I have not written in a while, and a lot of things are happening at the same time, in the country and in our regular life.
For the moment, I'd like to rant about politics for a bit.
In the end of May, there was European Elections, and the results could be commented, but let's center them to Spain. After years of screwing up big time, the two main parties had lost credibility, and it was expected that they would have worse results than in the latest general elections.
What nobody was expecting was Podemos. This was a new party that got created by people's associations, inspired by the 15M protests against the ruling parties, that had become nests of corrupt politicians in their leading positions. With only 4 months of life, they got more than a million votes in these elections. Polls say they may get a high number of parliament seats in the next general elections, although not enough at all to rule on their own.
The problem Podemos represents to the current rulers is that they defend popular meetings and popular votes to decide about things, and the people in general, when asked directly , may decide they want to limit the politician’s salaries or that they don’t want a king. Other left parties that are more traditional may not ask directly and are more controllable, but when people actually vote for things it’s really hard to, for example, decide your childhood friend should win a contract to provide a public service through a private company.
Podemos has also proven to be really good at advertising themselves and reaching people that got tired with the traditional parties, to prove some of their points by example (like rejecting to get the full salary of an European parliamentary) and to actually say quite reasonable things that resound with the public.
Of course, after these results, official newspapers and channels have stopped treating them like a joke and started attacking them to defend the traditional parties. The two main parties have been ruling on their own for ages, fighting publicly but agreeing and working together privately at the highest levels, and seeing how they are losing power scares them.
However, the current ruling party (PP) is maybe the least affected at the moment....they are losing votes, but I believe people who voted PP in the past will never change to Podemos (unless we're talking of really, really stupid people). No, the one that is most bothered by Podemos is PSOE.
PSOE, or the Spanish socialist party, was born very long ago, in 1879, and as a truly socialist party started fighting for worker's rights. However, a lot has happened since then, and the party has evolved and changed (as is normal with so much time passing). After Franco's dicatorship, PSOE became one of the main parties in Spain, participating in the transition period, and it managed to become the ruling party a few elections afterwards. At that moment the party was still defending interests considered from the left wing, but it had done several concessions (like accepting a monarchy) and in general moved to the center of the political spectrum, especially regarding economic ideas.
From that time till now PSOE's leaders have been moving to the right little by little. At the same time, they have started to use the same tactics than right-wing parties, where destructive critic is all it matters, and to point to the other as the cause of all problems. It is true that PSOE leaders still defend some ideas from the left, like LGBT rights, abortion issues and other similar things, but these things, even if important, do no deal with the main problem a leftist party should deal with: The abuse that middle and lower class people are receiving from the rich and the company owners. That minorities have the same rights as the rest is important, but if everybody has shit for a job, then maybe this should be the priority of a leftist party.
PSOE's leaders have also been caught in important corruption cases, have helped maintain a monarchy while keeping secret how much does it costs and what does it do, have promoted to important positions relatives and friends, have increased their own salaries and hired consultants while the country was in an economic crisis, has put ex-polititians in charge of banks and big energy companies, has helped the catholic church as if Spain was not independent from religion, and in general has behaved no differently than a (maybe softer) right-wing corrupt party, except for a few issues.
Now, part of the problem is that there are lots of people in Spain that believe PSOE is the worker's party. And there are a lot of people in the PSOE that also believe that they should work for the workers. When Podemos, or other parties, or me, critisize PSOE, I think it's clear we do not mean everybody in PSOE. However, the current leaders are the ones at fault, and the ones doing it all wrong.
Podemos may be tricking us and become something horrible later on, who knows...but right now them and other small parties are pointing to the problems Spain has and proposing solutions (that may work or not, but that go beyond criticising blindly what's being done by the other party). They're also promoting more democracy.
Meanwhile, PSOE leaders got some of the ideas that Podemos is promoting and started to apply them wrong. For example, they have chosen a younger party leader, as if age, and not ideas (the guy was involved in one of the banks that have done more irregular things in Spain), was the problem. Or promoting democracy by opening to all party members who is going to be the new leader, but at the same time the leader that actually got chosen and most of the central PSOE parliamentaries are saying that letting people from Catalunya vote about if they want independence is bad and should not be done (missing entirely the point).
