A quick look at Spain

Image from the University of Texas

As the name of the blog suggests, I am a fan of the game first. That doesn't mean that I don't have favourites. One of those favourite has long been the Partido Socialista, and Prime Minister Zapatero.

Elected back in 2004, the Socialists have been pretty effective at achieving their goals. Spain withdrew from Iraq (apparently putting them, in the eyes of American Republicans, somewhere between Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales). Zapatero, along with Erdogan, spearheaded the Alliance of Civilizations initiative at the UN. They increased access to safe terminations and ended the ban on gay couples being able to marry (and this was back in 2005, before even Sweden was down with it): No mean feat, in a country that is somewhere between ninety and a million percent Catholic. It's not what you'd expect!

So all in all, I like Zapatero and his merry band of socialists. Sadly, as of this weekend it looks like I'll be fans of them in the same way that I'm a fan of Firefly and the Mariners. Unless every poll in the country is wrong, and wrong to the tune of ten points or more, the Partido Socialista are out and the Partido Popular are in.

Incidentally, when we had a referendum (and what a referendum! It was on whether to swap from the worst system of voting to the second-worst), what both sides really wanted was Spain. It's proportional representation, and not just weak-tea-AV but full-blooded Party List PR. Despite that, and despite strong regional traditions it's a two-party system between Red and Blue.

Spain is one of Europe's wobbly economies; this is a problem, because the Spanish economy is about twice the size of Greece, Portugal and Ireland put together. The other big-enough-to-destroy-Europe economy is Italy, but Zapatero has been getting generally positive reviews from the moneymen about how he's keeping a lid on the crisis (the same was not true of Berlusconi). Of course, now he's leaving.

On the other hand, there's this:

Unemployment, total (% of total labor force)

Data from World Bank

Spain is not impressed with your Occupy camp.

This frustration is the main reason I hedge on predicting the result. It seems strange that mass protests among the youth would lead to the election of a centre-right establishment party who have campaigned on cutting everything except pensions. I can easily imagine a Dewey Defeats Truman situation; the Indignados have been saying they're going to spoil their ballot papers, but it's not hard to imagine a last-minute rally to the Socialists or (more likely) a surge for one of the minority third parties: the United Left and the Union for Progress and Democracy, both on less than 5% and both on downward trajectories, could be in the game for a revitalisation.