The municipalities have now been sorted out with their councils constituted, the regional governments are nearly all done but the first attempt at forming the new national government won't start till July 22nd. Greased lightning it is not.
Spain, has generally, since the return to democracy, had a two party state. More accurately two big players plus a number of important regional movements and some smaller national parties. Recently the maths had changed. Deciding who might govern a city, a region or a country became some sort of "what if" arithmetic challenge.
Now I'm not up to keeping tabs on all of the regional and town hall discussions but the impression I get is that this sort of manoeuvring is going on all over Spain. The fragmentation of the vote has tended towards a version of political Sudoku that has allowed people to get into power simply by perming their seats in the most illogical way often with a contemptuous disregard for voter intention. You know the sort of thing. A party takes a thrashing, it loses half of its old seats but by banding together with some strange bedfellows it can cling on to power. The obvious "winners" have not been able to consolidate their moral victory with a clear majority of seats in the local council or regional parliament.
Our town borders on Murcia so we notice what happens there. Murcia is a good example of this political wheeler dealing. Since 1995 Murcia, the Region, has had a conservative government. In the recent elections the socialists got 17 seats in the regional assembly narrowly beating the conservatives with 16. The conservative PP had 22 last time. Podemos went down by four from 6 to 2, Ciudadanos went up from 4 to 6 and Vox came from nowhere with 4. Given your point of view you could decide to stress the move to the left (the PSOE won), to the centre (loss of seats for Podemos, more seats for Ciudadanos) or to the right (new seats for Vox, a still solid vote for the traditional PP right and an increased vote to the right leaning centrists of Ciudadanos). You can also choose to complain about the proportional representation system, Cs got 6 seats with 150,000 votes yet Vox only got 4 seats despite getting 143,000 votes. Then you start to look for alliances.
The majority to control the Murcian Regional Government is 23 and so the parties have been dealing. It looked as though the PP and Cs were going to form the government with Vox backing them at vote time. But there was a problem in other locations, away from Murcia, and Vox, suspecting that they were being diddled out of any power, suddenly decided not to support the PP. That meant the potential coalition in Murcia has fallen apart for today at least. Exactly the same is happening in Madrid.
Oh, and something else that I really don't understand is the part that Ciudadanos has been playing in this game. Being simplistic about this the Cs have usually been considered to be centrist. But, for some reason best known to themselves, Ciudadanos this time has decided to be right wing. They campaigned on the right and they have said that they will never do deals with the socialists. It's not a stance I understand. It seems to me, given that the vote is so fragmented, if they stuck to the centre they would be in the perfect place to deal. Without compromising their principles, without letting down their voters, they could ask both the left and the right if they'll give them the things they want, the things they promised their voters. Whichever side offers the best deal gets their support.
I'm sure I read something about that in Politics for Beginners, Chapter 1.
Oh, and honestly. I started to write about weeding by pushing rather than pulling but some strange force gripped my keyboard fingers.
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