This and other comments shows in my opinion that PSOE has not been refunded, and the same people than before have power and are quite comfortable in there and do not want to change anything.
If PSOE would like to be taken seriously as a party again and not keep losing votes month after month, they need to actually do more instead of saying they will do more. They need to condemn corruption by auditing themselves through some third company, by making public all their numbers and accounts and the accounts of their leaders, and by doing internal investigations and actively collaborating with the police the moment someone in their party is accused of corruption, instead of just saying “not guilty until a judge condemns us”, which does not mean you are guilty but gives a really bad image, as if you’re hiding secrets.
They need to condemn the transfers between private companies and leading parties (or otherwise) by actually indicating, for example, that is shameful that the ex-president of Spain Felipe Gonzalez is part of Gas Natural, one of the major energy companies in Spain and part of the lobby who is promoting laws approved by the government that are punishing green energy companies and green energy research while increasing the energy bill and creating an energy monopoly.
They need to actually recognize that they have made mistakes, for example indicating that last time they were in power they screwed up and didn’t prevent the crisis or publicly recognize the start of it, without charging all of the guilt to ex-president Zapatero only.
They need to recognize that they have agreed with PP in lots of things and have voted the same as them especially in Europe or in economic topics, and if they want to differentiate from them they need to stop doing that.
They need to condemn the current pardon system and indicate that too many times the ones pardoned are ex-politicians, cops, company owners and other people that are not the “commoners” by far, and recognize that they have done this in the past to show they will stop doing so.
They need to actually comprehend and recognize that their new idea of a Federal nation was created once Catalunya gave them the option to be independentist or centralist like the PP, and since they didn’t want that association with PP they created this 3rd option never defended before.
They need to open up and learn from the new parties, by publishing their decisions in some public way, showing their decision-taking process and, if they want to look democratic, allowing their militants to participate in those decisions.
They need to do such things and much more, and then we could consider them as a valid left-party alternative that will defend the rights and interest of the middle and lower classes.
However, given the current leaders and their position of power, they’re never going to do that….
For the moment, I'd like to rant about politics for a bit.
In the end of May, there was European Elections, and the results could be commented, but let's center them to Spain. After years of screwing up big time, the two main parties had lost credibility, and it was expected that they would have worse results than in the latest general elections.
What nobody was expecting was Podemos. This was a new party that got created by people's associations, inspired by the 15M protests against the ruling parties, that had become nests of corrupt politicians in their leading positions. With only 4 months of life, they got more than a million votes in these elections. Polls say they may get a high number of parliament seats in the next general elections, although not enough at all to rule on their own.
The problem Podemos represents to the current rulers is that they defend popular meetings and popular votes to decide about things, and the people in general, when asked directly , may decide they want to limit the politician’s salaries or that they don’t want a king. Other left parties that are more traditional may not ask directly and are more controllable, but when people actually vote for things it’s really hard to, for example, decide your childhood friend should win a contract to provide a public service through a private company.
Podemos has also proven to be really good at advertising themselves and reaching people that got tired with the traditional parties, to prove some of their points by example (like rejecting to get the full salary of an European parliamentary) and to actually say quite reasonable things that resound with the public.
Of course, after these results, official newspapers and channels have stopped treating them like a joke and started attacking them to defend the traditional parties. The two main parties have been ruling on their own for ages, fighting publicly but agreeing and working together privately at the highest levels, and seeing how they are losing power scares them.
However, the current ruling party (PP) is maybe the least affected at the moment....they are losing votes, but I believe people who voted PP in the past will never change to Podemos (unless we're talking of really, really stupid people). No, the one that is most bothered by Podemos is PSOE.
PSOE, or the Spanish socialist party, was born very long ago, in 1879, and as a truly socialist party started fighting for worker's rights. However, a lot has happened since then, and the party has evolved and changed (as is normal with so much time passing). After Franco's dicatorship, PSOE became one of the main parties in Spain, participating in the transition period, and it managed to become the ruling party a few elections afterwards. At that moment the party was still defending interests considered from the left wing, but it had done several concessions (like accepting a monarchy) and in general moved to the center of the political spectrum, especially regarding economic ideas.
