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    Updated: Protests in Spain: waiting till the fat lady sings

    By David Seaton on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 8:46am |

    UPDATE:

    The results of the Spanish elections were exactly what the polls projected: a disaster for the ruling Socialist party. The 15-M Movement appears to have had no affect on the voting... Whether this movement consolidates into something meaningful remains to be seen.

    The Socialists got trounced because they applied neoliberal recipes and their voters deserted them, preferring the original to an imitation (Democrats take note).

    What is most striking about Spain is that despite very high unemployment, the elections were quiet and without incidents. The protest movement has been non-violent and the atmosphere cheerful. This is due to Spain's society still being based on personal relationships and not just on the cash-nexus. As Dimitri Orlov says, when things get really bad, what you need are friends, friends being defined as people who will do things for you without asking for money in return. I shudder to think what the USA would be like with Spanish unemployment figures.

    So yes, Spaniards still have their happy families, because if they didn't, with those levels of unemployment, the 15-M Movement would have been violent, not Gandhian. The United States could certainly benefit by studying the stability of Spanish society under stress.

    As to bullfighting, the Mexican bullfighter, Ignacio Garibay, got gored badly in Madrid yesterday by a bull from the ranch of Pablo Romero that weighed 672 kgs. (nice Hemingway touch, nu?)

    ******************************************

    I am holding off writing about this till the votes are counted on Sunday's local elections, because till then, it will be difficult to extract any meaning from it except that, up till voting, what we have here is one of those wonderful, very Spanish, bring the family and spend the day, type of enormous fiestas, with lovely, 1960ish, hippy vibes, very well and spontaneously organized by the kids themselves. We went to the Puerta del Sol yesterday twice. Once in the morning and then later in the evening and it was beautiful... the kids are really lovable.

    The rightwing is baying to have the riot police clear the square, but the government are behaving very intelligently... As I say, if this significantly affects the voting in any way, then we we would be looking at a really meaningful protest.

    It would seem logical that if people of the left wanted to send a message to the Socialists they would vote for Izquierda Unida, the Communist led coalition of the left,  which would force the Socialists to move more to the left. However, if everybody just stays home and doesn't vote, they will  have four years to regret so doing at their leisure, because the rightwing people always vote. They only win elections in Spain when there is big abstention. So lefties staying home would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.

    If you'd like to follow all of this live, here below, is the video stream direct from the center of downtown Madrid.

    Crossposted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/


    Video clips at Ustream

    Comments

    From the Guardian, on how 41% youth unemployment and massive political corruption may actually have consequences that even Spain's happy families structure can't resolve. 

    Cynical and ingenuous by turns, the Madrid protesters and those who refused to budge from the city squares have torn up the rule book of Spanish public politics. The heavyweights of old – political parties, trade unions and media commentators – are not wanted here.

    "I was sacked when the Madrid regional government closed down a women's centre last year when it imposed cuts," explained Beatriz García as she bashed a small frying pan with a wooden spoon. "The unions didn't even bother to turn up."

    The political parties were worse still, she said. "There is no renovation. There is nothing new or different, just two parties who take it in turn to govern because our electoral laws favour them."

    Just a week ago the Spanish had seemed stoical about one of the most depressing eras in recent economic history. Despite unemployment hitting 21% – rising to 41% for the young – widespread spending cuts and a socialist government bound to obey the diktats of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the financial markets, they had refused to show their pain. Marches, sit-ins or riots were for the French – or British students. The real drama, anyway, was in north Africa. Spaniards stayed at home.

    All that changed as demonstrations organised via Facebook and Twitter became static protests in city squares, mushrooming into something that caught politicians, unions and the media by surprise. While journalists were following the dull routine of campaigning for Sunday's municipal and regional elections, the steam was beginning to escape from a pressure cooker of discontent.

    Many Spaniards had told pollsters they were tired of the same well-known political faces – especially those who were due to be re-elected despite being mired in corruption scandals. Politicians have rarely been held in such disregard, with the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and opposition leader, Mariano Rajoy, of the conservative People's party, rating lowest. Rajoy seems set to take over after a general election next March.

    When police evicted the Madrid demonstrators on Tuesday morning, they came back in even greater numbers later that day. By Friday night authorities had lost the battle to impose rules banning public politics on the day before elections. Police could only look on. "Join us, police officers!" the demonstrators shouted.

