Don't believe the mainstream media over-hype about Vox

In the buildup to the Spanish General Election elements of the UK press, especially the BBC, were absolutely determined to talk up the prospects of the far-right party Vox.

But as the results came in a lot of mainstream media hacks failed to adjust to the actual reality. Vox only bagged 10% of the vote and finished 5th, and there were a lot of other extremely important stories, several of them much bigger than the extreme-right gaining a foothold in the Spanish parliament for the first time, but somehow the media continued their fixation on Vox.

In this article I'm going to run through a few of the stories and issues that got lost behind the Vox hype.

PP's worst result ever

Partido Popular are the Spanish version of the Tories. They're the shockingly corrupt, pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, right-wing establishment party who have switched power with PSOE ever since the end of Franco's fascist dictatorship in 1975. They ruled Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, imposing ruinous austerity, overseeing huge unemployment rates, attacking workers rights and individual liberties, and creating an unprecedented exodus of the younger generations who spread across Europe looking for work and opportunities.

On Sunday 28 April 2019 they suffered by far their worst electoral result in their history, collapsing from 32.6% of the vote at the last election in 2016 to just 16.7% and 66 of the 350 seats.

To put the scale of this defeat into perspective their previous worst result was in 1989 when they got 25.8% of the vote and 107 of the seats.

In the UK we can only dream of the Tory vote collapsing in half, and them returning to parliament with less than 20% of the seats in parliament.

PSOE win

PSOE are like the Spanish version of Labour, they're significantly to the left of the PP, but in recent decades they've failed to really live up to the "socialist" name, often opting for Blair-style neoliberalism-lite. They'll generally protect workers and champion socially progressive causes, but when it comes to rolling back privatisation and reversing tax handouts for the mega-rich they're nowhere near living up to their socialist name.

28.7% of the vote and 123 seats in Congress is a long way from the best performance in their history, but since 2014 Spanish politics has fractured from two main parties to five, and finishing 12 points above their nearest rival under these circumstances is not bad at all.

123 seats is still well short of a majority, but it's such a comprehensive lead over their rival parties that it's inconceivable that they won't form the next government.

PSOE majority in the senate

PSOE fell short of winning a majority in congress, but they secured a clear majority in the Spanish senate with 139 of the 265 seats, their first senate majority since 1989, and their best senate performance since they won a senate landslide in 1986.

A first left-wing senate majority in three decades is clearly a huge story, but one that's flown under the radar in a lot of mainstream media coverage, thanks mainly to all the Vox hype.

Ciudadanos

One of the major reasons for the collapse of PP was the rise of the right-wing Ciudadanos party which formed in Catalonia in 2006, but only really became a party at the national level in 2014.

After absorbing most of the anti-independence vote in the 2017 Catalan regional elections to become the single biggest party in the Catalan parliament, they were projected to do very well in the next General Election, but they've fallen back significantly since their peak in mid-2018 when they were actually leading in multiple polls on almost 30%, to finish in 3rd on 15.9%.

It's still technically the best result in their short history, but in light of the spectacular PP collapse, and where they were in the polls just a year ago, a modest 2.8% increase in their vote is clearly an under-performance.

With 57 seats a PSOE-Ciudadanos coalition is mathematically possible, but highly unlikely given the unpopularity of their leader Albert Rivera with PSOE supporters.

Unidas Podemos

Despite forming a political alliance with another left-wing party (Izquierda Unida) Podemos has fallen back significantly from their high point in 2016 to finish in fourth place with 14.3% of the vote and 42 seats.

Unidas Podemos would have been the most likely coalition partners for PSOE, but they dropped so many seats that even together they're still well short of a majority.

There are many reasons for the Unidas Podemos fallback, including former-PSOE voters going back to their previous allegiance, a lot of bitter public infighting between different internal factions, and some ridiculous behaviour from their leader Pablo Iglesias.

All is not lost though, because although 14.3% of the vote is a poor result compared to their achievments in 2015 and 2016, it's only a fraction behind PP in second, which is hardly terrible for a political party that was only formed in 2014.

Vox
 

Vox are a far-right ultranationalist party that were founded in 2014 by defectors from the ruling PP. Until this election Vox had won nothing at the national level, just a few seats in regional elections.

Bagging 10% of the vote and 24 seats in congress represents a significant stride forward for the extreme-right in Spanish politics, but in reality they're only slightly to the right of PP, they're just more open and overt about their bigotry, misogyny, extreme-right politics, and desire for the centralisation of political power in Madrid than the establishment right-wing party they split away from.

10% is clearly better than the 0.2% they achieved at the previous election, but anyone trying to make out that the story is all about them when 90% of Spanish voters rejected them, and they finished in fifth, with fewer seats than the Catalan Independence parties, is clearly pushing an agenda, rather than reporting the news.

Results in Catalonia

There are two ways of looking at the results in Catalonia. From an independence perspective, and from a left-right perspective.

The left-wing pro-independence Republican Left group won the most votes and most seats for the region.

It's difficult to argue that their popularity hasn't been driven by the fact their leader Oriol Junqueras has been held as a political prisoner by the Spanish state since 2017.

