General election excitement. And good sense

Exciting times in Spain these days.

We’re in the run up to a general election on Sunday 28 April. 

Yes, they hold their elections on Sundays. I know that in Britain we like to have the suspense and excitement of having to get up stupidly early to vote on a Thursday before going to work, school or college, or to dash back afterwards to get to the polls before they shut. But as is well known, Spaniards aren’t that excitable. Or possibly don’t go in for that kind of excitement much. They vote on a day when most people aren’t working at all. So they can do so at leisure.

Dull, I know, but hey, that’s what common sense looks like.

The main street near where we live has been taken over, for its whole great length, by banners advertising the Partido Popular or Popular Party. That’s the equivalent of the British Conservatives. Or at least it was until the Conservatives lurched rightwards and joined a harsher grouping in the European Parliament.

The popular party isn’t actually all that popular at the moment and, unless the polls have got it completely wrong, they’re not likely to do well. In fact, as things stand, it looks as though the PSOE led by the current Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, may pip them to the post.

The PSOE is the equivalent of British Labour. Or at least it was until the Labour Party lurched into left wing rhetoric and Brexit appeasement of the hard right.

Isabel Bonig's face dominating our main street for the (not-so) Popular Party

‘Valor Seguro’ the banners along the main street proclaim, with photos of Pablo Casado, running for Prime Minister of the nation, or Isabel Bonig, running for President of the region that includes Valencia. 

‘Valor Seguro’ isn’t that easy to translate. Maybe the sense is best conveyed by a free translation as ‘Sound Values’.

I can’t help feeling that has something of a Theresa May ring to it. Do you remember the 2017 UK election and her slogan ‘strong and stable’? It didn’t do her much good. And I don’t think Mr Casado’s sound values will do him much good either, especially since, however strongly he may hold them, the banners don’t tell us what they are. After all, ‘enrich the financier and beggar the unemployed’ are values, aren’t they? I’m just not sure that most of us are all that happy about governments that are sound about those values, as God knows far too many are at the moment.

Valor seguro: the slogan is from Bonig's party leader, Pablo Casado

To be fair to Ms May, at least you can’t accuse her of lying in her promise to be ‘strong and stable’. Not, at least, if you accept that the words apply only to her and to neither the government nor the party she nominally leads. And even then the terms apply only in the rather restricted sense of ‘obdurate and inflexible’. Certainly, that’s been her approach to the Brexit negotiations, for instance. She has a solution. She presents it to the rest of us, politely at first. And when it’s rejected, she waits a bit and then presents it again, a little more forcefully. As so it goes, until she’s practically shouting in our ears. She’s apparently incapable of understanding that the problem isn’t our inability to hear her, but her inability to listen to us.

Still, that’s strength and stability of a kind, isn’t it?

That’s the problem with soundbite slogans  ‘Strong and stable’ sounds good, but only if you interpret the slogan in a certain way. Give it a different slant, and it’s not so hot. Just like ‘Sound Values’. It all depends on what you mean by them…

Anyway. We’ll see on Sunday how the parties fare in Spain. Fingers crossed that the country may prove once more that sane good sense still prevails in some nations.

The kind of good sense that led to them holding elections on a non-working day in the first place.