos) should edge out the three-way split on the left (PSOE, Sumar and Podemos, plus assorted minor fringe parties like Más País or United Left).
The major campaign themes over the past few weeks have been water and the drought situation for farmers, housing and sqautters, and the decision by Basque separatist party Bildu, which has supported the left-wing coalition nationally, to include 44 former ETA terrorists, among them seven convicted murderers, in their electoral lists for this month's ballots.
Perhaps a bit excessive for him to kindly expose the problem but then mute everyone responding in such a friendly manner.