Spanish elections and politics II: Catalan elections on February 14, 2021

[Skye]

Rather big news. Pablo Casado has removed the controversial Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo from her post as spokesman (?) of the PP in Congress. Her post will go to Cuca Gamarra. Jose Luis Martínez-Almeida, the mayor of Madrid, was also made the national spokesman for the party:

https://twitter.com/JesusCintora/status/1295393879638904832

[Skye]

Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo just held a very belligerent press conference, coherent with her style. She harshly criticized the leadership of the PP and revealed details about her private conversation with Pablo Casado (who she kept referring to as "Mr. Casado") this morning and about internal affairs of the party (she revealed that she wanted to allow a conscience vote on moral issues for MPs and that the parliamentary leadership lacked autonomy due to the personal interference of General Secretary Teodoro García-Egea, among other things).

She stated her clear opposition to Pablo Casado's decision to sack her, which according to her is bad for the party and the country. She said that Casado told her he was unhappy about her outspokenness (which he considers a challenge to his authority) and her opposition to talks with the Government on the Budget and the appointment of judges (from which she was completely excluded). She also claimed that he disliked her focus on "culture war" issues like feminism and the legacy of Franco's dictatorship.

In regards to her future, she didn't say whether she would resign from her seat or leave the party. She will spend a couple of days with her daughters before making any decision.

I mean, I do believe party members don't need to behave in a monolithic manner, but if you are a party's spokesperson in Congress, your statements probably need to reflect the direction the party leaders want.

[Skye]

Catalan elections: Cs replaces Lorena Roldán by Carlos Carrizosa as the candidate for the upcoming elections in Catalonia (without specific date as yet)

Carrizosa is currently the Cs spokesman in the Parliament of Catalonia, while Lorena Roldán is the Cs spokeswoman in the Spanish Senate. The reason alleged by Cs is the need for a candidate holding public offices only in Catalonia, as well someone "less identified with the Cs acronym" (astoundingly, Carrizosa is regarded less partisan than Roldán), in order to form a 'constitutionalist' alliance with PP and the PSC. Such alliance is very unlikely, as it's totally rejected by the Catalan socialists and the PP is not very interested (except maybe for joint lists in Girona and Lleida, where the PP has very few chances of winning seats in its own).

 Lorena Roldán was appointed candidate in July 2019, when Inés Arrimadas decided to jump into national politics to second former Cs leader Albert Rivera. I don't now the actual reaasons for this replacement atm

I don't know what they are thinking with that alliance. Why should the PSC agree to it? It's not gonna happen.

[Skye]

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned the next CIS poll must not be far away, they tried to poll me a few days ago. Obviously had to decline since I'm not a citizen

[Skye]

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned the next CIS poll must not be far away, they tried to poll me a few days ago. Obviously had to decline since I'm not a citizen

I assume they could have still had some questions for you? Obviously none relating to politics but at least some along the lines of "What are the 3 biggest problems Spain faces?"

I thought so as well, but the interviewer specifically told me I had to be a citizen, so...

[Skye]

So, like I told you a few days ago, the new CIS is out. It, unsurprisingly, shows a strong lead for the PSOE:

https://twitter.com/Electograph/status/1306541372183375873

[Skye]

CC and PRC might also be a possibility for abstaining but I think they will vote in favour.

Why should they abstain? I find it strange for regionalist parties not to agree with this.

Well, CC is still a centre-right party at the end of the day so while unlikely it is not inconcievable that they abstain. PRC probably votes in favour though I guess.

Also there are some regionalist parties that are almost certain to abstain or vote no: UPN and Foro Asturias, though they both are little more than PP puppets at this point, especially the latter.

Are they (UPN and Foro Asturias) even represented in the Cortes Generales? I have never heard of them.

Yeah UPN has 2 seats as "Navarra Suma". I think Foro Asturias also has 1 seat but I am not completely sure, the party was on the verge of extinction or fully merging into PP lately. (and has a rather big internal divide on whether they should evolve into a centre-right regionalist party or should just merge back into PP)

Ahhh so UPN is the mythical Navarra +

Are Madrid and the two Castilles the only autonomous communities without any regional parties?

To add to that, the PP goes to elections in Asturias as PP-Foro.

The Castilles have but they don't get traction outside of UPL (Unión del Pueblo Leonés) which is not Castillian but rather Leonese-regionalist.

