National Elections on Sunday (local elections, one month later)

The Election Board (here) is under pressure to adapt to los tiempos modernos. For example, a ‘Day of Reflection’ (like, you’ve not made up your mind yet), when the political canvassing is over,  is a bit silly with the Social Media messages bombarding us all and every day – usually with negative messages. All the national election lists with candidates for the Congress and the Senate are now published, here. But Spain does have a few oddities (apart from Unidos Podemos changing its name to Unidas Podemos for its own reasons). We have the lista cremallera – the boy-girl-boy-girl list favoured by Podemos and the PSOE which particularly in local elections can make things hard to scrape up candidates (actually and officially, the Ley de Paridad is two of one sex and three of the other in every five names). But then, after the elections, people can drop out (heh heh) – like all the men featured on the list of the Feminism8. Now we have the mentally impaired allowed to vote (and drunk. Can we vote drunk?). Spain also uses a strange mathematical system called D’Hondt to decide which party gets what in the results. The Spaniards living abroad face huge hurdles (especially when there are two elections just one month apart). Expect around 6% successfully voting. Of course, the European lists are decided at party headquarters, so the early, cushy jobs are already written in granite before the voting begins. Finally, there’s a cynical yet instructive video to be found here which puts the wonders of the Spanish democratic system into tatters (does a blank vote, a no-vote or a spoiled vote help the largest party? You bet it does).