Spanish politics, a spectator sport for our times. Sometimes terrifying, always entertaining

As a spectator sport, politics can be right up there with the most gripping. 

Sometimes, here in Spain, it feels like a gritty comedy drama. Sometimes, more like a bullfight. But it certainly isn’t dull.

The 28th of May, when local and regional elections took place, was a bad day for those of us out here who don’t much like the far right. Or even the less far right. The traditional party of the right, the Popular Party or PP, in alliance with the far right Vox (which means voice in Latin, a good name for that bunch of loudmouths) swept into office in town halls and regional assemblies across the country. For the PP, think of the US Republican Party before Trump. Vox is the Trump version. 

Those results painted a bleak picture for the centre-left government of the Socialist Party, the PSOE, and the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. It looked like the elections due before the end of the year were likely to see him out of a job. I just hoped he would be able to turn things around a bit over the few months the old parliament still had to run.

But then he astonished me. Instead of waiting he called a snap election in July. My immediate reaction was to think that he’d made a mistake, that it was too soon, that he could only be defeated if he went that early. But then I reminded myself that Pedro Sánchez constantly surprises everyone, constantly overturns any predictions made about him.

And this time he did it again.

It’s undeniable that he lost the July election. The PP won 137 seats to the PSOE’s 121. Sánchez had come second. On the other hand, against all expectations, he’d actually added one seat to his tally in parliament, at a time when everyone expected him to lose some.

Then there were his allies out to the left of the PSOE. A bunch of small parties organised in a group called ‘Unidas podemos’ (‘United we can’, with ‘united’ in the feminine – yep, that’s how with-it they were) had won 35 seats last time around. Now, with a new leader and reorganised as ‘Sumar’ (‘add up’), they took 31.

A relatively small loss but a loss all the same.

The problem is that there are 350 seats in the lower house of the Spanish parliament. To be absolutely sure of being able to form a government, a candidate for Prime Minister has to have the support of 176 MPs. 

If that’s not possible, a second round of voting takes place, in which it’s enough simply to get more MPs voting for you than voting against. The problem was that neither the PP with Vox, nor the PSOE with Sumar, could gather 176 votes, or even enough to outvote the other side if they all voted together.

That was remarkable, given that the PP had 137 seats. In the previous parliament, Vox held 52. All they had to do was hold or increase that number. The local and regional elections, in which they’d done so well, suggested they’d have no problem. That would give the PP-Vox coalition the votes it needed.

That was what made the election in July so extraordinary. Because far from growing its allotment of seats, or even holding its own, Vox collapsed, losing 19 seats to end up with 33. That meant that together with the PP’s 137, it would reach 170 and fall short of a majority by six.

Even with the support of two small parties with one MP each, they’d still be on 172. That wouldn’t quite get it over the line.

It’s up to the king to decide which party gets the first chance to try to put together a coalition that would allow it to lead a government. He perfectly sensibly called on the PP to have a go. The biggest party in parliament clearly deserved to try first. But no one expected them to pull off the trick, hated as they are by so many of the smaller parties – or at any rate, hated as is the presence of Vox in a potential coalition by almost all the other parties.

Once it became clear that the PP wasn’t going to succeed, the king, again perfectly properly, called on the PSOE instead. It makes sense, doesn’t it? You try the biggest single party first, and if that doesn’t work, you switch to the second biggest.

That’s when Sánchez astonished me again. He’s proved himself extraordinarily skilful at coalition building. 

With his 121 seats and the 31 of Sumar, he was on 152. 

The two Basque parties (left and right) with their eleven MPs and the (left-wing) Galician party with one, came on side, putting him on 164. 

Still far from enough. 

Sánchez needed the support of the two Catalan nationalist parties with seven MPS each. That’s ERC, the Left Republicans of Catalonia, and Junts per Cataluña, Together for Catalonia. The ERC was happy to back him. That put him on 171. But that meant he still couldn’t outvote the opposition, even if Junts abstained.

