This Week in Spain 4 (July 31, 2023)

Brian's Spain Domain
Brian's Spain Domain
This Week in Spain 4 (July 31, 2023)
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This week we take a look at Spanish election results and aftermath. We’ll also talk a little about the heat as well as about the recent death of the legendary Spanish cartoonist, Francisco Ibáñez, creator of Martadelo and Filemón. Listen and enjoy!

You can subscribe to our podcasts on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Castos. Or if you wish to support Brian’s Spain Domain, click on our PayPal donate button or check us out at Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/briansspaindomain

This Week in Spain 4 (July 31, 2023)

This week we take a look at Spanish election results and aftermath. We’ll also talk a little about the heat as well as about the recent death of the legendary Spanish cartoonist, Francisco Ibáñez, creator of Martadelo and Filemón. Listen and enjoy!

You can subscribe to our podcasts on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Castos. Or if you wish to support Brian’s Spain Domain, click on our PayPal donate button or check us out at Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/briansspaindomain

This Week in Spain (July 15, 2023)

Brian's Spain Domain
Brian's Spain Domain
This Week in Spain (July 15, 2023)
/

This week we continue to look at the Spanish election coming up, but also take some time to talk about a famous wedding and the San Fermin running-of-the-bulls. Listen and enjoy! 

You can subscribe to our podcasts on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Castos. Or if you wish to support Brian’s Spain Domain, click on our PayPal donate button or check us out at Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/briansspaindomain

This Week in Spain (July 15, 2023)

Brian’s Spain Domain

This week we continue to look at the Spanish election coming up, but also take some time to talk about a famous wedding and the San Fermin running-of-the-bulls. Listen and enjoy! 

You can subscribe to our podcasts on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Castos. Or if you wish to support Brian’s Spain Domain, click on our PayPal donate button or check us out at Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/briansspaindomain

This week in Spain (June 30)

Brian's Spain Domain
Brian's Spain Domain
This week in Spain (June 30)
/

The weather heats up and inflation cools down. And general elections loom. Listen and find out the latest going down in Spain.

You can subscribe to our podcasts on Spotify, Amazon, Apple and Castos. Or if you wish to support Brian’s Spain Domain, click on our PayPal donate button or check us out at Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/briansspaindomain

Election Day 1 I’m twittering…or something like that.

Well, it’s Election Day, and it’s almost over.  I’ve been in a faraway village and at the bowling alleys to celebrate the event and haven’t had the chance to reach internet.  Here I am.  So far, things are going according to predictions.  The exit polls have given the PP a huge victory, and the absolute majority.  But those are the polls, and they can’t be trusted.  One thing is for sure, the Socialist Party is on its way out.  By how much?  It’s hard to say.

I’m not talking Spanish politics 10 – here’s why

It’s called the D’Hondt Method, and you can ask a thousand friends and family at home and probably get the same dumb look on their faces, so don’t feel bad.

      It’s the name of the mathematical design behind the Spanish electoral system, and its creator was an 18th Century Belgian mathematician who devised it for party-list elections.  That is, unlike in the States, where members of Congress are voted on directly by the populace, here, as in many European countries, the people vote for entire parties which have prepared their lists for parliamentary representation.  No head-to-head brawling.  Most people have no idea who represents their district.

      This system is considered extremely fair, and only slightly favors large parties, while allowing for small concentrated regional parties to get their representation in the legislature.  I’m no math expert, but I say that’s bollocks.  I mean people whined and bitched about the Electoral College in 2000 when Bush ran off with the elections with a lower popular vote (I’m still one of the few who argue that if a candidate’s own state doesn’t vote for him, as was the case with Gore, then he doesn’t deserve to be elected), but this can get just as dicey.

      Look at the supposed representation.  Izquierda Unida under this method gets reamed big time.  Last 2008, the party pulled off its worse showing in decades, but still ended up being the third most voted for of all.  It tallied 969,871 votes in all, earning them 3 seats in parliament.  The Catalan party CiU grabbed 779,425 votes, yes that’s about 20% less, but somehow ended up with ten members of parliament.  How can that be?  The CiU’s support came from four provinces in Catalonia while the IU disputed 42 provinces.  The votes were greater but all over the goddamn country.  The Popular Party, another pan-Spain competitor, won a little over 10 million votes and landed 154 seats.  Now let’s do a little rounding for simplicity’s sake.  IU won about a million votes and got 3 seats.  PP walked away with 10 million votes and took home 154.  The conservative party outdid IU with ten times more votes but 50 times more representation in parliament.  But wait, they said this was fair.

        It gets better…

I’m not talking Spanish Politics 9

All is terribly quiet on the campaign front in part because there is so little to talk about.  Barring any last-minute shockers, and, after the 2004 elections, I do not say that mockingly, the results are all but a foregone conclusion.  Now they are scrambling to gain or prevent an absolutely majority by the PP.

