🇪🇺 This Week in Spain: Who Wins the EU Elections? Who Cares?

Also: A comedian gets punched in the face and Feijóo and Puigdemont... joining forces?!

Jun 06, 2024

By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | June 6, 2024 | Madrid | Issue #60

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🥜 This Week in a Nutshell: The big story this weekend is the EU elections, something you care very little about and that you probably don’t really understand anyway so why even bother. However, political leaders care. They care a lot and we explain it.

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Dumpster fire summer is here

Tensions Rise as Spain Prepares to Vote in the EU Election

European Parliament elections are being held in Spain and across the EU this Sunday, June 9, and the expected rise of the far right could reorder the bloc’s politics in unknown (and unpleasant) ways. So big deal, right? But at the same time, for a long litany of reasons people don’t seem to care about European Parliament elections (like, do they have any power?). Which leads us to Henry Kissinger.

Now, we’re not normally the type to quote Kissinger (especially when he’s quote-stealing someone else), but watching Spain’s politicians brutally tear into each other in the run-up to these elections, we couldn’t help but think of his doozy, “The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.”

But seriously: In advance of the EuroParl polls, the nastiness in Spain’s political sphere has elevated itself into a kind of Platonic ideal of electoral unpleasantness. So much so that it almost turned into Argentina.
Which is bad, because if one exaggerates every injury, if everything is the end of the world, then nothing is the end of the world.

Let us count the ways.

Pedro is in so much ❤️ ! (Or, “L'État, c'est Begoña”)

It all started on Monday (like all unpleasantness does), when local Madrid judge Juan Carlos Peinado cited Sánchez’s wife Begoña Gómez to testify on July 5 in a probe into alleged influence peddling (or, rather, into whether she influenced Pedro to help businesses she knew).

A bit weird: The case appears flimsy so far—it was filed by Manos Limpias, a group with far-right ties, and based only on news clippings. And by calling Gómez days before the EU polls, the judge broke a longstanding (albeit unwritten) convention that cases with political impact would stay quiet in the pre-election period. So, bit off, that.
Still, the courts do their thing. Judges call who they want, and Gómez hasn’t been charged, so roll with it, drop a “We have absolutely nothing to hide and we’re sure the truth will out”, and move on, right?

Wrong. After the huge success of his first “letter to the citizenry”, Prime Minister Sánchez posted another one to slam the judiciary and the media and proclaim his love for his wife.

Really, don’t believe any of it. In the letter, he suggested readers “should come to their own conclusions” about why the judge called Gómez before the elections (far-right ‘lawfare’, wink wink, nudge nudge) and slammed “digital tabloids born to spread fake news“ where “everything is a lie” (aka no need to even read them, please?). He also added that in the coming days people would see “a careful choreography designed by the far-right coalition” to discredit the government etc. etc. etc.
In case you were worried. “You can be assured that I will not be broken,” he wrote.

Lest we forget Pedro’s love. Sánchez reiterated his affection for Begoña and his belief in a woman’s right to work (which isn’t exactly the issue here, but anyway…). He also brought her to a PSOE election rally (though she did not speak).

Pedro did speak though: “I speak to you from the heart: these days, these last few months, when the attacks of the international far-right have hit me and my family very hard, I have felt the solidarity, the empathy, the camaraderie of a great family.”

It was all a very dramatic reaction to being called to testify.

Alberto doesn’t want to 🤬 Pedro but he has to exaggerate so people care!

PP leader Alberto Nuñez Feijóo apparently felt the need to reply in equally dramatic style, but this does not come easy to the phlegmatic Galician politician.

Feijóo started by blasting the “deception, arrogance and cocky attitude of Sánchez, who believes he is immune” to his wife’s case.

But that wasn’t really enough, considering Sánchez’s full-throated roar. So Feijóo turned it up to 11.

Warming up. The PP president said “the entire career” of Sánchez “has been a hoax”: “Now it turns out that he has corruption in his house,” he added, noting, that “whether criminal or not, [her activities] are ethically reprehensible and politically unacceptable”
Sánchez is just like Maduro (or something): “That they accuse the wife of the president of the Government and he plays the victim is blackmail more typical of populism than of a Western democracy,” Feijóo said.
But no, there’s more. Feijóo went on (and on): “A government of a European country cannot attack judges on a daily basis,” he said, and called Sánchez “the first harasser of judges” (Catchy! Or not).

All limbered up for the elections by the bipartisan rending of garments?

🗳️ The actual European parliamentary elections

Let’s talk elections specifics! We’ll be brief, we promise. We know how boring this is to you.

