On the difficulties of knowing what's going on

I was catching up on the news, reading elDiario.es, and I came across this headline: 

War in the Social Networks between the Gay idols of Vox and the activist known for his "Txapote would vote for you." 

The first paragraph went on to say: The conflict, which is causing furore among streamers from the Extreme Right  - the people who produce digital content in social networks -  has reached the courts. The lawsuit presented by the YouTubers Carlitos de España (Charlie boy of Spain) and Madame in Spain, two of the gay idols of Vox, against Chema de la Cierva, the activist who menaced a team from TVE by shouting directly on air, Txapote would vote for you Sanchez," has had a trial date set. 

The reason for this blog has nothing to do with the actual news story. It's about how difficult it is, sometimes, to have the faintest idea about what's going on around us; just how much information you need to decipher even a simple story.

Some of the basics I knew. 

Vox is a far right Spanish political party. It is homophobic, racist, anti immigrant, super conservative and, basically, in my humble opinion, a party of dangerous nutters. They did well in the local regional and local elections and in several towns, cities and regions they hold the balance of power. In those places they have been getting close to book burning. No to LGTBI flags on public buildings, banning plays they don't like, changing the names of departments, cutting budgets and services etc.

Txapote was an ETA terrorist. ETA fought for independence in the Basque region of Spain by killing and maiming lots and lots of people. Txapote was one of ETA's mass murderers.

Sanchez is the current socialist President of Spain, He has pushed through various bits of legislation and maintained his coalition government with backing from, and doing deals with, several small parties with very specific agendas. One of those small parties has historical links with ETA. Think Sinn Féin and the IRA.

TVE is the Spanish State television broadcaster. They are always accused of being pro government by the parties in opposition.

It was easy to guess who Carlitos de España and Madame in Spain were. People who are Gay or Trans or whatever, the sort of people you would expect to be opposed the the policies of a group like Vox, but were, instead, outspoken and public supporters.

I knew the Txapote quote but I had no idea about the person behind it. Until recently Chema de la Cierva was one of the Vox faithful. De la Cierva was producing video blogs to support Vox and to distribute their message among young people. Apparently he got a bit fed up with the "soft line" the party are taking and he now claims that Vox owe him lots and lots of money.  He has decided to join the Falange which was Franco's party; basically fascists.

I didn't know about his full outburst on the TVE telly programme Hablando Claro, Speaking Out, which went something like this: "The media at the service of the people....!! Txapote would vote for you, Sánchez! Socialist! Mass murderer! Son of a bitch!" and then he went on to the programme's team "Don't come near me or I'll kill you! Don't come near me, you TV motherfu**er! I'll beat you to death! Get out of my fu**ing town! I'll beat you both to death! You bloodsuckers! You sons of bitches!".

And the court case? Well apparently he had a bit of a go at Carlitos de España and Madame in Spain. "What next?", he asked, "Child abusers on the Right?"

So, now we know.

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This is the actual text rather than my bastardised translations

Guerra en las redes de la extrema derecha: el agitador de 'que te vote Txapote' contra los youtubers LGTBI referentes de Vox

El conflicto que azuzó la atmósfera digital de streamers –creadores de contenido– de extrema derecha ha llegado a los tribunales. La querella presentada por los youtubers Carlitos de España y Madame in Spain, dos de los referentes LGTBI de Vox, contra Chema de la Cierva, el agitador que amenazó a un equipo de TVE y gritó en directo “Que te vote Txapote, Sánchez", ha sido admitida a trámite

Michael Reid on the 2023 General Election in Spain

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 excellent. I thought other immigrants might be interested too.

Just in case you don't know ETA was a Nationalist Terror Group in the Basque Country.

Spain: To try to explain Pedro Sánchez's decision to call a snap election for 23/7, a thread on Spanish politics, which have become a complicated world of coalitions. 

A two-party system has been replaced by two blocks, plus assorted nationalists and regionalists. To became Prime Minister in a censure motion in 2018, Sánchez crossed a red line set by previous Socialist leaders, building a parliamentary alliance with Catalan separatists and Bildu, the post-ETA party, and in 2020 forming a coalition government with far-left Podemos. Meanwhile the base of the mainstream opposition People's Party (PP) had splintered into three, with Ciudadanos a would-be liberal party towards the centre and Vox emerging on the hard-right, initially in response to Catalan separatism.

Sánchez governed fairly effectively at first, dealing with the pandemic crisis and strengthening the welfare state. But to hold his coalition together, he veered left last summer, pushing through badly drafted Podemos laws on sexual consent, trans and animal rights. To keep his Catalan allies happy he also approved ad hominem changes to the penal code to prevent further trials of separatist leaders. All this alienated many more centrist Socialist voters as the local elections showed.

The PP won 31.5% of the vote, the Socialists 28.1%. Not a landslide but enough for Socialist-led coalitions to lose power in at least 5 and probably 6 of the 9 regions they were defending, as well as losing mayors in iconic Socialist cities such as Seville and Valladolid. Ciudadanos was wiped out yesterday. But the far-left, too, is starting to fall apart, split between Podemos and its former allies by a power struggle between Pablo Iglesias, its founding leader, and his successor Yolanda Díaz. Bildu, which has yet to make a full criticism of ETA's terrorism, made gains in the Basque Country, where it is challenging the moderate Basque National Party, and Navarre, even though several of its candidates had formerly been imprisoned for ETA killings or woundings. The PP did well, but it will depend on Vox in several places to form local administrations. 

And that is behind Sánchez's calculation in calling the snap election. Because if the PP allies with Vox it is hard for it to gain many other allies in Spain's increasingly fragmented parliament.The snap election is a bold gamble typical of Sánchez. He clearly senses a better chance of assembling a parliamentary majority now than later. But it is his riskiest bet: inflation has hurt Spaniards, moderate Socialist mayors and regional leaders blame him for defeat. The election will be very close, but the right starts as narrow favourites to form a government. 

For more background, see my new book "Spain: the Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country." Thanks if you've read this far.

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.

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.