All good pals

WELL that’s a turnup for the books, or should it be turnip?

Vox does not believe in the EU but did not hesitate to present its list of candidates on May 26, presumably on a Trojan Horse basis.

Funnily enough, the VOX EuroMPs must sit with the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), Flemish allies of Carles Puigdemont, the self-exiled former regional president of Cataluña who declared independence on October 27 then scarpered.

Vox managed to get where it is by banging on about Spanish unity and calling on the national government to send in the Army to Cataluña and now its EuroMPs are sitting with Puigdemont’s pals.

You could call it democracy at work but you could also call it schadenfreude.

It’s never too late

MANUEL VALLS, the former French prime minister who also happens to be Spanish – and a Catalan – ran for mayor in Barcelona under the Ciudadanos banner.

In the end the most-voted parties were the pro-independence ERC and Ada Colau’s Barcelona en Comun, but Valls was brave enough not to listen to the diktats of Cs’ leader Albert Rivera.

He offered his unconditional support to Colau to keep out ERC’s Ernest Maragall who pledged to use the position of Barcelona mayor to further independence.

Colau took up the offer and Rivera has since disowned Valls and the three Cs councillors who followed his lead.

Rivera drew his red line by ruling out any pact that would allow the PSOE to form a national government but slightly relaxed his cordon sanitaire municipally and regionally.

Since the May 26 elections it is obvious that Rivera has obtained more municipal and regional benefit from Cs’ pacts with the socialists than being in thrall to Pablo Casado and Santiago Abascal. 

Hoping for the worst

PEDRO SANCHEZ will go to his investiture debate without knowing who will support him.

Podemos supremo Pablo Iglesias could do the dirty on him if he doesn’t get the ministry he thinks he’s entitled to.

Pablo Casada can’t support him and Albert Riveraç won’t, although the PNV nationalist will probably come through, leaving just odds and sods and the Catalan separatist.

So if Sanchez gets his votes that’s exactly what his opponents want:  backing from the wrong quarters and a stick to beat him with. 

In other words, Spanish politics at their most typical and their worst.

Wear a yellow ribbon

SO Ada Colau is once again back in Barcelona’s city hall.

And what has she done? She’s hung a yellow ribbon from the balcony, causing distress to the PSOE and giving Casado, Rivera and Abascal a fit of the vapours.

Colau always hedges her bets and obviously needs to placate her considerable number of pro-independence voters.

Those yellow ribbons denote solidarity with the remanded members of the former regional government responsible for the short-lived UDI. 

But is it separatist to feel that they should not be in prison, as Colau obviously does? And quite a few people outside Cataluña for that matter.