Castilian regionalism is indeed irrelevant, aside the Leonese People's Unión (UPL) that advocates the separation of León in order to regain its former regional status. There are small fringe parties like Tierra Comunera or the Castilian Party, though

Más Madrid could be regarded a regional party, too. In the beginning it was a party founded to run in local and regional elections, even though Íñigo Errejón launched the Más País experiment months later in order to run in the last general elections. I think Más Madrid is a fully autonomous organization. Currently the MM leader is Mónica Garcia, who is also a doctor and the party's healthcare spokesperson. The spokesman in the regional assembly is Pablo Gómez Perpinyà , a close friend of Errejón, while the leader of the municipal group is Rita Maestre. I don't have a clue about the future of Más País

I mean, they're regional alright, but regionalist?

Also is Andalusian regionalism even relevant? I do know Adelante Andalusia was sooooooort of that, but it was mainly Podemos in the end, right?

[Skye]

Is a snap election the best tactical choice for Ayuso? There's a chance voting preferences are skewed because of the impact of the pandemic in Madrid. No guarantee how things will look from now until a hypothetical election is held.

[Skye]

Why do they post stuff that comes across like it was made by edgy 15 year-olds.

[Skye]

Why do they post stuff that comes across like it was made by edgy 15 year-olds.

Well they need to appeal to the younger demographic somehow.

Something that goes rather underrated is that Vox is actually quite weak among old people. They seem to peak among the 30-44 demographic.

However Vox also has an extremely strong vote among young men; and in fact Vox won a narrow plurality among said demographic.

I never know how accurate this is and I tend to post it more often than I should tbh, but here is the graph of vote split by age and gender:



Of course, with Vox the big story is actually the huge gender split and not the age split, but a significant age split still exists.

Am I missing something here? All of the parties except the PSOE have a lower % of the vote than what they obtained.

[Skye]

Just kill me.

[Skye]

https://twitter.com/PabloIglesias/status/1328647145478615040

Thanks, Pablo, this is really the tweet I needed right now 🙄

[Skye]

Pablo Iglesias is clearly mocking all his haters in Tweeter; whom apparently use that hashtag. Not a fan of Iglesias wearing his hair in a  bun (moño), but far right trolls are gonna hate regardless his hairstyle

Wasn't his nickname "El Coletas"?

[Skye]

At the risk of derailing the thread, this is just way too funny not to share:

https://twitter.com/AutRomaAutNihil/status/1331516384568860673

[Skye]

Anyway:
1. I'm surprised #trends haven't hit the region of Madrid yet.
2. [citation needed] on your comment about the EU, because it seems to me that it's always damn complicated to get that.
3. Your above post is a good explanation (not that I needed any - we are on a mainly American forum) of why I think federalism generally sucks.

1) Yeah, while there has been movement in Madrid lately, it is not the usual #trends of the cities going far left. The posh areas of Madrid (Salamanca neighbourhood) and upper class western suburbs (Las Rozas, Majadahonda, etc) thankfully still give the right routinely 70% or more. As things should be

Iirc Madrid is one of very few European capitals (maybe the only one?) that votes to the right of the country.

Whether or not #trends will eventually hit is a mystery, but for now Madrid remains something like 7 points to the right of Spain at large. Winnable in a wave, but not by much.

2) My thought was that the EU's regional development funds do a great job at propping up the less developed areas of the EU. Spain certainly benefited from this in the 80s and 90s; and nowadays it is Eastern Europe that is catching up very fast to Western Europe.

We just need a similar scheme at the national level.

Yes, actually, this map is titled "Spot the fancy neighborhoods":

[Skye]

Breaking: Health minister Salvador Illa will be the PSC leading candidate in the upcpming Cstalan elections, replacing the veteran secretary general Miquel Iceta. This move has been apparently planned months ago, although socialists always dismissed rumours. The main reasons to place Illa are his current popularity and the relationship with ERC. Salvador Illa has become unexpectedly a popular figure after the outbreak of the Covid-19 with approval rates hIgher than those of Miquel Iceta. Also, the relationship between Salvador Illa and Oriol Junqueras or the ERC leadership is more fluid. One of the main roles of Salvador Illa was actually participating in the round table with the Catalan government, a task well suited for a quite and discreet peacemaker. Before the pandemic Health was regarded a light ministry, given the high degree of decentralization with nearly all competences devolved to the regions. This changed dramatically since March, when  Illa took the centrilized command of the Health Emergency under the first state of alarm. On the other hand, the relationship between Miquel Iceta and Oriol Junqueras is tense and the enmiity of ERC towards him led the party to vero his election as senator by the Psrliament of Catalonia, frustrating the intent of Pedro Sanchez to make his loyal friend Speaker of the Upper House.