And it's also difficult to argue that a party led by a political prisoner taking a massive historic win isn't a huge story that should at least have got a look in instead of the Vox over-hype.

Anti-independence PSOE came second in Catalonia and the more neutral Podemos group in the Catalan region slipped to 3rd, meaning all three of the most popular parties in Catalonia are on the left or centre-left.

The right-wing Ciudadanos party had an absolute disaster coming in 5th, less than a year and a half after coming first in the Catalan regional elections.

PP collapsed to 6th place bagging just 4.9% of the Catalan vote, meaning that they're essentially a dead political force there, which is hardly surprising given their former leader Mariano Rajoy's ridiculously arrogant and incompetent mishandling of the independence issue back in 2017.

Coalition or minority government?

Since PSOE and Unidas Podemos have fallen just short of enough seats to build a majority, they'll need support from smaller regional parties. The Catalan Republican Left party have 15 seats, but it's unlikely they'd collaborate without significant concessions, including the possibility of an officially sanctioned Catalan independence referendum.

The other option is for PSOE to go it alone as a minority government, then call another general election if the opposition parties vote down their budget again. Obstructionism would be a bold move from the likes of PP and Ciudadanos given that the political momentum is with PSOE.

It's hard to see how PP and Ciudadanos wouldn't be punished by the electorate if they forced the Spanish people into a 4th General Election in the space of four years through obstructionist tactics.

The Spanish right is split

It's often the case in politics that splits in the opposition end up handing power to the political right, but in Spain in 2019 the right has splintered into three (PP, Ciudadanos, Vox), while the left vote is divided between two (PSOE, Unidas Podemos).

The reason PP have collapsed so badly is that their vote is being eroded from both sides. Vox have pinched 2 million+ votes from PP by pushing far-right ultranationalist bigotry, while Ciudadanos have pinched a significant proportion of "centre-right" PP voters.

Between the three right-wing parties they bagged 42.9% of the vote, which is only a slight decline on the 45.8% the three parties' combined vote at the last General Election in 2016, but because the right-wing vote is more evenly divided between three right-wing parties, rather than being concentrated mainly with PP, they've fallen even further short of building a right-wing coalition.

Conclusion

Elements of the British press really wanted Vox to do well because "fascism is rising again in Spain" is a story they can really hype. The far-right did indeed bag a foothold in the Spanish parliament, but 10% is significantly below people's worst fears, but the UK media seemed unable to adjust their footing, drop the far-right overhype they wanted to present, and cover other significant and historic aspects of the election.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The danger of toxic political tribalism

One of the most infuriating things about writing about politics is the way that so many people don't even bother trying to understand what I've written these days, and just crudely caricature my views instead of actually considering what I actually said. 

People tend to do this because they're political tribalists who want everything to fit into simple and arbitrary "black vs white", "us vs them" type classifications, when things are rarely ever that simple in reality.

Labour 

Probably the most common politically partisan assumption that gets made about me is that I'm blindly pro-Labour. In fact I'm highly critical of many of the things Labour did and didn't do between 1997-2010, their unspeakably inept "austerity-lite" positioning for the 2015 General Election, and the fact that the upper echelons of the Labour Party are still riddled with active opponents of the kind of democratic socialism that the majority of Labour members and voters actually want.

Just because I think Jeremy Corbyn is a principled guy and the best Labour leader in decades, doesn't mean that I've completely forgotten about the toxic legacies of the New Labour experiment. Nor does it mean that I blithely imagine that the Labour Party isn't in need of massive structural reform before it could possibly become the kind of organisation that genuinely represents the will of it's members.

The Brexit debate

Another of the most common tribalist accusations that's hurled at me is that I'm blindly "pro-EU", but anyone who thinks I argued against Brexit in 2016 simply because I love the EU so much clearly wasn't paying any attention to anything I was actually saying.

It's clear that the tribalism cut both ways, with plenty of Remainers forming toxic tribalistic "us and them" mentalities too (look at the charts). However the overwhelming bulk of the insults and abuse I suffered during the EU referendum debate was hurled by Brexiters, so I can't help focusing on them.

I didn't argue against Brexit because I imagined the EU to be faultless (far from it), I argued against it because the leading Brexiteers were clearly willing to lie through their teeth to get their way, because they obviously had no plan for how to actually manage Brexit if they did get their way, and because it hardly took a visionary seer to predict that a "make it up as we go along" Brexit administered by the Tory party would turn out to be a disaster for pretty much everyone in the UK apart from the mega-rich with sufficient capital stashed in tax havens to insulate themselves from the chaos.

But as far as a lot of Brexit tribalists were concerned, that kind of analysis was enough to caricature me as a rabidly pro-EU, anti-British traitor so they could ignore what I was actually saying and instantly dismiss it as the crazed ranting of someone from the enemy tribal ideology.

Catalonia

More recently people have begun hurling accusations that I'm a supporter of Carles Puigdemont and his centre-right pro-Independence party in Catalonia, simply because I've been highly critical of the way the much-more-right-wing Spanish government and the Spanish nationalist establishment in Madrid have been handling the Catalan crisis.

