💥This Week in Spain: Post-Election Mayhem

Also: Puigdemont is still at it, Sumar loses its leader and there's a new far right in town.

Jun 13, 2024

By @IanMount and @AdrianBono | June 13, 2024 | Madrid | Issue #61

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

🥜 This Week in a Nutshell: Remember this meme? Well, this week we were already sharing it by Monday afternoon. That’s how crazy things have been in the last few days. The EU elections, the increasing legal troubles surrounding PM Sánchez’s family, more drama in Catalonia’s Parlament and Yolanda Díaz’s surprise announcement. And we haven’t even discussed the new far right party that’s making Vox look moderate! Fasten your seatbelt, readers. It’s going to be quite a ride.

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EU Election Aftermath: PP Wins, PSOE “Wins”, Vox Rises and Sumar Collapses

Yes, we know. The main takeaway from this Sunday’s EU elections is that the far-right has grown considerably in countries like France and Germany, but the pro-EU parties have still managed to hold on and get enough votes to remain in power at the EU Parliament. The center held.

We write about Spain, however, so let’s talk about how things went down here, shall we? (Spoiler alert: pretty weird, but the center held here too.)

Nobody voted. Well, “nobody.” Only 49.21% of the Spanish electorate cast their ballot (we told you last week that not many people care about these elections) to elect the 61 people that will represent this country in the European Parliament.
Seriously, a big drop. That’s down from 60.7% in 2019, when five million more Spanish voters cast ballots than last Sunday. So when we say “nobody”, we sorta mean it.

Still, people got elected! So let’s look at each party individually.

The Winner: The PP (center-right)

The Spanish branch of the European Popular Party, headed by candidate Dolors Montserrat, won the election by pretty much every measure, but still seemed sorta grumpy. (More on why they were grumpy in a minute.)

The PP got 34.2% of the vote for 22 seats, nine more than in 2019. And their 6 million votes was almost 1.5 million more than in 2019. So fantastic, right?
Much of their new votes were old votes. Ciudadanos, a one-time liberal party that tried to outflank the PP on the right and died trying (thanks, Albert Rivera), went from 2.8 million votes and eight seats to 121,031 votes and no seats (diagnosis: bad). Now, they didn’t get all those Ciudadanos voters, but remember, 5 million fewer voters this time.
So PP thrilled, right? Well, PP boss Alberto Núñez Feijóo had predicted a landslide victory, assuring that this election was going to be a referendum on socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government and it simply wasn’t. The PP only beat the PSOE by two seats.
Still, we’re smiling! The PP sent out talking points right after the election to prove they were happy winners. Or angry winners. But winners. “The PP gave the PSOE its biggest defeat in European elections in 25 years”; “Feijóo won his third national election. Sánchez obtained his worst result in European elections”; “Sánchez said that he wanted to ‘give himself the pleasure of beating Feijóo.’ PEDRO, THE PLEASURE IS OURS.” (The CAPS were theirs. So much happy! 😃).

The “Winner”: The PSOE (center-left)

The Spanish socialists, led by candidate Teresa Ribera, came in second after PP, but they still declared it a victory and found reasons to celebrate.

PSOE managed to get 30.2% of the votes for 20 seats. This means that the center-left only lost one seat, which is… great? Or at least good enough? In short, it is.
Like we said: The PSOE only lost one seat and ended up trailing PP by two, which, when you set the bar low, ain’t bad.
However, this isn’t such a great victory for Sánchez. His party got 700,000 less votes than the PP (meaning that the difference between them has doubled if you compare it to last year’s 23J elections when the difference was 350,000). This time, PSOE only won the Canary Islands, Catalonia and Navarra. Not much winning.
What’s worse? Andalucía (which historically has voted PSOE in Euro elections), switched to the PP for the first time ever: the center-right party got 37.85% of the vote there while PSOE got 32.16%. And this should sound the alarm for the socialists.🚨

The sort-of-winner: Vox (far-right)

Santiago Abascal’s party, led in the Euros by Jorge Buxadé, did better than last time round, but didn’t turn in one of those “Oh my god the far right in soaring” results like in Germany or Austria.

