The art of simultaneous talking

It's local and regional election day next Sunday, the 28th, and the local politicians are doing the rounds. This post came about as a result of one of the meetings I went to.

We got the usual sort of presentation from politicians on the hustings - lauding their party's past record and future plans with the occasional disparaging side comment about the meagre offer of the other parties. 

My Spanish coherency seems to be on hold at the moment and even my understanding is faltering. I'm hoping for a comeback but the slough has been a long and depressing one. So, as the politicians spoke, I only just kept up with the patter. Then came a comment which gave space for a local question. The meeting turned into a bunfight - claim and counterclaim, suggestion and rejection. Red faces and aggressive body language. I lost the detail completely but the broad stroke of the conversation was easy and it wasn't friendly.

In the Anthropocene past I used to run community buildings and my life often seemed to be one long committee meeting. A colleague suggested that the art to running a successful committee meeting was to get everyone to talk themselves out about something that anyone could have a valid opinion about - hand dryers as against paper towels, whether the vending machine should stock sugary snacks - just before you introduced the item or project that you wanted to push forward or stymie. It was a bit like that at the meeting but in reverse. We didn't get to talk about local concerns or the bigger questions because it was time to air old grievances. Conclusions were not reached.

I've often been impressed with how Spaniards handle themselves in large group conversations. Three Spaniards can easily maintain four conversations at once. It's a bit like that quiz show University Challenge where, sometimes, the contestants interrupt the question to answer. There the contestants guess at what's coming next to score points. Usually English speakers let someone finish their phrase before launching into the next. At times, amongst we Brits, there is a bit of a race to be the next to make the most erudite or argument winning point but, once someone is speaking, the rest hold fire, breathlessly awaiting their turn. Not so Spaniards. The person making the point may respond to two or three challenges or suggestions at the same time, turning from one conversation to the next with a dexterity as inbred as the ¡viva! call and response. Something Pavlovian. And of course, around here, when the raised voices and gesticulating starts you can guarantee that someone will break free of the Castilian chains and let loose in Valenciano.

I left the meeting a little early but long after it had finished.

Now, where was I?

I wrote a couple of articles for the TIM magazine which were never published. This is one of them. It was called Spanish Government

The current form of government in Spain dates from the 1978 Constitution which was drafted three years after the death of General Franco.

Central government takes care of the “big things” like foreign affairs, external trade, defence, justice, law making, shipping and civil aviation but in many areas it shares responsibility with the regions - for instance in education and health care.

The National Parliament, las Cortes Generales, has two chambers. The lower house, equivalent to the UK Commons, is the Congress of Deputies and the upper house, something like the Lords, is the Senate. The lower house is the more important. It has 350 members, against the 650 in the House of Commons. The deputies are elected in the 50 Spanish provinces and also from the Spanish North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Each province is an electoral constituency and the number of deputies it returns is population dependent. The big parties contest all the constituencies but there are also important regional parties which only field candidates in their home provinces. Voting uses a closed list system – if you vote for the party you vote for all their candidates. The number of seats is divvied up by a complicated proportional representation system. This means that there are several deputies for each province and no “constituency MPs”.

The number of senators changes slightly with population - each province elects four senators. The political parties put forward three candidates and voters choose up to three names - from the same party or from different parties. The four candidates with the greatest number of votes are elected. The legislative assembly, the regional government of each autonomous community, also designates one senator by right and a further senator for each million inhabitants. A different system is used in the Canary and Balearic Islands. Usually there are around 260 senators.

The official result of a general election is made public five days after the poll. Parliament meets and the deputies are sworn in. Next, the King, it's always been a King so far, meets with the heads of the parties and asks one of them to try to form a government. The government has to be agreed by the parliament as a whole. That's a simple enough process when one party has a clear majority or when a simple coalition will do the trick but the last couple of times, with no clear winner, the process has been very messy.

The leader of the party of government becomes the President of Spain with their official residence at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid. The President decides what vice presidents, ministries and ministers are required to run the country The people chosen form the Council of Ministers, akin to the British Cabinet

The Constitutional Court ensures that any new parliamentary laws are constitutional and comply with Spanish International agreements. The judiciary, overseen by the General Council of Judicial Power, is independent of government and has both national and regional structures

All of the 17 autonomous communities have their own president, government, administration and supreme court. The majority of funding for most of the regions comes from central government. The autonomous communities have differing devolved powers based on their history, on ancient law and local decisions. All of them administer education, health, social services, cultural and urban development. Several of the communities, like Valencia, have separate linguistic schemes.
Each of the 50 provinces, for instance Alicante, has its own administration, the diputación, that is responsible for a range of services.

