A Grumpy Parliament

After a month away (I've been in the USA visiting family), I notice that Spain is preparing itself – already – for the general elections to be held (probably) next December, a year from now. The governing coalition parties are naturally beginning to underline their differences, with an eye on the voters, while remaining united against the troublesome opposition parties of the PP and Vox (Ciudadanos is now practically extinct).

Insults, fake news and exaggerations are the weapons of the right wing in the current climate. Maybe such a tactic can be converted into votes. One headline says that there is an unbearable climate in Congress, ‘with several deputies and political leaders speaking of the spiral of verbal aggressiveness that politics has experienced in recent days’. The President of the Madrid Region, Isabel Ayuso, helps this tactic along with ‘We are on the way to a dictatorship, subjected to a tyrant who endangers the rule of law’. She of course means Pedro Sánchez.

The House-Speaker Meritxell Batet has asked the deputies to tone it down – ‘Parliamentary debate should be used to wrangle, not insult’ she said on Monday.

A witty put-down, known as una zasca, is the best answer to a hostile insult, as the strongest words rain down on the Government from Vox’s leader Santiago Abascal. Pedro Sánchez answered one such recent broadside with the comic reply: ‘You are like la Caperucita Roja – Little Red Riding Hood – saying that the forest is full of wolves’.

For the right or the left to claim the next government, the far-right or the far-left will probably need to (once again) be a fellow-traveller. The PP evidently has an evident problem with Vox’s Abascal, and so, inevitably, does the PSOE with (the increasingly fragmenting) far-left of Podemos, the IU, Más País and Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar. Yolanda might be the most popular political leader at the present time, but she is seen as pulling the far-left apart (as usual).

Before next year’s general elections, Spain will have both municipal and some regional elections to be held in May 2023. These will perhaps bring fresh encouragement to one party or another and will be a step forward to the main prize.