From that time till now PSOE's leaders have been moving to the right little by little. At the same time, they have started to use the same tactics than right-wing parties, where destructive critic is all it matters, and to point to the other as the cause of all problems. It is true that PSOE leaders still defend some ideas from the left, like LGBT rights, abortion issues and other similar things, but these things, even if important, do no deal with the main problem a leftist party should deal with: The abuse that middle and lower class people are receiving from the rich and the company owners. That minorities have the same rights as the rest is important, but if everybody has shit for a job, then maybe this should be the priority of a leftist party.
PSOE's leaders have also been caught in important corruption cases, have helped maintain a monarchy while keeping secret how much does it costs and what does it do, have promoted to important positions relatives and friends, have increased their own salaries and hired consultants while the country was in an economic crisis, has put ex-polititians in charge of banks and big energy companies, has helped the catholic church as if Spain was not independent from religion, and in general has behaved no differently than a (maybe softer) right-wing corrupt party, except for a few issues.
Now, part of the problem is that there are lots of people in Spain that believe PSOE is the worker's party. And there are a lot of people in the PSOE that also believe that they should work for the workers. When Podemos, or other parties, or me, critisize PSOE, I think it's clear we do not mean everybody in PSOE. However, the current leaders are the ones at fault, and the ones doing it all wrong.
Podemos may be tricking us and become something horrible later on, who knows...but right now them and other small parties are pointing to the problems Spain has and proposing solutions (that may work or not, but that go beyond criticising blindly what's being done by the other party). They're also promoting more democracy.
Meanwhile, PSOE leaders got some of the ideas that Podemos is promoting and started to apply them wrong. For example, they have chosen a younger party leader, as if age, and not ideas (the guy was involved in one of the banks that have done more irregular things in Spain), was the problem. Or promoting democracy by opening to all party members who is going to be the new leader, but at the same time the leader that actually got chosen and most of the central PSOE parliamentaries are saying that letting people from Catalunya vote about if they want independence is bad and should not be done (missing entirely the point).
This and other comments shows in my opinion that PSOE has not been refunded, and the same people than before have power and are quite comfortable in there and do not want to change anything.
If PSOE would like to be taken seriously as a party again and not keep losing votes month after month, they need to actually do more instead of saying they will do more. They need to condemn corruption by auditing themselves through some third company, by making public all their numbers and accounts and the accounts of their leaders, and by doing internal investigations and actively collaborating with the police the moment someone in their party is accused of corruption, instead of just saying “not guilty until a judge condemns us”, which does not mean you are guilty but gives a really bad image, as if you’re hiding secrets.
They need to condemn the transfers between private companies and leading parties (or otherwise) by actually indicating, for example, that is shameful that the ex-president of Spain Felipe Gonzalez is part of Gas Natural, one of the major energy companies in Spain and part of the lobby who is promoting laws approved by the government that are punishing green energy companies and green energy research while increasing the energy bill and creating an energy monopoly.
They need to actually recognize that they have made mistakes, for example indicating that last time they were in power they screwed up and didn’t prevent the crisis or publicly recognize the start of it, without charging all of the guilt to ex-president Zapatero only.
They need to recognize that they have agreed with PP in lots of things and have voted the same as them especially in Europe or in economic topics, and if they want to differentiate from them they need to stop doing that.
They need to condemn the current pardon system and indicate that too many times the ones pardoned are ex-politicians, cops, company owners and other people that are not the “commoners” by far, and recognize that they have done this in the past to show they will stop doing so.
They need to actually comprehend and recognize that their new idea of a Federal nation was created once Catalunya gave them the option to be independentist or centralist like the PP, and since they didn’t want that association with PP they created this 3rd option never defended before.
They need to open up and learn from the new parties, by publishing their decisions in some public way, showing their decision-taking process and, if they want to look democratic, allowing their militants to participate in those decisions.
They need to do such things and much more, and then we could consider them as a valid left-party alternative that will defend the rights and interest of the middle and lower classes.
However, given the current leaders and their position of power, they’re never going to do that….