He needed both Catalan parties to vote with him. But their support came with a serious price tag. The leader of Junts and then President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, had held an unauthorised referendum on Catalan independence on 1 October 2017. It had been attacked by police sent by the PP government of the time in Madrid, with serious violence, followed by the flight of some leading members of the party, including Puigdemont, abroad (those who stayed were gaoled). 

Junts and ERC wanted an amnesty for their colleagues in gaol or facing trial. And they wanted an official referendum.

It was clear that Sánchez would refuse the referendum. But he was prepared to move on amnesty. And I feel, why not? After all, these characters hadn’t done anything violent, no one had been killed by their calling the referendum, illegal or not, and I really couldn’t see how their actions merited a prison sentence.

Right wingers demonstrating against the Spanish Socialist Party

A lot of people in Spain, however, don’t see it that way. The right wing has been holding angry demonstrations outside the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid. But many on the left are just as fed up. Spaniards are sensitive about anything that affects the integrity of the nation, and they find the behaviour of the organisers of the referendum far more reprehensible than I, as a mere Englishman, do.

That shows the courage of Sánchez. While sticking firmly to his refusal of a referendum, he agreed to put a bill to parliament providing the amnesty the Catalan parties wanted. They eventually agreed to accept that commitment as the price of their support, possibly in part because their vote has been falling in successive elections, and the alternative of another general election didn’t appeal to them.

So Sánchez got the seven MPs from Junts to back him too, taking him to 178. And then, to cap it all, he even persuaded the single MP from the Canaries Coalition, a right-winger who’d previously backed the PP-Vox attempt to form a government, to switch and support him instead.

So he ended up with 179 votes, a clear absolute majority, and has been re-elected for another term of Prime Minister.

Now, there’s a lot of hostility towards the amnesty. Of course, I feel the electorate can only blame itself. If it didn't want a compromise, coalition government, they should have given one party a majority. They elected a parliament that pushed Sánchez into this kind of concession. How can they blame him now?

Still, the question remains, whether the hostility to the amnesty will eventually do him serious harm. It’s hard to know. Spaniards can get passionate about their politics, as the demonstrations against the Socialist party show. But will they be able to keep it up? However passionate such movements are when they start, it’s hard to see them lasting for many months.

Interestingly, one of the symbols of those demonstrations is the Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms that normally sits in the middle, cut out. Why? Because by even inviting Sánchez to try to form a government, some of these demonstrators feel the king has betrayed the country.

The Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms cut out

That’s not limited to Vox people. Many on the right call what Sánchez has pulled off a ‘coup’. It was fascinating to see the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Ayuso, in the PP but on its hard right, calling for a response ‘golpe por golpe’. That’s a gloriously ambiguous demand. It can mean ‘blow for blow’, which would be fairly innocuous. But it can also mean ‘coup for coup’. Was she calling for an actual coup against Sánchez? And was that what upset the people who cut the coat of arms out of the flag – that the king hadn’t called out the army for a coup?

Intriguing times ahead. Sánchez faces terrible hostility. He heads a coalition that runs from Coalición Canaria on the right to Sumar on the left. The received wisdom is that it can’t last.

But that’s the thing about Sánchez. He keeps proving received wisdom foolish. It’s going to be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming months and years.

Spanish politics is going to remain a remarkable spectator sport for a while yet.

The Skwawkbox, or master class in writing fake news

“The TV News is lying to us. I get my information from Facebook, friends and social networks.”

An interesting comment. Many people in the England, the US or other nations might well share the sentiment. In this instance, it came from Spain.

It could also have come from the left as plausibly as the right. The BBC has been upset by the attacks on it from the left, just when its very existence is coming under threat from a right-wing government. We might soon see a great public broadcaster muzzled by the right while the left does nothing to defend it.

In this case, the speaker was from the right. He was a supporter of the far-right Spanish party, Vox. The left-leaning paper El País was interviewing him for a study of where Vox gets its support.

He prefers to get his news from Facebook, his friends and social networks. Which is another way of saying that what he wants isn’t information, it’s confirmation. He will find those groups and posts, or friends, who believe what he believes, and always strengthen rather than challenge his views.

