Personal bias

Watching the TV news in Spain on Thursday afternoon. Thinking about the untrammelled stupidity of it all. About the actions of men, and it always seems to be men, like Putin and Sergey Lavrov sending people to kill and be killed. Wondering who is making money from this because behind almost every indecent act someone is making money.

Back at the news the next item was that the Partido Popular (PP) in Castilla y León had done a deal with VOX to form the regional government. It's not on the same scale but it is on the same spectrum of human wickedness. It's the first time that VOX has actually been in a coalition government. It's the first time since the restoration of democracy in Spain, in the period after Franco died, that the far right has actually been in government. It may be the first but it probably won't be the last.

I'm not sure how genned up on Spanish politics you are. I try to keep up but sometimes I despair because, every now and then, there is some event that those in the know know and I don't. Well at least I didn't till I did. There's just been a palace coup in the PP for instance and, until the moment it happened, I thought that everyone in that party loved their leader. Apparently not. All the journalists told me, after it had happened, that it had been on the cards for ages and that everyone had seen it coming. Not me.

Anyway. The basic plot of Spanish politics is easy. There's a traditional left wing and a traditional right wing party, a growing far right party, a fading far left party plus a crumbling centre. Oh, and lots of regional parties.

On the left there's the long established PSOE, Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Spanish Labour party if you will. They're not that left really but they remember to talk about poor people every now and again. They don't forget Bill Clinton's campaign message "It's the economy, stupid" so they try not to upset the people with the real power too much or too often. Their problem is that they don't have a parliamentary majority. They are propped up by a coalition with Podemos. Podemos are to the left of the PSOE. Podemos are not that keen on kowtowing to the money men so they give their coalition partners a lot of gyp. Even with Podemos the PSOE still don't have a clear majority and they have to prop up each crucial vote with a rag tag collection of parties.

Podemos, as I've said before is further to the left than the the PSOE. For some people there is an equivalence between the nutcase left (Podemos) and the nutcase right (VOX). Podemos, formed in 2014, was born from a popular political uprising that said it didn't trust politicians at all. As soon as they got a few people elected though they stopped talking about radical alternatives and elected a party hierarchy just like everyone else. They also subsumed the remnants of the communist party. As everyone else clamours to show how pro Ukrainian they are this bunch got into bother for saying that sending weapons, going to war, wasn't a good thing. Podemos is losing voter support all the time. The PSOE and Podemos keep having little fallings out because, from time to time, Podemos stands up for something it believes in - like a decent minimum wage or rent controls - whilst the PSOE think this will alienate their more right leaning members and it wants to pick up the remnants of the next bunch, Ciudadanos.

Ciudadanos is a party in the centre. They started well, back in about 2006, but it's all gone wrong and basically, they're a spent force. They had a bit of a power struggle in their ranks a few years ago which did for them as they forgot to stay central. Instead of continuing to broker this concession from the right and that concession from the left they drifted right. Now nobody remembers why they voted for Ciudadanos instead of just continuing to vote PP.

The PP, the Partido Popular. The sensible right, the Conservative Party. They are a post Franco party with roots in a bunch called Alianza Popular but the PP, as such, was born in 1989. Like the PSOE this lot have been in power a couple of times. They're just in the middle of a meltdown at the moment. Their young (ish) leader had a dust-up with a young (ish) woman who heads up the Regional Government in Madrid. Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the Madrid president, is dead popular for doing that Boris thing, the Donald thing, of saying whatever comes into her head. The idea is to make real people think she's a real person too and not a scheming politician. As a result of that internal dispute the leader of the PP is in the throes of resigning and he's about to be replaced by a steady hand on the tiller politician from Galicia. Nothing is decided yet but if it doesn't happen, if he's not the next leader of the PP, then the drinks are on me.

Then there's VOX. They're a bunch of racist, misogynist, radical right wingers who came into being in 2013. They couch their hatred in dodgy logic. They don't say they think black people are worse than white people but they do complain about immigration, not immigration per se, illegal immigration. Those are the people who clamber over border fences and cross the Med in toy boats. You know what colour illegal immigrants are don't you? Or they say they don't think it's fair to centre on the violence against women, after all women menace men too, so what we should centre on is violence in general. VOX are gaining in popularity. This means that the PP is careful not to stray into territory where they may appear to be too liberal so as not to lose the most right wing of their supporters to VOX.

