Spain Notes, Sept 3: dodgy forecasts + politics
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1a/ Is Madrid really going to get slammed by torrential rains this evening?
1b/ There were a few models forecasting what might happen with the heavy rains over the weekend in Spain. The official AEMET weather service settled on this narrative with a map and progressions showing very heavy rains first in Murcia and the Levante region overnight Saturday to Sunday, then moving up to extremely heavy rains in Madrid on Sunday afternoon into Monday.
2/ In reality down here overnight, there were just some light showers. The heavy rain, 100-200 mm depending on the town, fell 350 km to the north in Catalonia, which wasn’t a red warning area in the forecasts (see here)
3/ If the error radius of a weather forecast is 350 km (Murcia > Catalonia, last night), that is the same as saying it might rain with some intensity somewhere in Spain. In terms of warning the population and deploying public resources, perhaps a bit of broad brush.
3a/ And how many millions of euros were spent this weekend on deploying police, fire service and civil protection resources based on the AEMET weather forecasts of torrential rains somewhere in the country, for them to then get it wrong by 350 km?
4/ So who knows what will happen in Madrid this afternoon. The Mayor of Madrid, Almedia (PP), has said this morning that it will be “historic” and has told everyone to stay at home.
5/ While we’re in Murcia, and catching up a bit with politics, the PP and Vox have indeed done a deal for regional government, as everyone except the PP said they would eventually and after a long, hot summer of denying such a thing would ever happen, and promising voters back in May that it would not, under any circumstances. The far-right gets the regional infrastructure and policing ministries and their leader, Antelo, gets to be Deputy First Minister.
6/ So the PP has now done several deals for regional governments with Vox after the regional elections in May, as Sánchez (PSOE) and Sumar warned they would during the general election campaign through to the end of July. Those elections, as we saw, were inconclusive in terms of overall majorities for anyone and did not end in the outright victory for the conservative-far-right coaltion that most polls were by then predicting.
7/ PP leader Feijóo, though, somehow managed to convince the King to name him as the candidate for PM, even though just days earlier the socialists, communists and separatists demonstrated in the first vote of the new parliament, for the Speaker’s position, that they in reality still have more support between them (result: 178-172).
8/ Feijóo is getting nowhere, because anyone he might try to scrape a few MPs from doesn’t want to touch anything related to Vox. And that probably explains why the Murcia deal has been done now, along with the approach of the formal deadline for calling new regional elections.
9/ After spending the first half of the year insisting that the reason people should vote for the PP was to get rid of Sánchez, Feijóo met with Sánchez the other day and proposed a weak, two-year grand coalition type deal for government between the PP and the PSOE. Sánchez said no, of course.
10/ Formally, the confidence debate in Feijóo is now set for September 26-27. Headlines about the situation include words such as “fiasco”, “cornered”, “fake”, “disconnected”, “burning bridges”, etc. The closure of the new deal in Murcia with Vox is certainly not going to endear the PP leader to the left or the Basque or Catalan nationalists.
11/ RTVE reported yesterday, though, that the PP is still set on going ahead with the vote, and is trying to talk to everyone except the left-wing Basque separatist party Bildu. But three weeks is a long time in politics. The PP is stuck on 172 seats, still the same four short as at the vote for Speaker two weeks ago.