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.
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The Former Guardian columnist Alex Andreou has posted a savagely misleading Acid Attack of an article entitled "The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn" which attacks Jeremy Corbyn and derides his supporters on his blog. At the end of the article Andreou announces that he's taking a Twitter-break with an insinuation that the reaction of people who are opposed to the Anyone But Corbyn coup would be a load of intolerable abuse.
The article is misleadingly entitled "The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn"
This article is a response to Andreou's Acid Attack article and it contains no abuse other than references to the numerous examples of the generalised abuse that Andreou hurled at Jeremy Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members who support him, and exposures of the multiple abuses of logic, reason and evidence that Andreou peppered throughout his unpleasant, intellectually dishonest and fundamentally contradictory hatchet job.
Concern Trolling
Andreou opened his piece by claiming that he used to love Corbyn as much as he now despises him by saying "I have been as vociferous in my opposition to Corbyn as I was in supporting him a year ago".
This contrasts jarringly with his admission later on in the article that he only voted for Corbyn because he was the least-worst of the candidates. here's exactly what he said:
"I voted for him in the first place, because I thought all four candidates last time were unelectable. So I thought: 'Fuck it. If none of them can reach out to the wider electorate, I might as well vote for the one whose politics most closely align with mine'."
If he admits that he only voted for Corbyn because Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall were even worse candidates then he clearly and demonstrably wasn't as keen on Corbyn in 2015 as he is keep to trash him in 2016.
Pretending that you loved something before you set about explaining how much other people should hate it is a classic dishonest debating tactic that is commonly referred to as "concern trolling". People like Andreou try to get you onside by saying they understand how you feel in order to then relentlessly work you into switching to their side of the debate.
Corbyn vs Smith
In his initial bid to win Corbyn sympathisers over with kind words before working them with a relentless tirade of anti-Corbyn rhetoric Andreou admitted that "Corbyn has been hugely misrepresented by most media" that "the right wing press has been responsible for the worst kind of monstering" that "the lack of loyalty shown by a small cabal of colleagues, briefing against him from day one, is vile" and that "he was never properly supported or given a decent chance", but he dismisses all of that as being "the job he signed up for" as if that magically makes it all OK!
He then goes on to admit that Owen Smith is "a bit blah" and "ain't exactly Obama" which is just about the only reference to Smith in the entire 6,300 word hatchet job of an article.
Tellingly Andreou never admits that he supports Owen Smith, or gives any single reason why Smith would make a better leader than Jeremy Corbyn. But then the clear point of the article is to damage Corbyn as much as possible, not to explain why the only alternative option for Labour members to vote for would actually be any better.
Alleged abuse
Andreou constantly whines about the supposed abuse he's received for criticising Jeremy Corbyn, but forgets to cite any examples of it, never mind any proof that the abuse came from actual members of the Labour Party.
Of course nobody should have to put up with abuse, but as a relatively high-profile political commentator it's inevitable. Long-term readers of my work will remember examples of the abuse, insults and threats that have been hurled at me for expressing my political opinions. I don't like it, but I don't use the abusive comments of a small minority of people who comment on my page to generalise about larger cohorts of people like Andreou does.
In taking a stance that is highly likely to be seen as pro-establishment by his mainly left-wing readership, Andreou knew perfectly well that he was basically Above the Line Trolling, so crying because the people he has antagonised didn't like it is a pretty lame performance.
By weaponising the claimed abuse of unnamed individuals in order to attack one of the only mainstream politicians who actively avoids the kind of dirty personal politics that David Cameron, Lynton Crosby and the Tories have legitimised through their repeated use, Andreou is simply adding to the downwards pressure on the already dispiritingly low standard of political debate in the UK.
If Andreou really has suffered any serious abuse and intimidation he should report it to the authorities because stuff like threats of violence, bigoted abuse and cyber-stalking are all crimes that should be investigated. If it's just a case of inarticulate people telling him to "fuck off" because they disagree with him he should just ignore them.