That’s much more comfortable. It’s also how fake news spreads. That’s true whether the fake news is generated by a propaganda mouthpiece of the right, such as Guido Fawkes in the UK or the White House in the US, or the left, such as England’s Skwawkbox.

Purveyors of fake news
A rare photo of publicity-shy Skwawkbox founder Steve Walker (l)
Paul Staines of Guidow Fawkes (c) and the White House ranter

In answering a recent FaceBook comment of mine, a critic pointed me to a link to a Skwawkbox page which had the headline:

EXCL: NCC FORCED TO REJECT UP TO 90% OF ANTISEMITISM EVIDENCE AS UNFIT – MULTIPLE DEATHS FOLLOW EXPULSIONS

The claim, right at the start of the headline, to exclusivity is clearly a source of pride to the writer. To me, it just says, ‘no reputable journalist has picked up this story’. Clearly, the poster of the link was, however, entirely disinclined to wonder about the item’s reliability.

The story itself opens with:

A Manchester woman has died within days of her expulsion from the Labour Party under a new disciplinary system.

The woman, whose identity has been confirmed to the SKWAWKBOX, is understood to have died on Tuesday as a result of a brain haemorrhage that locals are linking to stress brought on by her summary expulsion under a new ‘fast track’ process in which the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is expelling members against whom antisemitism complaints have been made.

It seems the person who pointed me to this piece had confidence in it. But all it’s saying is that someone, unnamed to us though the Skwawkbox claims to know who she is, is said by some anonymous source and their equally unnamed friends, to have died within days of being expelled from the Labour Party.

Given the headline with its reference of the lack of validity of ‘90% of Antisemitism evidence’, the implication is that the evidence against this woman was weak.

However, we can check none of this. We don’t know the name of the woman. We don’t know the names of the people living locally who commented on her death. We don’t know what evidence was brought against her, let alone whether any proportion of it, or none at all, was deemed invalid.

In fact, we don’t know whether the 90% figure is accurate. Any more than we know whether evidence rejected by the disciplinary bodies of the Labour Party ought in fact to have been admitted.

The piece is written in such a way that it’s impossible to verify any of its allegations. It may be that I’m too cynical, but I believe that anyone who makes claims that can’t be verified, is afraid of any kind of questioning. That’s likely to be because they’re afraid the case will fall apart if it’s examined too closely.

The naivety of certain commentators, such as my critic, lies in the refusal to see this obvious truth.

As a result, I thought the best response was to write a piece of my own, applying exactly the same journalistic standards as the Skwawkbox.

A reliable source leads me to understand that the woman who died in Manchester soon after being expelled from the Labour Party, had faced multiple charges of antisemitism backed by overwhelming evidence.

While a proportion of the evidence submitted was found to be too circumstantial or too weak, more than enough was both conclusive and believable, in many cases confirmed by multiple, independent sources.

Her death soon after the expulsion was a tragic coincidence. 

The same source confirms that the woman had a serious and long-term circulatory condition which was both inoperable and likely to lead to life-threatening trauma if triggered by, say, an external shock. My source confirms that she had such a shock, unrelated to the expulsion, before suffering a massive and tragically fatal aneurysm.

My heartfelt sympathy goes to the woman’s loved ones in this terrible moment for them. However, it has to be stressed that her death, while tragic, was not associated with the disciplinary action Labour had taken against her. Her expulsion was inevitable, given the incontrovertible evidence that she made antisemitic statements, repeatedly, over a long period.

There is no place for anti-Semites in the Labour Party.

Now here’s your challenge: prove that any of what I’ve said is untrue.

A watercourse, a poet and a lot of persecution

There’s a piece of doggerel most schoolkids learn by heart:

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Rather fewer people, outside Spain anyway, know that 1492 was also the year that the last Moorish – Arab and Muslim – part of Spain fell to the Christian reconquest of the country. Ferdinand and Isabella, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, captured the Emirate of Granada that year, making the entire Iberian Peninsula Christian once more.

