Life in Culebrón

I'm sure you know that in the local elections here in Pinoso yesterday (28 May) Lazáro, the current Mayor and his socialist PSOE party, hung on to power with 8 seats. There were 3 seats for the right of centre Partido Popular and 2 seats for  the far right Vox. At the Regional level the Socialists lost control of the Valencian government. In general the PSOE took a pasting, as did the far left Unidas Podemos, with all its many variant names. Today the Spanish President/Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a General Election for July 23rd. Unless you are Spanish or Nationalised Spanish then you won't have a vote. We foreigners generally only get to vote locally. I saw this summing up of the situation on Twitter. It was written, in Twitter like style, by a bloke called Michael Reid. He mentions his book at the end so, given I've pinched his article I left the book plug in. I thought it was pretty good. I might not agree 100% but as a summing up in 450 words or so it's exce...

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 even...

It's strange how the same thing has more or less value depending on your own thoughts and when you have them. I was listening to some high up politician from Navarre (an area of Spain) on the wireless. She was going on about how her right of centre party had done well because it had picked up more votes in the last election. I won't extrapolate on her model by pointing out that her party came second. Instead I'll pick up on her complaint about a Catalan party that probably holds the key to the formation of the next Spanish Government. The party in question are Catalan separatists, they want some form of autonomy, nationhood even, for their region. So the Navarre woman says her party's votes give them legitimacy. She argues that Cataluña is an integral part of Spain. By her own reasoning the people who live in Cataluña are Spanish and, in Cataluña this separatist party got sufficient votes, enough to make them potential kingmakers. But, for the woman from Navarre, ...

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" arithme...

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 man...

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 an...

As I type I'm listening to the radio. They are voting for the investiture of the President of the Spanish Government.  The man who's up for President, Mariano Rajoy, is a right winger from the Partido Popular, the conservatives. The process involves reading out the name of each deputy who then says yes, for Rajoy, no against Rajoy or abstention. Rajoy needs a simple majority to be elected. The only way he can get his majority is if the PSOE, the socialists, don't vote against him and, in fact with the number of abstentions already recorded he's in. The abstention of the socialists is either a tactical move to avoid a third general election or a complete betrayal of principal depending on your point of view. The socialist party has lost its leader during the in fighting about what to do. Even to the last minute there were two options. Abstention of all of the socialist ranks or just the minimum abstention to let Rajoy win. The latter option would have allowed the ide...

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 f...

General election today in Spain. I'm sure you know. The fact that polling day is Sunday here and Thursday in the UK piqued my interest. Do you know that the UK and India are the only countries in the world where the vote is on a Thursday? Worldwide, Sunday is by far the most popular day. We had elections back in December. The old party duopoly that has existed more or less since the return to Democracy here collapsed. The Partido Popular, the most right wing of the big parties, won most seats in the parliament but they didn't have anything like a majority. Their leader is a bloke called Mariano Rajoy. He looks a bit doddery and he's got a beard. One of his favourite tactics is to wait and see. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the standard left wing party that stopped being left wing years ago came second but only just. The lowest vote for them in their recent history. It was the first election for their newish leader called Pedro Sanchez. He looks pretty dynamic, ...

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 say...