Then there are lots of regional parties. Some are there on a single issue - fair deals for rural areas is big at the moment for instance - but most are well established regional parties particularly from Cataluña or The Basque Country. There are left and right leaning parties in amongst the small parties, there are parties who want independence for their region and groups that have historic links to terrorism. If you're British just think SNP or Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein with a bit of Caroline Lucas or George Galloway thrown in.

So we've got the political spectrum which goes from issue parties through regional parties on to left, right and centre parties.

The structure is straightforward too. At local level there are the town halls. Spain still very much votes for personalities rather than parties at the municipal level.

Next up is the Regional Parliament - Valencian Community, Andalucia, Basque Country, Cantabria and so on. The Regions are very important in Spanish politics. It's they who take care of the services that affect people all the time, like health and education. The presidents of the regions are often referred to as Barons (most of them, obviously, are still men with grey suits) because just like the bunch that made King John sign the Magna Carta they have a lot of political clout at all levels.

Finally the National Parliament, the Congreso de los Diputados. This is the one that meets in Madrid. Just like in the UK it has two "houses". The difference from the UK is that both the upper and lower houses are elected. The deputies, just like British MPs, but elected in a completely different way via a party led system of proportional representation, are the rank and file, everyday politicians who do as their party leaders tell them. The upper house, the Senate, like the Lords, is used to park politicians and to reward loyal service. There are actually some real politicians in the Senate too who do their bit in keeping the country running.

Perhaps I should have heeded the advice to never talk about politics or religion!

Honestly I started writing about garden hoes

You'll remember we had a general election in April and regional and municipal elections at the end of May. The trend was that the socialists, the PSOE, did well, the far left, Podemos, did badly, the traditional right, PP, plummeted and the centrists, Ciudadanos or Cs, did well but not as well as they hoped. The new far right party, Vox, won a substantial number of seats but without the huge surge they were expecting.

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.

We want to go next

I was once a Geologist. The trick with geology is time. Imagine that if, every year, a stream were to cut a groove 1 millimetre in the ground. In two years the groove would be 2 mm deep and in 10 years it would be a centimetre deep. If the stream were to follow the same line for a million years the groove would be a kilometre deep. Just for my mum make it a sixteenth of an inch a year and the valley would be nearly a mile deep.

Now the earth is about four and a half billion years old. Just in case you're never sure what a billion is nowadays that would be 4,500,000,000 years. Obviously it's not possible but if our 1 mm a year stream flowed, non stop, in the same place, from the beginning, the groove would be 4,500 kilometres deep or about 500 times as deep as Mount Everest is high.

When I studied geology I found out about graptolites, brachiopods, lamellibranchs, belemnites and all sorts of other fossils large and small. I particularly approved of trilobites. I thought they looked cute. The first trilobites turned up some 520 million years ago and died out at the end of the Permian or about 250 million years. So the lifespan of all the different sorts of trilobites was 270,000,000 years.

There were a bunch of people before Homo Sapiens but the first Sapiens turned up in what is now Africa about 200,000 years ago. So trilobites lasted 1,350 times as long as people have existed so far. Stromatolites, by the way, make trilobites look like youngsters. They've been on Earth for 3,500,000,000 years and if you're not impressed by things you can't beat with a stick then jellyfish are around 500 million years old and elephant sharks are maybe 400 million years.

We've just had a couple of rounds of elections in Spain. The cambio de cromos, the dealing, has only just started in several areas. In Madrid the stupid internal wrangling of left wing politicians means that the conservative Partido Popular will probably get the leadership of the City Council. They can't do it alone though. In fact the PP governed Madrid, without break, from 1991 to 2015 and this time round they got their worst result ever. Nonetheless, with partners, they can govern. One of those partners is Vox, the fathead right wingers who have won their first representation at local, regional and national level this year. The outgoing mayor of Madrid is called Manuela Carmena. She actually polled the most votes in the elections but with all the permutations possible she can't pull together enough coalition votes to stay in office. Carmena put in place a scheme called Madrid Central. It's a programme to clean up the city environment. Bike lanes, pedestrianisation, not letting in the polluting vehicles etc. In the first month there was a 38% drop in Nitrogen Dioxide, 15% drop in Carbon Dioxide in Madrid with traffic flow down by 24%. And what does the potential new PP mayor say? - he will go back to less strict restrictions based on priority for residents and that he will concentrate on the problems that matter most to Madrileños such as clean streets and conservation. The Vox man said "starting tomorrow Madrid Central is over".