It's as if people can only conceive two possible positions in this political debate too. You either support the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish nationalist establishment in Madrid, or you support Puigdemont and his party. 

There is no middle ground, and just like with Brexit, if you criticise the behaviour of one side, you're immediately characterised by supporters of that side as a promoter of the enemy ideology to be hated, ridiculed and despised.

In my view the Catalan independence movement is actually much more like Brexit than the Scottish independence movement was, because unlike in Scotland in 2014 there isn't really anything resembling a detailed plan for how to manage transition from the union to independence, which makes supporting the Catalan independence movement very problematic for anyone who recognises that economic chaos tends to impact more seriously on the poor and vulnerable than the capital rich.

But Spanish nationalist tribalists don't give a shit about what I actually think about Puigdemont or the actual case for independence, because they're far too busy trying to shout me down as a despicable enemy to listen to what I was actually saying.

Self-determination

Despite my reservations about the unpreparedness of the Catalan government for the transition to independence they've been trying to achieve, I strongly believe in the right to self determination as a matter of principle.

I absolutely reject the idea that the right to self determination can be eradicated in perpetuity by a rushed 1978 constitution that was drawn up in the shadow of a brutal fascist dictatorship, under the very real and terrifying threat of more military rule if the constitution wasn't agreed.

Even if people interpret the Spanish constitution to say that the natural right to self-determination is permanently extinguished as "illegal", it's important to remember that a significant number of national independence declarations were made illegally. The United States, Belgium, Philippines, Albania, Ireland, Egypt, Bangladesh, Croatia and Slovenia are some of the high profile examples. 

It's also important to remember that within living memory it was illegal for black people to travel on the same bus or use the same washroom as white people in countries like the United States and South Africa. It was illegal for consenting gay men to have sex with each other in the United Kingdom (and many other countries). And it was illegal for Catalan people to speak their own language, or to give Catalan names to their children in Catalonia.

When it comes to imperialists and powerful political elites making and interpreting the rules in their own favour, and against minorities, there's often a hugely significant distinction between what is illegal and what is actually wrong.

Justifying violence and repression

The problem with the Catalan crisis of course is that the Spanish nationalists in Madrid have handled the situation about as badly as it's possible to imagine. They sent thousands of police into Catalonia from other parts of Spain to steal ballot boxes, attack non-violent civilians, shoot people with rubber bullets, and drag women out of buildings by their hair. Then the king of Spain deliberately made a bitterly partisan Spanish nationalist speech in front of a portrait of a brutal tyrant famous for repressing Catalonia and banning the Catalan language. Then Mariano Rajoy allowed one of his ministers to make a death threat against the Catalan President without the slightest censure. Then the corrupt and highly partisan Spanish judiciary set about rounding up Catalan political prisoners. Then the right-wing Spanish government overthrew democracy in Catalonia and seized control of the local broadcast media and police force for themselves. Then the Spanish nationalists announced an election for December 21st and set about arresting Catalan nationalist politicians and holding them without bail so that they can't actually stand in the sham election. 

The really sad thing is that a lot of people who oppose Catalan independence seem willing to justify, excuse or deflect attention away from the grotesque things Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish establishment have been doing to try to stop it from happening. 

Even when it comes to violence, death threats, government take-over of broadcast media, political censorship, the taking of political prisoners, and the holding of rigged sham elections, the reaction is to excuse such repressive measures with spurious appeals to legality, to condone them with victim-blaming tactics, or to distract from them with blatant displays of whataboutery.

Furthermore Spanish nationalist tribalists tend to immediately condemn anyone who criticises the divisive, belligerent and repressive approach of the Spanish nationalist establishment as a Puigdemont supporting separatist.

It's as if they're so invested in the anti-independence vibe that they refuse to see that it's a staggeringly counter-productive approach to opposing a non-violent political movement to brutally repress non-violent civilians, take prisoners of conscience, and bring back horrific memories of Franco era repression while gleeful Nazi saluting Falangists are simultaneously celebrating in the streets.

Misrepresentation of the enemy

Despite what tribalists try to claim about my views, there's actually a huge difference between blindly supporting everything that the secessionist leaders say and do, and believing that people have a natural and non-extinguishable right to self-determination.  

And there's also a huge difference between uncritically supporting all of the actions of all of the Catalan independence politicians, and simply pointing out that the violent, belligerent, divisive, oppressive and anti-democratic actions of the Spanish political establishment are creating a huge rift between Catalonia and Spain that is actually increasing the popularity of the Catalan independence movement. 

In fact the absurdly counter-productive attitude of the Spanish nationalist establishment should actually be something that every rational opponent of Catalan independence should be deeply concerned about. But because they've bought into the binary tribalist allegiances game, they'll actually defend (or attempt to distract attention from) what their side is doing, rather than think about the damage it's causing to their own position, and bitterly misrepresent anyone who raises such concerns as a Puigdemont-loving separatist from the enemy ideology who needs to be shouted down, criticised, and insulted.