38m people in Spain will be eligible to vote. They’ll be part of a total of 370m people in Europe who can vote to elect the 720 MPs (which is a lot!). Spain has 61 seats, the fourth largest number after Germany (96), France (81) and Italy (76).
33 parties (!) are participating in Spain, with PSOE, PP, Vox and Sumar being likely to get most of the votes. Other parties expected to get votes include Podemos, Ciudadanos and the Ahora República coalition (nationalist lefty parties ERC, Bildu and BNG).
Junts is also running (obviously) as Junts y Lliures per Europa. And then there’s newcomer Se acabó la Fiesta (the Party’s Over party) which we’re sure is going to give us lots of puns in the future.

So who are the candidates? There are many, but let’s just focus on the five that are likely to get the most votes (sorry, other minor candidates!).

Teresa Ribera, PSOE: Center-left. Third Deputy Prime Minister and current Ecologic Transition minister.
Dolores Montserrat, PP: Center-right. Former Health Minister and current vice-president of the European People’s Party.
Estrella Galán, Sumar: Left. Director of the Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid.
Irene Montero, Podemos: Far-left. Former Equality Minister.
Jorge Buxadé, Vox: Far-right. Chief of Vox’s European delegation.

Who’s gonna win? Well, depends on who you ask.

Home-field advantage. According to the CIS (led by someone close to Sánchez) the PSOE is expected to come out on top with between 31.6% and 33.2% of the vote. The PP would come second with between 28.3% and 30.5%. Vox would be third with 9.9%-11% and Sumar would be fourth with 5.4%-7.1%.
The rest of the polls. They say the PP —not the PSOE—will win this weekend. This poll for ABC (a conservative paper) says the PP will get 34.9% vs. 29.8% for PSOE. This other poll for La Sexta (a progressive network) also predicts a PP victory with 33.8% vs. 29.5% for PSOE.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? We’d say we were taking bets but that would be illegal.

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week

1. 🎯 Madrid ex-deputy mayor’s brother killed in possible gangland murder

The brushes with the law of those close to Spanish politicians took a tragic turn on Tuesday afternoon, when 41-year-old Borja Villacis—the younger brother of Madrid’s former deputy mayor, Begoña Villacis (Ciudadanos)—was shot to death alongside the M-612 Fuencarral-El Pardo highway.

It began with a meeting. Borja, driving a rented white Citroën C3 and accompanied by two friends in a blue car, met with two men and a woman in a rented gray BMX X2 sometime around noon.
The meeting did not end well. The three in the BMW drove off and Borja, accompanied in the Citroën by one of his friends, chased, until the Citroën crashed into the driver’s side of the BMW. It’s unclear whether he hit them on purpose—or they cut him off.
Deadly exchange. The two men in the BMW exited the vehicle and, with a 7.62 mm caliber rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun, shot Borja in the head and chest. He died immediately. Borja’s friend Luis, 43, was also shot in the head, but the wound was not life threatening,
The getaway. The three in the BMW sped off. When they stopped along highway M-603, with the driver side dented and the airbags blown, they changed the license plate, tossed it and the guns into the woods, and the two men ran away. The whole thing was caught on video by some office workers who were looking out the window across the street and the whole thing is surreal to watch.
Woman caught. Searching the area where the BMW stopped, the police found the license plate and weapons, but not the men. A search with helicopters, drones, and 50 police was launched, and the woman—María José, 52—was caught two hours after the crime at a gas station in Plaza Elíptica in the south of the city. She claimed to have been kidnapped, to no avail.

Wait, wait, wait. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in Madrid, right? No, not normally. But while Borja was related to a well-known and by all accounts honest politician, he himself had a darker past.

20-year rap sheet. Borja reportedly had been a member of Ultras Sur, the far-right football hooligans group who occupied the south stands at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium, and was arrested in 2004 after beating the crap out of a guy outside a Moncloa bar along with an Ultras Sur leader. He was later linked to Outlaw Madrid, a neo-Nazi criminal group.
Recent legal problems. Borja received a 6 month sentence and a €9,000 fine for assault, and stood accused of large scale drug trafficking and money laundering alongside Outlaw leader Antonio Menéndez aka 'El Niño Skin'. On a more above-board level, Borja had also apparently been working as a taxi driver.

But having a criminal record doesn’t make it okay to kill him. Very true. But it may offer clues. María José and the two other men—more on that in a moment—were linked to a criminal drug gang that began in Bargas (Toledo) before moving to the south of Madrid.

The other two caught. On Wednesday, police arrested María José’s son Kevin Pastor and the other (so far unnamed) suspect in Yuncos (Toledo).
The ‘why’ is still unknown. “There is no hypothesis that I know,” Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told reporters in the halls of the Senate. Spanish media say a crime-related ajuste de cuentas (payback) is the going police theory

Our condolences go out to Begoña Villacis whom we’ve both met and very much liked.

2. 🤝 Fejióo ❤️ Puigdemont to oust Sánchez?!

Wait… what?! Yes. You read that right.