The Alhambra in Granada
Fell to Ferdinand and Isabella when they defeated the Moors
And gave its name to their decree against the Jews

It was barely two months later that they issued the Alhambra decree, named for the great Moorish palace in Granada, expelling all practising Jews from Spain.

One of Spain’s, and indeed the world’s, greatest poets was Federico García Lorca. He was gay, in the early part of the twentieth century, when that was hardly a safe thing to be. He was also from Granada, and replying to a reporter in 1931, he said:

I think being from Granada gives me an inclination towards sympathetic understanding of the persecuted: the Gipsy, the Black, the Jew…, the Moor, that we all have within us.

He might have added “the homosexual” but that might have been dangerous.

Lorca. Outstanding poet. Champion of the oppressed

By the summer of 1936, it had become dangerous simply to be Lorca. That was when the military uprising, against the Republic that then ruled Spain, began.

The rebel leader was Francisco Franco, who would hold Spain in a rigid dictatorship for nearly four decades. His regime had no time for a gay champion of underprivileged minorities.

The Nationalists Franco led also believed that the revolt was a crusade for Christian values. So they were particularly ill-disposed towards Lorca for the comments he made during an interview in June 1936, just weeks before the military rebellion started. Asked for his view of the Christian reconquest of Granada, he replied:

It was a very bad moment, though they say the opposite in the schools. We lost an admirable civilisation, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a delicacy unique to the world, and replaced them with a poor, cowardly city, a land of piety in which the worst of the Spanish bourgeoisie operates today.

Unforgivable words for the Nationalists who, just two months later, caught up with Lorca and murdered him.

All this came to back to me while walking in the hills above Valencia the other day.

This region is remarkably fertile. Far more so than the relatively poor country around Granada. It doesn’t rain often, but when it does, the rain comes down like a waterfall, in storms that usually last three or four days.

That means there’s all the water agriculture around here needs. The trick is to manage it well, so that it doesn’t all seep away to the sea in between the storms. And, to this day, the locals are happy to acknowledge that the irrigation systems they use are based on techniques their ancestors learned from the Arabs.

Irrigation water flowing in the Sierra above Valencia

That made it poignant to walk along watercourses guiding irrigation water from the mountains to the fields and orchards. Every few metres there’s a side channel, with a small sluice to let water into the adjoining fields or keep it out. These structures are modern, not Moorish, but they use the same principles.

My mother had a refrain when talking about Spain. The two great errors of that nation’s history, she maintained, errors which ensured its long-term decline, were defeating the Moors and kicking out the Jews. With them, they lost their best agriculturalists (to say nothing of the cultural wealth Lorca listed) and their most skilled financiers and traders.

So walking along a watercourse in the hills above Valencia isn’t a simple, innocent exercise. It’s redolent with historical meaning. In the Moors, Spain had an outstanding civilisation, which it defeated and overthrew, to its own lasting harm.

In the Jews, it had another great minority with much to contribute, persecuted for merely being other.

And centuries later, Spain produced a magnificent poet, who understood and empathised. Who knew what it was to be oppressed. Who, finally, fell to that very oppression at the hands of a dictator certain he was acting for his white, Christian and Spanish nation.

And who, by doing so, inflicted further damage on that nation, just as the earlier persecutors had.

The saddest aspect of all these memories? The descendants of those self-harming oppressors are ready to do it all again. The Trumps, the Johnsons, the Leaders of the Italian League or of Spanish Vox. They learn nothing and keep making the mistake of thinking that homogeneity is the way to greatness.

Whereas, as Lorca knew, it’s stultifying and ultimately fatal.

Water, water everywhere. All for the land to drink

A hard-won government in Spain can teach us a lot

It’s been a long haul, but Spain at last has a confirmed government again.

That matters to me particularly because we now live in Spain, land of our Brexit exile. Others, though, might also find much of relevance in the difficult road that got us here, littered as it was with obstacles, many of them self-inflicted.

Pedro Sánchez addresses the Cortes

Let’s start with the positives.

