Spain 2016 General Election - *Results In - Establishment Wins*

[Scoop]

TODAY Spain has it's general election. Here is how polling looks:

If you're not familiar with the parties ideology:

PP - Establishment Center Right
Podemos & allies - Anti Establishment Left Wing
PSOE - Establishment Center Left
C's - Anti Establishment Fiscally Conservative/Socially Liberal
IU-UPeC - Catalonian Separatist/Left Wing
DL-CDC - Catalonian Separatist/Center to Center Right
PNV - Basque Nationalist Party/Center Right

6 things to watch in the Spanish elections
It’s the second vote in 6 months. With 28 percent of Spaniards undecided, a third is possible, too.

By
DIEGO TORRES


6/26/16, 6:00 AM CET


Updated 6/26/16, 4:05 PM CET

MADRID — For the first time in its short democratic history, Spain holds repeat elections on Sunday, six months after voters shook up the two-party system, depriving the winning incumbent Mariano Rajoy of a governing majority.

The four top-placed parties couldn’t break the deadlock and Spaniards now have to head to the ballots again. Rajoy, the acting prime minister from the conservative Popular Party, hopes he can win a second mandate by luring back defectors from Albert Rivera’s centrist Ciudadanos and getting those on the fence out to vote.


The PP’s traditional Socialist rivals, the PSOE, face being relegated to third place by an anti-austerity alliance led by upstart leftists Podemos.

Voting begins at 9 a.m and closes at 8 p.m., and one hour later in the Canary Islands. With 28 percent of Spaniards undecided, anything could happen — even a third round of elections.

Here are six things to watch:

1) Combined Left
The main change prompted by the six-month impasse is the alliance between Podemos and communist United Left. ‘Unidos Podemos’ (United We Can) includes other regional and social allies to total 16 participants. Under a province-based electoral system which rewards strong concentrations of voters, this factor has the potential to alter the status quo. Had both parties run together in December, their 24.33 percent share of the vote would have yielded 85 seats in Congress, instead of the 71 they got separately. That would have given the combined PSOE and leftist forces 173 deputies in Congress — very close to the absolute majority of 176 seats.

Leader and candidate of left wing alliance party Unidos Podemos ‘United We Can’ Pablo Iglesias | Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Most polls predict Podemos and its partners overtaking the PSOE in terms of percentage of votes and challenging it closely in terms of seats in Congress as well: So the combined left-of-center bloc could even muster an absolute majority.

Unidos Podemos, therefore, goes into Sunday’s vote in better shape than it was in December. Its success or failure depends on its ability to keep votes it gained six month ago. The PSOE, the PP and Ciudadanos, on the other hand, are riding against the wind to reach the same result and keep their seats in the Congress.

2) Left-Right balance
In December’s vote, the right-of-center PP/Ciudadanos bloc won 163 seats vs 161 for the combined leftist bloc, with the rest of the seats allocated to regional parties such as the Basques and Catalans. Historical animosity — the legacy of the 1936-1939 Civil War won by Francisco Franco — makes it hard to cross the Left-Right divide, although the PSOE’s Pedro Sánchez tried to break the impasse with an agreement with Ciudadanos. Podemos, however, managed to portray it as a betrayal of Socialist voters.

There should be little difficulty forming a ruling coalition between the PP and Ciudadanos, if they get the numbers; on the Left, though, coalition-building could still prove difficult. Kiko Llaneras, who has compiled and analyzed polls for the online paper El Español, gives the right-of-centre bloc a 28 percent chance of reaching 170 seats and the left-of-center 45 percent, with a 27 percent likelihood of ending up with a similar stalemate as December.

