The Political Scene

 We arrive at the end of another year, bowed but unbroken (as someone said somewhere). For Pedro Sánchez, it has been a tricky but mostly successful time. The budgets have gone through and the Government looks safe to continue until the end of its cycle in 2023. His greatest failure (as we shall read in the right-wing media over Christmas) will likely be his unfulfilled promise of a large drop in the electric bill by the end of the year, back to 2018 prices, which now looks increasingly unlikely, as even the European Commission doesn’t want to get involved.

Sánchez has seen off the opposition, who can make as much noise as they like – they are still standing outside on the terrace. If anyone has come to the front, it has been the fresh leader of Unidas Podemos: Second Vice-President, Minister of Labour Yolanda Díaz. How the Establishment must fear her!

Outside, warming their hands, we find the increasingly pointless Ciudadanos party. What’s the point of voting for a shrill leader of a tiny PP splinter, whose only remaining function is to remove support from the PP? They are forecast to get just two seats in a future election; and tiny parties that can be bisagra – that can carry the day thanks to the balance of the two main forces – are clearly counting more on Luck than on Grand Rhetoric.

On the other side of the PP – further still to the right indeed, is Santiago Abascal and his Vox. Perhaps (in British terms) a kind of UKIP or Brexit party, Vox has been doing dispiritingly well. Gosh darn those foreigners (with their pesky foreign ways) taking our jobs and our women! Only an increasingly rightist PP can stop them!

So, we arrive at the doors of the PP, led by the straw-filled Pablo Casado, increasingly known by the Wits as El Fracasado (the RAE describes this as ‘A person discredited because of the failures suffered in his attempts or aspirations’). Big business may be behind the PP, but the endless column of scandal, corruption and poor politics is paying a heavy price. What say it’s time for Casado to go, maybe replaced with a young, attractive, forthright, popular (and populist) leader to bring the limping conservatives back to the forefront, see off the neo-fascists back to their kennels and put an end once and for all to Ciudadanos?

In short, will 2023 be the year of Isabel Díaz Ayuso?