Is Pedro Sánchez "clinging to office"?
Half-truths, Willful Stupidity and Distortions in The Economist
I really have a lot to do but this article is so bad it needs to be taken down, line by line.
Partido Popular governments have also ruled in de facto coalitions with Basque and Catalan nationalists. When the Partido Popular does it it’s regarded as far-sighted statesmanship.
I can’t believe I am having to say this but in parliamentary systems the winner of an election is not the party with the most votes, it’s the one that wins a confidence vote in parliament.
Who knows what PP voters might have wanted but the PP leadership has spent the last six years excoriating Sánchez as a traitor, liar and criminal. There was never the slightest chance of it offering him a coalition deal.
“Eight assorted parties” : you can smell the writer’s contempt for the Spanish citizens who voted for them, votes every bit as valid as those for the PP.
I wonder how many votes would it have had to pass by for it to be deemed ok by The Economist? And “rammed”? What the actual fuck?
Vague promises were certainly made for improved financial terms for Catalonia but no one outside Vox and the PP and their excitable fans in the media think it’s going to get fiscal autonomy. Among other reasons because there’s no chance that Basque nationalist deputies will vote for measures that erode their own region’s historic financial privileges.
Note also “a Socialist” designed to make readers innocent of Spanish politics think the mild-mannered Illa is a latter day Trotsky when in fact he’s a slightly progressive centrist.
Previous PP governments have ruled for years on prorogued budgets. No one thought it was a big deal.
Sánchez’s wife’s professional activities have been investigated by the UCO, the central detective division of the Guardia Civil and a body unlikely to include many PSOE voters. It found nothing on her. The accusations against her are based on a complaint made by a group that specialises in vexatious accusations against progress politicians. The judge is dragging out the investigation to embarrass the government, in due course it’ll be dropped.
And note the scare quotes around “far right”, as if the people hounding Sánchez and his family were not exactly that.
Yet more parroting of PP and Vox attack lines. The PSOE is fully behind Sánchez because he has kept it in national office for an extended period against the odds.
Some achievements?? If a PP government had this one’s economic record The Economist would be running seminars on The Spanish Model and how to imitate it. Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo was called the other week to Congress to answer questions for the first time since he was appointed last December. The opposition has abandoned the economy as an issue because it’s going well and it can’t think of anything coherent to say.
Sémper is the guy who abandoned politics because he was disgusted by the PP’s drift to the right only to do a handbrake turn last year when he was offered the role of national spokesman. And there’s no such rule, of course. The PP has repeatedly made deals with Basque and Catalan nationalists and negotiated with the former when some of them were murdering people.
Catalonia has a non-separatist government for the first time in 14 years.
Elements of the criminal code have been changed by votes by Congress, the bearer of national sovereignty, not by anything signed with Junts and Esquerra.
By far the biggest beneficiaries of the amnesty so far have been members of Policía Nacional and Guardia Civil.
Neither the opposition nor The Economist can accept that Sánchez has reduced Catalan secessionism to its lowest ebb in decades.
The present make up of the Constitutional Court is the result of its progressive members being faster on their feet when it came to choosing new members than their conservative colleagues. When PP governments appoint low voltage party hacks to key roles in the state that’s regarded as democracy as usual, when Sánchez appointed José Luis Escrivá, an economist with an impressive professional track record, to run the Bank of Spain that gets written about as if it were a sign of approaching dictatorship.
When I was young I was a devoted reader of The Economist. As the years have passed I have come to realise that, at least on questions I know a lot about, it can’t be relied on.