Red-hot polarised political conflict just four days after Sánchez announces snap election
The Guardian and The WSJ weigh in on the global importance of July's vote.
The culling continues in Spanish politics, less than a week after Pedro Sánchez announced a snap general election that surprised everyone and will last two long months. The weaker parties are getting crushed by the sudden unexpected shift of momentum. United Left leader Alberto Garzón is out. Former Ciudadanos leader Inés Arrimadas is out.
The partisan polarisation, as we were saying, is already running red hot. Yesterday, the Prime Minister, or whoever is really controlling his Twitter account, wrote that “all setbacks are possible” if the PP and Vox win power, “including the exploitation of child labour”. The PM wrote that the opposition is in favour of child slave labour.
The Popular Party blasted back with…child abuse and rape. “Sánchez, the guy who didn’t open his mouth to defend the young girls who were exploited while under the care of socialist governments”, said spokeswoman Cuca Gamarra: “Sánchez, the guy who passed the Only Yes is Yes law” [the disastrous criminal law reform that has let many rapists out of jail early]. “At this rate”, she added, “Podemos is going to end up on his political right”.
The European Parliament yesterday passed corporate sustainability due diligence legislation “to anchor human rights and environmental considerations in companies’ operations and corporate governance”. Vox’s spokesman in the European Parliament, Buxadé, said that “they want to turn companies into agents of the Agenda 2030, the Bible of the elites”.
We are witnessing, then, the dirtiest of disgusting personal things mixed with extremely polarised global political ideologies. A hatred of Sánchez and the left versus a the fear of a conservative-far-right government. What can possibly go wrong?
Vox is also in the news today for an outrageously crude and xenophobic social media post by a local branch in Cieza (Murcia), in reply to the idea that “Spain smells a bit more like fascism” after Sunday’s elections.
Spain, the group retored on its Facebook page, smells a bit less like a long list of left-wing things, including “sweaty socialist armpit”, “Podemos pussy”, “indoctrination in classrooms”, “contraceptive abortion”, “subsidised lubricant”, “Falcon kerosene [the PM’s official plane]”, “cocaine and roadside brothels”, “popular front”, “pandemic blood”, “civil war” and “young illegal immigrants, squatters, delinquents, illegal invasions, the chilaba and the Hijab”.
“There is still lots to be done against reds (PSOE), purples (Podemos) and blues (PP)”, they concluded. The local branch of the Socialist Party has lodged a criminal complaint over the message: “this is not acceptable, this is not the Cieza we want”, a socialist councillor told La Opinión de Murcia.
“The best Spain or the worst right with Vox-PP”, wrote the PM on his Twitter account this morning, claiming record job numbers in May: 20.8 million Spaniards employed in total “for the first time in history”.
International media have begun to weigh in on the snap election.
The Guardian wrote in an editorial yesterday that “Spain’s summer election has important ramifications for Europe as a whole. An overwhelming majority of Spaniards have no desire to see Vox anywhere near power. But recent elections in Italy, Sweden and Finland indicate that authoritarian nationalists, intent on whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment, waging culture wars and rolling back rights for women and minorities, are becoming a feature, not a glitch, in western European polities”.
Over at the Wall Street Journal, the editorial board believes that “Sunday’s results also reflect a backlash against the Sánchez government’s woke cultural politics” and that property rights are at risk after they “sought to cap rent increases while taking a permissive approach toward squatters and rent dodgers”. “If last weekend’s vote is an indication”, the WSJ concludes, “voters are rightly more worried about extremism from the ruling Spanish left”.
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