        Now, just because the Socialist Party and the conservative Popular Party had muscled their way to the top as the two leading national political entities, doesn’t mean they don’t have competitors.  They have; it’s just that they aren’t what they used to be in many ways.  The UCD, which ran the country in the first four years, dissolved rather quickly, and the party to spring up from its ashes, the CDS, fared even worse.  It was all but gone by the early 90s.  This was due to the fact that the PSOE and the PP had become moderate enough in their stances to attract politically central voters.  An official center-party made less and less sense.

       Izquierda Unida (The United Left), or just IU for short, was a conglomerate of different far-left parties which began to grow in popularity.  It managed to pool together several million votes in the 1990s with a man named Julio Anguita at the helm.  But it had a problem.  Because it was voted on nationally, and because its votes were spread out nationwide, the IU rarely got the representation it deserved in parliament.

      The bulk of the other parties is made up of regional and nationalist parties which defend their provincial interests and in some case support secession.  These are my favorite:  They try to get into the Spanish Congress just to say they want to leave.

        The two biggest parties are the PNV in the Basque Country and the CiU in Catalonia.  Their influence on the course of the country has been considerable over the years as the major parties have at times had to pact with them in order to get enough support to run parliament (we’ll get to that later because it’s pretty amusing).  Both the PSOE and the PP are “guilty” of this because they have both resorted to the regional parties when they didn’t have the absolute majority.  These groups have also had a large representation in parliament because of the way the voting system is designed…I’ll tell you more later.

I’m not talking about Spanish politics 8

To say that Zapatero didn’t deserve to win the 2004 election would be unfair because he undisputedly received the most votes.  To say he didn’t expect to win is a different story.  Some say he got lucky because it came as a result of the death of nearly two hundred innocent lives but that is a twisted way of looking at the whole matter.  However, there is no doubt that, in this case, the use of extreme violence actually did produce the desired results: pain, suffering and political collapse.

       On March 11, 2004, three days before the general election and two and a half years to the day after the 9/11 attacks, what would have been an uneventful morning on the public transportation system, in a flash, turned into hours of horror and mayhem.  191 drowsy commuters were literally blown apart by several bombs planted in small backpacks and left unattended on several commuter trains.  As opposed to the strategy used in America, there were no suicide bombers, but devices set off electronically by cell phones from a distance; the aggressor would call the number and detonate the bomb.

      At first everyone thought this was ETA’s doing.  They are the Basque terrorist group responsible for some 800 deaths over the past four decades.  Though the band had never perpetrated anything on that scale and normally targeted politicians, police, judges or military personnel instead of everyday civilians, no one considered another possibility.  The bombing had been done just the week after a huge van stuffed with explosives had been located right outside of Madrid, and in December of the year before, bags carrying bombs had been discovered on trains in the north of Spain.  Both had been carried out by ETA.  It was reasonable to think ETA was behind the attack this time.  As we walked to work to the incessant sounds of wailing sirens, not a single person I knew thought otherwise.  It was an unusually brutal act for the group, but given the dates, who else could it have been?  Even El País, the left-leaning national newspaper, cast the blame on ETA outright, as did numerous international dailies.

        But something just wasn’t quite right.

      Just hours after the bombing had occurred, the first rumors that the Basques had nothing to do with the horrifying massacre began to circulate.  A tape with verses from the Koran were found in one of the vans used by the attackers, and the explosives used, GOMA-2, were not standard ETA material.    The savagery of the act seemed almost uncharacteristic of the terroirist group; if anything, it appeared suicidal.  If there was ever a way of doing their own cause in, that would have been it.

      Still most people refused to believe it.  It just didn’t make sense.  And the Aznar government reaffirmed that stance of incredulousness by insisting it had no doubt about who had committed the crime.  The opposition grew more and more suspicious.  Suddenly, as a hundred bodies had yet to be identified, politics got involved.

        You see, who was right had huge political implications as what was at stake was enormous.  The ruling party blamed ETA, and that would have meant probably taking in more votes on Sunday because a harder stance would be needed against the terrorists and they would have been just the people to do it.  But if the Muslims had bee the authors of the act, the Left could point the finger at the government claiming that because of Spain’s involvement in the war, 200 hundred people are dead.  Though no one actually sought this, I am not going to accuse anyone of that kind of barbarous behavior, each side knew the benefits and damages of both situations.

        The difference was, there really was no doubt.  At least for those who were well informed.  The Muslim theory grew in strength as the evidence piled up.  While the spokesman for the Popular Party kept the country abreast of this possibility he also played it down, and by Saturday, as members of the police were arresting suspects from a radical Islamic group, the administration was still informing that it believed ETA was probably behind it all.  The government was trying to delay the information before the election halls opened the next morning, and the opposition party was eager to get the news out and place the blame on the part.  Everyone was either in a hurry or taking their time.  No one had bothered to postpone the election a week off and honor the dead.

       The next day, with anger in their minds, voters flocked to the ballot boxes and essentially ousted the Popular Party from power and handed it back to Zapatero and the socialists.  It was a knee-jerk reaction, but an understandable one.  A cell group from Al Qaeda had successfully toppled a government with the effectiveness it had with knocking down two 100-story buildings.