Two more far righties in Brussels. Vox went from 1.4 million to 1.7 million votes to rise from four seats to six. This is not the boom that Marine Le Pen’s party saw in France, but, hey, it’s something.
Actually happy. In the words of Buxadé: “We have had a great result regarding last summer's elections. There are going to be more of us and they are going to hear us much more and with much more force.” At least he’s happy. We don’t know how we feel about that, but moving on…

The Loser: Sumar (left)

It was only last year that smiley lefty pol Yolanda Díaz launched Sumar, a coalition of leftist political parties, to ~~steal the leftist space from Podemos~~ represent those to the left of PSOE. And after this election weekend, her leadership is no more, because her party was sorta nowhere.

No votes. Sumar only got 4.7% of the vote (three seats in the EU parliament) which is, um, not good, and prompted her to announce on Monday that she was stepping down as leader of the platform that she put together in 2023.
But not really stepping down. On Tuesday, however, things got a little (or a lot) confusing when she “clarified” things. You see, she said, she was leaving as the platform’s leader, but not quitting as second Deputy Prime Minister, Labor minister or president of the Sumar caucus in Parliament. She also said “Yolanda Díaz continues as an Executive within Sumar. Yolanda Díaz is not leaving… I’m staying,” weirdly speaking in the third person for some reason.
So…? Anyway, she kinda quit (just as leader and nothing else) and the platform now needs to pick another general coordinator. Confused? Us too.

So much losing: Junts (center-right, Catalan separatist)

Remember Catalan separatist party Junts, led by outlaw Carles Puigdemont, who can’t return to Spain (or risks being arrested over the whole 2017 illegal independence referendum thingee if he does). Well, Junts UE (you know, for the EU) didn’t have a great night either.

And then there was one. The party only got 433,000 votes (2.55%) and lost two seats in the EU parliament. They used to have three, now they have one, which belongs to EMP (and less famous outlaw) Toni Comín, who stepped up to the job after Puigdemont decided to run for Catalan presi last month (and came in third).
These are not the droids you’re looking for. Comín said the balance was “frankly positive”, but in total they’ve lost half a million votes when comparing it to the 2019 results. Frankly not being frank!

Others you probably don’t care about

Little guys lost. Podemos (they were once the left), Ahora Republicas (ERC is hiding in there), and CEUS (PNV is hiding in there) all did really badly and lost seats and votes. The less said, the better. Let them have their cry in peace. 😭

Special mention

Se Acabó la Fiesta (far, far right): This one deserves its own separate explainer, so see below to find out why we are heading towards societal collapse thanks to social media (and we’re not doing anything about it). Frankly positive!

Bonus: Parliamentary clash—again.

Old friends. Yesterday, Sánchez and Feijóo clashed on the Parliament floor (as they do every week), and the PP leader asked the PM to “be responsible and resign”, and mocked him for both the election results and for having a Deputy Prime Minister who had “resigned just a little bit” (Yolanda Díaz).

Mic drop. “And it’s only Wednesday, Mr. Sánchez,” Feijóo concluded, coming full circle and totally vindicating the meme that we shared at the beginning of today’s newsletter.

👇👇👇👇👇 More news below! 👇👇👇👇👇

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💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties this week

1. 🐿️ Who the hell is Alvise? (or, the party’s not over for The Party’s Over party)

Ed.’s note: We told you last week there would be puns. We delivered.

One of the craziest stories of the European elections is the unexpected rise of a new far-right leader (or maybe we should say far far-right?) who ran exclusively using his Telegram channel and who makes Vox look like moderate and bo-ring.

Meet the unhinged professional agitator and social media troll Alvise Pérez (née Luis Pérez Fernandez), who astonishingly managed to get 800,763 votes and three seats in the European Parliament for his electoral group called Se Acabó la Fiesta (“The Party’s Over”), or SALF, promising to end “corruption, crime and pedophilia” in the government. Because…lots of pedophilia?