Those trilobites survived at least one mass extinction event, maybe two, before the one at the end of the Permian got them. There are various theories about the extinction from massive volcanic activity to a surge in microbe numbers but whatever it was it caused a destabilisation of the atmosphere and so the climate. Apparently after the Permian one it only took a couple of million years for the planet to bounce back though. To re-establish some sort of normality.

The general consensus is that there have been five big extinctions so far: late Devonian, 375 million years ago, 75% of species lost, end Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost, end Triassic, 200 million years ago, 80% of species lost, end Cretaceous, 66 million years ago, 76% of all species lost. I've heard that some plastics can take 1,000 years to decompose. As I said the trick with geology, the trick with the planet, is time. Currently humans, as a species, are a tiny blip in geological time. If fossil fuel type pollution started with the Industrial Revolution then people have been affecting the atmosphere for about 290 years or 0.145% of our time on Earth. It does seem a bit stupid though to purposely speed up the dash towards that next extinction event.

You got the SP, now the results

Just in case you're interested the socialists, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), had a good election. They gained 38 seats and now have 123 seats in the lower house of parliament (they also won the upper house). On the other hand the conservative Partido Popular (PP) had a disastrous day. They lost 71 seats down from 137 to 66. Anyone want to give me odds on the survival of their recently elected leader?

On the left Unidas Podemos (UP) dropped 29 seats to 42  and on the right Ciudadanos (Cs) gained 25 to 57. To the shame of Spain and Spaniards the ultra right party VOX went from nothing to 24 parliamentary seats.

Another eight parties won representation in the lower house. Most of them have a regional flavour - Catalans, Basques, Valencians, Navarrese etc. The biggest of these, with 15 seats in the Congress, is Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC, which is headed up by a politician who is currently in prison for his part in the dodgy Catalan referendum.

There are 350 seats in the Congress so 176 seats are needed for a majority (minority governments can be elected but only if, in the investiture vote, they get a majority either through abstentions or through one off support). The right: PP, Cs and VOX, even lumped together, can't get anywhere close.

For the head of the PSOE, Pedro Sanchez, to get the 176 seats he needs to be President the only (reasonably possible) single party that could help him do that is Ciudadanos because they vacillate around the centre ground sufficiently to be philosophically compatible. Even though the pundits say the chances are icicle in hell there could well be lots of external pressure to push for that unlikely pairing.

The natural bedfellow for Pedro and the PSOE is Unidas Podemos but, between them, they are short of the magic number. Add in the other independent groups with similar philosophical leanings and the alliance is still one short. So Pedro needs to talk to some of the independents to get there and that is dodgy political ground. The alternative, and a real possibility, is that he will try to go it alone as a minority government in which case he will have to horse trade over every single initiative.

We shall see.

Just to round things off the elections yesterday were national.  The local elections come next month. The political "constituencies" for the General Election are the provinces but votes are collected on a municipal basis. So, just for information, Pinoso voted like this: PP and PSOE had a dead heat with 1,013 votes each, Cs got 839, VOX 503, UP 501 and Compromis (a Valencian group) got 56. The animal rights party got 39 votes. That's a good result for the PSOE in a town which is traditionally PP for the General Elections.

We also had elections for the regional government here in the Comunitat Valenciana. There are 99 seats in the local parliament so it's 50 seats for the majority. The PSOE (and its local version the PSPV) got 27 seats, PP 20, Cs 18, Compromis 18, VOX 10 and UP 8. For the last Valencian administration the PSOE, Compromis and Podem (local version of UP) formed the government. They could do the same again after yesterday's results.

2019 General Elections in Pinoso

I don't get a vote in the General Elections here in Spain. Nonetheless I popped out to the three polling stations in Pinoso to have a bit of a nosey. I took the photos as soon as I arrived and I only stayed a few minutes just to see what numbers were like. The polling stations looked busy to me though it was mid morning, a good time, especially as the church had just chucked out.

