Elections in Spain
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With 95 per cent of the votes counted, as I write, it looks like PSOE have the largest nunber of seats – 120 – followed by PP at 88 and Vox the ultra right quasi fascist party with 52 seats – an alarming development, Podemos the left wing party is down to 35 seats and Ciudadanos the centre right party has been slaughtered – down from 47 seats to 10.
There has been a definite shift to the right but not enough to dislodge a potential left wing bloc of PSOE, Podemos and one or two others.
It will be a hung parliament with months of uncertainty and backroom dealing in store
I should mention that in the Spanish parliament to have an absolute majority you need 176 seats. The left bloc currently has 158 seats and the right bloc 152. Its close
So the far-right Vox party has increased its representation in parliament but at which other parties expense?
So the far-right Vox party has increased its representation in parliament but at which other parties expense?
Ciudadanos mainly the centre right party whose sears fell from 47 seats to 10. I suspect what happened was a little more complicated though. Probably a large of its supporters voted for the PP which gained seats in this election and some PPs in turn voted for Vox though many of Vox supporters probably came from elsewhere as well. The Catalan Independistas also made gains and of course Vox has overtaken Ciudadanos as the most vociferous opponent of Catalan independence.
So we have a very polarised situation developing with no prospect of a resolution in the future. The parliament is hung if not drawn and quartered more than ever and I fear things could turn nasty with the right on the rise partly thanks to those idiot Catalan nationalists and their pseudo progressive nationalist claptrap
That’s what I would have thought. Agree with you about the Catalan nationalists. The same situation could occur here in a couple of years with the Scots Nats. Already the Tory party is positioning itself as an anti-Scottish English nationalist party — I had a one of their leaflets through my door last week which declared that “voting Liberal Democrat risks a Labour/SNP government for the next 5 years.” And does anyone think that the Orange Order and Rangers supporters in Glasgow and elsewhere will take a Scottish breakaway lying down?
Safer to accept “national” boundaries as they are and work with all workers within a particular state to win control of it, in conjunction with workers in other states doing the same, with a view to dismantling them all. In any event, not to support breakaway movements within states. That just divides workers even more, setting one section against another.
Around the whole world, workers are supporting right wings and nationalists populists leaders, and they are also supporting military coups like in Bolivia. It is a situation that was not seen in prior epochs, mankind is not learning anything new from history
There is a so-called workers party or communist party in the Dominican Republic which is supporting right-wingers candidates and its whole membership are following the instructions of the leadership.
The whole world is moving backward, and Spain is not an exception, I do not see workers moving toward real socialists conceptions, on the contrary, there is a new rise of anti-communists workers, and marching behind their own rulers and their own class enemies
It was thanks to those idiot Scots Nats and their pseudo progressive claptrap that I was compelled to rejoin the party.
It may surprise ALB to learn that many Rangers fans support the Indy Irrelevance. At least one poll put the number as high as 44%.
(Some Rangers “fans” are even Socialists! 😮0.000001% at a guesstimate.)
There are also Facebook pages like “Rangers Fans For Independence” & “Old Firm Fans Utd for Independence” (etc) which have a higher visitor turnover/more “likes” than our own Facebook page/s – sadly.
(No doubt other social media platforms have similar groupings.)
The Orange Order may not like it, but as their numbers have been falling for years – happily – they’d just have to lump it! (If the Nats got their way.) Even in the west of Scotland they are no longer the force they once were.
It would well behove the Tories not to overplay the “English Nationalist Party” card, unless they too desire a break up of the UK, as it plays right into the hands of the Scots Nats, and possibly/probably the spent force of Labour in Scotland (thus the UK as a whole) too.
It seems like history is indeed repeating tragicomedic regimes/governments of arses the world over, but the question for us socialists is, as ever, how do we best break their damned ideological hegemony and inculcate class consciousness, and a real understanding of socialism in our fellow workers?
*Answers on a postcard to 52 Clapham High St.
