matthewbennett on Nostr: Game of Seats: Will Sumar beat the Socialists in Spain? We are only two weeks into a ...
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?
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?