    By the early hours of Friday, it was already elbow-room only in the Puerta del Sol – the square which prides itself on being Spain's "kilometre zero", the spot from which all other distances are measured.


    by quinn esq on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 1:39pm

    And from the NYT:

    MADRID — With elections set for Sunday in Spain in more than 8,000 municipalities and 13 of its 17 regions, thousands of people, most of them young, have taken to the streets in Madrid, Barcelona and other large cities this week, calling for an end to suspected longstanding corruption among established parties.

    Fueling the demonstrators’ anger is the perceived failure by politicians to alleviate the hardships imposed on a struggling population by a jobless rate of 21 percent.

    At sit-ins, street protests and on social media networks, the protesters’ message is that of an alternative campaign that could eclipse that of the established parties and result in a decline in voter turnout on Sunday, from 63 percent four years ago....

    On Sunday, Francisco Camps is expected to be re-elected as head of the regional government of Valencia, which includes the third-largest city in Spain and some of the most popular Spanish resorts.

    By the end of the year, however, Mr. Camps is also likely to be in court facing bribery charges, as part of a vast corruption investigation, dubbed the Gürtel case, that has also targeted several other politicians from the main center-right political force, the Popular Party.... Nine other politicians standing for the Popular Party on Sunday in Valencia are being investigated or have been charged with fraud. Mr. Camps and his fellow candidates deny any wrongdoing.

    .... In fact, “many people in Valencia now talk about the Berlusconization of our society,” said Ferrán Bono, a Socialist lawmaker who represents Valencia in the national Parliament in Madrid. “Some people have seen so many political scandals that they just treat them as banal, but I think many also genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that Camps has been so actively promoting.”

    The Gürtel investigation, which also targets some Popular Party politicians in Madrid, involves more than €120 million, or about $170 million, of public funds misspent by politicians in return for alleged kickbacks, according to a summary of the charges presented by the prosecution this year. Its alleged ringleader, Francisco Correa, is in jail awaiting trial.

    But corruption investigations have not spared other main Spanish political parties, starting with the governing Socialists of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Socialist politicians stand accused in several of the property-related fraud inquiries that have mushroomed amid a collapse in the Spanish construction sector. ...

    Mr. de Areilza, the law school dean, said: “We have built a democracy with political parties somehow disconnected from society, who have accumulated a lot of internal powers and have not been regulated in very important areas like their financing — and unfortunately they are also the ones who are in charge of pushing through any reform of the system.”


    by quinn esq on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 1:43pm

    If you know Spanish politics, you know you can't tell anything till the voters have spoken. On Sunday night we'll have a clear idea of what this all really means.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 1:47pm

    What the protests have meant up till now, is that what was seen as a very boring election, with unmotivated socialist voters that were going to hand more power to the rightwing on a plate, has now heated up and gotten people involved. Having voters involved is the very last thing the right ever wants.. they are a minority, but they all vote, always... now the tricky part here is that the kids that are protesting are advocating abstention, but what complicates that, is the kind of kids who are organizing this business, almost never vote, or if they do, they vote for some trotskyite-vegetarian-front... so the question is what the people who are just watching are going to do, will they get off their duffs and vote on Sunday?

    We won't know till Sunday... perhaps the Gandhian protests will continue or perhaps the kids in the square will go home and have their loving Spanish mamas wash their  dirty clothes and make them chicken soup, while they catch up on their sleep... or perhaps Izquierda Unida will get enough votes to govern with the chastised Socialists... or maybe the polls will prove correct and the right will win big.

    We'll find out tomorrow about 9PM Madrid time.


    by David Seaton on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 4:38pm

    I forgot to thank you for this.

    You are our Spanish correspondent!

    Good job!

     


    by Richard Day on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 6:28pm

    You DO seem to be writing about it, but...

    I put this Pablo Ouziel piece up a few days ago; Spain's Tahrir Square.  Favorite graph:

    "Spain is finally re-embracing its radical past, its popular movements, its anarcho-syndicalist traditions and its republican dreams. Crushed by Generalissimo Francisco Franco seventy years ago, it seemed that Spanish popular culture would never recover from the void left by a rightwing dictatorship, which exterminated anyone with a dissenting voice; but the 15th of May 2011, is the reminder to those in power that Spanish direct democracy is still alive and has finally awaken."


    by we are stardust on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 6:57pm

    Sorry Stars, this article by Pablo Ouziel is bullshit.  Spanish people, excepting the fascist element, given half the chance, are the most moderate, family obsessed, don't put their nose in other people's business, people in the world. To know this is to know how bad things were in the 1920s and 30s to get a civil war going. They have come out in force every time that democracy was in danger after the death of Franco, but generally they live their lives in their families and their circle of inlaws and friends. The idea that Spain is very "dramatic" is a 19th century romantic, cuasi-orientalist idea. If you want to know what Spanish people of today are really like, study their national soccer team.


    by David Seaton on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 7:41am

    Good to see you writing about a country you actually know.

