Politico: Sánchez loses bid to be reelected Spanish PM

Spanish lawmakers on Thursday voted down Pedro Sánchez’s bid to be reelected as prime minister — triggering the countdown for a new election to be held in November if the Socialist leader doesn’t manage to assemble a majority within two months.

Sánchez — whose party came first in a general election in April with 29 percent of the vote but fell short of a ruling majority — had been negotiating a potential coalition deal with the far-left Podemos. But the two sides failed to reach an agreement and accused each other of blowing up the talks in a parliamentary session that turned into a blame game. [...]

Ciudadanos head Albert Rivera used the word “gang” to refer to Sánchez’s potential allies among the far-left and regional nationalists, and argued that “the gang just couldn’t agree on how to share the lot.” [...]

It took close to three months after the April 28 ballot for the Socialists and Podemos to start talks, which took place against a backdrop of mutual mistrust, threats and ultimatums aired in media, and leaks of both parties’ negotiating positions.

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Jacobin Magazine: Power Has Returned to Power

On April 29, as Spaniards woke up the day after the general election, it was the Right that was left wondering what might have been. The right-wing Partido Popular (PP) had achieved its worst ever score, and the far-right Vox’s breakthrough was less than expected. For the conservative FAES — the country’s most influential think tank — the blame for the right-wing parties’ poor results lay with the division of their forces combined with voters’ “reckless ignorance.” Federico Jiménez Losantos, a hard-right radio host, declared Spain “lost, stupefied, and idiotic.” [...]

We should not underestimate the scale of this defeat. Five years after its triumphal breakthrough in the 2014 EU elections, Podemos has suffered a resounding defeat, losing almost all of the key municipalities it won with grassroots coalitions in 2015. The exceptions are Cádiz — whose anticapitalist mayor, Kichi, won an impressive absolute majority — and Valencia, still governed by a leftist coalition, but where Podemos has failed to secure a municipal foothold. [...]

More broadly, we can today characterize the current situation in Spain as governed by a stabilization of the center after years of popular revolt. Indeed, for all its threatening appearance, even the emergence of the radical right Vox has facilitated this process. Failing to make a breakthrough in this weekend’s election, it appears to have hardened as a small party that appeals only to wealthy Spaniards and members of the armed forces. It is enough to propel the conservative PP to regional and local power, but also serves PSOE prime minister Pedro Sánchez as a convenient boogeyman. As he forms a national-level government may now be tempted to draw the liberal Ciudadanos away from a right-wing coalition and toward a large, centrist alliance. [...]

Sánchez, however, is under no hurry to invite Podemos into the government — even less so after Sunday’s results. In previous televised debates, he refused to clarify, when pressured by Iglesias, whether he would seek Ciudadanos’s support. It fell upon Rivera to insist that his party would rather join forces with the radical right. But Rivera has broken his word before, and he has a proved talent for overnight ideological conversion. In four different regions, Ciudadanos’s support could prove instrumental for PSOE to hold power. One of them is Madrid, without which the PP would lose its last remaining stronghold.

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The Guardian: Fear of the far right and the collapse of Podemos gave Spain’s socialists victory

Sánchez’s victory is the result of two main trends. First and foremost is the rise of Vox, a new, openly misogynistic and xenophobic party that toys with nostalgia for Franco’s dictatorship. Backed by the likes of Steve Bannon, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini, and indirectly financed (via the Madrid-based CitizenGo organisation) by a US super PAC with ties to Donald Trump, Russian oligarch Aleksei Komov and the Italian MP Luca Volontè, who is accused of bribery, Vox rode a wave of anti-Catalan sentiment into the government of Andalucía in December. Sunday’s massive turnout (75.8%) was most likely driven by widespread fear of a rightwing coalition government that would include it.

The second trend that explains Sánchez’s staggering victory is the decline of Unidas Podemos, the radical-left party that emerged in the wake of the anti-austerity indignados movement. Though the party initially promised to implement a progressively participatory new style of politics, over time its leadership has adopted a more traditional top-down approach that has been overly reliant on individual personalities. It lacked proper channels for democratic deliberation, so internal dissent most often took the form of high-profile desertions, such as that of former party leader Íñigo Errejón. It was also recently revealed that a group of police officers have been accused of conducting a smear campaign against the party, with help from government officials. Much was made, too, about the purchase of a pricey chalet by party leaders Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero, which was depicted in the media as a betrayal of the couple’s leftist ideals. [...]

Towards this end, Podemos could take some cues from the leftwing councils currently governing most of Spain’s major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona. Though not without significant shortcomings, these councils have made citizen participation a crucial part of their brand by organising citizen consultations and participatory budgets. On the other hand, a more radical approach to participation would involve opening the party up to more meaningful forms of deliberation and participation. Over recent years, Podemos’s failure to do so has come off as a disavowal of its initial promise. This is most disheartening because it leaves the impression that a new approach to politics simply isn’t possible. And when the new seems impossible, people are tempted to go back to the old ways or, worse, to embrace the destructive, authoritarian political nihilism of the far right.

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UnHerd: Who voted for Vox?

One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975. [...]

Vox offers an affirmation of traditional, unapologetic, masculine Spanishness. “The Left will never succeed in making us feel ashamed for that which only merits pride,” said Abascal at a rally last autumn. This is Spanish politics, cowboy-style: Vox’s campaign video shows its leader crossing a plane as a lone ranger on horseback.