The municipalities, the town halls, are headed up by a mayor supported by the councillors of the ruling party or coalition. Town halls are responsible for local services from tourism and environment through to urban planning and social services. The official population of the municipality, the padrón municipal, is the basis of the electoral roll and so the basis of this whole structure. Oh, except for the Monarch who gets his or her job simply by being born.

Susi, Pete and Frank

Rather surprisingly, considering the recent history of Spain, we don't have a General Election on the horizon. Of course that's not strictly true. The Podemos people are pushing a parliamentary no confidence motion and if that were to prosper then, General Election here we come. But it won't.

We do, though, have a bit of a leadership battle in the PSOE, the Socialist Party. You will remember that we had a couple of General Elections in quick succession. The PP, the blues, the conservatives, won both times but they didn't get a majority. To be President /Prime Minister here you need a majority. The orange party, Ciudadanos, wobbled around a bit about who to back - given that there were two General Elections they had two real choices and they used them both. After the second and decisive election they sided with the blues and that's why we have the current Government. The PSOE, the reds, the socialists, were led by a bloke called Pedro Sánchez - he tried to form a government after the first election, the orange people were with him but the mauve people, Podemos, the bunch that don't wear ties, said the socialists were of the old order and not to be trusted. In the final analysis Pedro simply couldn't raise the support he needed. That's why we had the second General Election. Neither of the two biggest parties could muster enough support to form a government after the first.

After the second General Election Pedro, of the reds, was saying no -  no to backing the blues. If the reds didn't help the blues there would have to be a third General Election. Pedro was not for supporting the conservatives into government. There was a lot of toing and froing and eventually the socialists sorted it out by deposing their General Secretary, Pedro Sánchez. The day to day management of the socialist party was taken over by a caretaker committee.

We are now in the process of electing a new leader for the socialists. It's taken months and months. There are three candidates, the deposed Pedro Sánchez, an old hand in the party from the Basque Country called Patxi López and the President of Andalucia called Susana Díaz. Andalucia is the strongest stronghold of the socialists. Susana is the hot favourite with the backing of nearly all the party heavyweights. Personally, without much to go on except what I see of her on the telly or hear on the radio, I don't care for her. She seems a bit stern, a bit ready to get snappy for a politician, she doesn't seem to want to talk policy and she seems a bit sure of herself.

We've just had the first stage, the bit where the candidates have to garner enough support from the party faithful to be able to stand. Unless they get a specific percentage of party member's votes they cannot run for party leader - the idea, I suppose, being to stop joke candidates. Susana expected to be miles ahead in these "avales," endorsements, but she was only a few thousand votes in front of Pedro. Patxi was miles behind. What's more Susana picked up most of her votes from her home ground. She was beaten into second in lots of important areas of the country.

Obviously enough the three candidates are travelling around, on the stump, trying to rally support for their campaigns. It struck me that they may be somewhere local where I could go and see them so I put a search clue into Google to check their public appearances. At the top of the appropriate Google page when I searched on Pedro there was his timetable. It was the same for Patxi but the same search clue with only the name changed turned up nothing for Susana Díaz. Indeed having gone through four pages of results I still don't know where she's appearing. There are just news stories, her Twitter account and the Facebook page. Without delving too deeply I also noticed that on her Facebook page quite a few of the comments on show were a bit negative - your campaign is very 1970s, you need to talk specific policy rather than bland platitudes. That sort of thing. On the other hand both the Patxi and Pedro pages seem, with the same cursory look, to be much more positive about them though lots were telling Patxi to throw his lot in with Pedro.

I never back winners at elections, or very rarely, but I think it would cheer me up if Pedro Sánchez were re-elected. I didn't like the way he was shifted to one side for sticking to his principles and maintaining that socialist voters would not want to be the means by which a conservative government was put in power.

Right, whilst I'm thinking politics good luck to Macron and I'd better have a look at some of the UK websites to see who my choices are in the UK General Election. I've just realised that, presuming the Liberals or LibDems still exist, I don't even know the name of their party leader. I do know the other two. Not that it matters, I vote in Huntingdon and we know how we vote there.

Casting a vote

I've described this process somewhere else, in the past, but as it doesn't happen very often even my most trusty reader may have forgotten - so.