They simply refuse to compute that someone could believe that the repressive actions of the Spanish nationalists are making the Catalan independence movement ever more likely to succeed, while the less belligerent and divisive approach of just allowing Puigdemont to hold his referendum with a 50% of the total electorate requirement, then calmly and peacefully pointing out that he didn't actually have a coherent plan for independence, would likely have seen the Catalan independence movement beaten at the ballot box.

Victimhood tactics

One of the classic tactics political tribalists use is to pick one of the most insulting things someone from the enemy ideology has said, and then cry victim by claiming that absolutely everyone from the enemy ideology uses insults and abuse like that. 

Thus the tide of victim-complex Brexiters who keep yelling at me that I've unfairly called all Brexiters racist (when I never have, and even actually published an article called "not all Brexiters were racist") and Spanish nationalists crying that I've called them all fascists (when I've done no such thing either).

People resort to this kind of fake victimhood tactic because it's very much easier to argue against a fabricated (straw man) misrepresentation of what the other person is saying, than to actually consider what they've said and find a real fault with it.

The danger of tribalism

Aside from people continually trying to stuff me into simplistic arbitrary positions that I don't actually hold (blindly pro-Labour, pro-EU, right-wing Puigdemont supporter) and totally misrepresenting what I've said to the point of outright lying about it (which annoys the hell out of me), there's something more sinister about this kind of hyper-partisan political tribalism.

We've all seen Brexiters performing bizarre acts of mental contortionism in order to defend the "£350 million for the NHS" lie (and making excuses for all kinds of indefensible stuff like their dodgy donations, their Twitter bot armies, their collusion with foreign interests, Nigel Farage's Nazi style anti-immigrant propaganda, and all of the other lies they told about the joys of the Brexit fantasy land). And now we're seeing plenty of Catalan independence opponents wilfully defending stuff like police brutality, the taking of political prisoners, massive acts of political censorship, and the holding of sham show elections where the leaders of opposition parties have been jailed without trial.

There are clearly a lot of people out there who decide a political position, then rapidly develop a tribal hatred of anyone they characterise (rightly or wrongly) as holding the opposite position, and a strong tribal affinity with others they identify as holding the same position, which is an affinity that stretches to defending the absolutely indefensible out of tribalistic loyalty.

Once people have got themselves into a position where they're actually defending the lies told by Brexiteers during the EU referendum, or the outright assault on democracy and civic freedom that the Spanish nationalist establishment has been conducting in Catalonia, it seems highly likely they'll defend literally anything, just as long as they identify the perpetrators as one of their tribalist allies, rather than a tribal enemy.

This is obviously an incredibly dangerous situation, because once we're willing to turn a blind eye when our tribal allies are doing things we'd scream blue murder at if it was our tribal enemies, we're not only utterly debasing ourselves, we're creating a rotten political environment where stuff like outright lies, corruption, state violence, repression, and political censorship become completely normalised.

for example if Britain somehow comes to its senses and stops (or at least pauses) the absolute farce that the Tories are making of Brexit, there's no doubt that there would be plenty of Brexiteers joining in with the riots when Nigel Farage and his ilk attempt to trigger a violent uprising in response, as they've openly threatened to do.

Similarly, even if Spain resorted to the re-imposition of military dictatorship in Catalonia, which seems to be getting closer by the day, how many of the anti-Independence people are going to suddenly admit that their fellow anti-independence tribalists have now gone too far, rather than blaming the whole thing on Catalans and saying "they brought military dictatorship upon themselves"?

More escalation

Just imagine how the Spanish nationalist establishment will react when the pro-independence parties win another majority in their sham election in December, despite having most of their high profile politicians taken as political prisoners and the regional means of communication either turned into Spanish nationalist propaganda or simply shut down?

The only reaction of the Spanish nationalist establishment to any event in Catalonia so far has been escalation and more repression, so why would they dramatically change position to a more democratic and conciliatory approach when their effort to rig the snap election ends up going all wrong, as it almost certainly will?

Expecting the Spanish nationalists to change tack away from spectacularly counter-productive belligerence is about as likely as expecting tribal opponents of Catalan independence to suddenly throw up their hands and say, "hang on a minute, maybe this guy I've been tribalistically smearing as a Puigdemont fanboy was right all along, and that resorting to violence, belligerence, censorship, and repression is actually a spectacularly counter-productive way of opposing a non-violent political movement".

They'll stick with their chosen tribe, no matter how disgusting and unjustifiable the violence and repression that they have to justify, excuse, or deflect attention from. And they'll keep labelling me as as a member of the enemy tribe and misrepresenting what I'm saying, because that's so much easier than listening to what I actually said.

The worrying thing is that political commentary seems to be ever more populated by tribalists like this.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The EU reaction to the Catalonia crisis is absolutely unacceptable

October 27th 2017 will go down as a historic day in Catalonia no matter what happens from here on in. The Catalan parliament has voted to declare independence from Spain, and the Spanish nationalist government in Madrid has responded by launching a coup against the democratic and social institutions of Catalonia. 

Within minutes of the Catalan declaration of independence the right-wing Spanish government moved to scrap the Catalan parliament, and to give themselves to power to seize control of the Catalan police (Mossos) and independent Catalan broadcast media.