PP voters suddenly grew very confused about a Monday Antena 3 interview in which party boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo apparently admitted that he wasn’t ruling out a no confidence vote (Europe’s version of impeachment) against PM Sánchez after this Sunday’s elections—a move that in order to be passed would need the support of Catalan separatist party Junts, led by current outlaw Carles Puigdemont.

For those who don’t remember: Both right-wing parties PP and Vox consider Puigdemont and Junts to be a bunch of treacherous (and sometimes even terrorist) politicians whose push for an independent Catalonia is a crime against Spain. (Now, Junts leans right in many areas but they are pro-independence first and right-wing second.)
So what happened? Feijóo (which means “He who is prone to putting his foot in his mouth” in Gallego… joking, but not really), was asked whether he would pursue a no confidence vote in Parliament if the PP won the European elections. His response? If a majority of people “send a message” this weekend that they “disagree” with the current government, then he’d be ready to pursue all available options and yes, a no confidence vote to oust the PM would be one of those options.

But the numbers, man. Feijóo’s party has 136 seats in Parliament and it needs a majority of 176 for a no confidence vote to pass, so it would need the support of other parties. PSOE’s opponents Vox and UPN, with 33 seats and 1 seat respectively, could certainly support it, which gets you to…171. And let’s say they get Coalición Canaria (1 seat) to agree. That makes 172. They would still need 4 more. Which means they’d need the votes of the parties that are currently supporting the PSOE coalition: PNV (5 seats), EH Bildu (6 seats), ERC (7 seats) or *drumroll* Junts (7 seats).

But did Feijóo actually say he’d be joining forces with Junts? No. But he didn’t say he wouldn’t. And in Spanish politics, that’s a mistake. While the PP trotted out the old bits about Feijóo “misspeaking” and people “misinterpreting” his words, both the PSOE and Vox immediately began using the interview to score points, noting it was high hypocrisy to diss Sánchez for reaching a deal with the Catalan leader and then turn around and look for the dude’s votes.
To be clear. PM Sánchez said on the campaign trail that, “Feijóo has bouts of truth, of sincerity… Today he’s said it clearly: his proposal is a no confidence vote with Abascal and Puigdemont. They are absolutely desperate”. Vox, for their part, mocked Feijóo by speculating how his party would reward Puigdemont: “Would they name a plaza after him?”

And where was Junts in all of this? Nowhere to be seen, of course, as their strategy is always to negotiate “discreetly” with all parties and laugh when there are problems.

3. ⚽ Something happen with Real Madrid this week?

Fine, we know: Real Madrid had a fantastic week. They beat Borussia Dortmund 2-0 to win their 15th (!) Champions League trophy, which is eight more than the second-biggest winner (Milan) and three times the trophy collection that arch-rival Barcelona have won. Oh, and they signed the world’s most wanted free agent, PSG star Kylian Mbappé (see video above—he’s good), which means they should be even better next year. Verdict? Not fair.

But we’re not here to bore you with obvious ~~soccer~~ “football” news. If you cared about the Champions League final, they you would have watched it, and if you follow footy, you would already know about Mbappé.

Instead, we’re going to talk about stats, because we’re statistics dorks. An article by El País’s Kiko Llaneras—our favorite statistics miner/election poll guru—caught our eye this week because it showed how out of this world Real Madrid’s success has been—statistically.

What Does Real Madrid Have Against Statistics? That’s the title of the article where Kiko dives into the utter improbability of the fact that Madrid has won every one of the last nine Champions League finals it has appeared in, back to 1998.
9 in a row. Yes, that’s weird. Because the final in theory features the best two teams in Europe (aka the world) so one would be expected to lose occasionally. But Real Madrid? Not so much.
Let’s talk numbers. Kiko uses the Elo rating system, originally from chess, to assign Real Madrid a probability of winning for each of the finals. (Too boring to delve into too deeply, but it involves assigning each team points based on its results and then comparing them.)
Shrinking to zero. Real Madrid only had a 29.8% probability of winning against Juventus in 1998, for example. Then, Kiko multiplied out the probabilities against each team over the nine wins, and discovered that Real Madrid had a… 0.3% probability (!) of winning all nine in a row.

Seriously? Yeah. That’s less than a 1-in-300 chance of winning the nine. Amazing. No wonder FC Barcelona President Laporta claims that Real Madrid gets favorable treatment from the refs. (Our theory is much simpler: a deal with the devil).

But don’t take our word for it. Here’s Kiko’s work.

Final heartwarming note. The father of Real Madrid right-back Dani Carvajal (who scored the first goal against Borussia Dortmund) is a policeman, and while on duty accompanied the team’s celebratory parade (on horseback) to Cibeles on Sunday. Together they took a photo with the trophy. Awww…

4. Neo-Nazi dude attacks comedian making bad jokes (and eventually they make up 😘)

The way we live now.

