Tag Archives: politician

28N: Catalan Elections 2010 – Who to vote for?

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UPDATED: View the election results

There’s one week to go until this year’s elections to the Catalan parliament. And that means that the competing parties are ramping up their campaigns, desperate to convince wary voters that they offer Catalonia the best chance of recovery and stability. Fools! Don’t they know that’s my job?!

In case you have the right to vote in these elections (I don’t), and aren’t sure who to vote for, allow me to go over the main candidates.

Artur Mas – CiU (Convergència i Unió)

Mas is a scumbag. He clearly believes that he is entitled to the presidency, dei gratia. His campaign has been heavy on frivolity and light on policy. CiU’s posters include: his face, considerably more jowly than before, a really irritating smiley face, and a slogan and weird little round logo lifted directly from Obama’s ‘change you can believe in’ campaign. It’s like they couldn’t decide which elements to go for, so they just threw everything in. CiU is a shamelessly self-interested political party that seeks to ‘defend’ the bourgeois of Sarriá and Sant Cugat by screwing the rest of us over. It will form a coalition with anyone (not that this is unusual) and I think it’s likely that Mas will pursue a Cameronite campaign of painful, unnecessary cuts to public spending. Civil servants, be afraid. Or just join CiU now and hand them 30% of your salary. Don’t worry: they don’t mind if you pilfer public funds to make up any shortfall. Oh, and Mas says he wants to be president ‘for 12 years’. Catalans, be very afraid.

José Montilla – PSC (Partit Socialista de Catalunya)

If there’s one thing that pisses me off about the Tripartit government we’ve had here for the last 4 years, it’s José Montilla. I don’t doubt that he’s a shrewd back room negotiator (his announcement that he only wants one more term in office confirms this). The thing is that Montilla is a deeply uninspiring, confidence-sapping grey technocrat of a politician. The PSC has run a generally austere campaign, except for this video of a young woman experiencing orgasmic bliss at the moment of democratic involvement – a video which would be rendered much more unsettling if, instead of a cute Catalan chick, it featured the old man from downstairs. This election represents an opportunity for voters to register their displeasure with a Tripartit government that, in one form or another, has run Catalonia for 8 years. And this is the problem: there’s much to dislike about the PSC (they’re fickle, fascist-appeasing, directionless, Madrid-controlled morons, for example), but the Tripartit itself has not actually been as bad as CiU would have you believe. With different people, it could have been a great government. Montilla’s little trick probably won’t get him returned as president, though.

Joan Puigcercós – ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya)

I get the impression that Puigcercós would be happy to remain a party leader rather than a national leader, as long as he remains in work. He’s not as left-wing as he should be, even though like me he studied politics and philosophy, and like me, failed to get a degree. I’m good at computers, he’s good at flags. Actually, Puigcercós strikes me as a fairly honest man, but a bit of a small-time loser. He’d make quite a good school teacher (except for the lack of a degree). ERC’s main policy is Catalan independence. If (and that’s a very big “if”) ERC manages to retain anything like its current position as Catalonia’s third party, Puigcercós would pact with whoever offered him the best deal. A nationalist coalition with CiU would probably be based on some sort of referendum for Catalan independence. Another Tripartit probably wouldn’t.

Alicia Sánchez-Camacho – PPC (Partit Popular de Catalunya)

Known in this house as “that fucking woman”, Sánchez-Camacho has presided over a Catalan PP that has plumbed the depths of right-wing hostility over the last few months. She’s a talentless monster. The PPC has progressed from highly racist electoral material in the mayoral election in Badalona, to producing a computer game where users ‘bombed’ immigrants and Catalan independentists for points. Graeme from South of Watford reckons that the PP are using Catalonia as a testing ground for newer, nastier tactics. He’s probably right. I’d be surprised if they do much better than the 10% they normally get – though low attendance WILL HELP THEM. So go out and vote, otherwise we’ll end up with her in bed with Artur Mas. So to speak.

Joan Herrera – ICV-EUiA (Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds – Esquerra Unida i Alternativa)

Red of cheek and earnest of word, Herrera is one of a handful of Catalan politicians I find it difficult to hate. The eco-socialists of Iniciativa aren’t exactly a powerful force, but they represent a broadly good political perspective: Marxism and environmentalism. In Cerdanyola del Vallès, they formed a town hall coalition with the PP, but they’ve also managed to turn CdV into a really pleasant town. Herrera gained some political capital by arguing that all Catalan MPs should declare their wealth and interests at the beginning and end of each parliament. He then revealed the slightly depressing, though all together pleasing, state of his finances. ERC and, to a degree, Ciutadans, followed suit. The PP, CiU and PSC (fat pigs, the lot of them) all said it was ‘silly’. Now, Montilla has said they’ll back any law that enforces this. I take this as evidence that Iniciativa’s left-wing policies speak to a youth vote that, apart from ‘free orgasms for voes’, the PSC is finding it difficult to engage with. Vote for this party.