3) ‘Sorpasso’
What matters on Sunday is not only who comes first — almost guaranteed to be Rajoy’s PP — but also who ends up second. Both Podemos and the PSOE aspire to the silver medal, in their battle for the hegemony of the Spanish Left. The goal laid out by Podemos’ Pablo Iglesias is to force the Socialists to choose between submitting to his authority or committing hara-kiri.
So far, the radical movement founded in 2014 has outmaneuvered the PSOE at every turn. The Socalist old guard, like former prime minister Felipe González, doesn’t trust Podemos and would prefer to facilitate some sort of understanding with the PP, which might require Rajoy’s resignation to make it digestible for Socialist voters. This would also be the preferred choice of the most powerful figure right now in the PSOE, Andalusia’s regional leader Susana Díaz.

However, a large chunk of Socialists, including some regional PSOE figures like Valencia’s Ximo Puig, who governs with the support of Podemos, would rather make a deal with Unidos Podemos even if it means making Iglesias prime minister.

4) Potential resignations
Spanish politics isn’t prone to resignations at big moments, with the exception of former PSOE leader Joaquín Almunia who quit on election night after losing to the PP’s José María Aznar. That being said, nothing is to be ruled out on Sunday and the PSOE’s Sánchez looks like the weakest link, who could find it difficult to resist pressure to quit if his party comes in third.

Leader of Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and party candidate Pedro Sanchez | Cristina Quicler/AFP via Getty Images

Rajoy doesn’t have a future if he can’t secure a new mandate, but he might prefer to remain party leader until a PP congress settles on a successor, in whose appointment he would want to have a say.

5) Center vs. extremes
Rajoy has tried to polarize the campaign by playing on fears of the far left to squeeze Ciudadanos and the PSOE in the middle ground. Podemos was complicit in this strategy, saying there were only two possible outcomes: rule by the PP or Podemos.

Ciudadanos and the PSOE, respecting an apparently non-aggression pact in the center, fought back with different tactics: Rivera struck out at the PP for corruption and Podemos for its links to leftists in Venezuela and Greece; Sánchez wooed leftists who had defected to Podemos by accusing Iglesias of preferring to keep Rajoy in power rather than support a government led by the PSOE.

Regional results in Catalonia will also be closely watched for clues to a confidence vote that pro-independence regional president Carles Puigdemont faces in September. In Andalusia, people will pay attention to regional results in the last remaining PSOE stronghold. If Susana Díaz wins and keeps Podemos in check, she’ll be a stronger contender for the Socialist leadership.

6) Brexit, scandals and age
Candidates have tried to spin the Brexit debate to their own advantage, with Rajoy warning that now is not the time for any more uncertainty in Europe, and Sánchez compared the U.K. vote to the binding referendum on independence that Podemos proposes for Catalonia. Rivera said “fear” had won in Britain and he was worried it would win in Spain as well; Iglesias argued that if the EU was fairer and more equitable, nobody would want to leave.

Unlike in Britain, where older and less educated voters opted for change, in Spain they back the traditional two-party system and the status quo. This is one of the reasons why Rajoy’s PP isn’t taking more of a hit from corruption scandals affecting the party, as well as a ministerial resignation over the Panama Papers and leaks of a plot to discredit Catalan separatists.

The PP remains the top choice for voters over 65-years-old but comes fourth among young people. The PP loyalists are unlikely to change their minds on Sunday, but it may be hard for the conservatives to win back disenchanted supporters who fled to Ciudadanos in December.

6 things to watch in the Spanish elections

 

[Scoop]

The Spain Report covers Spanish politics, including today's election, in English.

Spanish General Election 2016 | The Spain Report

Exit polls expected at 8PM Spanish time (2PM EST)

Results expected 10PM Spanish time (4PM EST)

Spain General Election Brief: 20/06/2016

Jun 20 2016—SUMMARY—Six days to go until the voting day.
LATEST POLLS: As well as the El País and El Mundo polls, which for the first time in weeks suggested different outcomes next Sunday, several other polls were published over the weekend:

• All of them agreed on the same finishing order: PP, Unidos Podemos, PSOE, Ciudadanos.
• Right-wing outlets (ABC, El Mundo, El Español) awarded the PP more than 30% of the vote but differed on the range of seats that will be turned into.
• El Español offered the broadest spreads of seats for each party: PP (116-134), Unidos Podemos (76-94), PSOE (65-85), Ciudadanos (34-50).
• A poll in La Voz de Galicia had both the PP and Ciudadanos losing ground compared to December, as well as Podemos overtaking the PSOE.
• A Monday morning poll in La Sexta had the PSOE dropping below 20% of the vote for the first time.
• An NC Report poll for La Razón pushed the PP up above 31%;

NO OVERALL MAJORITY, AGAIN: Those results would mean that, like in December, no party is close to an overall majority. With those numbers, at the upper end of each range both a right-wing PP-Ciudadanos or a left-wing Podemos-PSOE majority coalition might be possible. At the bottom end of each range, neither would.

GROUNDHOG DAY, AGAIN: PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez said he would not support either Mariano Rajoy or the Popular Party, or abstain to allow them to govern in minority, were a hung parliament again to be the result of the general election. "We are not going to support either a PP government or support Pablo Iglesias for Prime Minister", he said during a radio interview, adding that meant neither "actively or passively", in reference to a possible abstention. He said he could govern with Podemos and Ciudadanos ministers.

ANTI-PSOE DIRTY TRICKS: On Sunday, Mr. Sánchez was the target of a social media dirty tricks play, in which PP accounts—including the party's leaders in Madrid (Cifuentes) and Catalonia (Albiol)—and Podemos's Telegram rabble rousing channel (La Guerilla) posted a video of the PSOE leader that suggested he was racist. In the short clip, Sánchez briefly shakes hands with a small (black) boy, who looks at his own hand as if something slimy was on it, and then Mr. Sánchez is seen making a wiping gesture with his own hands.

PODEMOS CLAIMS DRAW WITH PP: In an interview with Público, Pablo Iglesias claimed Podemos was now in a "technical draw" with the Popular Party in the polls: "Practically, we would be in a situation of a a technical draw if that means a three point difference and that coincides with the polls' margin of error". He said he thought the PP was "nervous" and that their internal polling must be "telling them that we can win".

RURAL RAJOY: Rajoy continued with the PP's campaign targeting older rural voters by visiting the village of Malagón (Castilla la Mancha): "There is a party in favour of the rural world", he said: "the Spanish countryside and the agriculture sector: the Popular Party". There were no reports of him attempting to eat another ice cream, after embarrassing everyone last week.

RIVERA'S RIDDLES: Albert Rivera said Ciudadanos was not proposing him as a candidate for Prime Minister: "We are not going to suggest it, it is not an option". He said during a radio interview that he thought an independent candidate might still be a possibility, if the leaders of the four main parties could not agree on which man should be appointed. He suggested that none of the four leaders should negotiate a government on the basis of having to be part of it.

MARXIST POPULARITY: The FT interviewed United Left leader Alberto Garzón: "The most popular politician in Spain is a 30-year-old Marxist economist who wants to abolish the monarchy and believes that capitalism will ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions".

NEW PSOE VIDEO: The PSOE launched a new campaign video titled "The Country We Want", exhorting voters to cast a "'yes' vote for change".

READY FOR A BIG FRUIT SALAD? The Periodic d'Andorra, sister newspaper to the Periódico de Catalunya, announced it would be publishing daily poll tracking data from just across the border from Tuesday onwards. Spanish electoral law prohibits the media from publishing polling data in the six days prior to elections, although polling companies and political parties can still commission the surveys. Before the December election, ingenious Spanish political commentators began referring to fruit prices in the Pyrenees: aubergines, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.

 

[Scoop]

First exit poll in from Sigma Dos. Anti Establishment Left overtaking Establishment Center-Left. The numbers below are expected seats.

PP: 117-121 (123 currently)
Podemos: 91-95 (71 currently)
PSOE: 81-85 (90 currently)
C's : 26-30 (40 currently)

 

[Scoop]

Another exit poll from GAD 3:

PP: 121-124
Podemos: 87-89
PSOE: 84-86
C's: 29-32

Looks like no one will be able to form a government

 

[#StarkSet]

Who usually dominates in Spain?

