Centring on the Centre

CONFLICT: Carles Puidemont rejects dialogue.

THE central portion of the Partido Popular is cheesed off with Pablo Casado’s decision to lurch further to the Right to entice back defectors who have listened to Vox’s siren song.

The central portion of Ciudadanos – theoretically most of the party – is cheesed off with Albert Rivera’s lurch to the Right and his acceptance of Vox in Andalucia while vetoing the PSOE. And the PSOE?

The PSOE needs to woo everyone, and not only the diehards who have always voted PSOE regardless. Above all it needs to woo back the PSOE’s once-considerable support from the Centre. Pedro Sanchez, the Moncloa’s current tenant, is more beloved by the card-carrying militants who twice gave him the primaries than the territorial barons who gave him the bird.

But the Centre – the PSOE’s and everyone else’s – is there for Sanchez to mop up and it is the Centre, especially the undecided Centre, which decides elections.

Theirs are the votes all parties need and Casado and Rivera ignore them at their peril because they will push them into Sanchez’s arms.

Yes me no yesses

THE PDeCat’s (Catalan independence party) National Committee recently met to decide its election strategy. This entails making life as difficult as possible for everyone concerned, including those in their own party who want non-conflictive independence and some kind of understanding with the other parties.

Its list of candidates for the General Election on April 28 underline Carles Puigdemont’s rejection of dialogue and his decision to go all out for conflict. As someone once said of GW Bush in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, he’s not going to take yes for an answer.

Black joke

THE irony of it! Not long ago, Spain was proclaimed as the healthiest country in the world, thanks mainly to virgin extra olive oil and its 85.8 year average life expectancy, according to a Forbes.com online report.

Then, an OECD survey goes and finds that only 6.4 per cent of the Spanish are happy with their lives, compared with the Finns who top the list.

Spain is credited as the cradle of black humour and what else could you expect in a country where the population is condemned to live longer than everyone else and be bloody miserable at the same time.

Cup runneth out

ANTI-SYSTEM party CUP announced that it will not present candidates in next month’s election. 

This is not a priority CUP, said party spokeswoman Mireia Boya: “The necessary conditions do not exist to present a groundbreaking and transforming candidature in Madrid.”

It’s tempting to respond with ‘chicken!’ because CUP held PDeCat to ransom when its votes were needed to install Artur Mas as regional president in 2016. 

Mas’s head its price and PDeCat could come up with no-one better than Girona’s mayor, Carles Puigdemont.

CUP had as much to do with pushing the Procesas PDeCat, ERC or the pro-independence organisations Omnium and ANC. The party has a great deal to answer for, because it foisted Carles Puigdemont on not only Cataluña, but the rest of Spain, too.

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Cassandra

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