matthewbennett / Matthew Bennett is on Nostr

Journalist. Thoughts about a changing Spain.

Last Notes

2023-11-11 18:51:03 UTC

Just a quick comment today. Given the rapid development of events on the streets and with political rhetoric since the weekend, in terms of the political narrative and where things might go, I think it would no longer be implausible for there to be an attempted assault on Congress by the Spanish alt-right during Sánchez's confidence debate in parliament (still without a date set by the also socialist Speaker of the lower house).
That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It just wouldn’t be implausible or illogical, having suddently gone from boring normality to 39 people injured and police charges with rubber bullets and tear gas in the Spanish capital in four nights of “spontaneous” protests. The amnesty deal with Puigdemont is now done and the right is fuming.
The alt-right sees Sánchez as a traitor. The confidence debate will be the point of maximum psychological and political tension, when the hated Sanchismo gets to renew its mandate in the Prime Minister’s office, Moncloa, for another four years, through to 2027, thanks to the widely criticised amnesty agreement with the even more hated Puigdemont, who is still a fugitive from Spanish justice, with both of them, in the eyes of the right, trampling all over the Constitution, and with a strong perception of democratic impotence among the protesters, without judicial protection and with the clock ticking down against them.
All the elements are there.

2023-03-21 20:04:41 UTC

⚡ Vox motion of no confidence: Day 1
The 89-year old candidate for PM managed not to fall asleep in his seat. Pay more attention to the evolution of Deputy PM Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist).
Okay, let’s get back to it. I’ve been translating a novel for the past month, snowed under with 130,000 words or so of science fiction and time travel. Thank you for your patience. It has been surprisingly refreshing to take a bit of a break from Twitter and the news for a few weeks and imagine other worlds. Unfortunately, I see that the flood of insults and contempt continue as soon as I write almost anything at all over there.
That model of journalism and reporting and conversation, which worked and served us all well for a decade of convulsive global events, appears to have disappeared, even though the site remains under Musk. That’s a shame but life is too short to put up with such constant negativity.
There might perhaps be something to be done with more in-depth, feature-like stories with photos and videos and things here on the Substack. I will explore that a little over the course of the year. In the meantime, you have shown over the past few months that you do value a half-decent analysis here of what’s going on with some issue—in our case Spain. I promised you I would keep writing about this year’s elections and politics and that I will do.
A couple of times a week will be enough for that, not daily. Not feeling any motivation at all to keep chasing the latest news headlines or the constant political bickering from one side or the other right now.
Today something interesting and objectively relevant has happend, though.
The motion of no confidence that Vox was banging on about in December finally got underway in parliament. Yes, at the end of March, three months later. Two days of debate and then a vote, which nobody in Spain believes they have a hope of winning. The Popular Party leader, Feijóo, has not even bothered to turn up to watch (he is formally a senator, not an MP).
The man put forward as replacement Prime Minister is Ramón Tamames, a former Communist Party MP from 1970s Transition-era Spain that Vox has somehow managed to convince to take part as an “independent” candidate.
Yes, he has shifted ideologically all that way from the far-left to the far-right in the intervening 40 years. He did well this morning, I thought, at the age of 89, not to fall asleep in his comfy leather chair in the chamber, from where he slowly read out a pre-prepared written speech that consisted of a long list of complaints about what he thought was generally wrong with Spain. Policy suggestions for solving any of them were noticeably absent.
A 30-page version of that speech was leaked to the left-wing media site El Diario last week and Tamames found out while he was being interviewed on an obscure radio show one night. He didn’t even know what El Diario was. “It’s the Podemos commie website”, the host helpfully informed him.
Summing up a morning of debate for you, Vox has gifted the left two days of national media attention in exchange for nothing or even minus points given all the ridicule and doddering. The PM, Pedro Sánchez (PSOE, socialist), and the Deputy PM, Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist) have been able to argue again they are great in government and that their political ideologies are winners.
