🐻 This Week in Spain: Groundhog Day 2

Also an arrested mafioso, Grand Prix is back, and scary watermelons.

Jul 27, 2023

By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | July 27, 2023 | Madrid | Issue #25

🎉 Welcome to The Tapa, an English-language, weekly newsletter about all things Spain!

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell: We’re done with elections… right? Spain finally went to the polls in the middle of summer and the people spoke loud and clear: None of the above. The question is now whether Pedro Sánchez can form a new coalition government or we head back to the polls… again.

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Voting on Christmas Eve, anyone?

Election Aftermath: Winners, Losers and What’s Next

What an election!

When we thought everything was said and done, here comes Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez once again to prove that he has more lives than a cat.

Yes, in theory the center-right Partido Popular (PP) won the election as it was the most voted party. But they ended up far from the 176 seats needed for an absolute majority, a number they couldn’t even reach by forming a coalition government with far-right Vox.

Sánchez’s center-left PSOE, however, may be able to reach that number—but in a cruel twist of fate they will need the support of the Catalan separatist party Junts per Catalunya run by Carles Puigdemont, who led the 2017 attempt to break away from Spain and now lives in self-imposed exile in the Brussels suburb of Waterloo (where Napoleon was defeated). So there’s certainly something symbolic there?

Will the Prime Minister find a way to strike a deal with them? The clock is ticking and if no deal is reached soon (more below about how “soon” is calculated), we may be forced to head to the pools again around Christmas. “Summer and Christmas?” you ask. Yes, hijo mio, we’re only doing vacation elections from now on.

First, let’s a brief look at the winners and losers of this election.

Winners

Pedro Sanchez, the PSOE and Yolanda Díaz’s Sumar (kind of)

The left mostly held its ground. Pollsters and pundits the country over counted them out for dead, but the PSOE and Sumar won 153 seats, just five less than the 158 the PSOE had with Podemos in 2019. Not the catastrophic flop expected. They managed to instill fear in many voters about what Vox would do—Franco will return!—and Sánchez didn’t attack Sumar, which kept things all smiley between them.
In the end, many of the government’s mistakes and controversies (the “only yes means yes” law, the pardon of jailed Catalan leaders, etc.) didn’t really translate into a massive migration of votes from the left to the right.
During his “victory” speech on Sunday night (see video above), Prime Minister Sánchez said Spain had spoken “loud and clear” and that the “regression bloc (PP + Vox), which proposed a total elimination of all of the progress we’ve made in these last four years, has failed”.

Losers

Alberto Núñez Feijóo (Partido Popular)

The leader of the center-right PP was predicted to be the biggest vote-getter of the elections. And he was. But while most pundits ventured that he would be able to form a government with far-right Vox, the two combined fell short of the magic number of 176 seats (PP’s 136 + Vox’s 33 = 169).
And because the PP was open to forming a government with toxic (for most) Vox—and did so in several comunidades—they now officially have cooties and no one will consider helping them get over the line. So he won… but he really lost. And now people are asking if Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso will replace Feijóo, but that’s for later.

Santiago Abascal (Vox)

Vox was the biggest loser of the night. The far-right party went from 3.6 million votes and 52 seats in parliament in 2019 to 3 million votes and 33 seats in 2023. So… really bad.
Santiago Abascal bears huge personal responsibility for the loss. Instead of laying low during the campaign, he played “How incendiary can I be?” by saying things like if there were a PP+Vox government in the Moncloa Palace the tensions with Catalonia’s separatist-led Generalitat would be “worse” than in 2017 (when they were f-ing awful). Which basically was a recipe to make every Catalan who was thinking of voting PP change his mind and inspire every on-the-fence voter (especially in Catalonia) who didn’t want to relive 2017 to come out to vote anti-PP/Vox.
In a last minute attempt to find a way to form a coalition government, Vox is now saying they would agree to a pact that includes “a few good socialists”. In other words, they are wondering whether PP can find a way to turn some PSOE seats and hopefully reach the 176 mark. This is, of course, practically impossible.
Vox remain the third largest political party in Spain, but their results were so bad that they can no longer put forward ill-considered no-confidence votes (like they did in March). You need 35. Vox may have reached its electoral peak.