 

[Scoop]

Who usually dominates in Spain?

It's usually either been the center right People Party or the center left socialist party.

 

[Scoop]

Looks like a disappointing election for the anti establishment parties.

Elecciones Generales 2016 - Total Estatal

PP will gain but not enough to form a majority or even a majority coalition with C's

 

[CHL]

Unidos Podemos

 

[Scoop]

Final results for the major parties

PP - 33.03% - 137 seats
PSOE - 22.66% - 85 seats
Podemos - 17.55% - 59 seats
C's - 13.05% - 32 seats

 

[CHL]

Notes on the Spanish Election

A strong Unidos Podemos showing in Spain’s election today would give hope to radical left forces across the continent.

by Pablo Castaño Tierno

An assembly of indignados during Spain's 15-M movement in 2011. Javier Sastre / Flickr


This month has seen the most important electoral campaign in recent Spanish history, with sweeping implications for the country’s emboldened left.

Last December, Podemos shook up a long-standing political system dominated by the Socialist Party (PSOE) and the conservative Popular Party (PP), getting almost as many votes as the PSOE.

Because the parties could not come to a parliamentary agreement to form a government, new elections had to be called.

Now Podemos has formed a coalition — called Unidos Podemos (Together, We Can) — with the United Left (IU) and other left-wing and green regional and national parties.

Ciudadanos, a small right-wing party that grew rapidly last year, will also play a major role in the coming election.

Today’s election is the last act of a long electoral cycle that began with the 2014 European election, when Podemos first erupted onto the national scene. These are the key issues.

1. The Left is united and looking to overtake the center-left.
Podemos candidate Pablo Iglesias and IU leader Alberto Garzón have overcome resistance from some sectors of their respective parties to form an alliance that gathers virtually all the formations left of PSOE, including important regional parties in Galicia, Valencia, and Catalonia.

Unidos Podemos aims to revamp the Left’s appearance and win more votes than Podemos and its allies did in December.

However, the coalition’s main roadblock is the electoral system, an imperfect form of proportional representation. The small size of the electoral districts and the D’Hont system penalizes small parties running national elections.

For example, IU won over nine hundred thousand votes in December, but only received two parliamentary seats. Each seat cost them 460,000 votes while PP’s and PSOE’s MPs were won with around 60,000 votes and the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) got a seat for each 50,000 votes.

Unidos Podemos therefore needs to decisively defeat PSOE in key provinces — which seems likely to happen — to take advantage of the electoral system’s proportional division of seats.

The Left’s ambitions have made the term “sorpasso” — the Italian world for “overtaking” — a buzzword in Spanish politics. If Unidos Podemos wins more votes and MPs than PSOE, the traditional social-democratic party will suffer its worst crisis ever.

Some are even predicting that Pedro Sánchez’s party will undergo “Pasokification” — another trendy term that refers to the sudden decline of Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) after Syriza’s rise.

2. For the business interests backing it, Ciudadanos hasn’t lived up to its early promise.
Ciudadanos might qualify as one of the biggest bluffs in recent Spanish politics. All last year, pollsters trumpeted the party’s skyrocketing vote share, even predicting its electoral victory.

But in election after election, Ciudadanos, which is led by Albert Rivera, has come in fourth.

This position has allowed it to systematically support PP candidates, revealing their engagement with neoliberal policies and how vacuous their anti-corruption promises are.

The only exception has been the 2015 election in the party’s home region of Catalonia. There, Ciudadanos’s anti-independentist discourse allowed it to become the leading party in a highly fragmented regional parliament.

Different arguments have been put forth to explain polling firms’ continuous exaggeration of Ciudadanos’s electoral prospects: their voters’ lack of fidelity, the difficulty of opening political space in the center, and so on.