We say “group” because The Party’s Over is not even a political party (we still call it a party for the puns). It’s literally just a group that he put together in order to run. In fact, there’s nothing on the SALF website. No information, no political manifesto, no campaign promises. It’s just a site that he used to gather the 15,000 signatures he needed in order to run.

So who the F (or SALF) is Alvise Pérez? This 34-year-old Sevillano is a college dropout (he calls himself “academically illiterate”) who had brief stints as a member of Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPyD) first and later of the now-defunct centrist party Ciudadanos (he was chief of staff in the Valencian Parliament but quit after a year). He also tried Vox but apparently it didn't take.
That’s when he decided to go rogue and started weaponizing social media by bombarding his followers with fake news and misleading stories that he presented as “real news” as part of his crusade against “corrupt politicians and criminals”. Think of his politics as a guy screaming “freedom!”, “anti-dictatorship!”, “anti-taxes!” and “anti-feminism!”. If you think about it, that’s quite a anti-combo. Oh, he’s also anti-vax and a climate change denier. We hear he likes cats, however.
Alvise built his community on Telegram (he calls his followers “squirrels” 🐿️). Appealing mostly to the far right (and also some far left, but always “far”) conspiracy theorists, he has become a cultish hero to disenfranchised voters who think everyone in the world (i.e. politicians, the media, international organizations, cows) is lying except for him and all institutions are corrupt. In short, he’s “the only one who tells the truth”. He’s our own little Jesus. You know all the people you see online sharing posts on Facebook about QAnon, reptilians, microchips in vaccines and Tom Hanks being a pedophile? This is what happens when they organize and it’s… not great.
His fiery rhetoric gets its inspiration from Argentina’s Milei, El Salvador’s Bukele and Donald Trump among others. During his victory speech Sunday, he said he would put Pedro Sanchez in prison (he didn’t say how or why, but only nerds are into specifics).
Just like Milei, he has said he would raffle his Euro MP salary to get more people to join his Telegram account and make sure they “start getting informed” through him.
After getting in legal trouble over corruption accusations he made against some high profile politicians, he admitted that he wanted to get a seat in the European Parliament in order to get immunity from slander lawsuits and be free to continue to “inform” his audience. His Telegram group now has over 800,000 followers.

Who votes for him? Mostly young men in small towns, locations where unemployment is high and there’s a high presence of immigrants. In fact, 18.7% of SALF voters supported Vox in the 2019 elections.

And now he’s in the EU parliament. Fun times ahead.

2. ☑️ Catalan separatists aren’t dead yet

PM Pedro Sánchez got some unwelcome news Monday when his socialist sister party in Catalonia, the PSC, lost in its attempt to run the regional parliament’s managing board. But the PSC won the most seats in recent elections and in theory will form the next regional government, so they shoulda got the board, right?

What went wrong? Good question! It seems like the left-wing separatist party, ERC, had to decide if it was more left-wing or separatist, and this time it decided it was more separatist.
Oh, you want to know what that means in English? ERC could have joined the PSC to vote in a majority left-wing board, but instead it voted with right-wing separatist Junts (run by Carles Puigdemont, the former regional bossman who now lives in self-exile in a ~~Belgian~~ French McMansion), and the anarchist/“dirty hippy” separatists in CUP, to elect a majority separatist board. Because? Supposedly ERC were worried at losing face among their separatist peers: “The only unbearable thing would be if they called us botiflers," unnamed ERC sources told El Español, using the Catalan word for traitors.
But was there another way? Sure, the local version of the PP (the PPC) could have held its collective nose and voted for the PSC. But have you noticed how cheesed off the PP is with the PSOE these days? They certainly have. So their reaction was, like, go ~~fuck~~ screw yourself. Literally: “We accept ultimatums from no one.”
And does it matter? Maybe? Yes, definitely maybe. The president of the board—now, Junts’s Josep Rull—gets to name the candidate for regional president. Who wants to be president? Carles Puigdemont, of course. So does the PSC leader Salvador Illa. Who will Rull pick to go first? Dunno, but he’s got the power.