Salvador Illa remains as Heath minister for a while, but he will be eventually replaced. Incumbent Territorial Policy minister Carolina Darias would be the favourite to take the Health portfolio  while Miquel Iceta could enter the government in replacement of Darias

This honestly surprised me, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm not paying too much attention to politics atm, or if it was a real surprise.

[Skye]

So since the Catalan Regional election is in little more than a month I wanted to do a fun little project: The results of the 2017 Election by precinct in the city of Barcelona.

Naturally, I failed miserably, since OFC the Ajuntament de Barcelona doesn't have the results available in a format that I could work with.

They did, for some reason, have the precinct results of the Nov. 2019 General Election in a format that was relatively easy to work with, so I decided to give it a go. I was an extremely tedious process but I was able to produce this:



So this is a map that has 3 different blocs: The Spanish Right (blue), which is composed of PP, VOX, and Cs, the Spanish Left (red), composed of the PSC and ECP, and the Catalan Nationalists (Yellow), composed of ERC, JxCat, and CUP.

I know this isn't an "ideal" way to separate the blocs. For starters, as I understand, CUP and JxCat don't exactly see eye to eye, to put it mildly. Also, ECP which isn't exactly aligned with any group on the Catalan Independence issue. There's also Más País, which got 1.6% of the vote in the city and is missing in the "Left" bloc. The Ajuntament groups the party with other minor parties into the "Other" vote category, and as such, I wasn't able to include the party with the PSOE and ECP, which would've maybe won them a few more precincts, but alas.

I felt like this was a good place to start, since PP+C's+VOX and PSOE+UP are usually grouped together in the national level, and the pro-Independence parties are kind of their own thing. Plus, eldiario.es already has a precinct map which groups PP+C's+VOX+JxCat for the overall right wing % and the rest of the parties for the overall left wing %, if you wanted a map of that.

So overall in the city, we have:

Nationalists: 40.3%
Left: 35.6% (37.2% if MP is included)
Right: 20.5%

I'd appreciate feedback if you think this is (or isn't) an acceptable way of placing the Blocs.

[Skye]

Very nice map Skye! Congrats!. The colours are fine by me. Grácia and Eixample are really bastions of the pro-Independence. Les Cots and Sarrià are the most affluent areas of the city, right?

Thank you. Yes, parts of Les Corts and Sarria are among the most affluent in the city. The PP (by itself) easily won a few precincts there.

Though the precincts around the Passeig de Gracia in the Eixample district are very affluent as well, but the right doesn't nearly have the same strength there. That said, all of the precincts there were won by JxCat instead of the more left wing ERC, so there's that.

[Skye]

Nice map. Have you found precinct data for regional elections?

Thanks for your input, as well as the added context. Catalan politics is such an exhausting topic lol.

Regarding precinct data for regional elections, the data for the 2017 election is here:

http://www.bcn.cat/estadistica/catala/dades/telec/aut/aut17/caut1004.htm

So as you can see, the data is there, but trying to copy and paste it into excel just brings up a bunch of formatting issues that I simply wasn't able to solve. Maybe it's just that I'm not that savvy with this kind of stuff, but I just couldn't do it.

[Skye]

Nice map. Have you found precinct data for regional elections?

Thanks for your input, as well as the added context. Catalan politics is such an exhausting topic lol.

Regarding precinct data for regional elections, the data for the 2017 election is here:

http://www.bcn.cat/estadistica/catala/dades/telec/aut/aut17/caut1004.htm

So as you can see, the data is there, but trying to copy and paste it into excel just brings up a bunch of formatting issues that I simply wasn't able to solve. Maybe it's just that I'm not that savvy with this kind of stuff, but I just couldn't do it.

I trust this can work for you?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QhSAJrQ9DQkYRq6vhHmcdO3R3cXpBrpU/view?usp=sharing

It's not that hard to get into Excel, just need to know how set things up before you paste so it reads the table correctly. Also, can I recommend the next step after your block map? It seems the obvious follow-up would be comparisons of parties within the blocks - PSC vs Comu-Podem, PP vs C's vs VOX, ERC vs JxCAT vs CUP - since they are accepted be tenuous groupings, albeit the best ones for this situation.