There are two elections going on today. The first is for the majority of the Autonomous Communities, the Regions, which deal with the powers not held by Central Government in areas like health and education. Our region is the Comunitat Valenciana which is made up of three provinces, Valencia, Castellon and Alicante. We are in Alicante and that's where we should vote except that European legislation denies me a vote at this level. I cannot vote regionally either in the UK or in Spain. The second elections are for the local Town Halls. These people decide how much our water and car tax cost, what we pay for rubbish collection, how to organise the local fiestas and lots of the day to day decisions that affect our lives. I do, at least, get to vote at the Town Hall level.

My polling station is in one of the schools in the local town of Pinoso. There is no polling station in the village. There are basic procedural differences between Spain and the UK.

In Britain, provided the system hasn't changed whilst I've been away, you turn up and show that you have the right to vote because you are on the electoral register. That done you are given a ballot paper which you mark with your choice in secret. The marked ballot paper is then placed in the ballot box. You vote for a named person using a first past the post simple majority system.

In Spain you cast your vote by sealing a list of candidates inside an envelope and placing that envelope in the ballot box. The lists are available at the polling station but the lists and envelopes are also available beforehand. This means that lots of people turn up at polling stations with their sealed envelopes already prepared. If you don't have an envelope ready you will need to prepare one in the polling station before you approach your designated electoral table. You prove your identity, I used my passport, someone checks you are on the electoral roll and, provided you are, that's when you are able to place your sealed envelope in the box.

The list system means that you vote for a group of people rather than a single person. The order of the candidates on the lists is chosen by the parties. The number of people elected from each list depends on the number of votes cast and the mathematical formula applied to those votes using a system called the D'Hondt method. It's a proportional representation system based on highest averages. Like all voting systems it has pluses and minuses, supporters and detractors.

Polling stations are open from 9am till 8pm. There are only 5,584 people registered to vote in Pinoso and the vote is local so I presume we will get the local results very quickly. The national picture, reflected in the regional votes, will take longer to firm up just as in the UK.

A few things that crossed my mind when I was trying to think of a blog entry

It stopped being cold in our house a few weeks ago now. I forget quite when but suddenly we weren't using the gas heaters, I started to pad around the tiled floors in bare feet as I got up in the morning. Winter was gone and there were flowers in the garden. Last week, I think, it was warm - a few days in the 30ºC bracket. I folded up my pullovers. That turned out to be a bit premature. I've needed a woolly the last couple of days.

I was just about to go to work, Maggie was on her way home after work. We were together. We decided a quick snack was in order. We chose a roadside bar café that we haven't been in for years. It was a mistake. It was scruffy, barn like, dark and a bit dirty. Nonetheless we sat at the bar, ordered a drink and surveyed the tapas in the little glass display cases. Lots of them looked like food left on the plates piled up by the side of the sink after a good meal; perfectly nice when freshly prepared but well past their best now. We ordered a sandwich instead but as I ate and surveyed the sad looking tapas their aspect began to lose ground to their potential taste. I wondered about ordering something. I didn't, but I nearly did.

I work in Fortuna, It's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Murcia. Litter blows around the streets of Fortuna. The traffic misbehaves. Dogs, or dog keepers, misbehave. Our local town is Pinoso. it's a small forgotten town, or maybe a village, in Alicante. I have always thought of Pinoso as just another no mark town, the one I happened to end up in. I now realise we fell lucky. It's a clean, inexpensive, well organised, little place.

The election campaign this time has been odd. Not that odd but not exactly to formula. There have been lots of leaked news stories that have affected big candidates as usual but there are new names all over the place touted as possible victors. The clever money is on the collapse of the two party hegemony. At least two of the "important" high profile politicians don't have a manifesto to speak of. They think it's not important. Policy isn't the thing this time it's who you trust.

In our own local elections I went to an election meeting where they had no manifesto either. It'll be out tomorrow I was told. It's well past tomorrow now but I haven't been able to find one. I have to confess that my search has been a bit half hearted. Working, as I do, till around 9pm I've found it difficult to get to any of the meetings but the publicity about when and where they are taking place has been a bit thin on the ground anyway.

Still on the elections I was surprised to hear a very partisan interview on the town radio yesterday where the interviewer fed one of the candidates the questions he wanted. "Words of wisdom" commented the interviewer after one response. The interviewer is one of the candidates for the same party as the interviewee. I stood up for him in the social media when his candidature was announced.

