The Andalusian elections of
December 2nd are interesting both for Andalucía and indeed for the rest of
Spain. It’s assumed that Susana Díaz (generally known as La Susanita) will win – after all, the PSOE always does in
Andalucía – but she will certainly need to join with one of the other three – led
by Juan Manuel Moreno (PP), Teresa Rodríguez (Adelante Andalucía) or Juan Marín
(Ciudadanos) – to form a government. These four candidates (who met
in a televised debate on Monday) are, in national terms, only the second best,
and thus the four leaders from Madrid are doing all they can to help support
their party comrades, especially as a national election begins to appear
possible in May next year.
Pablo Casado, for example, is
in Fines (an obscure Almería pueblo)
on Friday with his new and original motto ‘Guarantía
de Cambio’. There are hopes from the AUAN
that he will save the ‘illegal homes’ in the nearby communities (Facebook link). Note to
politicians – we need to check in the thesaurus for a new and different word
for ‘change’. One of his
ideas for change, as he told them in Algeciras, was for a Gibraltar
Español.
Albert Rivera from Ciudadanos
(or ‘Albert Primo de Rivera’ as the Podemos are calling
him) was
saying in Cádiz this past Sunday that the Madrid PSOE hasn’t time for the
old socialists in Andalucía, who would be better off supporting his candidate.
‘We are the cambio’, he said to the
adoring crowd.
Teresa Rodríguez from the
IU-Podemos clone Adelante Andalucía, is
asking – oh, here we go – for ‘la
alternacia’- she wants a switch rather than just a change.
Talking of change, pocket
change that is, Susana Díaz, rather overdoing the ‘we’re all common folk’ card,
this week declares
her current account at the local bank to stand at just 81€, plus a few bits and
bobs she has elsewhere. El Mundo says,
poor woman, that she is ‘condemned to hug her worst enemy Pedro Sánchez who
beat her in the primaries’. All for the sake of the Party.
El País asks
here,
‘why does the PSOE always win in Andalucía?’ The answers seem to be a mixture
of tradition, a historical dislike of the right, innumerable obligations to
those in power, and a couple of historic socialist champions from Seville
(Felipe Gónzalez and his wing-man Alfonso Guerra). As one politician admits in
the article – Andalucía has been at the tail of Europe for forty years, but the
people still support the same party...
Besides the four contenders,
we have two small parties that will skim a few votes: PACMA, the eccentric
animalist party (Bizcocho for president), and the sinister-sounding far-right
Vox which could even take one seat in the San Telmo parliament in Seville (see
them here).
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