Acid Attacks
Not only does Andreou cry victim over the alleged abuse he's been getting, but he's so hypocritical that he peppers his article with critical, dismissive and abusive comments about Jeremy Corbyn and anyone who dares support him. Andreou uses terms like "Armchair Che" and "achingly middle class Corbynistas" to denigrate Corbyn supporters and repeatedly accuses them of "fanaticism", "violent fervour","denialism", contributing to "clear patterns of wickedness" and being a "personality cult" and an "army" that will inevitably become "an instrument of violence".
This generalistic abuse is not the kind of language used by a guy who rejects bad faith tactics like abuse, smears, generalisations and condescension, they are the tactics of someone who revels in the kind of insulting muck-raking abuse that he bookends his article crying about.
Not only does Andreou use derogatory generalisations and accusations as weapons to belittle the hundreds of thousands of people from all ages, areas of the country and walks of life who support Jeremy Corbyn, he openly admits that he's "gone over the top" with his criticisms and then belligerent declares that "I stand by every acid word".
Owen Jones
Andreou actually tries to cite Owen Jones' 9 questions article as evidence against Jeremy Corbyn. The absolute gall of it is incredible.
Andreou's manipulative and highly contradictory Acid Attack article is in stark contrast to Owen Jones' article about Corbyn which actually did raise a number of legitimate questions.
Although Jones was critical of Corbyn the article was actually quite balanced and tried to engage with Corbyn supporters rather than attempting to con them with a bit of dishonest concern trolling then crudely smearing them for the rest of the article.
You can read my response to Owen Jones' 9 questions article here.
Blame Corbyn
The entire article is littered with examples of Andreou blaming Corbyn for things that are clearly the fault of the Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters.
Andreou Blames Corbyn for the slump in Labour's poll numbers since the coup-plotters launched their inept effort to bully Corbyn into resignation.
He blames Corbyn for the fact that the coup-supporting Labour establishment tried to rig the leadership election against him by disenfranchising 130,000+ Labour Party voters and then selling votes to non-members at £25 a pop.
He even tries to blame Corbyn for the catastrophic implosion of the Labour Party in Scotland!
Scottish politics
Trying to blame Jeremy Corbyn for the annihilation of Labour in their traditional Scottish heartlands displays an extreme ignorance of Scottish politics.
Scottish Labour lost 40 of their 41 Westminster seats at the 2015 General Election. This happened months before most people even knew who Jeremy Corbyn was. The election strategist for that complete meltdown was a Blairite called John McTernan. And guess what ... the guy who is actually most blameworthy for the Scottish debacle is standing alongside Andreou cheerleading for the Anyone But Corbyn coup.
This ludicrous effort to blame Corbyn for the damage that out-of-touch Labour right-wingers like Tony Blair, John McTernan and Jim Murphy did in Scotland is not the only example of Andreou betraying a deep ignorance of Scottish politics and the lessons that should have been learned from Labour's political suicide there.
In another section Andreou bitterly criticises Jeremy Corbyn for deliberately distancing himself from David Cameron's toxic Project Fear style Remain campaign.
I'm not too convinced that Corbyn has much idea about what to do about the Scottish mess he's inherited, but at least, unlike Andreou he had the good sense to recognise that sharing a platform with Tory fearmongerers during the EU referendum debate would have discredited the Labour Party even further in the eyes of all progressives.
The Scottish electorate abandoned Labour because they were sick of being treated like an insignificant irrelevance. Andreou exemplifies this complacent Labour attitude towards Scottish voters in his absolute unwillingness to consider the actual causes of the furious mass revolt against the Labour Party by one of it's most reliable demographics.
The EU debate
Andreou's article is full of regurgitated mainstream media attack points against Jeremy Corbyn. Even though Corbyn returned 63% of the Labour vote for Remain while Cameron's fearmongering returned 58% of Tory voters for Leave, all of Andreou's opprobrium is reserved for Jeremy Corbyn.
Polls during the EU referendum debate showed that Jeremy Corbyn was rated as by far the most trusted Labour politician and his tactic of speaking to the public like we're adults rather than a massive bunch of sub-juvenile halfwits who can be goaded into supporting one position or the other with fearmongering, threats, misrepresentations and outright lies chimed with a lot of people.