The big issue. Even with support from ERC and the CUP, Puigdemont can only get to power if Illa’s PSC abstains. Now, Illa has said he’d never ever do that, but Puigdemont’s bet is that Sánchez will force him to, in exchange for Puigdemont promising to support Sánchez in Madrid (and thus keep him in power) for the rest of the legislature. Oh, the intrigue!

ERC factor. This assumes that ERC will vote with Junts for President Puigdemont. But what if they want to play both sides, and vote for President Illa? Then would Puigdemont drop Sánchez like a hot botifler? Oh, the more intrigue!

The thing nobody really wants but… ERC could vote for Puigdemont but Illa’s PSC could refuse to step aside, then ERC could refuse to vote for Illa. And then you know what? New elections in the fall! This is why we can’t have nice things.

3. 🙋 Who knew PM Pedro Sánchez had a brother?

Roger Clinton, Billy Carter and now…David Sánchez? In the grand tradition of troublesome brothers of world leaders, Pedro Sánchez’s brother David is now taking a star turn in Spain’s ~~partisan mud-hurling contest~~ political debate.

So who is David Sánchez? A 50-year-old musician 🎼 known professionally as David Azagra, the First Bro got a degree in music composition and orchestra direction in St. Petersburg (Russia) before plying his trade in the U.S. and in European cities like Lucerne, Milan and Siena, and receiving artistic residencies in Tokyo and Toulouse. For the last seven years, he’s been the director of the Performing Arts Office and the Ópera Joven in the province of Badajoz (Extremadura) for a salary of about €55,000. And he speaks Russian fluently. Seems qualified so far, right?

So what’s the problem? Well, being the brother of the PM (especially one so unloved by those on the other side of the political spectrum) brings with it extra scrutiny, and far-right law office Manos Limpias has brought it on. Indeed, they’ve filed a private complaint against the First Bro on the grounds of embezzlement, perjury and influence peddling.

Oh do tell. Put into layman’s terms, Manos Limpias is accusing David of being given a fake patronage job because of his brother (aka enchufe), not fulfilling his contract (aka not going to work regularly, only directing one musical event in the last seven years) and living in Portugal to avoid paying taxes (on a pubic salary no less 😱).
Truth or big fat lie? David apparently got the job pretty easily and the PP and Podemos complained about that at the time. As for the rest, it seems he works remotely sometimes and mails it in a bit (don’t we all) and he does indeed have his tax residence at a house he bought in Portugal, in a town called Elvas.
So…that’s bad? Well, Pedro wasn’t PM at the time he got his job (though he was PSOE bossman), and with his degrees and international work, David seems sorta qualified. As for the house, it’s only 30 minutes by car from Badajoz and by living there, he is legally entitled to pay Portugal’s (much lower) taxes, so, like, wouldn’t you? But but but, it seems the big ol’ 425m² house is actually uninhabitable and people in town tell (right-leaning) ABC that they haven’t seen him since he bought the place, so maybe that’s a little fishy?

Ultimately, it feels like small potatoes 🥔. Dave might have gotten some special treatment and he may be only sorta “residing” in Portugal to avoid taxes (though let he who is without sin cast the first stone, or whatever the saying is). Still, in the cray-cray partisan moment in which Spain finds itself, painting just a little outside the lines (or looking like you do) will get noticed. See. Begoña Gómez.

And remember, this is Manos Limpias, after all, who make it their job to whip up this kind of drama.

4. ⚽ First criminal conviction for racist abuse in Spanish football

Real Madrid star Vinicus Jr’s racist abusers have been convicted. Just under 13 months after the events took place (light speed in the Spanish justice system), three men were given eight-month prison sentences and a two-year ban from football stadiums for hurling racist insults and gestures at Vini in a May 2023 game in Valencia’s Mestalla Stadium.

Repeated racist chants (usually based on the Spanish word for monkey) pushed Vinicius into clashes with the fans during that game. A furious Vini identified a spectator who had been hurling racist insults at him minutes before the end of the second half. The game was briefly interrupted and eventually resumed after Vini agreed to rejoin.