Spain has its first coalition government since the end of the Franco dictatorship and the restoration of democracy in 1978. That brings it into line with most countries in Europe, where government always requires negotiation between parties and compromise to reach an agreement that commands broad support. It’s not the case in Britain, of course, where Members of Parliament are still elected by simple majorities in individual constituencies. As a result, parties with minority support nationally can command a huge majority in Parliament. As is the case today.

I’m not sure that this leads to better government.

Pedro Sánchez, now the confirmed Prime Minister of Spain after holding the role in an acting capacity since last April, and leader of the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), has agreed a joint programme for progressive government with Pablo Iglesias, of the anti-austerity, harder-left Unidas Podemos Party (UP). That has kept the right well away from power, even though the far-right Vox now has a major parliamentary presence.

You read that right. A joint programme for progressive government. And the hard right out of power.

How many, in Britain, the United States, Poland, Hungary, Turkey or Brazil would give their eye teeth to have such a government? And how many, particularly in Britain, the United States, Poland, Turkey or Brazil would like to see the far right well away from government?

So, now the negatives. 

The Spanish left nearly didn’t pull the trick off, and its worst enemy was itself. As in Britain and the United States especially.

That joint programme between PSOE and UP was something that could have been agreed months ago. Say, straight after the General Election in April, which left the PSOE as the biggest single party in the Spanish Parliament – the Cortes – with 123 seats, while UP had 42. PSOE was up significantly, while UP had lost seats, but at least between them, they had 165 MPs, just 11 short of the 176 needed for a majority in the 350-seat Cortes.

They couldn’t reach agreement. After six months of negotiation, new elections had to be called in November. Both parties lost seats, three in the case of the PSOE, though it was still the biggest party in Parliament, while UP lost seven. Now their task had become far harder, since they’re now 21 behind the magic number for a majority.

Far worse still was the surge in support for the quasi-fascist Vox, which shot up from 24 to 52 seats to become the third biggest parliamentary presence.

The PSOE-UP failure to compromise before the November election meant that when they finally did, the two parties of the left were working from a weaker position, and against a far more vigorous opposition. Note and learn, British Labourites or American Democrats: you risk it all when you decide to dig your heels in and refuse to budge on principle. Insisting on doing it all may leave you unable to do anything at all. The price of intransigence can be a Trump or Boris government.

Sánchez has at least avoided that fate, but by the tightest of margins. He couldn’t win his investiture on Sunday (yes, Spanish MPs can work on Sundays) when an absolute majority was required, in the first vote; on Tuesday however, with the bar lowered to requiring simply more Yes votes than Noes, he squeaked through, by just two votes with eighteen abstentions.

Those abstentions were won through hard negotiation. Sánchez had to make agreements with eight parties, covering 313 different commitments, to secure those abstaining votes. Not all those commitments are compatible with each other. Government, with so much to deliver to keep minor parties at least neutral, and up against such a powerful right, isn’t going to be easy.

This is particularly true in the specific circumstances of Spain. Some of the commitments Sánchez has had to make concern the status of Catalonia and its desire for independence. That’s something he can’t grant and retain his support in the rest of Spain; it’s going to be challenging to give the Catalans enough, short of independence, to keep Tuesday’s abstainers in line.

With a powerful and ferocious right-wing Opposition, he and Iglesias are going to have torrid time implementing their programme. It’s going to be enthralling to watch. I’m at least glad they have the opportunity to try – after the crushing defeat of the British left in December, being able to do as much as Sánchez can in Spain seems a distant dream.

There were some good moments in the investiture debate.

One of the most moving was the standing ovation offered to Aina Vidal, who turned up to vote despite undergoing aggressive treatment for cancer.

Aina Vidal stands to acknowledge the ovation for her presence

Another was Sánchez’s reference to one of the iconic figures of the Second Spanish Republic, the one overthrown by Franco. Manuel Azaña told his compatriots, “we are all children of the same sun and tributaries of the same river”.

In Britain and the US, I can’t help feeling that we’re all children of the same deeply disrupted climate system, and tributaries to the same traffic jams.

Maybe the Spanish example can help us towards a more encouraging future.