He was one of the only politicians to speak truthfully about the fact that the EU isn't ideal, but how it's better to stay in and try to reform it rather than bail out with no plan of action for what to do next, yet Andreou characterises Corbyn's EU stance as being dishonest!
Tunnel vision
Another regurgitated mainstream media anti-Corbyn attack point that Andreou blurts out is the so-called honours controversy over Shami Chakrabarti. Andreou lambastes Corbyn for appointing someone he admits is "thoroughly deserving" because it apparently "muted" the criticism of all of David Cameron's dodgy appointments.
How many of these dodgy Tory appointments has Andreou criticised? None of course.Like Peter Mandelson before him, Andreou was far, far too busy concentrating on weaving criticism of Jeremy Corbyn's one House of Lords appointment into his anti-Corbyn hatchet job to find a single word of criticism for any of David Cameron's 13 unelected cronies, another Tory donor turning down his peerage because of the storm of negative publicity or another of Cameron's dodgy Tory donors getting disallowed by the appointments commission.
Channelling Tony Blair
One quote from the article stands out because of its remarkable similarity to a sentiment expressed by Tory Blair back when he thought that his anti-Corbyn rants would serve any purpose other than sounding like a ringing endorsement in the minds of the millions of people Blair and his cronies drove away from the Labour Party.
"Right now, the only thing more frightening to any rational person than Labour losing the next election, is Labour winning it with Corbyn in charge." - Alex Andreou, 2016
"Let me make my position clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it." - Tony Blair, 2015
The sentiment that it would be much better for Labour to lose the next election than actually win with Jeremy Corbyn in charge is clearly identical.
Perhaps if Corbyn's critics don't like being criticised as Blairites, they should consider not using the exact same form of anti-Corbyn argument as Tony Blair?
Honesty
Andreou weaves the theme of honesty throughout his article (even entitling it as The Truth About Jeremy Corbyn) which is ironic given that he shares the same objectives as the deceitful Anyone But Corbyn coup-plotters and people like Angela Eagle and Margaret Hodge who have repeatedly exaggerated and outright lied about abuse in order to inflict as much damage on the party leadership as possible.
Andreou's constant posturing as a truth-teller also clashes glaringly with his intellectually dishonest debating tactics, his brazen misrepresentations and the fact that his favoured Anyone But Corbyn candidate is a former PR man whose white shirt + rolled-up sleeves "normal guy" posing is just as brazenly dishonest as Eton educated former-PR man David Cameron's woefully transparent white shirt + rolled-up sleeves "man of the people" act.
it takes some brass neck to utilise honesty as a central theme in a bad faith Acid Attack of an article designed to assist the removal of Jeremy Corbyn and his replacement with an ideologically flexible placeholder candidate like Owen Smith.
Misrepresentations
One of the most woeful of Andreou's misrepresentations is his assertion that Corbyn would personally "deselect all dissenters and take full control".
Top-down Kinnockesque witch hunts and expulsions of ideological dissenters are not going to happen under Corbyn's watch. If Corbyn does use his likely re-election to put re-selection of MPs onto the agenda, the people who would make the decision to remove corrupt/complacent/party wrecking/self-serving/right-wing MPs would be local Labour Party members.
If re-selection does materialise, it won't be Corbyn taking "full control" of the party for himself, it would be Corbyn handing an awful lot more control over the direction of the party to the people who make up the party membership.
It's a complete liberty for Andreou to make honesty and truth central themes of his article, but to dishonestly characterise Corbyn's democratisation of the party as a dictatorial power grab.
Not only is Andreou dishonestly misrepresenting the situation, he's also dishonestly misrepresenting his own commentary as being an honest appraisal. The dual nature of Andreou's dishonesty warrants the coining of the term "meta-dishonesty" to describe it.
An unwarranted attack on Podemos
Towards the end of the article Andreou really begins to lose the plot and allow his true anti-democratic agenda to shine through. At one point he tries to illustrate his claim that mass political participation is unworkable by citing an article in the Rupert Murdoch operated Times slagging off the Spanish left-wing anti-austerity party Podemos.