This lot of elections are the thirteenth since democracy was restored in the late 1970s and the fifth set that we've been here for. We've lived under only three of the, so far seven democratic presidents.

Anything is possible, results wise, and coalition wise but it's likely, according to the polls, that the socialist Pedro Sanchez will be returned to power as the head of a coalition with left wing Unidas Podemos and possibly some of the Nationalist groups. There is even speculation that the socialists could form a coalition with the right of centre Ciudadanos party. Who knows? It's much more likely though that Ciudadanos will throw their lot in with the conservative Partido Popular, headed up by recently appointed, Pablo Casado. His chances of becoming president are increased if the racist, homophobic, peddlers of populist myths, Vox, (Hello Farage and Brexit fans) burst onto the political scene as the polls suggest and then support the PP.

We also have regional elections today for the Valencian Community. I don't get a vote in that either.

Making one cross

It's election time in Spain. The local and European elections were on the cards, programmed in on the calendar for May from long ago, but then the Central Government, headed up by Pedro Sanchez, couldn't get its budget through parliament and so was left with little option but to call a General Election. On Monday of this week the President of our region in Valencia decided to bring forward the regional elections and to hold them on the same day as the General Election, April 28th.

As I listen to the news there seems to be a qualitative difference between the politics I'm used to and what's happening at the minute. It all seems very personal, very combative. It's more like squaring up for a shouting match or a brawl than a political debate. No actual fisticuffs to date though!

You may or may not remember that Spain had two General Elections very close together in late 2015 and mid 2016. In both cases the conservatives gained most seats but they couldn't manage a clear majority. Eventually, in October 2016, Mariano Rajoy, the then leader of the conservative Partido Popular or PP, pulled a minority government together. In June 2018 one of the highest courts in Spain handed out lots of sentences in a big corruption case. The court said the PP was implicated directly in that corruption. As a result Pedro Sanchez's socialists orchestrated a vote of no confidence. It was supported by a whole host of disparate political parties and that was the end of Rajoy. He jacked in his job and went back to being a property registrar. Sanchez became President.

For years and years the two big parties in Spain have been the Partido Popular, PP, the conservatives, and the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE, the socialists. There has always been a good smattering of nationalist parties particularly from Cataluña and the Basque Country and the vestiges of the old communist party always picked up a few seats too. That two party structure started to fall apart when a left wing group called Podemos did well in the 2014 European elections and shortly afterwards a right/centre group called Ciudadanos, which had been present in Cataluña for a while, gained ground on the national stage. In the last two general elections it has been four big players plus the nationalists.

On top of this splintering on the national stage there are the Catalans. Back in 2017 they organised a second referendum on independence. None of the safeguards were in place for a fair vote and the referendum had been banned by the courts beforehand  but, somehow they have managed to produce a situation where anyone outside of Spain sees them as the innocent victims of a brutish and almost totalitarian government. The politicians involved in that declaration of independence were locked up soon after the referendum and not given bail. Some of the Catalan politicians foresaw that possibility and fled the country. Holding those politicians in prison, on remand, for so long hasn't done Spain's democratic image much good. The jailed politicians are actually in court now.

It's difficult to be objective about Cataluña. My view is that the independence politicians are a bunch of petulant children who are quite unable to have any conversation that doesn't start from the premise that their birthright has been stolen from them and that Cataluña should be an independent nation now. So far as I can see they haven't actually done any politics for ages - economy, education, health and the like - because they spend all their time talking about being oppressed and bullied. Obviously there are other schools of thought.

The nationalist Catalans did support the socialist censure motion against Rajoy but, when it came to budget time, they refused to help the socialists a second time unless Sanchez talked to them about Independence. Sanchez said we can't have talks with a pre-set condition of talking about Independence and the Catalans said talk to us about Independence or you won't get your budgets. The Catalans knew that their reaction would mean the fall of the socialist government so I can only presume that they think they are going to get on better with the PP and Ciudadanos. Now there's a bit of clear thinking for you. Even by trying to talk to the Catalans the right of centre parties continually called the socialists out saying that they were negotiating with rebels and betraying the Spanish people. In fact Ciudadanos and the PP keep blathering on about imposing central government rule in Cataluña. Under much more pressing circumstances, when the Catalans actually declared unilateral independence, Rajoy used an article of the Spanish Constitution to impose direct rule but it only lasted as long as it took to organise local elections and get the next regional government in place.