Elections in Spain, and the lessons for the Elections in Britain

Be careful what you wish for.

That seems to be the main lesson from the results of the General Election in my adopted country Spain, on 10 November. A lesson that some people in UK politics might do well to learn. If it isn’t too late already.

Seats won in the Spanish Parliament
The PSOE have the most but are even further from a majority

Take the socialists, or PSOE. 

Its leader, Pedro Sánchez, had been acting Prime Minister since the previous election in April. He headed the biggest party in Parliament, with 123 seats, but that was still well short of the magic number for a majority, 176. He tried to cobble together an agreement with other groups, principally working with a party to his left, Unidas Podemos, but the negotiations repeatedly failed. Both sides blamed the other, and there seems little point in trying to assign responsibility now.

Sánchez decided that he had no choice but to go the country again. He may have been right. After failing to negotiate himself a coalition, he may indeed have had no other option. But far from growing his parliamentary presence to 140, as he had hoped, a position from which he might have had a better chance of building a majority, he ended up losing three seats, leaving him on just 120.

A message for Boris Johnson: merely calling an election doesn’t guarantee that you’ll emerge with the wins you hoped for. Besides, sometimes hung parliaments happen because the electorate is split and unable to endorse one party or another. Then politicians have to find ways to work together.

As for Unidas Podemos, it too paid the price for failing to reach an agreement to govern. Its 42 seats were reduced to 35. A breakaway party from Podemos, Más País, won three seats, so even taken together, these left-wing groupings are down four. If the discussions between Sánchez and the Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias were tough before, they’re going to be a lot tougher now.

The great losers of the night, however, were the centrist grouping, Ciudadanos, Citizens. They couldn’t quite make up their mind about what they stood for, which may be a cautionary tale for Corbynists: if you equivocate, you’ll be punished.

They proclaimed they would not under any conditions join a Sánchez-led coalition, though they claimed to be in the centre and therefore open to working with either side. At the time, they had 57 MPs and could have had a role in leading the country. It was a clear statement that they wanted no part in government, and voters can’t see much point in electing parties that don’t want to govern. 

Besides, there is in Spain a question as central as Brexit is in Britain, which is Catalan separatism. They chose to take a hard position against the separatists, moving them away from the centre ground to positions more closely associated with the far right. Voters prepared to vote for far-right views will generally prefer a far-right party. That they did on this occasion, reducing Ciudadanos from 57 seats to just ten.

Perhaps another lesson for Corbynists flirting with pro-Brexit positions.

The day after his election debacle, the leader of Ciudadanos resigned.

May yet another lesson for Corbynism, and more particularly, for Corbyn.

So who were the great winners of the day?

The traditional right, the equivalent of British Conservatives, the Partido Popular or Popular Party, turns out to be rather more popular than at its disastrous low in April, when it won just 66 seats. This time it took take 88.

But the biggest winner of all was the far right, Vox. It only entered parliament for the first time in April, with 24 seats, far more than they should ever have won, but still containable.

This time, they’ve taken 52. More than twice as many as last time.

And what’s that all down to?

Why, the massive error of Ciudadanos in wanting to be a centrist party and then lurching rightwards, and the failure of the centre left and left to find common ground. They preferred to remain pure in support of their principles than to compromise and enter government. The result was that the far right gained.

In Britain, the situation isn’t entirely similar. There is a party of the far right, but it’s losing momentum as the Conservatives become the voice of the far right themselves, losing their moderate MPs on the way. There is no separate party like Unidas Podemos, instead a faction of the Labour Party, the Corbyn tendency, has taken control of the party.

Even so, there’s much to learn for Britain from the Spanish experience.

• Refusal to compromise doesn’t always yield the results you want.
• Accommodating the far right lets it devour you
• Equivocate and the voters will punish you
• Sometimes you just have to live with hung parliaments, because voters themselves are divided

A former boss of mine used to say that the trouble with having your back to the wall is that you can’t read the writing on it. The writing from Spain strikes me as fairly powerful. But politicians in Britain, with their backs to the election wall, may no longer have the time to read it.