What Andreou fails to mention is that Podemos was only founded in March 2014, meaning that in just over two years they've gone from nothing to being the third largest political party in Spain with above 20% of the vote (just a whisker behind the second party) and winning the mayoral elections in both Madrid and Barcelona.
Imagine if a brand new political party took 20% of the vote in the UK and their candidates became the mayors of London and Edinburgh. Do you think anyone in their right mind elsewhere in Europe would be trying to write that off as a spectacular failure to score political points against a local politician they're waging a vendetta against?
Interestingly, as a self-proclaimed expert on Greek politics Andreou fails to make a much more telling comparison between Labour and the once powerful Greek socialist party PASOK.
PASOK made the mistake of embracing right-wing austerity economics and slumped from never receiving less than 38% of the vote between 1981 and 2011 to taking just 4.7% of the vote in 2015 and ending up as Greece's 7th party!
Instead of trying to paint the remarkable rise of Podemos in Spain as some kind of desperate failure, maybe it would have been more useful for Andreou to point out a real political catastrophe that actually happened, and explain how traditional left-wing parties peddling hard-right economics are playing on extremely dangerous political thin ice?
Participation vs Managerialism
It begins showing from around the middle of the article, but toward the end Andreou really starts losing the ability to hide his true agenda. The absurd attack on Podemos in order to try to discredit the concept of mass political participation is bad enough, but in his concluding remarks he demonstrates his true anti-democratic sentiments by describing the massive number of people inspired by Corbyn to become Labour Party members as an "army" that will inevitably become "an instrument of violence".
Andreou is clearly afraid of mass political participation. He's scared of the idea of allowing ordinary plebs to have any real influence over the political system. He's terrified of participatory democracy, so he's smearing the people who want to get involved as part of a violent mob.
Andreou obviously prefers the managerialist style of politics where an insulated political elite get to make the important political decisions and the lower orders are kept as far away from the political process as possible.
What seems to have passed him by is that the slick managerialist style of Tony Blair led us into the Iraq catastrophe that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, caused a huge refugee crisis and triggered a wave of sectarian violence that eventually culminated in the rise of ISIS. If the millions who protested against the Iraq invasion would have actually had some kind of democratic political mechanism to influence the managerialist political establishment, then perhaps all of that violence, and death, and suffering, and bloodshed, and misery could have been averted ...
But no ... In Andreou's version of reality the Westminster political establishment (you know, the ones who just wrote a blank cheque to renew Britain's stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction and are still allowing British corporations to sell arms to the disgusting Islamist Saudi Arabian regime) are the peacemakers, and the people who want to reform politics to make them more accountable to the British public are the loathsome violent threat that you should be afraid of.
Utter contempt for democracy
Andreou's article is riddled with confused logic, misrepresentations and outright hypocrisy but his contempt for democracy is the one thing that shines through the most strongly at the end.
He spends the article wildly generalising about how intolerant the so-called far-left are, insisting that Corbyn and his supporters are a far-left fringe who are "obsessed with purging it [the country] from anyone who thinks different" and then later in the article he says that "Corbyn must be ousted at all costs. Everything else can be fixed later".
The contrast really couldn't be starker. He's smearing Corbyn supporters for supposedly wanting to conduct an ideological purge, then insists that no matter what the outcome of the leadership election Corbyn and his supporters should be purged from the party at any cost!
Screw what the membership want. Screw the concept of participatory democracy. What Andreou wants is an ideological purge of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, and he openly admits that he doesn't care how much damage to the Labour Party it takes to achieve it.
And most delusional of all he genuinely seems to think that a return to the orthodox old-fashioned managerialist style of doing politics will enough to undo the damage inflicted by the "destroy Corbyn and drive away his supporters at any cost" brigade.
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.
After the inconclusive Spanish general election in December 2015 the ruling right-wing Partido Popular (PP) government have tried to hang onto power, despite not having enough MPs to form a majority (even with the support of the centre-right Trojan Horse protest party Ciudadanos). In the months since the election PP has been rocked by one corruption scandal after another, including a huge corruption scandal in Valencia (24 PP politicians and people with ties to the party arrested) and the implication of the wife of their environment minister in the Panama Papers scandal.