But maybe the real reason for the firms’ enthusiasm is that economic elites see Ciudadanos as a party able to channel the Spanish population’s unstoppable desire for change without endangering any important elements of the current political and economic system.

Ciudadanos has tried to portray itself as a center-progressive party, but its young leaders’ charm has not been enough to fool many progressive voters. In the December election it successfully attracted a large number of former PP voters, fed up with the party’s corruption.

But now that Unidos Podemos represents a “red danger” for the Right, it is likely that many of them will vote PP this time.

3. The Popular Party will likely win the election, but to form a government the Socialists will need to discredit themselves even further.
All polls predict a PP victory, citing both rural and older voters’ unshakable fidelity to the conservatives and the likely split among left-wing voters between the Socialist Party and Unidos Podemos.

It also seems clear that Unidos Podemos will win more votes than PSOE — and maybe more seats too — provided that the anti-austerity coalition manages to turn out their voters for the second election in six months and attract more former Socialist supporters.

One of the election’s main unknowns is whether the combination of PP’s and Ciudadanos’s MPs will give them a majority. This would be a hard blow for the Left, as all the energy Podemos generated in the past few years would not have been able to stop a new right-wing government.

That said, PP and Ciudadanos will probably need PSOE’s abstention to govern, an option supported by the main PSOE leaders but very few of their voters.

If PSOE chooses to support that “big coalition,” Unidos Podemos will become the only important opposition force to austerity, which would condemn PSOE to an even steeper decline.

4. Unidos Podemos is the only national party in Spain open to a referendum on the Catalan question.
One or two years ago, a referendum on Catalonia’s independence seemed a likely option. But the movement lost momentum in last May’s regional election, when the independentist parties earned fewer votes than the unionist ones.

The biggest surprise came in December when the left-wing alliance En Comù Podem (In Common, We Can) — led by Podemos and Barcelona’s mayor Ada Colau — were Catalonia’s leading party in the general election vote. They’ll probably do even better on June 26.

En Comù Podem is neither independentist nor unionist: they propose a legally binding referendum on independence, which would need the Spanish government’s approval.

The only national party defending this position is Unidos Podemos; therefore only a Pablo Iglesias–led government would accept the referendum’s results. So unless Unidos Podemos defies the odds and wins the national election today, Catalonia’s independence vote is unlikely to take place anytime soon.

5. Success for the Left in Spain would have an impact across Europe.
The June 26 election is a major milestone in the continental struggle against the European Union’s austerity measures and xenophobic policies.

The Spanish economy’s size — it is the fourth largest in the eurozone — would make it impossible for the troika to repeat its performance in Greece if faced with a Spanish left-wing government.

Also, Unidos Podemos would break the right-wing consensus about the so-called refugee crisis within the European Council: the party calls for creating legal paths for refugees’ and economic migrants’ arrival in Spain and Europe and will propose other measures opposed to the dominant European migration policies.

Europe is facing a historical crossroad. Far-right parties are getting impressive electoral results in a growing number of countries, including Austria, France, Hungary, Poland, and the traditional conservative and social-democratic parties are embracing their xenophobic platforms.

At the same time, the mass protests that have taken place all across Europe since the beginning of the crisis haven’t been able to stop the austerity policies.

In this context the electoral path is unavoidable for the European radical left. The Greek case has shown that winning an election doesn’t mean winning real power, and a Pablo Iglesias–led government would need massive popular mobilization and international support to resist the European Union and business pressure.

But a Unidos Podemos electoral success would still be a great step forward for the ensemble of European progressive and radical forces, and a source a hope across the continent.

 

[Tate]

Basically a mirror of Portugal's last election here no?

 

[Scoop]

Basically a mirror of Portugal's last election here no?

Portugal in 2015:

Establishment Center Right - 38.6%
Establishment Center Left - 32.3%
Euroskeptic Left Wing - 10.2%
Communist Party - 8.3%

Portuguese legislative election, 2015 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Scoop]

delete

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

delete

delete

 

[Scoop]

servers being shyt