You cannot even enjoy a not-so-great stand up act without some guy jumping on stage and punching the comedian. (Thanks, Will Smith).

That’s what happened this Monday evening to humorist Jorge Caravaca, whose act in Madrid went viral for all the wrong reasons. But first, let us explain who’s who in this tragic story of hate and redemption. We begin with Jorge Caravaca.

Caravaca is a stand up comedian from Murcia who used to do the warm up act at La Resistencia (you know, David Broncano’s hit interviews show that’s now moving to TVE) until he was fired three years ago.
His jokes are… controversial, to say the least. In fact, he’s apparently been “censored” on Instagram for some of his witticism, which usually targets the right and the far-right.
Caravaca has made some unfortunate “jokes” or comments on social media, including one that made light of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s miscarriage last year, saying “no one could put up with her for nine months”.

So far so good, amirite? Then there’s the other guy, Alberto Pugilato.

Pugilato (stage name) is, well, the lead singer in a white supremacist band. According to El País, he’s considered “one of the most prominent neo-Nazi figures” in Spain by the local authorities.
He has a pretty troubled history with the police, has publicly supported the white supremacist who killed 51 people in a terrorist attack in New Zealand and was also sentenced to a year in prison for peppering his songs with racist lyrics.

We know, this all sounds like the plot of a 90s sitcom featuring two guys that are forced to live together. But there’s more.

The drama started when Caravaca, who likes to taunt the right-wingers on social media, decided to tweet at Pugilato last Friday night saying that “nothing nor no one” could stop the possibility that his three-month old son “is gay, and when he’s an adult he doesn’t get tired of sucking a black man’s dick”.
Pugilato’s response on Twitter was to ask him to apologize, to which Caravaca responded “Apologize to a neo-Nazi? I don’t think so, dude”. So Pugilato responded by warning that he would discover that “real life isn’t Twitter”.

Fast forward to Monday night, when Pugilato jumped on stage during Caravaca’s act and punched him (see video above).

Caravaca seems to be frozen in fear while Pugilato threatens him and later apologizes to the audience, explaining that he did it because of the “pedophile” comments he had made “about his newborn son”. (To be fair to Caravaca, referring to his tweet as “pedophile comments” is a stretch since he said “when your son is an adult,” but we think we can all agree children should be off limits in Twitter, right?).
The video spread like wildfire on Tuesday (both men became trending topics on Xitter) and, as with everything in these polarized times, people had to pick a side. You were either with the “concerned father against the pedophile comedian”, or with the “comedian attacked by a neo-Nazi”.
Even Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun tweeted about it and said that he stood with the comedian and that there was “zero tolerance” for this kind of violence.

But hey, this story has a happy ending.

No charges were filed by Caravaca. Yes, the police showed up but there were no injuries so, after talking to both, no one was arrested.
Caravaca decided to apologize on Twitter, explaining that even though he intended for the tweet about Pugilato’s son to be a joke, in fact “it was an unfortunate and inappropriate comment.”
Surprisingly, Pugilato reacted positively to it, responding “I accept your apology, Jaime”. He added he defended “freedom of expression” the same way he defends “the right to respond” and that “he didn’t wish him ill”.

This is… surprisingly mature, all things considered. Maybe a sitcom with both of them isn’t such a bad idea after all.

5. 🦟 That sounds like a terrible idea, right?

Meet the tiger mosquito: Originally from southeast Asia, this bad boy arrived in Spain in 2004 (ah, those were the boom times!), and has spread ever since. This did not make public health people happy, as Don Tigre is famous for spreading diseases such as Dengue, Zika, Yellow Fever and Chikungunya (which are bad, btw).

But there’s a plan to eradicate him! The city hall of Valencia, which has a bit of a mozzie plague problem, has plans to release 1.3 million male tiger mosquitos, which…
What?! Wait a minute. They’re going to release over a million mosquitoes? To stop mosquitoes? Yes, indeed, they are. And…it actually makes sense (and is funnier than you might expect).

Undercover love machines. The 1.3 million male insects are bred in a lab and then irradiated, which renders them sterile.

All horned up but nowhere to go. Once freed in the wild, these horny, radioactive beasts are fruitful and multiply. Actually, that’s exactly what they don’t do. Instead they have lots of mosquito sex, which leaves the hopeful lady insects with worthless eggs, thus vastly shrinking the number of offspring.

It’s true! Horny Hulk Mosquitoes will save us all. In the words of Health and Consumer Affairs Councilperson José Vicente Gosálbez, "these male mosquitoes do not bite the population, but they are effective in eradicating the pest and preventing the transmission of diseases."

Tried before—and effective. The technique was applied in 2019 and 2020 (see video above), and reduced the mosquito population by some 70% in the areas where it was used. This year the technique will be used across the Comunidad de Valencia.

Stupid sterile men of the world rejoice, for ye have a calling!

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