One of the biggest PP corruption scandals of all is going on in Madrid, where PP ran the city council from 1991 until they were turfed out by a Podemos led coalition in 2015. The scandal involved the sale of hundreds of units of social housing to a consortium between a US based vulture fund called Blackstone and an entity called Magic Real Estate.
The Mayor of Madrid who oversaw this corrupt fire-sale of public property was Ana Botella, who is the wife of former Prime Minister Aznar (you might remember him as one of the few world leaders to back Bush and Blair's catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq). Botella was a controversial figure before she decided to sell off a load of public property on the cheap because she never actually won a Mayoral election, she was parachuted into the role after the resignation of her predecessor.
The sale of the 1,890 apartments at the heart of the corruption scandal came during the biggest sell-off of public property in Spanish history, with billions of euros worth of public assets being distributed to the likes of Blackstone and HIG Capital (USA) AXA (France), Burlington Asset Management (UK) and the even the Bank of China!
The €128.5 million sale of the 1,890 social housing units was highly controversial at the time because it violated the first option rights of the tenants, and nobody but the utterly credulous believed the promises that rents wouldn't be hiked by the new owners. Within a couple of years, as expected, the new private owners raised the rents by up to 43% and began the process of evicting dozens of families (social cleansing).
The next revelation, in the summer of 2015, was that the American vulture fund Blackstone had significant links with José María Aznar Botella (the son of the Mayor and her husband, the ex-Prime Minister of Spain) and Juan Hoyos Martínez de Irujo (the ex-Prime Minister's close childhood friend). So it's established that the major of Madrid oversaw the sale of public property to an American vulture fund with links to her own son and to her husband's childhood friend!
In April 2016 a preliminary investigation into the sell-off was released establishing a number facts. Here are some of the findings:
- The sale price significantly undervalued the properties, meaning the buyers benefited from a €32 million discount on the actual value of the assets (about a 20% discount).
- The council acted unlawfully by not conducting any official valuation of the properties before allowing the buyer to set the sale price and then simply accepting it without consideration of whether it represented value for money.
- The sale was not put out to competitive tender, as was legally required.
- The housing units were sold as a block which violated the rights of the tenants who had the contractual right to purchase the properties for themselves after 7-10 years of occupancy.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the PP Mayor of Madrid oversaw an unlawful sale of public property, at a massive discount, in an uncompetitive manner (the client got to set the price) to a consortium with which her her own son and her husband's close friend had significant connections.
The current Podemos led city council have stated that they would try to reverse the unlawful sale if the irregularities in the preliminary report are confirmed. Meanwhile the party responsible for this corruption scandal (and countless others) are doing all they can to cling onto political power at the national level.
The appalling thing is that despite all of the corruption scandals, PP have a core demographic of mainly older tribalist voters who will under no circumstances vote for any other party. This is a very similar situation to the Tory party in England, who can always rely on backing from some 20% of likely voters, no matter how extreme their incompetent, or how many scandals the party is rocked by.
There is no doubt that the 2011-2015 right-wing government of Spain was the most corrupt of all since the fall of General Franco's fascist dictatorship in 1975. Aside from the aforementioned scandals there's also been the €449 million Gürtel embezzlement case, the secret Bárcenas slush fund for PP politicians, the former PP economics minister Rodrigo Rato's involvement in the Bankia collapse and bailout, the imprisonment of Carlos Fabra for tax fraud, the Palma Arena corruption scandal, and on and on ... However even with all of these scandals being public knowledge, PP still somehow managed to secure more votes than any other party in the inconclusive December 2015 general election!
If no coalition government is agreed by the 2nd of May, the Spanish constitution dictates that there will need to be another election no later than the 26th of June. Podemos (who broke through at the last election to become the third largest party in Spain within just two years of their foundation) look likely to make more gains because of their consistent anti-corruption stance, but PP can't be ruled out of the equation because they have plenty of older tribalist voters to support them. The existence of the PP tribalist voter block means that if younger Spanish voters (who are much less likely to support PP, but also much less likely to vote) don't turn out in force because of "election fatigue", PP could end up creeping back into power despite their disgusting track record of corruption.
