Election notes
In two weeks, Spain holds its general election.
Polls: the PP is rising but has found some resistance at 35% of the vote. Sánchez’s campaign seems to be working and the PSOE is clawing votes back, up, towards, but not yet reaching 30%. Vox has dropped from its previous seemingly immovable 15% level to 12-13%. Sumar is around that same level, but neither rising nor falling. So two blocks, both with a senior and a junior partner, on approximately the same levels, with the right block a few points ahead. But still two weeks of hard campaigning to go.
Debates: Feijóo didn’t go for the six weekly debate festival that Sánchez proposed back at the start of June. El País has cancelled its debate after Feijóo and Abascal said they weren’t going. The RTVE debate is still going ahead on July 19, four days before the general election, but it will be a three-way affair as the PP leader still insists he’s not going. The only head-to-head between the two men who could become the next Prime Minister of Spain happens tomorrow night on Antena 3 at 10 p.m. Expect Sánchez to go in for the rhetorical kill with Feijóo. Will it shift those polls?
The Guardian: “Free money to teenagers, shorter working week and climate action: can Spain’s new leftwing party win power?”, wonders Sam Jones in a piece on Sumar: “It has pledged to put the climate emergency at the centre of policymaking, to introduce a shorter working week and, perhaps most arrestingly, to create a “universal inheritance” intended to improve social mobility by giving all young Spaniards €20,000 (£17,000) to spend on studying, training or starting a business when they reach the age of 18“.
The New York Times has actually been out of Madrid to visit Elche (Alicante) to talk about the new Vox and PP local governments, in the broader context of the rise or the new far-right in other European countries: “In a seeming recognition that the continent’s political complexion is changing, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said in Spain this past week that the European Union needed to deliver tangible results in order to counter “extremist” forces”.
That doesn't seem to me to provide the fiscal oportunity for tax cuts!
The usual electioneering carrots - lower taxes, abolish inheritance tax and so on. The reality is, as so eloquently put by the FT earlier this week, "Enforcement of the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact resumes from next year after it was suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic, adding to the pressure for member states to curb borrowings.
Spain’s public debt is equal to 113 per cent of gross domestic product and its budget deficit last year was 4.8 per cent of GDP.
The country’s debt load jumped due to the economic costs of the pandemic, but Feijóo also accused Sánchez of allowing the public sector workforce to swell.