The Spanish prosecutor in Madrid has threatened that everybody involved in the independence vote will be arrested and held as political prisoners like the two Catalan civic leaders Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart who are already being held captive.

Anyone with any political sense whatever must be able to see what an atrocious mess the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has made of the situation with his tactics of violent repression and continual bone-headed escalation.

When he used brute force against non-violent civilians on the day of the referendum he not only created a PR disaster for Spain, he also completely destroyed his ability to cite the low poll turnout as a reason the referendum lacks legitimacy (you can't steal an estimated 700,000 votes from ballot boxes and violently intimidate people away from the polling stations, then complain the turnout wasn't high enough).

When he continually refused to enter dialogue with the Catalan secessionists after the vote, and set about plotting a coup to abolish the Catalan parliament instead, he simply spurred them on to make their independence declaration before the Spanish nationalist coup was launched.

Sadly a lot of people who oppose Catalan independence have bought into the simplistic tribal mentality that if you oppose the Catalan secession, then you need to side with and justify the idiotic and self-defeating moves that Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish nationalist establishment have made in response.

Even more disappointingly, several politicians and institutions that should have been positioning themselves as neutrals have destroyed any hope that they can mediate between the factions by openly siding with the Spanish nationalist government in Madrid.

Just hours before the Catalan parliament declared independence and Madrid responded by launching their coup, the EU President Donald Tusk issued what is likely to be remembered as on of the most ill-considered political statements an EU representative has ever made.

His absurd proclamation that "nothing changes", his determination that the EU will only talk with Madrid, and his pathetic "hope" that the Spanish nationalist government don't resort to violence (again) are unacceptable.

Whichever way you look at it "nothing changes" is a delusional rejection of observable reality. Not only has the Catalan parliament unilaterally declared independence from Spain, the Spanish government is launching a social and political coup against Catalonia.

Spain is undergoing its worst political crisis since it joined the EU. In fact it's arguably the worst crisis since the 1936-39 civil war when the fascist  military dictator Franco seized control of the country and set about brutally repressing the Catalan people until 1975.

If this kind of extraordinary political meltdown is considered business as usual in the EU, then perhaps the Brexiters were right all along that the EU is an absolutely farcical organisation that the UK is better off out of?

Tusk's declaration that Spain remains the EU's "only interlocutor" is a catastrophic error of judgement under the circumstances. If the EU leadership had any sense whatever they'd be positioning themselves as neutral mediators not openly siding with Madrid and refusing to even talk to the Catalan political leaders, because after all, the Catalan people are EU citizens too.

Then to tack a vague wishy-washy sound bite onto the end of his statement about how he hopes that the Spanish government favours "force of argument not argument of force" is simply not good enough.

The Spanish government already graphically demonstrated its willingness to resort to violence and repression on October 1st (we all saw it happening on social media) and the EU demonstrated its refusal to condemn it, so EU figures simply hoping that the Spanish government don't resort to violent repression again is clearly no disincentive whatever.

What Tusk should have done is explain that it would be unacceptable for an EU member nation to resort to violence and repression against EU citizens, because all EU citizens are entitled to freedom of speech and freedom from state repression.

Another problem with this vague hope that the Spanish government don't resort to violence and repression is that it's stark-staringly obvious that the only way that conflict and violence can be averted now is through urgent dialogue and mediation. Something that Tusk made all the more difficult in his previous sentence affirming that the EU sides with the Spanish government and has no interest whatever in talking to the Catalans or taking on the role of the neutral mediator.

It's hardly possible to be disappointed with the belligerent, violent, and anti-democratic escalations of Mariano Rajoy and his party. He was always a fool promoted way beyond his abilities, and they were always a bunch of extraordinarily corrupt hard-right fanatics. Only a fool would have expected better from that repulsive bunch.

However, the EU stance, as outlined in Donald Tusk's Twitter statement, is absolutely exasperating. 

If they continue to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to act as impartial mediators this crisis is only going to get worse, and the EU's critics will have an absolute field day when Catalonia descends into tyranny, police violence, mass civil disobedience, the taking of political prisoners, or even tanks on the streets of Barcelona.

It's bad enough that the EU allows this kind of extreme political repression to go on just across the border in Turkey without imposing sanctions and demanding the restoration of liberal democracy, but it'll be a whole new level of wrongness if they allow this kind of repression within EU borders and against EU citizens, and insist on siding with the government that is inflicting it.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The Spanish political establishment are plotting to attack Catalan political and social autonomy

The right-wing Spanish governing party (PP) and the pseudo-socialist opposition party (PSOE) have announced that they've concocted a plan to seize control of the autonomous region of Catalonia.

Just days after the Catalan President Carles Puigdemont decided to disappoint the secessionist movement by appealing for talks with the Spanish government instead of unilaterally declaring independence (like he said he would before the referendum), the response of the Spanish political class has been to completely ignore the calls for dialogue, and to further escalate the situation by threatening to launch a Spanish nationalist power grab in the region.

The Article 155 plan that the two main Spanish political parties have concocted isn't just to scrap the Catalan parliament and impose Madrid rule until new elections are held, they've also decided to take over local Catalan language TV and radio stations (TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio), and take over running of the Catalan police force (los Mossos) [source - in Catalan].