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.
On the 20th of December 2015 Spain experienced a democratic political revolution. The two party duopoly on political power was consigned to history as millions of Spaniards voted for alternative political parties. In this article I'm going to run through some of the important issues.
The era of two party politics is over
Two political parties have held a duopoly on political power in Spain ever since the Franco dictatorship came to an end in the 1970s. PP share the same fanatically right-wing economic stance as the Tories in the UK however they're significantly more right-wing in terms of social policy (during the last parliament they attempted to make abortion illegal and introduced 30,000€ fines for participating in "unauthorised" political protests).
The PSOE are very much like the UK Labour Party during the New Labour era. They masquerade as socialists but actually promote orthodox right-wing economics behind a thin veneer of pseudo-socialist slop.
The 2015 general election saw the share of the vote taken by these two parties reduced to just 51% between them. PP took 29% of the vote which was their worst performance since 1989 and PSOE took 22% which was the worst performance in their entire history.
Demographics
Anyone who thinks the two big establishment parties might bounce back to regain their former dominance should consider the voter demographics. The new left-wing anti-corruption party Podemos came third overall but they were the most popular party of all amongst under 35s. The new centre-right party Ciudadanos was the most popular with 35-44 year olds. The older generations were the only ones to stay fiercely loyal to PP and to a lesser extent PSOE.
The ruling PP used similar tactics to the Tories in the UK. They loaded the burden of austerity onto young people (who suffered 50%+ unemployment for the majority of PP's time in government) and workers (who had their wages and labour rights significantly eroded) while bribing the older generations with pension increases. The ploy worked in that it secured the votes of the elderly, but attacking the younger generations so mercilessly is clearly political suicide from a long-term strategic perspective.
Economic exiles
Under the punishing ideological austerity of the PP government unemployment in Spain has remained ludicrously high. General unemployment is still 21.6% and youth unemployment has remained around 50% for years. The result of this is hundreds of thousands of predominantly young Spanish workers leaving Spain to find work elsewhere in the EU. The electoral impact of such heavy outward immigration is difficult to estimate, but it's impossible to say that it hasn't had an influence on the outcome.
On the one hand the economic exile of so many younger voters will have benefited the two establishment parties favoured by older voters, but on the other hand if economic conditions weren't so incredibly dire as to drive hundreds of thousands of voters out of the country, it's likely a significantly smaller percentage of the electorate would have decided to vote for new alternative parties like Podemos and Ciudadanos.
The right-wing PP can't hold onto power
The suspicion of many in Spain was that the new centre-right political party Ciudadanos were going to enable PP back into power despite their pre-election promises that they wouldn't. As the results came in it became clear that a PP-Ciudadanos alliance would have nowhere near enough seats to form a majority government. This means that the only conceivable way for PP to hold onto power would be to form an alliance with their traditional rivals for absolute power PSOE (I'll explain why this is unlikely under the PSOE subheading).
PP are still the biggest party so they could attempt to form a minority government, but the consequences of a right-wing party attempting to hold onto power in such a manner have only just been played out in Portugal. The Portuguese right-wing minority government was widely regarded as an anti-democratic power-grab and lasted only a matter of weeks before they were replaced by a left-wing coalition with a clear majority of seats between them.
The rise of Podemos continues
The party that finished third was only founded in March 2014. They finished just shy of PSOE with 20.7% of the vote (to PSOE's 22.0%). Due to the disproportional nature of the Spanish electoral system this translated to a much lower 69 seats to PSOE's 90, but despite this, their performance can only be seen as a continuation of their remarkably successful growth. They have not only established themselves as a significant parliamentary force, they also have the mayors of Madrid and Barcelona and secured very strong backing in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
Podemos were the most popular party of all in two of the four Catalan regions (Barcelona and Tarragona) and were the most popular national party in both of the others (Girona and Lleida). Podemos were the most popular party in two of the three Basque regions (Álava and Gipuzkoa) and only finished narrowly behind the Basque Nationalist party in the other (Biscay).