Without the Catalans and other nationalist politicians in the Basque Country the socialists couldn't raise the support to get their budgets approved. Without a budget the government couldn't do the things it wanted to do. It was an impasse and the only real way out was to call a General Election which is exactly what happened.

The last time I saw opinion polls the Socialists were out in front. In their short time in office they've got stuck in to doing lots of things that have been on the cards for ages. The fact of doing something has cheered up their long time supporters and brought on board some of the ditherers. They're having a tough time at the moment because, with the election called, they have decided to use their dying days of office to enact some legislation by decree and the other parties are calling this an electoral strategy.

Second up were Ciudadanos. They have a good looking youngish bloke in charge. They're pretty right wing and they are all for taking over Cataluña but they too seem to put their money where their mouth is. They managed to leverage some things they wanted to see done out of the last government and their Catalan leader comes across as level headed and articulate woman. So they cheered up their natural sort of supporters and took lots off the PP.

The replacement for Rajoy as leader of the PP  is also a smart youngish bloke. However he seems to be ill informed and stupid. He's talking about rolling abortion laws back to a 1985 law (nobody quite knows why he's talking about abortion as nobody else is) and he seems to be quite happy to lie, not the usual sort of political manipulation of the facts, but the Donald Trump sort of direct untruth. When the PP had slumped to third in the polls he said that it was because the socialist government now had charge of the statistical office and so they'd made up the figures.

Finally there's Podemos, the left wingers who subsumed the old communist party into their ranks and then let it wither away. They've been involved in lots of infighting and they've failed to support pragmatic and popular changes which they have tried to explain ideologically. Complicated and subtle political messages don't make easy news and the right has been able to exploit the lack of agreement on the left.

So socialists popular and out in front, Ciudadanos popular and in a strong second, the PP trailing badly and hampered by poor leadership with Podemos entrenched in navel gazing and on the verge of extinction. The likelihood is that nobody will get a majority. The most obvious outcome is a rightist coalition but nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to Spaniards doing deals so no crystal ball gazing at the moment.

There's also another factor. Down in Andalucia at the end of 2018 the socialists, who had held the region since democracy was re-established, didn't win an outright majority for the first time. The PP and Ciudadanos did a deal to take over and govern the region but even then they didn't quite have enough votes to do it. The wild card was a bunch of right wingers called Vox. They want to suspend the Catalan Government, in fact they want to re-centralise all government (Spain is basically organised federally), to centralise education, to beef up support for "family values" (they don't much care for feminists), close frontiers and mosques and they want to increase the influence of Spain in Europe. Basically then usual sort of idiotic populist nonsense that we've heard from the USA, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Poland and an increasingly long etcetera.

Vox doesn't have any parliamentary seats but it does have a Twitter and an Instagram account. And they are on a roll. They are doing what Trump does. They do not argue in the time honoured tradition of proposals and counter proposals. They publish something bad, nasty, homophobic, sexist, jingoistic or whatever in a short, easily digestible form and right thinking people rise up against them and denounce them on the social media. The debate actually helps abhorrent politicians to spread their poisonous messages. We see their misinformation and twisted analyses on Facebook or in WhatsApp groups because all of us have "friends" on Facebook who we would steer clear of in real life or at least we'd steer clear of the subjects that turn up on social media. Those people believe the slurs, repeat the false information and they simply attack anyone who is not with them. If we respond the nonsense gets more exposure and if we don't respond we are doing less than we should. It's a bit tricky.

And, down in Andalucia, the two, run of the mill, right wing parties, the Partido Popular and Ciudadanos, were perfectly happy to get into bed with the far right politicians of Vox. If I were to use that crystal ball my guess is that, after the vote on April 28th, that's what we will be looking at on a national scale.

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.

Political comment

I'm finding that I'm shouting at the telly and the radio more often recently. The politicians are talking more nonsense than usual but, more than that, one of them seems to have simply decided that none of it is really anything to do with him.