The reason the Spanish political establishment in Madrid want to exert control over the Catalan police is obvious. They're furious that the Mossos didn't join in with the Guardia Civil and Federal Police to violently repress the October 1st independence vote. In fact the Mossos were actually seen protecting non-violent civilians from the brutality of the Spanish police, and the head of the Mossos was hauled to Madrid to be questioned on trumped up "sedition" charges. 

The reason the Spanish nationalists in Madrid want control of Catalan media is even more obvious. They want to exert as much influence as possible over the Catalan public in order to influence the outcome of the election they're forcing.

They're obviously trying to claim that they're only planning to take over these broadcast organisations to "enforce neutrality", but the extreme lack of neutrality of those plotting this move was betrayed by the PSOE polotician Carmen Calvo who accused the Catalan President of "mounting a revolution against democracy". 

It takes a massive amount of chutzpah to make an accusation like that when you're the one who is plotting to force the closure of a democratically elected parliament and to seize control of broadcast organisations, and just weeks after your allies in the plot sent police in to brutally attack non-violent citizens and actually steal ballot boxes!

The problem is that this plot to seize control of TV stations and radio waves is a very 20th Century approach to mass indoctrination.

There's absolutely no way Catalans are going to take this attack on their autonomy lying down, and if their local TV and radio stations suddenly begin spewing endless pro-Madrid propaganda, they're hardly likely to remain silent about it on social media, or in the streets, cafes, and bars of Catalonia.

Sure, seizing control of broadcasters worked a treat back in the 1970s for the likes of the brutal Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, but in order for the indoctrination efforts to work these days the Spanish political establishment are clearly going to have to significantly increase the cyber-warfare tactics that they deployed against the referendum organisers in September 2017, including the kinds of social media clampdowns witnessed in dictatorships like Turkey and Egypt.

In any other country this kind of anti-democratic scheming would be seen as a political coup d'etat, but somehow there is very little outrage over this outright attack on Catalan political and social autonomy that the Spanish nationalist parties are plotting.

The EU have continued to do nothing to intervene, even after the grotesque displays of state violent state repression of EU citizens during the October 1st independence referendum, and neither have the governments of other supposedly liberal democratic European states like Germany, France, the United Kingdom or Italy.

The craziest thing of all is that this continuous escalation from the Spanish nationalist establishment (cyber-warfare, violent police repression, the taking of political prisoners, veiled death threats from Spanish government ministers, the abolition of democratic Catalan autonomy, seizure of Catalan broadcast organisations ...) is exactly the kind of behaviour that is likely to drive more and more non-partisan Catalan civilians into the welcoming arms of Catalan secessionist parties, who can easily position themselves as the moderate non-violent democrats in this kind of situation.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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If this was happening in Venezuela or Cuba the UK media would be spinning a very different story

The hard-right Spanish government in Madrid shipped thousands of police from across other regions of Spain into Catalonia in an attempt to forcibly and violently repress the Catalan independence referendum, resulting in hundreds of injuries and a social media tsunami of appalling clips and images.

The Guardia Civil (the "civil police" who operated as Franco's paramilitary bully boys during the 1939-1975 fascist dictatorship) and the Spanish federal police have been filmed attacking peaceful citizens with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets, dragging women around by their hair, deliberately breaking people's fingers, throwing people down stairs, confiscating ballot boxes, and even attacking fire fighters who were attempting to defend the public from their brutality (see embedded video clips).

Violent hard-right Spanish nationalism vs peaceful and democratic Catalan civic nationalism. pic.twitter.com/vA9MSM5NXc

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 1, 2017

Spanish police violently storming a polling station & snatching ballot boxes to disrupt the peaceful Catalan independence referendum pic.twitter.com/R5Fm5Aesxo

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 1, 2017

Catalan people peacefully singing. Spanish police sent to disrupt the referendum attack them with batons. "Democracy" Spanish style pic.twitter.com/D7gguXk8rA

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 1, 2017

The Spanish government described this behaviour by the police today as "professional and proportionate" pic.twitter.com/9htjJpVEAr

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 1, 2017

Catalan firefigters attempting to protect public from police brutality attacked by Spanish police. #CatalanReferendum pic.twitter.com/8g2WBhsySo

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 1, 2017

Spanish police shipped into Catalonia to disrupt the referendum attack an unarmed woman with batons. The ugly side of Spanish nationalism. pic.twitter.com/XrnamLoQVF

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 1, 2017

Mainstream media bias

We all know that if such scenes of repression were coming out of countries like Venezuela, Cuba or Bolivia the UK mainstream media would have been howling condemnation.

However because Spain is ruled by the hard-right neoliberal PP (the Spanish version of the Tory party) the British media have repeatedly attempted to downplay the levels of violence and the deliberate repression of democracy.

The BBC tried to sanitise the violence with an ludicrously Orwellian headline casting voters as "protesters" and using the term "rubber projectiles" instead of "rubber bullets".

Fixed that for you, @BBC pic.twitter.com/0vWHSZdzz1

— Alan Ferrier (@alanferrier) October 1, 2017

Sky News even posted a disgraceful (and now sneakily deleted) Tweet claiming that the peaceful victims of police brutality were getting what they deserved for daring to defy the Spanish nationalist government in Madrid.