What happens now?

First, ignore the noise. Feijóo has said he is ready to explore coalitions that allow him to hit the 176 mark, like by joining with the regional Basque nationalist party PNV. But the Basque party was quick to say they would never ever be part of a coalition government with Vox, and even criticized Feijóo of “crossing a red line” with his regional deals with the far right. Cooties, like we said. No way.

Feijóo also insisted that, since his party got most of the votes, he should be allowed to govern because that makes sense somehow. Not gonna happen.

The next step? For now, Sánchez will go on vacation, and fly to EU events that allow him to look “presidential”. While he is tanning and glad-handing, his team—most likely led by chief of staff Félix Bolaños—will be feeling out what he needs to offer to buy the support of the bazillion (okay, five) parties he needs to repeat as PM.

The new Parliament will be formed on August 17, and its officers will be elected. That’s when the King (you know, Felipe VI, aka Mr. Snazzy) will meet with the various parties and, when one says convincingly that it has the votes to form a government, will propose that candidate.
Then, the clock begins to tick. The proposed candidate will have two votes in parliament. In the first, he (or she, though probably he this time) needs a ‘yes’ vote from a majority of seats (i.e. 176) and in the second, just a majority of those who vote (abstentions play a part).
If the candidate fails, parliament has 60 days to elect a prime minister, after which parliament is dissolved and new elections would happen some seven weeks later. Fun!

The negotiations to form a government will (almost inevitably) be between Sánchez and the Catalan separatist parties. The question—will he offer enough to win them offer?

ERC may be happy with regional investment and steps toward some sort of ill-defined vote on changes in the relationship between the region and the central government.
But the more radical Junts, led by the self-exiled former regional boss Carles Puigdemont, insists that it demands full amnesty for those involved in the unconstitutional independence referendum the regional government put on in 2017 (the prosecution for which Puigdemont moved to Waterloo to avoid)—and a real referendum on the region breaking off from Spain. Negotiations will be tricky. Junts as a political party is hard to define as they are more of a curious amalgam of pro-independence activists than anything else. Defining them as leaning right or left would be a mistake (their fiscal policies tend to lean right) and achieving independence from Spain is their only true north.

How rigid their demands are and whether Sánchez thinks new elections will help or hurt him will determine whether we head back to the polls.

For now, enjoy your vacation!

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week

1. 🚨 An Italian mobster arrested on…Gran Via?

Madrid’s Gran Via was even livelier than normal on Monday—and no, it was not because Rosalia in disguise held an impromptu concert in front of Primark (though we’d like that). Instead, a gaggle of undercover cops arrested an Italian gangster while he was walking his dog, with a big fistfight and all!

The story began in a hotel in the Sardinian city of Cagliari, when the gangster and his girlfriend were supposed to deliver 3 kg. of cocaine to some buyers, but instead shot them up and walked away with the cocaine and the money to boot.
Italy’s Polizia di Stato busted the group of criminals behind this and other similar crimes, arresting 25 people. But they realized they’d missed two—the narco and his girlfriend.
They learned that the two might be in Spain. Through ENFAST (European Network of Fugitive Active Search Teams), the Italians brought in the Spanish police, and the chase was on.

The Spanish chase was difficult because the two were multilingual and had a pile of false ID documents of various nationalities. After investigating leads in Alicante, Barcelona and Malaga, police got a break in mid-July when they located the pair in a downtown Madrid hotel. Both were using Spanish ID documents.

Plainclothes police waited outside the hotel until, around noon, the two emerged—with their dogs.
5 policemen went to arrest the narco, who tried to flee… and then fought back. Two agents suffered minor injuries and the narco kept kicking even after being bundled into the police cruiser.

The agents seized €3,800, a Dominican passport and a Spanish driving license forged with the guy’s photo, as well as a Spanish ID document, also forged, with the photo of his partner. He was arrested on the charges brought up by Italy, and the woman was arrested for document forgery.

“Gran Via mobster arrest” is a good headline, but not quite as good as another Spanish takedown, when in December 2021 the police found an Italian gangster who’d be on the lam for 20 years after someone looking a lot like him appeared in a Google Maps photo outside of a vegetable shop he owned in Galapagar (home to Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero too!). “How did you find me?” he asked after his arrest. “I haven’t even called my family in 10 years.”