We don't have a proper government at the moment but we do have a Caretaker Government,  a Gobierno en funciones, run by the Partido Popular. Mariano Rajoy is the less than charismatic leader of the PP and Caretaker President. He's one of those blokes who appears to have almost no political personality. From time to time the news programmes show him out for a bit of exercise and he just looks wrong in badly co-ordinated sports clothes. If he abandons his suit for a jacket and trousers the jacket is too blue and the trousers too black. When he doesn't wear a tie he reminds me of that picture of John Major meeting the troops and wearing a ribbed pullover to ride around in a tank - completely out of his element. But to be fair, when I saw Mariano interviewed on a "come over to my house and let's cook something" type interview show he seemed a perfectly likeable bloke

In the UK the Speaker of the House of Commons is a party politician but, once they become Speaker, they try to be impartial. There is a similar position in the parliament here and Ana Pastor, from the same party as Rajoy, is currently the Presidenta del Congreso de los Dipuatdos. In the last, very short lived parliament, the equivalent position was taken by a bloke called Patxi López from the other side, the PSOE. When the Government has to explain itself before the MPs or diputados, it's the Presidente del Congreso who arranges the debate. Patxi tried, in the face of objections from the PP, to organise the debate when MPs wanted a Government response but when Ana should have done the same thing she prevaricated. There were mumblings about her lack of impartiality. The thing they wanted to talk about was an ex PP Minister, who had resigned, because he was suspected of having dodgy Panamanian bank accounts, taking up a position with the World Bank with obvious backing from the Caretaker Government. Mariano Rajoy said about that one that it was nothing to do with him. If Soria (the politician was called José Manuel Soria) wanted to apply for a "civil service" type job that was his right, completely up to him. I can see why Soria was interested though with a pay rate of 620€ per day. Rajoy had nothing to say about the impartiality of the Presidenta.

The ex Mayor of Valencia is a woman called Rita Barberá. She is one of hundreds, nay thousands, of PP politicians accused of corruption. In her case it's to do with illegal funding of her party. There are plenty of other politicians from the other parties being investigated for corruption but the majority stakeholders are definitely the PP. Even the party itself is caught up in a case for dodgy funding of a rebuilding programme at party HQ. But back to Rita; one of those larger than life characters that politics throws up from time to time. When she was defeated in the local elections to be mayor of Valencia her party popped her into the Upper House, the Senate. 

Spanish politicians have a sort of political immunity. They can't be tried by lower courts, just the Supreme Court, so that getting a prominent politician into the dock is a lengthy process. Rita resigned from the PP a couple of days ago but she is refusing to give up her seat in the Senate to maintain that protection.

As you may imagine the press wants to know what her (ex) party and particularly the Caretaker President have to say about the case. For days Mariano said nothing at all. He just kept quiet. This is one of his favourite tactics. Say nothing, see how things are going, maybe it will all go away. When he did speak his answer was that as Rita was no longer in the party he had no authority over her and it was absolutely nothing to do with him. Silly me, I thought that a President might have something to say about political corruption especially when the case is about illegal funding within his own party. I must be mistaken

Rajoy is a master of inaction but, to be honest, none of the leading politicians seem to be up to making a decision at the moment. We have a four way split. The centre left can't talk to the hard left because one is for talking with the Catalans about self determination. The party that doesn't seem able to decide whether it is left or right leaning has thrown its votes in with the PP this time though last time they did a deal with the Socialists. In return for their votes they demanded several concessions. One of the biggest was that the PP stomped on corruption. They haven't had a lot to say about Rita's shenanigans. The smaller regional parties can't join with either of the big parties again because of the stuff about Catalan independence. One of the two, apparently, workable options is that the centre left just abstains and so lets Rajoy back in. They have said no several times though. They say they can't stomach another Government headed by Rajoy. The other option is that Rajoy goes, that someone else takes over but his side are staying loyal at the moment.

I should mention that the PSOE, the biggest left leaning party, has a big corruption case going on at the moment too. That one involves two former Presidents of the Region of Andalucía. Those two did resign their political office and they are in court and fighting their corner. I don't remember feeling the need to shout at the radio when that story first broke.