Even the supposedly left-leaning Guardian continued to run an extraordinary opinion piece casting doubt on the legitimacy of the referendum as one of their leading articles for hours after the scale of the Spanish nationalist violence had become all too clear on social media.

If these displays of state violence had been committed by a left-wing regime like Venezuela or Cuba we all know the "look at the evils of socialism" spin UK corporate hacks would have put on it, but nobody in the UK mainstream media is using these disgraceful displays of state violence to say "look at the evils of this brutal right-wing government right on our doorstep" or to raise concerns that the increasingly dictatorial government in Madrid is driven by the exact same virulent form of hard-right neoliberal economic dogma as the Tory party in the UK.

Spanish fascism

As police shipped in from the rest of Spain were repressing democracy, dragging women around by their hair and deliberately breaking their fingers supporters of Mariano Rajoy's increasingly tyrannical regime gathered in Madrid to make Nazi salutes and sing right-wing Falangist songs from the Franco era, which is absolutely outrageous given horrors that all regions of Spain suffered under the brutal fascist government of Francisco Franco between 1939 and 1975. 

Again, as with the police brutality, these disgusting outburst of extreme-right Spanish nationalism received muted, or non-existent criticism from most of the UK mainstream media.

In their efforts to paint the disorder as a product solely of Catalan nationalism the UK mainstream media have absolutely failed to observe that the violence is actually a product of a grotesque form of dictatorial and rabidly right-wing Spanish nationalism.

Rajoy's ineptitude

You don't need to be any kind of supporter of Catalan independence to recognise that Rajoy has handled the situation dismally. Instead of sending in police from across Spain to attack the polling stations, undermine democracy and brutalise peaceful voters, he could simply have let the referendum go ahead unmolested and then simply refused to accept the result.

The repressive tactics of arresting the referendum organisers on trumped up charges, confiscating ballot papers, shutting down pro-independence media outlets, launching cyber attacks on the polling station software, and the orgy of repressive state violence on the day of the vote have dramatically escalated the situation.

Only the most partisan of observers could look at the countless clips and images of Spanish police beating and abusing peaceful Catalan citizens as they attempted to vote and fail to see how these images will inevitably be interpreted by many as the violent and repressive face of right-wing Spanish nationalism as it attempts to disrupt and destroy the peaceful and democratic civic nationalism of the Catalans.

Just as the brutal and merciless repression of the 1916 Easter Rising fuelled the Irish independence cause resulting in the declaration of the Irish Free state just seven years later, the bombardment of violent and repressive images is sure to fuel the fightback against Spain's fanatically right-wing and increasingly dictatorial government, not just in Catalonia, but in other regions of Spain too (especially the Basque Country).

The blame game

Even people who strongly oppose Catalan independence should be horrified at the images, because this level of violence and repression by the Spanish state can only increase the probability of Catalan independence happening eventually. 

But we all know that a lot of people are so easily led that they can be distracted by us vs them blame games, so that they end up actually believing Spanish government ministers who claimed that the police behaved "professionally and proportionately", and totally ignoring Rajoy's catastrophically inept handling of the situation.

People will actually swallow the propaganda that the victims of the violence are to blame for bringing it upon themselves.
Of course flag-waving Spanish nationalists will delight in seeing the Catalans "put in their place" once again by the systematic brutality of the Spanish state, but sadly an awful lot of British people will fall for the biased mainstream media framing of events and end up believing that this savage right-wing state repression of non-violent citizens was somehow proportionate and justified when they would have undoubtedly been herded like sheep towards hysterical condemnation had these exact same events played out in left-wing countries like Venezuela or Cuba, rather than in hard-right Spain.

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OR

The Bankia bailout

On Friday 25th 2012 Spain's largest banking group Bankia went cap in hand to the Spanish government in order to ask for a €19bn state intervention, in order to prevent them from going bankrupt. The banking group already received a €4.5bn "investment" in 2010 meaning that the Spanish taxpayer is going to foot the bill for a €23.5bn "investment" in return for something like a 90% stake in the debt riddled banking group.

The markets obviously took the news badly, Bankia shares plummeted 13.38% before trading in the company was suspended, the rest of the Spainsh banking sector took a hit, The blue-chip Ibex 35 has been in free fall and the yields on Spanish government bonds began rising towards the 7% mark that is widely regarded as unsustainable.

The president of the Bankia group José Ignacio Goirigolzarri further panicked the markets by saying that "We don’t need to talk about giving any of it back" but changed his tune over the weekend to imply that he meant the unprecedented bailout could be used as a "state investment" and that it would be up to the Spanish government when to sell its stake in Bankia to obtain the highest possible price to benefit taxpayers.

This narrative about bailouts being "investments to benefit the Spanish taxpayer" will sound remarkably familiar to residents of the UK who were told in 2007-08 that the £850bn package of bailouts and emergency nationalisations of debt riddled financial institutions like Northern Rock, Bradford and Bigley, Lloyds and RBS should be considered as lucrative government investments instead of a wanton act of using taxpayers' money to prevent the bankruptcy of unviable debt laden businesses.