    Laughing + Kiss

    Edit to add: look forward to some "after the vote" opinion, even if I don't agree with it.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 05/21/2011 - 7:44pm

    Right now, interesting news at 1:40PM Madrid time.... The voting in working class neighborhoods in higher than normal and lower in middle class neighborhoods. This goes against normal trends, as middle and upper class people, usually get up early on election day Sundays, go to mass, leave mass, vote and than buy their lunch baguette and then meet friends in a tapas bar for an aperitif. Most of their heavy voting is over by early morning... so this figure of low early turnout in their neighborhoods may prove significant.


    by David Seaton on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 7:46am

    Latest results and projections are coming in at 9PM Madrid time. These results, with a normally high turn out are exactly what the opinion polls have all been predicting for weeks... Sooooooooooo, I would say that the protests have had little or no effect on the election at all... Much ado about nothing, I'm afraid. What the long term effect they may have on this generation remains to be seen... at this point we can only say that a fine time was had by all.


    by David Seaton on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 2:59pm

    Socialists lose BIG TIME and the protests are continuing:

    The Atlantic Wire: Ruling Spanish Socialist Party Suffers Worst Defeat in 30 Years

    Deutche Welle: Spain's ruling Socialists suffer election losses as protests rumble on

    Reuters: Spain's ruling socialists crushed in local elections as mass public protests continue

    The Austrailian: Spain's ruling Socialist party reeling from weak outcome at local elections

    AP: Spain's Socialists trounced amid economic woes

    BBC: Spanish socialists suffer heavy election losses

    New York Times: Spain's Governing Party Suffers Heavy Losses

    Xinhua: Spanish Socialist party suffers crushing defeat in local and regional elections

    Bloomberg: Zapatero’s Socialists Routed as People’s Party Takes 38% of Vote in Spain

    Zapatero as quoted in several of the above: The results of the vote show that the Socialist Party has clearly lost today's elections. We have suffered a broad setback compared to four years ago.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 11:10pm

    Stop worrying ArtA, the Spanish have their families, their happy happy families, and 21%-41% unemployment, complete fiscal collapse and political corruption matter not a whit to our beloved commentator on Spanish politics, who can see no ill at home, and no good abroad.

    Oh yeah. And bull-fighting = GOOD! 


    by quinn esq on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 11:36pm

    The results of the election were exactly what the polls projected: the 15-M Movement appears to have had no affect on the voting... Whether this movement consolidates into something meaningful remains to be seen.

    The Socialists got trounced because they applied neoliberal recipes and their voters deserted them, preferring the original to an imitation (Democrats take note).

    And yes, Spaniards still have their happy families, because if they didn't, with those levels of unemployment, the 15-M Movement would have been violent, not Gandhian. The United States could certainly benefit by studying the stability of Spanish society under stress.

    As to bullfighting, the Mexican bullfighter, Ignacio Garibay, got gored badly in Madrid yesterday by a bull from the ranch of Pablo Romero that weighed 672 kgs. (nice Hemingway touch, nu?)


    by David Seaton on Mon, 05/23/2011 - 2:11am

    Meanwhile, in the Spanish periphery...

    By Tracy Alloway,Financial Times Alphaville blog,  May 23 09:42.

    ....The FT reports on Monday that initial results from the weekend’s Spanish regional elections show hefty losses for the ruling Socialist party — with the right-wing opposition making inroads into towns run by the Socialists since the 1970s....

    Citigroup’s Michael Saunders, for instance, warned before the elections....

    ...For example, while attention is now grabbed by the regional deficits, we believe that the dynamic in the social security system is also crucial....

    Don’t say we didn’t warn you market participants might think this way.

    When it comes to debt and austerity, tension between Spain’s central government and its regions has been rising in recent months....

    That might be worrying enough, but Nomura’s Laurent Bilke points to tension of a different sort....

    Spain’s political situation is getting traction by the market....


    by artappraiser on Mon, 05/23/2011 - 4:51pm

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