Nothing in particular

It's raining. It's rained quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. We've forgotten all about the drought which lasted from last winter through to a few weeks ago. Usually, though not today, it rains overnight which is very civilised. I can't pretend that it's warm but it isn't cold either - at least not outside. Generally we're into the mid to high teens during the day but with sun and blue skies so it feels pleasantly warm. Overnight we're down at 7ºC or 8ºC maybe. I expect it will turn cold in December, it usually does. The pile of leaves that have just started to clog our drive suggest that Autumn has finally arrived. And its getting dark just after six in the afternoon. Considering it will start to get lighter again just before Christmas that's not too bad. So outside, in the fresh air everything is as it should be. Inside the house of course it's miserable. On the front page of today's Alicante paper there's a headline which says that nearly half of the houses in Alicante province lack any form of insulation against sound, heat or cold. This statistical information is tied in to the introduction of energy efficiency certificates for dwellings a while ago. In our house the little windows, designed to keep out the beating sun of summer make our rooms dismal in winter and the uninsulated house with tiled floors, painted walls and badly fitting doors make it exactly the opposite of cosy. With the log burner alight the living room has been lovely and warm but all the adjoining rooms have a cold, musty feel. Getting into bed is quite unpleasant until you stop shivering.

In the news, corruption stories are everywhere. The health minister resigned this week. She was mentioned by a judge as being the direct recipient of goods bought with her husband's dodgy money. I heard lots of comments that it was like making the poor thing resign for having eaten poached game when she didn't know it was poached. Hmm. The same judge said the ruling PP or Conservative party had benefitted directly from dodgy funding but the health minister's boss, the national president, forgot about that when he stood up in parliament and said that corruption was not endemic. The last three PP party treasurers have all been in court, one is on remand and that one has accused the current president of taking illegal payments. I wouldn't like to give the idea that only the PP have their fingers in the till. Certainly on percentages they come out top but, down in Andalucia, there's a huge corruption deal about suspect redundancy notices which implicates two past PSOE or Socialist party presidents. And the independents don't want to miss out either. In Cataluña an almost mythical ex leader turns out to have a stash in Andorra and there was a case of illegal party funding a while ago that another key political figure somehow seemed to sidestep.

Back to our national president; he's a very strange president. Earlier this month a couple of million Catalans turned out for an illegal referendum on independence - the national president generally ignored that and sent something akin to the Crown Prosecution Service (if it's still called that) after the regional president for running an illegal poll. So much easier than arranging to talk about it. He's behaving the way I do when I need to talk to someone in Spanish on the phone. Anything to avoid a difficult conversation.

There are close on 2000 politicians currently charged with some level of corruption yet none of the promised anti corruption legislation has got past the committee stage. The politicians don't go easily either. None of them behave like people convicted of crimes. No sackcloth and ashes. Most of them spin out the process for ever with iffy legal arguments and expensive lawyers. The few who have been locked up argue about which prison they'd like. An ex president of one of the regions was in the sort of prison regime where you go home for the weekends and only put on your stripey suit every now and again. When people found out they got a bit indignant so a judge decided to withdraw those privileges. The ex politician appealed the decision. Another ex regional president who has been sentenced to four years in chokey still has body guards and an official looking car and has been asking the Central Government for a pardon - a real live get out of gaol for free card.

Yesterday I got a text message from the General Treasury of the Social Security on my phone to tell me that my petition to become a self employed person had been approved. In the past I've complained about the difficulties that people face who want to set up their own business here. People needed to have a hefty amount of cash behind them in the bank or at least some heavyweight backers willing to cough up if the business went pear shaped. Social security payments were high too with even the smallest business subject to a 260€ minimum payment from the first day of trading and before any tax committment. Anyway, for my new job, my new boss suggested that I should be self employed. This only made sense because now there is a sort of reduced charge sliding scale social security payment scheme starting at around 53€ for the first 6 months and then going 130€, 180€ and finally 260€ after two years. I thought it sounded like a good scheme. An incentive to get people to register and run legal businesses from the start rather than to start illegally and register only when the profits justified it. Nonetheless in my case I thought it sounded a bit flaky and there were plenty of disadvantages as well as advantages but the accountant told me that at least it was all legit. He did all the work. All I had to do was to sign on the dole and hand over some basic ID documentation and he did the rest. Then a text message. Nearly as strange as our president.