Abascal proudly invokes Spain’s unity and Catholicism while calling for drastic measures against immigrants, particularly of a Muslim background. He defends family values and stands up for men against the oppression of “feminazis”. He champions hunters and bullfighting, opposes gay marriage (which has been legal since 2005), and wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape. [...]

The Catalan crisis is definitely a factor in Vox’s rise in a country that was long considered immune to the anti-immigrant, right-wing populism that has emerged in many other countries. But more important is the feeling that the progressive urban political elites have neglected their needs and disparaged their traditions and culture. This disconnect is something we are seeing throughout Europe. And is felt particularly strongly in rural populations. But the Vox message has also found purchase in wealthier, culturally conservative voters; this could be down to the fact that the party twins its conservative nationalist message with more liberal economic proposals (it seeks, for example, to reduce corporate tax rates, and abolish inheritance tax and estate tax altogether).

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The Atlantic: Betting on Anti-feminism as a Winning Political Strategy

The smaller march that followed, however, was decidedly not courting the feminist vote. In a gravelly voice, a small woman introduced as a dissident of gender ideology—the expression is used by the global far right to designate advances in women’s and LGBTQ rights—declared that it was in fact men who were being discriminated against under the law. The crowd responded with thunderous applause. The sexes were being pitted against each other, and the only way to restore the balance, the speaker said, was by voting against feminist legislation. [...]

In many ways, its rise mirrors advances made by populist and far-right parties across Europe. A decade of slow economic growth, dislocations caused by the global financial crisis, and the vast wave of migration that has hit Europe in recent years have fueled disenchantment with traditional political groupings across the region. Spain had, for a time, been a rare exception to that shift. And in a way, that remains the case: Whereas most of the continent’s populist parties want to either gut the EU or leave it altogether, Vox’s focus is different. While blatant anti-feminist rhetoric is often employed by political parties in eastern Europe, such efforts are markedly less frequent in the west of the continent. That was, of course, until Vox announced its first legislative push in Andalusia—to demand that the region’s gender-violence law be scrapped. [...]

The party also espouses what Sílvia Claveria, a politics professor at Carlos III University in Madrid, described to me as “modern sexism”: It advocates longer maternity leave and encourages women to be proud mothers, but once women want to separate from or divorce their partners, it shifts positions to take the man’s side. According to Manuela Carmena, the mayor of Madrid and a politician known for her efforts to promote women’s rights, Vox has sought to benefit from “the frustration and confusion of many men who feel displaced by the growing role of women in society.” [...]

Such platforms are more often seen in eastern Europe than in western Europe, Ruth Wodak, a linguistics professor at Lancaster University and the University of Vienna who focuses on right-wing populist rhetoric, told me. France’s Marine Le Pen, shy of calling herself a feminist, has come out to defend “women’s rights” (though she did so largely to prop up her anti-immigration policies). The Dutch and Scandinavian far right have “more progressive gender politics,” Wodak says. These are mainly manifested in an apparent embrace of LGBTQ rights, though this too is often at the expense of immigrants: In 2015, Sweden’s far-right party staged an unofficial gay-rights parade in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood. In Italy, Matteo Salvini, the country’s interior minister and leader of the League party, has said that abortion and “equal rights between men and women” were not up for debate.

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Politico: The battle for Spain’s empty center

Sánchez has good reason to be focusing on the interior. Polls predict that the Socialists will replace the Popular Party (PP) as the biggest party in a majority of inland provinces. But it's not because rural voters are flocking to the Socialists; it's because the far-right Vox party and the liberal Ciudadanos are taking votes away from the PP. [...]

Spain is divided into 52 electoral districts, and the rural areas are valuable. The 28 most sparsely populated constituencies have just 20 percent of the population but 30 percent of the seats in parliament — 103 out of 350. On top of that, the electoral system becomes less proportional in these areas because of the reduced number of seats per district, giving the winning party a bonus.

In 2016, the PP won 40 percent of the vote in rural districts and 51 percent of the seats. A poll of polls for El País forecasts the conservatives will lose almost half their seats in those constituencies, while the Socialists will grow from 29 to 48. [...]

Ciudadanos unveiled a plan to cut personal income tax by 60 percent and bring fast internet to underpopulated areas. The PP has defended its rural track record and its role negotiating the CAP in Brussels. The far right has focused on defending hunting, fishing and bullfighting. The far-left Podemos, which risks losing all its current 15 lawmakers in the least populated provinces, has promised better social services and infrastructure.

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openDemocracy: #ElectionsSpain2019: Populist radicalisation, Catalonia, and the far-right

However the Catalan issue remains plagued with negative emotions, and that inheritance was too heavy to deal with by the new Moncloa palace (siege of the president of the government) lodger. The negotiations for governance, and above all, to pass the annual budget through parliament, have left their mark on Sánchez’s short but sweet stay at the Palacio de la Moncloa, and Catalans ensured its lack of viability towards the end.[...]

Traditionally, governments have governed with either an absolute majority or with minority governments that gained the support of the Basque and Catalan nationalists, that were pragmatic in character. The nationalists often acted as bargaining chips in favour for benefits for their territories, have become kingmakers in Madrid on several occasions, and have heavily invested the gains in nation building at home.[...]

This radical shift in Catalan consevative nationalism, acquiring clear populist traits, inreasingly demanded a referendum to gain territorial independence, putting in the centre of the political agenda something which is not permitted by the Spanish constitution.[...]

An ultra-right reaction to the threat of the breakdown of the Spanis State is certainly taking advantage of the current state of affairs to create a dangerous scenario for Spain, and as a consequence the whole European Union.

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