2. 🗳 Pollsters Weren’t So Good on 23J—except for one

Pollsters pretty much all got the 23J election results sort of wrong—most by overestimating the right.

The often reliable GAD3, which had the PP winning with 35.5% of the vote and 147-153 seats (compared to the 33.1% and 136 of reality) and the PSOE trailing with 28.6% and 109-115 (compared to 31.7% and 122) actually apologized. Most of the others were similarly wrong with some deviation. And the usually wrong CIS was right about the PSOE—and mostly wrong about the rest.

But one unexpected pollster got it mostly right. Atlas Intel, an outfit based in Brazil and founded by Andrei Roman, a Romanian political science doctorate from Harvard who left McKinsey in 2016 to found his own data consultancy. Why Brazil? That’s where his husband’s from.

Atlas doesn’t use traditional phone polling, like many do in Spain. Instead, they collect their data 100% online and use new methods like high frequency polling, big data and multilevel regression with post-stratification (no, we don’t understand that last bit either).
Roman’s company burst onto the scene with the 2020 U.S. elections, which the Wall Street Journal declared “the worst presidential polling miss in 40 years.” Atlas’s was the most accurate of all pollsters then. Nate Silver’s 538 gives it an A accuracy grade and ranked it 6th out of more than 500 pollsters.

So, of course, Atlas decided it would try its hand at Spain for 23J, even though no media organization had hired it. “It was more of an experiment, a strategy to build a reputation and verify that our method works in Spain, in a new context,” Roman told El Confidencial.

Atlas polled 2,974 Spanish voters from July 15-17 (the last day polling was allowed).
The results, while imperfect, were closer to reality than the pack. Atlas pegged PP with 30.8% of the vote; the PSOE with 29.4%; Vox with 17%; and Sumar with 16.1%. The real results were 33.1%, 31.7%, 12.4% and 12.3%, respectively.

Atlas’s results got the PP/PSOE balance right. They pegged the 1.7% different between the PP and PSOE, and saw that Vox would beat Sumar by a small margin.

Most importantly, their poll’s combined right vs. left vote totals of 47.8% vs. 45.5% showed a difference of 2.3 percentage points, when most showed the right leading by 5% or more, El Confidencial says (reality was a 1.4% win for the right, 45.4% vs. 44.0%).
Their poll had a margin of error of 0.87%, according to El Confidencial, compared to around 7% for the worst of the pollsters this time around.

Can the new kid repeat? We may see soon, if we redo elections at Christmas.

3.🐄 Grand Prix is Back on TV!

Those of you who were living in Spain back in the good old 90s will probably remember a game show called Grand Prix that was all the rage back then.

For those who weren’t, it looked like this:

The nearly three-hour show featured two small towns competing against each other (two teams of 30 people each and led by the town’s actual mayors) for a cash prize. For a fleeting moment, suddenly rural Spain had a time to shine as tiny villages became the center of attention as millions of people tuned in to watch how people tried to run up a ramp covered in wet soap.

There was a live band, lots of humor, celebrities and a series of physical trials. There was even a real cow chasing people around!
Even though the show ended in 2005, it has remained in the collective nostalgia of millennials, who watched it during their childhood with their parents or grandparents.

Now, almost 30 years after its debut, Grand Prix is back on TV with an updated version of the game and millions around Spain tuned in on Monday night to watch.

The show’s format includes almost everything that made the original a success: ridiculous feats of strength, hilarious falls, small towns competing against each other and even the same host, Ramón García.

One exception is the live cow, as the animal protection law would make it illegal to bring one to a TV stage to make it chase people around. (It’s now been replaced by a person wearing a cow costume).
Everything else is there, however, and this translated to 2.5 million people tuning in to the first episode, making it one of the most watched -and talked about- television events this year.

The decision to bring back the game show largely came down to live streamer and influencer Ibaí Llanos, who recently insisted during one of his shows that Grand Prix should be back in the air, kickstarting a conversation on social media about it.