Albert Rivera – C’s (Ciutadans – Partit de la Ciutadania)

The thing about Albert Rivera is that he’s obviously a talented chap. I just don’t believe that abandoning the entire system of autonomous communities and withdrawing official support for the Catalan language, while simultaneously indulging a very nebulous neoliberal economic policy is what we need. All too often, C’s supporters are racist scum, too. A low turnout might well favour C’s, the PPC and other fringe groups like the Falange Española de las JONS, España2000 and the Falange Autentica. Those are just examples of other parties. Picked at random.

Other parties and groups

There will be many other parties contesting these elections. They range from the neo-fascist Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) to the Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (CUP), which stands for independence. You are free to vote for these, but it probably won’t have much effect on the election results.

Best result?

Actually, I think that a left-wing coalition would be the best way forward here. However, I really don’t like Montilla. But I like him more than I like Mas. In fact, four more years of Montilla as president would be a fair price to pay for the pleasure of seeing Artur Mas denied the residency AGAIN. So vote for Inicitativa, and hope for some sort of Tripartit. It wouldn’t be perfect but it would probably be the best we can get from these buffoons.

Is Israel exempt from international law?

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This week has seen a startling series of events redefine the way the UK acts on international law, and the way British governments understand the power of the courts. Under the principal of Universal Jurisdiction, an arrest warrant was issued by Westminster magistrates court for former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, accused of war crimes during the most recent invasion of Gaza. As soon as this information reached the Israel, its government reacted furiously (which was to be expected). Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, said in a statement:

“The current situation is absurd and unacceptable in equal measure. Israelis cannot continually be held hostage by fringe groups of anti-Israel extremists, preventing politicians, businessmen and officers from visiting the UK.”

While Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu described the situation as an “absurdity”.

What happened next was that the British government leaped into action, apologising to Israel and promising to better control the way international law is applied to Israeli officials in Britain. Gordon Brown and David Miliband both rushed to condemn the warrant, assuring Israel that it’ll never happen again.

So why is it that a senior Israeli politician can’t be arrested in the UK for alleged war crimes? The answer, as usual, is that British government ministers have acted entirely out of personal self interest. The precedent that would be set by arresting Livni would make it far more likely that British officials could be arrested for their own war crimes. And that just wouldn’t do.

The way international law is applied currently suggests that the only people who can ever face it are either (a) a few of the operators in the Yugoslavian war of the 90s and (b) Africans. Israeli and British and other ‘western’ government officers are effectively exempt not because of any weakness in the law, but because every single time an arrest warrant is issued, or an arrest is attempted, the move will be swiftly quashed by politicians. Who aren’t supposed to have that much sway when it comes to the courts.

One of Livni’s statements was particularly telling:

“I have no problem with the world wanting to judge Israel. A problem arises the moment [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are compared to terrorists.”

By ‘terrorists’, she’s obviously referring to Hamas (the political organisation of which, the UK does not designate to be a terrorist group). Well I don’t have such a problem with that comparison, Ms. Livni. But it seems that as ever, uniformed soldiers are seen by Britain as being naturally better than rag-tag freedom fighters. Unless they’re our rag-tag freedom fighters, of course.

News from Spain

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Quite a big split has taken place in the right-wing Partido Popular, with the more Catholic conservative side (Aznar, Rajoy, Aguirre and Acebes) now claiming victory over the more centrist elements (Gallardon & Piqué). This is good news for the PSOE as a right-wing shift in the PP might convince potential non-voters to come out and back the centre-left. John at Iberian Notes (in between a couple of misogynistic and racist remarks) reckons that it would still be better for Spain if Rajoy won, if only to prevent Zapatero from having two terms. Now that’s what I call party loyalty. Mariano Rajoy is a politician who somehow manages to make Zapatero look statesmanlike, confident and wise. Actually, I wouldn’t vote for either candidate but on balance, Zapatero hasn’t had that bad a time in office.

The national anthem lyrics which I mentioned the other day, after being firmly rejected by the Spanish public, have finally been withdrawn by the Spanish Olympic Committee. They were, as you can see, awful lyrics. But it seems that the ‘Viva España!’ rallying call (which features twice in the proposed song sheet) was what upset the most people. ‘Viva España!’ is a phrase which for most people still evokes Franco’s fascist regime – the old coot used to say it every other breath. Tourists – this may be why people stared at you and muttered under their breath when you tried to express how much you love Spain.

Actually, this opens up an interesting debate about Spanish nationalism in general. At some point in the future, it’ll become more possible to shout ‘Viva España!’ and not be called a fascist. But for the moment, expressions of nationalist or patriotic pride always seem to hark back to the dictatorship. You would think that the chap who wrote the proposed lyrics for the national anthem, would have known the import of including a couple of ‘Viva España!’s… but I doubt that he realised he was saying anything that could cause anyone offence. An unemployed man from La Mancha (‘Castilla la Nueva’), I suspect he is in fact pretty cut off from public opinion in the big towns.

My wife has quite a lot of family in Ciudad Real province and while the older generations are lovely, warm and sensible country people, the cousins who are our age, are spectacularly badly informed, racist and nationalist. They even took part in that pathetic anti-Catalan boycott a few years back (and had the temerity to invite Gemma, who lives in Catalonia and is Catalan, to take part). Actually, one of them also intended to have a medieval-themed wedding at which all the guests would have to dress up in silly costumes. I found this even more offensive than the stupid boycott.