In Spain, an election like ours
It had seemed so close…and like a desert chimera, it wasn’t.
Spain fell short in its election, with conservatives taking the most votes but not quite winning an outright majority, putting the country into a political stalemate, quite possibly until a new election is called.
It was a terrible disappointment. The country’s ruling left had been a monstrous failure. The cultural future of Spain was on the line as migrants wrought havoc in the country, the economy cratered, and the E.U. lorded over the country mightily. Polls had shown conservatives ahead, too, yet with the result out, they didn’t quite make it to victory. Yet they came soooo close.
This certainly reminds us of the disappointing U.S. election result of 2022.
What the heck happened? And why couldn’t conservatives clinch it, as they already have in countries such as Greece and Italy?
There are a lot of possibilities.
First, and I saw a lot of this on Twitter, there are suspicions of rigging and cheating from the entrenched left.
Maybe. The right such as it exists in Spain is known to drive the left mad, same way President Trump drives the left mad, putting the left on a “by any means necessary” footing.
Mail-in ballots were in the picture this year, which may be one indicator.
Hard to investigate from here, of course, but we know that there is a lot of evidence here that they have engaged in electoral rigging if not outright fraud and seem to have gotten away with it in our hemisphere — in the U.S., and possibly Brazil. The left is nothing if not international, so maybe they got ideas.
But there are other readings, too.
The Financial Times’ Barney Jopson has an analysis as good as any that can be viewed without a subscription, which began with this:
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s warnings that conservatives and hard-right nationalists would drag Spain backwards were far from original in the lexicon of political campaigns. But in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, the conservative opposition People’s party and the [very conservative] radicals of Vox provided real-life examples in local government of how they would handle coalitions. And a critical number of voters did not like what they saw. As a result, the PP did not gain as many seats in parliament as expected, and Vox lost one-third of its share, leaving the rightwing bloc without a majority to form a government.
The piece describes how conservatives and their very conservative allies in Vox moved in quickly in local elections to ban LGBT flags, ban bike lanes, and engage in “cultural wars over theatre,” which I guess means theatres themselves, or else other gestures like these.
The FT argues that these amounted to mistakes from the right, and there is reason to consider this, given that much of the population has an interest in some of these cultural issues continuing. Did they really have to start in on bike lanes and gay flags?
Could they have left those for now as a sop to the left since they are such small things and focused on harder things such as what is taught in schools and stopping mass illegal immigration? Could they have focused on the great uniting issue of all nations, which is the economy?
It’s a valid point, because even if we conservatives don’t like these little things, we have to recognize that some of them are window dressing, not the root of the problem, and what’s more, parts of the population have a stake in them. People don’t like wildly radical change right out the gate, especially on small micromanaging cultural issues.
It reminds me of the battle over abortion in the U.S. and how some red states have moved in too quickly to stop abortion, prompting rounds of sob stories and mobilizing Democrats, giving them an issue to rally around and the capacity of portraying their opponents as crazies who would shut down all freedoms. Might an incremental approach have worked better — say, halting abortions for minors without parental consent and more slowly reducing the gestation times for having an abortion? With so many people having a stake in abortion, in women who have had abortions already feeling the twinge of conscience and needing to feel that they were justified in their act rather than be branded murderers by such sweeping acts, I think that would have worked better as midterms approached in 2022, as would shutting Sen. Lindsey Graham up, who introduced a useless bill in the Senate calling for a nationwide ban on abortion, which allowed the left to paint the right as total extremists. President Trump tried this approach several months ago and was smeared as pro-choice, but he was right about this and could see what was going on: the great is the enemy of the good in a thorny issue like this, and now the pro-aborts have their issue to justify their own extremism and rally the Dems with all kinds of absurd claims that Democrats will buy in to based on their existing fears. The softer boiled-frog approach for a pro-life America would have worked better.
So it seems with Spain. Getting rid of bike lanes should not have been an act to do just because conservatives could do it. People use those things and have gotten used to them. They don’t harm anyone, even as conservatives know that the real problem is that global warming is a sham. It would have been way better to have left them as legacy things until people got sick of them and stopped using them, and focused instead on bigger issues such as disincentivizing wind farms and other green energies, teaching science in schools, and finding ways of pulling Spain out of international treaties if it could be done. Taking away the little stuff that voters can see can often annoy many voters.
The small mistakes of overreach may well have been a reason the conservatives lost in Spain — we know it contributed to the lackluster showing of conservatives here. It may be the same there.
That said, it’s important to note that all is not lost, which is also the case in the States.
Europe’s direction has unmistakably been rightward, with conservatives winning in places such as Sweden, Finland, Greece, and Italy, as well as the reliable central European stalwarts of Poland and Hungary. As Richard Baehr has noted in these pages in the past, it’s rare to have an outright shift in political direction after a long period of entrenchment by either the right or the left. Typically, it comes in chunks, bigger and bigger ones with each election, until a real consensus majority is achieved. Spain is right on the cusp of it, so conservatives may well take it all in another election or two. That’s just how democratic politics operates. In the States, recall our despair in 2012, when Mitt Romney seemed so close to the presidency, yet the failed Obama administration somehow won again. But in 2016, the miracle finally occurred.
That’s what may be the case here in Spain, and we hope the conservatives can get their game down, both in the election itself as regards fraud, and in getting good leaders of good judgment who can move the coalition along rightward without annoying too many on the lightly left. It may not be long before conservatives finally take it all, given that the trend is our friend. Let’s keep fingers crossed that this eventually brings forth a credible government for Spain…and one for us here in the States, too.
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