After waffling on for nearly an hour himself, Tamames later interrupted Sánchez to protest to the Speaker that the PM had taken an hour and forty minutes to reply and had turned up with 20 pages of socialist ideology and policy that had nothing to do with what Tamames had mentioned. The Speaker told him off for interrupting and Sánchez was allowed to continue talking about Sánchez and how great Sánchez’s govermnet was compared to Rajoy’s previuos Popular Party administration before the pandemic.
Vox does not appear to have even come up with a plan to benefit from the operation electorally on the right. How many PP voters are this evening thinking about swapping over to vote for Abascal instead of Feijóo? I would wager very few after this morning’s uninspring, pre-planned drudgery.
Abascal (Vox) began by trying to convince the chamber that it was all “very serious” despite everyone making fun of it for the past couple of weeks and that Sánchez was now a smelly Prime Minister hanging around the political fridge beyond his use-by date. At other times, Sánchez appeared to be playing “Robin Hood when he has never stopped being the Sheriff of Nottingham”. Only minutes after relating immigrants to criminal rapists in his own ususal rhetoric, Abascal said that the feminists, communists and socialists “do not have the right to crminialise all men in Spain” as rapists. He attempted to criticise the PP for not really turning up for the debate and for drifting towards becoming the social-democratic party the country needed at the same time as he tried to half-heartedly convince them to vote for Tamames.
Sánchez replied that Abascal was hiding behind the 89-year old former communist, that he had failed at his previous motion of no confidence and if he was still around after the next general election, he perhaps wouldn’t have enough Vox MPs left to try again. He framed Abascal as a coward or at least a shirker, “that’s what you might expect from someone who exalts military values but avoided military service” and wondered “what’s the point of Vox?”, assuring listeners that he struggled to recall even a single measure from the far-right to improve peaceful coexistence among Spaniards over the past few years, but that they sowed “hatred everywhere”.
The PM said the Vox model for Spain rejected science, climate change, Europe, gender violence, feminism, infant poverty, the regional government system and the differnt official languages recognised by the Constitution. The far-right offered “a way of life under that euphemism of a dominant culture that takes us back to the worst moments of the 20th Century, a country that rejects its democratic memory and honours the mausoleums from the dictatorship built with slave workers to the greater glory of the tyrant”.
Abacal said “I am not going to reply to all of the lies you have mentioned”.
Tamames, despite getting told off by the Speaker for interrupting, was not wrong in his appreciation of how long Sánchez rambled on about his vision of his government’s achievements. Such are the rules of parliamentary football.
The Deputy Prime Minister, Yolanda Díaz (Sumar, communist) replied with what I thought was the most intelligent political speech of the day. A modern, educated, powerful woman politely and respectfully replying in 2023 to an old, economist and politician from another time but using the opportunity to frame herself and her ideological vision for how to govern Spain in a—dare we say it—prime-ministerial fashion. She spoke with some eloquence, both rhetorically and intellectually, about the consitutional, economic and human imperative of strengthening the welfare state for all and of how she believed the current left-wing coalition government she is part of has achieved that to some degree over the course of the current parliament and especially during the Covid pandemic.
Voters, of course, will agree or disagree strongly depending on which side of politics they are already on, and with the different ideological or policy aspects, but in the same way as it seemed to me that voters on the right would not be shifting to Vox from the PP after today’s performance, voters on the left, even perhaps from the PSOE, and especially women, might this evening be considering a vote for Sumar after listening to Díaz. It was not so long ago that the PP’s Isabel Díaz Ayuso (Madrid, First Minister) was spoken of as a possible first female Prime Minister of Spain, but could there be a scenario containing a surprise from the far-left? It’s not probable, given the disjointed nature of national politics and the current state of the polls, but looking at how Diaz has evolved over the past year or so, it’s not completely implausible either.
Thank you for reading.

2023-03-02 19:43:27 UTC

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Perhaps a bit excessive for him to kindly expose the problem but then mute everyone responding in such a friendly manner.

2023-03-01 18:59:01 UTC

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We could talk about something interesting while we're all here...
...what would you spend one bitcoin on with your projects in life at the minute...?

2023-03-01 18:41:49 UTC

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Nice to meet you all.