The show’s concept may seem outdated, but producers are very much aware of this and are in fact appealing to nostalgia and promise viewers the chance to go back to a pre-polarization era of what they call “banana peel humor”: simple and non-political content, something that everyone will find funny.

You can watch Grand Prix on La 1 at 10:35 p.m. Mondays. It’s not Stranger Things or The White Lotus, but it’s still worth a watch to see what the fuzz is all about.

4.😂 Some Fun Highlights From Last Sunday’s Election

As you focused on the election results this last Sunday, you may have missed some of the more… colorful election stories that popped up on the social medias. Don’t worry. That’s why we’re here.

Have you checked the video above? That is Saldaña (Palencia) mayor Adolfo Palacios, from the PP, who showed up to the polls dressed as a Roman emperor guarded by soldiers and women in period costume. You may think he was trying to make a political statement, but you would be wrong.

Turns out that the municipality of Saldaña celebrates a traditional Roman Market (“Mercatus Romanus”) each year, an event that includes a military parade, various workshops and dramatizations of life in ye olde Roman period. And this time, the elections fell on the same weekend as the market, so, you know, the mayor decided to show up to vote already dressed for the military parade that was scheduled to take place at noon.
Saldaña has been celebrating the market for almost 20 years now. The market was created to promote the Roman Villa of La Olmeda, which includes a museum and an archaeological site with the remains of a fourth century Roman villa that was discovered back in 1968.

But no, there’s more! The Montserrat polling station in Madrid also attracted attention as Pablo Durango, whom you probably know better for his drag character Onyx, showed up for polling station duty dressed as the “alien queen” that rose to national fame after appearing on the second season of Drag Race Spain.

Onyx’s fine style didn’t go unnoticed.

Last but not least, this guy:

Meet Jorge, a man from Churriana, in Malaga, who showed up to vote wearing swim trunks, flippers, goggles and even a cooler. He said he wanted to send a message about the importance of voting—even if it took place in the middle of summer. “I had to come, even if I was on my way to the beach,” he said.

Democracy at its best.

5. 🍉 Tough year to be a watermelon—or to eat one

This year hasn’t been easy on Spain’s watermelon crops—or its watermelon eaters. And, it being Spain’s unofficial summer fruit, that’s a tragedy.

A mixture of drought, heavy rains, and hail have wreaked havoc on Spain’s watermelon regions—led by Andalucía (especially Almería)—both in 2022 and this year. After hitting record production 1,382 thousand tons in 2021, it fell to 1,163 last year.
2023 is expected to be similarly bad—or worse. Asaja, a farmers association, thinks the harvest will be down 52% in Valencia this year. “Watermelons are 90% water and in their final phase they need a lot of water. If they lack it, everything is lost,” a group spokesperson told Spanish News Today. (They are called watermelons after all.)

So what do you do? The easiest and most obvious workaround is to increase imports from Morocco, and that’s what Spain does.

Imports of watermelons from Morocco increased from about 95 thousand tons in 2021 to 122 thousand last year.
But those imports weren’t enough to keep prices down. Average per kilo prices jumped from around €0.80 in 2021 (according to Spain’s Agricultural ministry) to €1.19 last year.

But this year, facing a drought/downpour double-punch, there’s another problem. The European Commission’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) has issued a warning about Moroccan watermelons, after finding elevated levels of a prohibited pesticide, methomyl, in the fruit. The level it found was 0.19-0.38 ppm (parts per million), or 12 to 25 times (by our calculation—sorry if we’re wrong. Math, you know 😬) the allowed amount of 0.015 ppm.

What is methomyl? According to the U.S. EPA, it is an insecticide that farmers use to control plant and soil-borne insect pests on a variety of food and feed crops.
And what’s the danger? Again, in the words of the EPA, if a person is exposed to methomyl via mouth, skin or inhalation, it can “overstimulate the nervous system resulting in nausea, dizziness, confusion and at very high exposures (e.g., accidents or major spills), respiratory paralysis and death.”
The Spanish warning is less drastic, omitting the whole respiratory paralysis and death bit, though it notes that combining methomyl with alcohol can lead to kidney failure. Which is pleasant.

Maybe strawberries or blueberries this summer? 🍒🫐

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We’ll be back next week with more.