Your spreadsheet is pretty much what I had. Here's the thing. There are two spaces after each number of votes in every cell with a vote. So I have to delete the spaces for the program to be able to recognize the numbers. I run a simple formula to do it. Bang, the number doesn't have the spaces afterwards. Yet it still doesn't work I don't know why. I run a formula to calculate the votes but it's like the program doesn't recognize it as number. I've tried messing with the number format but it doesn't seem to work. It only recognizes it as a number after I click on each number in its formula bar. And well, that's not gonna do it lol. I'll admit I'm not an Excel expert, but damn, I was frustrated with this one and just gave up. If you know of any way to work around it, let me know please.

Regarding the comparisons, it is indeed something I wanted to work on. However, I have to work first on a color scheme. I only have a red-blue color scheme that worked well enough for me for US maps, Spanish maps where only the left and right parties were involved, and Venezuelan maps. I had to make one for a third party for this map! Considering we're talking about 8 parties for this alone, that color scheme gonna take a bit of time. Hopefully I'll be able to have it ready by the time the election comes.

[Skye]

Try the link now. I believe I have solved your problem, and I uploaded a new version.

What you have described is a bit common when you CTRL+C/V straight from older websites. These websites have characters that separate the values which Excel does not recognize and are not spaces. ALT+0160 is the most common. Here's my quick and easy way to clean for these, since excel will do nothing with these characters.

-CTRL+C/V to new Excel Doc
-Remove any Commas/periods in numbers over 1000 with a CTRL-F. This may not be needed, and since they can be added back later with formatting, but I just do it for safety during future steps.
-Save it as UTF-8 CSV
-Open CSV in Notepad++. You will notice that there are characters (might appear as spaces/tabs) which are not numeric, a ", or a comma.
-Copy the characters and select everything in Notepad++. Do a CTRL+F and replace these characters with nothing. You could also remove all ", but it changes nothing.
-When the lines in the Notepad++ doc look like the following, you are done: ,"72","68","104",,,,,,,,
-Ctrl+C/V this into a new excel sheet and it will now work.

There are ways to set things up with a cleaning script to remove these things solely in excel, but this is quicker since you are just doing CTRL+F removals.

Wow, it really is fixed. Thanks for the steps, I'll try to do them myself to see if I understood them correctly.

Since the spreadsheet works, this map will be even easier to do than the previous one. But that'll have to wait until tomorrow, I'm gonna hit the bed now. Again, thanks!

[Skye]

Thanks to Oryx for his spreadsheet. Here's the 2017 Catalan Regional Election in Barcelona by precincts:



Same dynamic as the last time for the blocs, except VOX wasn't a thing back then so the right is only C's+PP. So in the city, we have:

Nationalists: 45.8%
Right: 29.0%
Left: 23.8%

The Spanish left posted poor numbers that year, and it shows. At glance, it seems it was only able to win 6 or so precincts. I made a gif to compare the 2017 to the 2019N one, and look how the most of the areas where the right performed well in 2017 were won by the left in 2019 (except in Ciutat Vella):



Wondering how will it go this year. Polls show the pro-Independence parties doing well (sometimes even earning around 50% of the vote combined), the Right almost certainly falling from its 2017 performance, and the Left in a middling position.

[Skye]

The issue with regional elections in Catalonia (specially since 2012) is that they haven't been fought on the ideological axis. Rather they have been contests focused on the sovereigntist process, between supporters and opponents of the Catalan independence. The 2017 election in particular came after the events in autumn 2017 (unilateral attempt of seccession) that led to the temporary suspension of the regional autónomy. Unlike the general elections, the most obvious bloc division for me is pro-independence (JxCAT, ERC, CUP) vs constitutionalist* (Cs, PSC, PP). Caralunya en Comu-Podem would be un no-man's land on this axis, as they represent a "third way" .

I could do a map of "Unionists" v. "Separatists" using the blocs you outlined. I just don't know about excluding CatComu-Podem.

[Skye]

Try to spot a small precinct in Sant Marti district that is light blue in the first map and dark blue in the second. It's an old housing block for national police agents.  The block is a PP bastion in Barcelona and I think it was the only precinct where the party came first in April 2019

I read about this during the election! Something along the lines of "No matter what happens, the PP will always win that precinct". Not sure if it was here or somewhere else.

[Skye]

So this little poll caught my eye. It’s a general election poll of Asturias, a usually left-leaning province, done by SyM:

https://twitter.com/electograph/status/1347489194243973122?s=21

It shows the right leading the left by a 51-44 margin. I guess it shouldn’t be *too* surprising since the left (especially UP) isn’t polling that well on national polls, but still.

For comparison, Asturias voted 51.5-45.8 for the left during the Nov. 2019 General election.