You’d be forgiven for thinking that it was Groundhog Day in Spain following Sunday’s general election.
While the polls sprung a few surprises, such as the centre-right Popular Party crashing to its worst ever election defeat, Spain is effectively right back to where it started.
It’s true that Prime Minister Sánchez will be happier than he was before the weekend. The ruling socialist PSOE’s share of the vote went up by a not-to-be-sniffed-at six points, but with 123 seats it still falls way short of the 176 needed for a majority. That means Sánchez faces the same uphill struggle to convince the rest of the nation that he can, or should, do business with the Catalan nationalists and the far-left Podemos party.
If the election proved anything it was that disaffected voters could be stirred from their slumber and come out in support of the PSOE party. All it took was for the left to issue sombre warnings about what could happen if Vox were to do a repeat performance of the regional election results in Andalusia. It worked – there was a significantly higher turnout compared to the 2016 elections – but Vox now boasts 24 deputies, which means the far-right is now back in parliament for the first time since a certain portly general ran the entire country all by himself.
Even so, the established parties got off relatively scot-free if the much-publicised televised leaders’ debates were anything to go by. The TV clashes – mercifully, there were only two – were hugely disappointing low-brow affairs, and one of the many cringe worthy moments involved the exchange of props between Sánchez and Ciudadanos’ leader, Albert Rivera. The one from Rivera was a copy of Sanchez’s infamous and possibly plagiarised thesis to illustrate the man’s dishonesty, while the former responded in kind by taunting Rivera with a book penned by the head of Vox – an unsubtle suggestion that Rivera’s party is a tad more to the right than he likes to let on.
It was done with all the finesse of a rugby player adjusting his jock strap in the middle of a scrum, but it neatly summed up the level of bickering.
At times the four candidates (the other two were Pablo Iglesias from the Podemos party and the PP’s Pablo Casado) appeared to be locked in a time-warp as they doled out the same hackneyed arguments about the economy and patriotism.
At one point Casado made a statement so bold it was Trumpesque in its delivery, claiming the PP’s job creation policies had been “copied by every country”. You got the distinct impression not even he believed that, but you could see where he was getting his inspiration from.
As for Rivera, his infuriating habit of continually interrupting the other candidates did him no favours. Eyes wild and verbally accosting the other three with a scatter-gun approach, he sprinkled the debate with a few pearls of his own, such as claiming that the answer to a falling population rate would be to introduce fiscal measures to encourage the nation to procreate. He didn’t add ‘like rabbits’, but he might as well have. His solution deftly circumvented the prickly issue of immigration, but he failed to say how contributing to an already ballooning global population would help a planet creaking at the seams.
Rivera’s neurosis matched Casado’s. They acted like two men frantically trying to outdo each other as the standard bearers for neo-liberal conservatism, but this worked mostly to the advantage of the left-wing candidates, particularly Iglesias, who at times appeared presidential as he watched Casado and Rivera desperately trying to out-Vox Vox. This was quite a feat, given that Iglesias is actually a bit of a firebrand, but he shouldn’t take all the credit because Casado and Rivera were truly poor. They were so bad in fact that even Sánchez – an intellectual lightweight by most standards – came away with a big smile on his face.
Who was it who said we have the leaders we deserve?
(May 2019)