As the dust settles on 13 December, the day after the British general election, we shall see whether they, like the Spanish, are going to have to learn their lesson the hard way. And, sadly, voters with them.

Spain and England, a leader and a ditherer, a victory and a defeat

It’s been an interesting few days, watching a general election in my new home country, and local elections in my old one.

In the former, Spain, the right was routed. It’s true that the hard nationalist party Vox won 24 seats in the new parliament. This was presented as a lurch to the right by some in the foreign press, but the reality is that where the two main parties of the right had 167 seats in the previous parliament, now all three together – including Vox – have only 147.

Essentially, therefore, the election redistributed the votes of the right and then cut them back. It’s as though the hard wing and the more liberal wing of British conservatism broke off to form their own parties, and all three parties were returned with a total of fewer MPs than the Conservatives previously held on their own.

So it was a conclusive victory for the left. In particular, it was a major success for the incumbent Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who gets to form a new government. Under the Spanish proportional system, he won’t be able to do so alone – he doesn’t have an overall majority – so he’ll have to come up with accommodations and agreements with other groupings. But he should be able to do some good.

Sánchez: the leader who won

My prediction? That’s exactly what he’ll do – some good. It won’t be enough for those on the left who believe all we need to achieve a Socialist utopia, is to elect a Socialist and have him wave a magic wand. That Sánchez won’t do, any more than Tony Blair did in Britain. I only hope that the result won’t be that Spain in turn has to suffer another ten years of conservative rule, and learn the hard way that demanding too much of your allies can let in your opponents, who give nothing at all and, indeed, take a great deal.

What about the elections in England?

Brexit continues to poison the atmosphere there. And the first victim has been the Conservative Party. Theresa May promised to deliver Brexit and has spectacularly failed to do so. The party was punished in the local elections, losing 1334 seats, over a third of those contested that it held before the election.

It’s normal for a party in power for nine years to lose local council seats. But on this scale? That’s a rout.

And yet it wasn’t quite the rout it should have been. The Labour Party, the official Opposition, should have been romping home. The seats lost by the Conservatives should have fallen to them. But they didn’t. Instead, Labour too lost 83 councillors – far fewer but a massive loss when it should be winning big against a government party in such disarray.

Corbyn: the ditherer who lost

Labour’s led by a man entirely after the heart of those who hanker for a magic wand. His supporters view him as a socialist and a man of principle. Neither claim seems particularly supported by the facts.

Those supporters like to claim that Labour, by not taking a position either for or against Brexit, has become the party of both those who believe in remaining in the European Union and those who want to leave. In other words, Corbynism refuses to back the EU and, instead, takes a non-committal line. As it admits itself, it does so in the hope of not putting off Leave supporters.

It’s not clear to me that sitting on the fence in this way is a principled position. On the contrary, it strikes me as the rankest opportunism, of just the kind that Corbynists like to allege against Tony Blair.

Nor does it seem to me to be particularly socialist. Opposition to the EU is a key view of the right, and especially the far right, anti-internationalist, xenophobic and insular as it is. What on earth is a socialist doing in that company?

In any case, this opportunist, electoral calculation isn’t paying off. As was predictable and predicted. By trying to please both sides of a deep divide, you end up pleasing neither.

The local election results make the point. Brexiters see Corbyn taking a lukewarm stance so they don’t vote Labour; they see May failing to deliver and don’t vote Conservative; so they stay home and vote for no one. Meanwhile, Remainers see Corbyn refusing to back the EU, so they too either don’t vote or vote for a party that explicitly endorses their stance – the Liberal Democrats, the biggest winners in this election, with a gain of 703 council seats, and the Greens, the second biggest, gaining 194 seats.

Corbyn’s paying the price for his lack of integrity.

The contrast between my two homelands is powerful. A real leader, with clear positions, won the Spanish general election. A fence-sitter, dithering on the great question of his time, lost the English local elections.

Oh, for a British Sánchez to lead Labour. Oh, for the chance to win a victory like his. And oh, for the chance to watch the wishful would-be wand wavers leave the scene.