The elections are on the streets though. We were having a drink. When only one other table was occupied we could hear its occupants making their predictions for the vote. A second table was occupied later. They talked about the elctions too - they had clear views on some of the candidates. "I'm not telling you who I'm voting for," said the female to the male partner, "it's a secret vote."

Apparently it's the fiftieth anniversary of the European flag - the one with the yellow stars on the blue background. I was, as so often, listening to the radio and some chap was talking about the flag's anniversary. We fly the flag a lot in Spain he said, the same in Italy. In Britain they hardly ever fly the European Union flag because of their feelings towards Europe.

It was International Museum Day, IMD, this week. In Cartagena, where we used to live, the Night of the Museums was a huge and joyous family event with the museums open for free till 2am, on a Saturday evening nearest to IMD and all sorts of street events alongside. I wondered if there was anything happening close to Culebrón this year as Cartagena is a fair distance away. There were 138 events listed for Spain and another 295 for the rest of Europe though the nearest to us was some 40km away. Out of curiosity I wondered who was doing what in the UK. At first I couldn't find anyone but, with a bit of probing, I found that the Auckland Castle Museum and the Thackray Medical Museum were doing their bit.

I am reminded of the oft quoted headline, puportedly from the Daily Mirror in 1930. Fog in Channel Continent Cut Off.

Locked out

It must have been the 1964 general election. I walked on to the Town Hall Square in Elland to see Harold Macmillan speak. I would have been ten at the time. I've always been strangely drawn to political meetings.

Shortly after democracy was restored to Spain in 1977 the pattern soon settled into the usual two party - leftish, rightish - seesaw. The last time, in 2011, it was the turn of the right. There are several regional parties which have strong representation in the national parliament but their power base is in their home regions. Otherwise there were really just a couple of smaller national parties. A harder left party has, traditionally, been the third largest national party and, in 2007, a breakaway socialist politician formed a new centrist party. To put that into figures at the last general elections it was 185 seats to the PP (conservatives), 110 to the PSOE (socialists), 11 to the Left, 5 to the Centrists, 21 to Catalan and Basque groups and 18 to the rest

Then suddenly, last year, there was a group called Podemos which is often described as an anti austerity party though they are clearly hardish left. They surprised everyone by picking up five European seats just three months after their official launch. Current "intention to vote" polls have them neck and neck with the big two but, after relentless media pressure, they seem to be losing some of their gleam. Almost as suddenly there was another party, Ciudadadanos, on the scene. They come from a regional party formed in Catalonia in 2006 which went national in 2013 and got a couple of MEPs last year. They seemed to be just another small party but then suddenly their name was cropping up everywhere. Their politics are hard to pin down, they're definitely not for Catalan Independence, they suggest they are a bit left though lots of commentators place them to the right. The polls have Ciudadanos in a close fourth place. So from a two horse race less than a year ago we now have four and a half serious contenders.

I vote for the European Parliament through a Spanish ballot box. At the national level I get to vote in England. At regional level I am denied a vote in either my own or my adopted country and at the local level I vote in Spain.

The Spanish Town Hall Elections are on May 24th. The official campaign season hasn't started yet but the various parties are presenting their lists of candidates now. Our current council has the socialist PSOE in charge in coalition with a local party called the PSD. The opposition is made up of the conservative PP, a local party called UCL and BLOC d'el Pinos which is a local branch of a Valencian Nationalist group.

For 2015 the choice is a bit different. We have the same PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the same PP, Partido Popular, a renamed version of BLOC now in a wider coalition called BLOC Comprmís, the Partido Democrata Pinoso Independiente, PDPI, which appears to be a renaming of the local PSD and then Ciudadanos, the relatively new national grouping mentioned above.

I couldn't get to either the PSOE or PDPI candidate presentations. Tonight it was the turn of the PP. Their meeting was advertised for 8.30pm and as I don't finish teaching my last class till 8pm in a town some 30km away from Pinoso it was going to be a bit tight. Spanish events tend to start late though so when I rolled up outside the building at 8.45 I reckoned I would be fine. The car park looked a bit quiet though, there was nobody milling about, the door was firmly locked. I gave up and came home.

I notice from the reports on the Town Hall website that the PP meeting took place in the Auditorium not the Interpretation Centre as billed. I'm sure the change was advertised somewhere.

Now I can't pretend I put a lot of effort into my planning for the event. All I did was to add the dates and places to my diary that came with a leaflet called Municipal Elections 2015 produced by the Municipal Means of Communication but I do hope that the rest of my election campaign goes just a little more smoothly.