Northern Rock was split up into a "good bank" and a "bad bank" with the government keeping the bad bit and selling the "good" bit to Virgin Money at a loss of £2bn. A similar trick was played with Bradford and Bingley, with the government keeping the debts and flogging off the "good bank" on the cheap to Spanish banking group Santander, who rebranded it (as well as the other former building societies it had acquired) under the Santander name. By far the biggest intervention was the RBS nationalisation, which cost £45.5bn for an 83% stake. As of 2012 the British taxpayer is looking at a £22bn (48%) loss on RBS alone.

Common sense alone should be enough to tell the Spanish taxpayer that this is going to be absolutely nothing like an "investments to benefit the Spanish taxpayer". If it is such a lucrative investment opportunity, where is the enormous queue of private sector investors lining up to grab their share of this wonderful investment opportunity?

On the Monday the Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy continued the charade at a news conference by insisting that the intervention was not a "bailout" but an "investment" and that  there would be no "bailout" for the wider Spanish banking sector either. The right-wing Popular Party leader said he was confident the €23.5 billion being injected into BFA-Bankia would be recovered. "Once the bank has been cleaned up, as the leading financial institution in Spain, it will be sold and the state will get back its investment".

Given the massive losses on UK bailouts/investments in debt riddled banks, Rajoy must either be delusional or utterly disingenuous to claim that the Spanish taxpayer will somehow spin a profit out of the creation of a zombie bank, that should have been allowed to die from its terminal debts.

Rajoy and the Popular Party have stated that the method of providing the "investment" has yet to be decided after several commentators began reporting that the only way that the debt laden Spanish government would be able to provide funds for the insolvent bank is through swapping Spanish government bonds in return for at least a 90% stake in the company, which would then redeem the bonds at the European Central Bank to create liquidity. The reason this is supposed to work is that the ECB still treat government bonds as if they are high quality collateral, rather than the extremely risky assets as the markets do. The Financial Times then ran a piece claiming that the ECB had flatly rejected the idea of indirectly bailing out Bankia via bond transfers only for the ECB to retort with the statement that "contrary to media reports published today, the European Central Bank has not been consulted and has not expressed a position on plans by the Spanish authorities to recapitalise a major Spanish bank, the ECB stands ready to give advice on the development of such plans."

There has been a wave of public indignation after it was revealed that the departing financial director of one of a Bankia subsidiary company Aurelio Izaquierdo had accrued a huge €14m pension fund. This too is reminiscent of the UK banking crisis where executives at debt stricken banks walked away with vast pension funds and golden goodbyes. The most notorious example being Fred Goodwin who was rewarded for his work in leading RBS to a £24.1bn loss with a pension fund worth £700,000 a year and a 2.6m bonus for the year in which the bank posted the biggest loss in UK corporate history.

The Prime Minister has steadfastly refused to hold an official inquiry into the Bankia crisis, presumably out of loyalty to former chief executive Rodrigo Rato, who served as the Spanish finance minister for Rajoy's Popular Party between 1996 and 2004 and also served as the head of the IMF between 2004-07.

An abandoned construction project in Ibiza, still displaying the ludicrous
182,500€ asking price. There are an estimated 700,000 such properties in Spain.

One question that should be under serious consideration is, how on Earth Bankia posted 2011 profits of €302m in February 2012 under the leadership Rodrigo Rato, only to revise them downwards to a loss of €2,979m a few months later after he had stepped down?

Perhaps some of the executives at Bankia are relaxed about waiving their pension funds and severance pay because they have already had their payoff through the sale of massively overvalued shares thanks to the creative accounting that allowed them to overestimate their performance in 2011 by well over €3bn. The excuse for this absurd "miscalculation" is that the bank are sitting on a vast amount of "toxic" property assets, however the Spanish property crisis happened back in 2008. The Spanish banks have had four years to establish their exposure to toxic property assets, they would have to take people for cretins if they expect anyone to believe that they only just found out the enormous scale of  recklessly speculative property investments on their books.

This latest financial crisis is making one thing very clear, that Mariano Rajoy and his right-wing Popular Party are much more determined to protect Spanish corporate interests than they are to protect the interests of ordinary Spanish people. It was only a couple of months ago that the Spanish industry minister Manuel Soria spoke out against Argentina's oil renationalisation plans, saying that  "If there are hostile moves towards [Spanish corporate interests] anywhere in the world, this government will interpret them as hostile moves against Spain" only a couple of weeks after vast public protests across Spain against the draconian new pro-corporate anti-worker labour reforms that PP have introduced. This Bankia intervention is going to cost an additional €19bn, either from their bond swapping plan or raised directly from the markets, which represents a huge proportion of the €27bn in austerity measures inflicted on ordinary working Spaniards in the 2012 budget with the justification that Spain can no longer afford luxuries like pay rises, welfare and infrastructure investment or labour rights.

See Also

What is happening in Spain?

Barclays defiling their Quaker roots

Eurozone austerity, neoliberalism rebranded

The Greek revolt against austerity

Argentine recovery economics