Aside from these clear successes Podemos also finished as the second most popular party in nine other regions (A Coruña, Alicante, Balearic Islands, Castellón, Las Palmas, Madrid, Navarre, Pontevedra and Valencia).
Ciudadanos
Podemos were not the only new political party to do well. The centre-right party Ciudadanos finished in fourth place with 13.9% of the vote and 40 seats.
Ciudadanos undoubtedly did well, but they fell short of their objective of winning enough seats to hand power back to PP. It doesn't matter that Ciudadanos repeatedly promised not to enable PP and Mariano Rajoy back into power, it was always clear that that was their objective. Many people saw their rise in popularity as an attempt by the Spanish establishment to back a Trojan horse political party to soak up the protest votes and derail the exponential rise of Podemos.
The suspicions that Ciudadanos are just an establishment Trojan horse were confirmed in the days after the election when their leader Albert Rivera called for the two establishment parties to join Ciudadanos in a grand coalition in order to lock Podemos out of power.
To go from posing as an anti-establishment party and promising not to keep PP in power to actively promoting a PP led establishment coalition in the space of a few days either side of the election show Ciudadanos up for the cynic political opportunists that they are (and always seemed to be to anyone with a grain of political sense).
PSOE are in huge trouble
The supposedly socialist party PSOE suffered the worst result in their entire history winning just 22% of the vote. This leaves them in an extraordinarily tricky position. It's hard to envisage a course of action that will not end up damaging their party even further.
The most damaging course of action of all would obviously be for them to enable their historical rivals PP back into power by joining a grand coalition. We only need to look at what happened to PASOK in Greece after they enabled the right-wing pro-austerity New Democracy party into power in 2012. The move was so unpopular with their own supporters that they ended up slumping to just 4.7% of the vote in 2015 reducing them to the 7th party in Greece, a spectacular fall from grace for a party that had formed a majority government in 2009 with 43.9% of the vote.
Another option for PSOE is to form a left-wing coalition, but this is dangerous territory for them too. If the left-wing coalition goes well then it's likely that the newcomers Podemos will take most of the credit at the next election, but if it goes badly PSOE will end up losing votes over it. A weak left-wing coalition looks like a lose-lose situation for PSOE.
Another option is for them to refuse to join in with any coalition leaving PP to attempt to form an incredibly weak minority government that would be bound to fall triggering new elections. This is also a risky strategy because everyone knows that they only finished ahead of Podemos by the slimmest of margins, so their propaganda line from the 2015 election that they are "the only party that can stand up to PP" has been rendered completely ineffective. It's clear to everyone who opposes PP that Podemos are in the ascendency and PSOE are in rapid decline.
A quick look at Portugal
There are a number of obvious parallels between the 2015 general elections in Spain and Portugal. Both saw the ruling right-wing party lose their majority, both saw the head of state (the right-wing Portuguese President and the King of Spain) hoping to enable the right-wing party back into power, both elections saw a huge rise in support for left-wing anti-austerity parties.
The Portuguese President encouraged his right-wing party colleagues to squat in power with a weak minority government, but they were soon defeated and replaced with a left-wing coalition of the nominally left-wing main opposition party and two genuinely left-wing parties.
It remains to be seen whether the King of Spain will encourage Mariano Rajoy and PP to squat in power with a weak minority government, or whether the Spanish establishment have learned their lesson from what happened to their Iberian neighbours just a few months previously.
The unfair electoral system
The Spanish electoral system is a lot fairer than the staggeringly disproportional and unrepresentative system in the UK, but it's still heavily skewed in favour of the two main parties and badly in need of reform.
The Spanish system is much fairer than the UK system because they have multi-member constituencies elected using a system of proportional representation. This means that smaller parties are not locked out of the political system as they are under the UK's absurdly disproportional single member constituency system,
The major problem with the Spanish system is the wild variance in size between highly populated metropolitan constituencies and much more sparsely populated rural constituencies. The result of these disparities in constituency sizes is a huge bias in favour of the ruling PP.
