PSOE’s ugly campaign, pacts and Sumaring up - Spanish 2023 election

Hang together or hang separately is the choice for the Spanish Left, and that really is no choice at all.

PSOE’s ugly campaign

Well we’re one week in and this absolute sewer of a campaign shows no sign of improving, but in a crowd of terrible takes perhaps the best can go to PSOE’s recent campaign video. The main thrust of the video is to mock PP’s leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo for not speaking English, as he admitted in a TV interview with Ana Rosa on Telecinco (I was going to say think ITV daytime before it went all, you know…).

From the music, to the smug tone, to the ending of the video with Pedro Sanchez meeting other leaders like Macron (not exactly who I would want to be associated with if I was supposed to be Left wing but there you go) and speaking English, it was all designed (or must have been designed) to come across as PSOE being the modern and outward looking party, with PP the inward looking, little Spaniards.

What it actually did was show PSOE and the modern Left to be everything their opponents claim they are: smug elitist liberals who are more interested in mocking their own countrymen and hob-nobbing with fellow liberals than giving a toss about their own country. Who exactly was this video designed to appeal to? The last study I can find, from Eurostat, of English speaking Spaniards put it around 30%. Those who do speak it will be highly concentrated in major cities (places that PSOE aren’t going to get votes) or overwhelming affluent (again, not the target market for a PSOE party trying to cling on).

Now, this isn’t Spiked so we aren’t going to do that “Left wing liberals are out of touch, what the proles really want is open borders and to listen to my friend Daniel Hannan!” Indeed, one point of pride in old working class culture was the element of self-improvement and an autodidactic nature that created institutions, so that people not from the magic circle could access high art, culture and, yes, foreign languages. If you have never read it, go and get a copy of Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes and be blown away be how much better those people are than any of us.

However, it is hard work to learn a foreign language and laughing at a man from Galicia who has probably had no need to use it, like many Spaniards, is more likely to alienate the very people PSOE was founded by (and have lost) than bring them back. Lastly, as someone learning a language and one of the few working class lads stupid enough to like reading, people who mock others for not knowing something instead of encouraging them to learn are fundamentally anti-intellectuals of the worst kind and should have no association with Left wing politics. Luckily, PSOE clearly understand English so hopefully they will see this. Dear PSOE, whoever made that video should be kept in a cold dark room, away from internet access, so that decent Spanish people never have to see this nonsense again.

Vox-PP: PSOE’s new creation

One area where PSOE are having more success, though, is in linking PP with the more Right wing Vox. Indeed, after the May local elections, many of the areas that PP will wish to replace PSOE in regional assemblies and municipalities will require Vox to join the government or, at the very least, abstain. However, Vox’s leader Abascal is in no mood to play along with being side-lined and, with many of these pacts set to be announced or leaked in the middle of the national electoral campaign in big cities such as Valencia, Seville and Valladolid, PSOE will hope to use it to lure any swing voters who would rather Vox weren’t in government.

Sumaring up

And finally, a wave of new election polls have come out recently showing that the new rainbow co-alition of parties under Sumar, which is led by Yolanda Diaz, is on only 10% of the vote, significantly below where they would need to be to cancel out Vox. However, as predicted, this didn’t include Podemos; once that takes place, Sumar are neck and neck with their mirrors on the right, Vox. It just shows that although Spain is not exactly returning to a two party system, the era of everyone having their own hobby horse party and making an impact is over. Hang together or hang separately is the choice for the Spanish Left, and that really is no choice at all.