This might be of interest to provide a bit of context to the Catalonian issue…
How could they leave those great attackers Hannibal Barca, and Johan Cruyff out of thier “history!?” 😮
Been following this, with a kind of morbid intrest:- https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/11/15/inenglish/1573807473_375456.html
Nationalists pervert what is in fact the richness of linguistic and cultural diversity in human society in the service of the nation-state: the unit of capitalist rule. Nation-states are the armed camps of the capitalists in which the workers are regimented and constricted, and with which we are supposed to identify.
National separatists, whose purpose is the establishment of yet more nation-states (units of exploitation), make use of what they can to persuade workers to follow them. For instance, in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent they will use religion, in Europe language.
I am all for linguistic and cultural diversity. I am impassioned by the conservation of minority languages and am a writer for journals in Occitan, which is Catalonia’s second language. I like Occitan precisely because, never having been the language of a nation-state, it remains free from centralization, unlike the majority “official” languages of the world. Whilst this means it must be incessantly kept alive by enthusiasts in the face of capitalism’s insistence on uniformity in life, the student of Occitan enjoys a linguistic freedom that the rise of the nation-state destroyed; a linguistic freedom that was typical of the Middle Ages and which I find invigorating.
The joy of this richness-in-diversity is threatened by a regional nationalism which would exploit the love of the language and its history along national separatist lines and impose uniformity in its turn.
Regional, cultural and linguistic blossoming in fact requires world socialism: a society rich in diversity and united in that richness: not divided into people-separating nation-states vying over markets, exploiting their own wage-slaves and pitting workers against one another in the name of “national identity.”
I don’t know what the Catalan nationalists are complaining about. As far as their language is concerned— the only thing that distinguishes them from other workers — they have got full cultural autonomy just as they would in socialism. The only people to benefit from a separate Catalan state would be local capitalists who wouldn’t have to pay so much tax as they would no longer be taxed to pay subsidies to the poorer regions of Spain.
But there’s a risk it could end in tears if some idiots form a Catalan Liberation Front or a Catalan Republican Army and start assassinating people and throwing bombs around. The Spanish state, with its superior might, will react and the same sort of cycle of violence will begin that the Basque Country and Northern Ireland suffered and have only recently escaped from.
All for nothing, especially since Catalan-speakers cannot even claim to be oppressed because of the language they speak — and if they were the solution would be cultural autonomy not the establishment of a Catalan state.
True.
They were doing fine as an autonomous region, with the language flourishing. By challenging the national state of Spain they have brought repression down on their workers, who could have done without it. They risk finding themselves in the situation of the Occitan nationalists in France, whose language has never been given recognition by Paris, although it (Occitan) IS recognised in Spain (the Val d’Aran) and in Italy (Piedmont).
Catalan thrives in Perpignan, by the way, and down the coast through Valencia, yet the latter, as far as I know, has no separatist hang-up. But Barcelona is the industrial hub, isn’t it? Which bears out what you say about the region’s capitalists and their ambitions – ruining it for those workers who want to enjoy language and history without nationalism buggering them up.
I don’t know what the Catalan nationalists are complaining about.
I understand that a lot of it has to do with the financial/tax arrangements between the central state and Catalonia which is different from, say, Pais Vasco which has more control over its budget (though it too had/has its separatist movement, with an armed wing ETA, the Basque’s equivalent of the IRA which mercifully hasn’t happened yet in the case of Catalonia), Essentially, Catalonia as one of the richest regions of Spain pays a lot more in Madrid’s coffers than it receives and the Catalan capitalists dont like this, They resent having to, in effect, subsidise other autonomous regions (I think there 17 in all)
Incidentally, talking of languages, Euskara , the Basque language is quite unique. According to this:
Euskera is the oldest living language in Europe. Most linguists, experts and researchers say so. Euskera is a very old language whose origins remain unknown. Renowned linguists and historians believe that it can be the direct descendant of the language spoken by the dwellers of the caves of Altamira, Ekain or Lascaux.
The Basque language’s origins date back to the Neolithic, but there is evidence that it could be even older. In fact, it could be at the seeds of articulate language.https://www.bizkaiatalent.eus/en/pais-vasco-te-espera/senas-de-identidad/euskera-antigua-europa/
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