Reputational crisis. The conviction draws a line of sorts under a series of racist incidents that had sullied the reputation of Spanish La Liga football. It was not the first time that Vini had faced abuse, and afterwards he tweeted that in Brazil, Spain was now known as a “country of racists”, and that La Liga, “which was once that of Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Cristiano and Messi, now is one of racists”. That tweet went mad, and has now been seen more than 74 million times.

Vini’s reaction to the conviction. In a tweet on Monday, a defiant Vini said, “I’m not a victim of racism. I am a tormentor of racists. This first criminal conviction in the history of Spain is not for me. It’s for all Black people. May other racists be afraid, ashamed and hide in the shadows.”
La Liga president Javier Tebas also celebrated. “This ruling is great news regarding the fight against racism in Spain, as it redresses the wrong suffered by Vinicius Jr. and sends a clear message to those people who go to a football stadium to hurl abuse,” he said in a statement. In the last two seasons, La Liga has reported 16 incidents of racist abuse against Viní Jr to Spanish prosecutors.
Even the defendants seemed happy. Their lawyer called it a “good ending”—
"They have been caught insulting a player and they are going to pay for being sinners," he said. The three wrote an apology to Vini as part of the sentence, in which they also, according to Real Madrid, asked ”fans that all forms of racism and intolerance be eradicated.” The three will probably not serve time in prison, as sentences under two years are usually suspended for first time offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes.

All’s well that ends well? It’s good to see action taken against racism in Spanish football, but it seems unlikely that the fight ends here. Why? Well, among other reasons…

Take La Liga’s Tebas. After the Valencia incident, Tebas emitted an epic tone-deaf tweet in which he told the Brazilian player that “before criticizing and slandering LaLiga, you should be better informed”, in reference to the anti-racism work that the league has—allegedly—been doing. (Tebas later apologized for his “misunderstood” tweet.)
And a columnist in the Barcelona sports daily Sport wrote the day after a Vini Jr press conference this March that his real problem wasn’t the chants. He said Vini should ask why other Black players didn’t have the same problems, and seemed to suggest it was his attitude on the pitch that was the cause.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction. Maybe fans are learning monkey chants are not “funny”.

5. Giant moths invade Madrid (and freak everybody out)

Is this one of the biblical plagues? Is it a sign of the end of times? Honestly, we don’t know. Apparently not. At least not until it starts raining blood, which is pretty gross if you ask us. (And the stains! 😱)

In case you haven’t noticed, Madrid is being invaded by ~~mutant~~ giant moths, cute little creatures that are harmless, do not eat your clothes and only have a bad reputation because of The Silence of the Lambs (that’s a classic thriller from the 90s, kids!).

So many people seem to be freaking out over how big they are that Mayor Martínez-Almeida has addressed the population on television to ask everyone to “remain calm” and say that they are harmless, so if one of them sneaks in all you need to do is “open the window” and let them fly away. (Although, wasn’t the window open to begin with? How did they get in if it wasn’t? The chimney? Anyway.)

The scientific community has explained that the moths don’t bite or transmit diseases, and that they are simply migrating to “colder lands” (like the local Carrefour) because they love the spring but the summer here is just too much (they are clearly already Madrileños). In fact, they are so harmless and safe that the city hasn’t even fumigated. And that’s what makes it an invasion and not a plague. Phew! 😅

Moth experts (totally a thing) have told La Sexta that there’s two reasons for how many there are:

The first is the massive rain and the ensuing plant boom that the larvae feed on in the area.
The second is their metabolism and metamorphosis seem to have accelerated so it takes very little time for them to go from egg to full adult (meaning there are multiple generations coexisting at the same time). Not scary at all. And isn’t that the plot to one of the Godzilla movies? Anyway.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. We were visited by these little furry angels back in ’62, ’96 and 2013 and the most common species is called Autographa gamma. They are dark and hairy and can be up to 5 centimeters long.

Remember, as La Sexta explains, the best thing you can do is “be patient”. And don’t ask Autographas for an autograph. Also, don’t feed them after midnight. Or get them wet. Just saying (also a movie reference that Gen Z will probably not get) but points if you comment the name of the movie below so we can get some engagement.

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