Elections

So, there were elections in Catalunya, and the results are....curious. They´r not good, but they could be worse.

There is a majority of votes towards the right or centre-right side of the political spectrum, which is always worrisome....but it´s true that, in general, the left parties got reinforced after elections, and won some territories. This was casued by a bigger participation mostly, but also by some changes in votes.

First of all, CIU. This is Catalunya´s main right party, and they have always played with catalanism to obtain things for themselves. In the past they did some good things, but also plenty of bad things, like helping private schools only, and big companies and such things. Lately, they did mostly bad things, like corruption  repression and huge social cuts.  Right now, they were governing without a majority, which means they had to pact to achieve things. They didn´t like that, and when it was clear that people were tired of some of the problems that come from being in Spain and wanted independence, they claimed that they were the most independent of them all, and organized this elections, with the message that independence would only be possible with them. They tried to hide all the bad things they had done, and present independence as the most important thing to vote for right now.

Luckily, things went very wrong for them. They have lost a big chunk of people in the parliament, and they have been weakened. They still have more than twice people in parliament than any other single party, but they cannot reach majority by far, and they need to pact.

ERC, catalunya´s main left catalanist party, got the next best result.ERC is truly in favor of independence, and for one people didn´t get tricked, and they got the majority of independentists votes instead of CIU . PSC followed them (spanish centre party, they are a little lost at the moment with no clear ideas), and then PP (spanish right party, same ideas as last 70 years). Then ICV (catalunya´s left party, got reinforced with some more people than before), C(catalunya´s right party in favour of Spain, won some votes against even asking about independence) and CUP (a new party from the left that wants independence while paying lots of attention to giving lots of social rights, and therefore got lots of new votes) took the rest of the people in the parliament. The result is that CIU has 50 people, ERC 21, PSC  20, PP 19, ICV 13, C 9 and CUP 3.

To have majority you need 68 people at least, so it´s easy to see that there are 4 main possible combinations: CIU+ERC, CIU+PSC, CIU+PP and PP+ERC+PSC+(ICS or C).

Some people, usually from the right political mindset, think that this is terrible. After all, it´s true that it´s really hard to do things if you have to make sure that some other party needs to agree on them with you. However, that´s something that really expresses democracy. If you can rule alone, you usually rule by yourself. You can claim that half of the people wanted you to rule (which is false, since with the laws around votes you can usually win elections with 20% of votes or less), and that means any decision you take is right. That ignores all the other parties that people also voted.  The result is that, if you don´t need to pact, you can be a dictator  until next elections, deciding everything on your own. And lots of people call that Democracy with a straight face. However, when you need to pact, it´s possible that the smaller parties force some changes down your throat. That is great, it makes you learn to dialogue, to compromise on things, to have to open your mind a little bit, or to just accept that you cannot do whatever you want responsibility-free until the next elections.

PP, being Franco´s heirs, and ERC (being part of Franco´s opponents heirs), will probably never agree in anything (they´re almost opposites) , so the last combination is not possible (or the probability needs to be calculated with a supercomputer, to fit all the decimal zeros it has before any other number).

This leaves the other 3 possible combinations.

CIU could pact with PP and they would probably agree on most things except independence. However, this is a very important point, CIU already has agreed on start the process of consulting with votes in a referendum about it (PP is completely against it), and in Catalunya if you ally yourself with PP in an open way you are committing political suicide. They could probably ally themselves with PSC. They do not have that many differences, and PSC is very lost at the moment and could probably adapt to CIU. However, either CIU would reject the idea of independence, which would be another suicide, or PSC accepts to make a referendum and policies from the right, which would give unclear results for them, but it´s probable that they would lose votes too.

CIU and ERC are the more probable initial pact. ERC has a problem, and that is that some of its members forget that "E" is from "Esquerra", which means left in catalan. ERC sometimes gives priority to give more independence to Catalunya than making social policies. This means that they could rule together for a while. CIU could pact with PP from time to time to approve their worst policies against social rights (no matter how publicly they fight and insult each other, CIU and PP are really close to each other and help each other again and again, even if they try to not advertise it), and if ERC doesn't get angry about it, things would continue like this. However, ERC has said that social policies will be a priority.

Will ERC be able to make CIU swallow a number of social reforms to, at least, get closer to the social situation we had before CIU ruled, with a better healthcare, education and other social objectives? Will it manage to stop the rampant corruption and repression, or will it join in the game?

We will see...but it might be interesting after all....

First week in Adler

After some time of instability, we're finally living in Russia. Right now we're still in the hotel, but this Monday we're supposed to sign the contract for our apartment.

The first impressions have been good, but Russia is indeed a curious country. The place where we will live, Adler, is quite small. It has 3-4 big streets, and the rest of the town is made of little passages and houses. There are a lot of little shops, and we have two shopping malls, that can be reached by a 10-minute walk.

Traffic is awful, there's way too many people using cars to move around, and they drive aggresively, plenty of times ignoring preferences, lights or lanes, and always competing for spaces with other cars. The result is that you can see daily deadlocks in the main street, created by cars trying to turn while other cars are in the way, with no one giving away any ground, and other similar situations.

Luckily, as mentioned, we do not need to use the car in here, we walk everywhere and it takes only a few minutes.

If we feel like going to a bigger place, Sochi's centre is 40 minutes or so (if there are no big traffic jams/deadlocks) away from here using the public buses. We've been there only once, but it's true that feels more like a city. However, if we analyse it, it's a similar situation than in London, where the centre was 40 minutes away, and around our house there was almost nothing, just some shops.

The apartments we can rent are pretty awesome and big, and the one we want to have will give us enough space for guests and parties (so we hope to have people around from time to time). We're meeting new nice people who already live here, and the feeling is similar to London, or to Sweden, where you usually keep meeting people in a similar situation, and since we do not know much of the place we band together. We've already gone to a couple of parties where we've met co-workers, Russians or from other parts of the world.

The hotel we're using right now is quite nice, but it has a major drawback: no internet in the room. This means that we need to go downstairs every time we want to connect, which means that we cannot check things as much as we usually want, or watch series and such things. Anyway, soon enough we'll be able to get internet in our apartment, and we're told it works well enough.

The weather, at the beginning of November, has been quite amazing, sunny and nice, while being temperate and not very hot. At night it's colder, since weather is drier than in Barcelona, but it's still very nice for the month. Before arriving here we had to stop one day in Moscow, and we were at around 3 degrees, it was raining like hell, and when it stopped raining it was to start snowing...

All in all, we believe we can live well in here, we'll see how it goes^^