The number of votes cast for PP per representative in the Spanish parliament was 58,664. The number of votes per PSOE representative was 61,453 but the number of votes cast per Podemos representative was 75,209.
One of Podemos' key non-negotiable demands is reform of this unfair electoral system, so if they do end up sharing power as part of a coalition government (or winning outright in a repeat election) we should expect Spain to adopt a much fairer voting system.
Electoral spending
Podemos have by far the biggest social media presence of any of the Spanish political parties. In fact their 1.043 million Facebook followers absolutely dwarfs the 469,000 followers of the other three major national parties combined (PP 124,000, PSOE, 113,000, C's 232,000).
It's interesting to note the significant reverse correlation between social media presence and electoral spending. Podemos spent only 0.48€ per vote cast in their favour. Ciudadanos spent 1.26€ per vote, PSOE spent 1.63€ per vote and PP spent 2.00€ per vote.
To me it's not actually that surprising that Podemos ended up spending less than a quarter of the money per vote than PP did, because a well orchestrated social media campaign is the best free advertising possible. If some bloke from Yorkshire who has never appeared on the TV or even in his local newspaper (me) can reach millions of people per week with his social media content with 220,000 followers, then a well staffed and well funded political party with over a million Facebook followers should be able to reach staggering numbers of people, especially during an election campaign.
A lot of people still sneer at social media as if it's some kind of meaningless distraction when it comes to serious politics, but the result of the Spanish election makes it absolutely clear that social media presence is an increasingly vital component of electoral success, (especially for alternative parties that suffer relentless negative coverage in the pro-establishment mainstream press).
Another election?
It seems increasingly likely there will be a replay of the Spanish general election in 2016.
A grand coalition including both PP and PSOE is the only conceivable way that a coalition government with a strong majority could be formed, and it's clear that a move by PSOE to prop up their traditional rivals and enable Mariano Rajoy back into power would destroy the credibility of their party.
Either no government will be formed meaning that new elections will be automatically triggered within two months, or a weak government will be formed but will be thrown into crisis at the first major disagreement between the rival coalition parties.
Unless PSOE decide to commit electoral suicide, another set of elections sooner rather than later looks almost inevitable.
What does this all mean for the EU?
The rise of Podemos must strike fear into the hearts of the pro-austerity technocrats who run the EU because were Spain to reject ideological austerity then it would be a much bigger problem for them than Greece.
We all know that the Troika of the EU, European Central Bank and IMF managed to back the left-wing anti-austerity Greek government into a corner and humiliate them by forcing them to carry out an extreme-right programme of socially destructive austerity and ideologically driven privatisations. However Greece is just a small country that generates just 1.3% of economic activity in the EU. For the unelected technocrats who run the EU it's not a problem to vandalise the Greek economy for "the greater good" of protecting the interests of German and French banks. However Spain is a much bigger economy, the fifth biggest in the EU and the fourth biggest in the Eurozone. Spain's economy generates 7.6% of economic activity in the EU making it a much bigger problem if their elected government were to reject right-wing ideological austerity.
The EU, ECB and IMF Troika spent the first part of 2015 grinding Greece into submission, ignoring the will of their electorate and humiliating their democratically elected government. If Spain ends up with an anti-austerity government it's going to represent a much bigger problem for the unelected pro-austerity technocrats. Such an occurrance would mean that Spain, Portugal and Greece would all have anti-austerity governments. The economic repercussions of the Troika campaign of economic destruction in Greece (1.3% of the EU economy) were severe enough, but launching similar concurrent campaigns against Spain (7.6%) and Portugal (1.3%) would mean that the EU would be at economic war with over 10% of its own economy (13% of its own population)!
The issue for Spain is whether they have the confidence to stand up and reject austerity, or whether they're so afraid of the humiliation and economic destruction unleashed on Greece that they'd overlook the fact that Spain is a much more powerful economy. If Spain have the confidence to try it they could lead the fightback against the EU's socially and economically destructive campaign of ideological austerity, especially if they ally themselves with Greece and Portugal.
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