XPost: soc.culture.spain, talk.politics.drugs, alt.politics.homosexuality   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   From: queers@ruin.things   
      
   Scout  wrote in   
   news:zZTjJ.23967$SW5.7084@fx45.iad:   
      
   > Fuck that, put them all out of office.   
      
   After gains for the Right in Sunday’s local and regional contests, Spain’s   
   prime minister Pedro Sánchez has called a snap general election. Yolanda   
   Díaz’s left-wing Sumar project can get a good result — but only if the   
   Left can overcome its damaging splits.   
      
   It’s been described by Spanish media as both political suicide and a   
   stroke of tactical brilliance. Just hours after suffering heavy losses in   
   Sunday’s local and regional polls, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a   
   surprise general election for July 23.   
      
   This may seem counterintuitive. Sánchez’s ruling center-left Socialist   
   Party (PSOE) had just lost six of the nine regional governments it   
   controlled. Still worse were results for his junior coalition partner, the   
   left-wing Unidas Podemos. It suffered a devastating collapse, in three   
   regions (Madrid, the Canary Islands, and Valencia) falling short of the 5   
   percent threshold for representation.   
      
   Yet with the conservative Popular Party (PP) celebrating a sweeping   
   victory, including in city halls across the former PSOE stronghold of   
   Andalusia, Sánchez swiftly moved to upend the narrative. Rather than wait   
   until December for the scheduled national poll, he announced surprise   
   elections for this summer. He hopes to silence criticism within his party   
   while also ensuring the national campaign will coincide with tricky   
   coalition negotiations between PP and the far-right Vox in multiple   
   regions.   
      
   Sánchez thus aims to define the snap general election as a binary choice   
   between a potential hard-right national coalition, which would include Vox   
   leader Santiago Abascal as interior minister, and his own brand of   
   moderate social democracy. “He is searching for a reaction to the reaction   
   — harnessing the fear that these results have generated among progressive   
   voters so as to pull them out of abstention in July,” Unidas Podemos MP   
   Txema Guijarro tells Jacobin.   
      
   But Sánchez is also seeking to reinforce PSOE’s hegemony at the head of a   
   wider left-wing bloc — both by positioning himself as the only option for   
   tactical voters aiming to stop the Right’s advance and pushing a   
   fragmented radical left to club together. If his announcement wrong-footed   
   his Unidas Podemos coalition allies, it also imposed new deadlines on a   
   divided left that had expected to spend this summer negotiating its   
   reorganization around labor minister Yolanda Díaz’s new unity platform   
   Sumar. Now the various factions, both within and outside Unidas Podemos,   
   are up against the clock, having until June 9 to register such a coalition   
   before the electoral deadline passes.   
      
   The alternative to such unity is likely to mean further marginalization in   
   what will be a blitzkrieg campaign. But Díaz, a lifelong member of the   
   Spanish Communist Party and currently polling as Spain’s most popular   
   political leader, has the potential to reverse the Left’s fortunes if she   
   can swiftly end its internal civil war.   
      
   A Divided Left   
   This will not be easy. The open conflict between Díaz and the Podemos   
   leadership over her plans to overhaul the left-wing space has been going   
   on for more than a year and created a toxic atmosphere in the run-up to   
   Sunday’s local elections. Indeed, such internal tensions have seen a   
   series of routine tactical disputes over the last year turn into near-   
   existential crises, for instance in last fall’s row over judicial   
   appointments.   
      
   Given current levels of mistrust, it is easy to forget that Podemos   
   founder Pablo Iglesias himself named Díaz as his successor as deputy prime   
   minister in 2021, on the back of her growing prominence as labor minister.   
   At that time, Iglesias bet that with Díaz at the helm, Podemos could   
   remain central to the Left even after his own withdrawal from frontline   
   politics. This partly owed to the pair’s long-standing working   
   relationship, but also to Díaz’s lack of an organizational base of her   
   own. Even though she is not a Podemos member, it seemed she would be   
   dependent on it.   
      
   Yet not wanting to be a continuity “Pablista” figure (as Iglesias’s   
   firmest supporters are called) and believing a much broader process of   
   renewal was necessary on the Left, from her appointment as deputy premier,   
   Díaz quickly sought greater independence. Rolling out unity platform Sumar   
   over the last year, she looked to balance Podemos’s influence with   
   alliances with other left-wing forces and trade unions while insisting   
   that the existing Unidas Podemos structure was no longer fit for purpose.   
      
   As one of her senior advisors told Jacobin in January, “[Sumar] is not   
   just about ensuring [Díaz] can exercise authority over the Left, which as   
   an objective would be legitimate in itself for any new leader, but also   
   stems from the need to construct a new project centered on a fresh set of   
   ideological coordinates. [The left has] to once again be capable of   
   widening its electoral base — as the early Podemos did in 2015.”   
      
   Sunday’s election results would seem to confirm such an analysis, again   
   pointing to the exhaustion of Podemos’s brand of left populism,   
   particularly within a post-pandemic atmosphere marked by deep anti-   
   political sentiment and demobilization after a decade of intense political   
   upheavals and ideological debates on the Left. Its campaign, which was   
   largely subject to a media blackout, sought to generate controversy around   
   right-wing corruption and the party’s unfair treatment in the press but   
   never gained momentum.   
      
   But even still, the sheer scale of the losses came as a devastating blow.   
   The alliance went from forty-seven regional MPs across all Spanish   
   territory to just fifteen as it lost votes to a mix of alternative local   
   left-wing platforms, the PSOE, and abstention. In the capital, Unidas   
   Podemos was wiped out; its former ally Más Madrid, led by Íñigo Errejón,   
   also dropped votes, but ultimately maintained its position as the main   
   opposition force there, winning twenty-seven seats at a regional level   
   (with 18.35 percent of the vote) and twelve city councillors.   
      
   Díaz is also far from blameless in this regard, having chosen to largely   
   sit out the campaign. She was surely put in a difficult position by the   
   multiple left-wing electoral lists with different identities in various   
   regions, such as Más Madrid, Drago, and Compromís. She had hoped to   
   incorporate all of them into Sumar before a general election, which was   
   expected in December. Often, these alternative regional forces have indeed   
   been more receptive than Podemos’s leadership to the idea of Sumar as an   
   umbrella platform. Yet for Unidas Podemos, not able to count on   
   significant participation from its highest-ranking minister clearly added   
   to its campaign troubles.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)