Italians vote in early elections on September 25. All 400 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 200 elected seats in the Senate will be contested.
The elections were called after Prime Minister Mario Draghi lost the confidence of the populist and right-wing parties in his coalition. Polls predict a victory for the right.
Here is everything you need to know. (more…)
Hundreds of thousands of separatists streamed into Barcelona on Sunday. A mass of red, yellow and blue — the colors of Catalan independence — filled the boulevard along the city’s old seaport before crowding Ciutadella Park, where the regional parliament is located.
Organizers claimed 700,000 Catalans attended this year’s National Day rally. Barcelona police put the figure at 150,000, which would make attendance by far the lowest since demonstrations began in 2010. El Nacional, a pro-independence outlet, argues the low estimate isn’t credible, but 700,000 seems high given this year’s shorter route.
Whatever the number, it’s clear the separatist movement has peaked. As many as one million (on a population of 7.7 million) demonstrated for independence as recently as 2018.
The failed breakaway of 2017, that year’s suspension of Catalan autonomy and the prosecution of Catalan leaders (later pardoned) have demotivated many separatists. Polls suggest four in ten Catalans still want their own state. It was close to fifty-fifty in 2019. (Although even then, almost half of independence supporters would have been content with federalizing Spain.) (more…)
Italy’s next coalition government will likely consist of three right-wing parties: the Brothers of Italy, League and Forza Italia (Forward Italy) are polling at close to 50 percent support, which should be enough to give them control of both chambers of parliament.
For the first time, the Brothers of Italy, who split from Forza in 2012, would place first and provide the prime minister: Giorgia Meloni.
The (formerly Northern) League, led by Matteo Salvini, won the election in 2018, but conservatives were disappointed when it formed a government with the left-populist Five Star Movement, and even more disappointed when Salvini left the government in a failed bid to force snap elections.
Forza has been in third place since their leader, Silvio Berlusconi, lost reelection in 2013.
The parties have released a joint manifesto for the election in September that is light on detail but nevertheless provides the best clues about what a right-wing government might do. Here are the main points. (more…)
Mario Draghi is on his way out.
The former European Central Bank chief, prime minister of Italy for eighteen months, failed on Thursday to keep his coalition together. The populist-left Five Star Movement and right-wing League and Forza Italia boycotted a confidence vote in parliament.
Draghi’s resignation could trigger an early election in the autumn, which would push passage of the 2023 budget, including measures to help businesses and families cope with inflation, to next year.
It also puts a six-year, €221-billion investment and reform program at risk that’s funded by the EU. (I analyzed the plan here.) Right-wing opponents are polling in first place. (more…)
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has found a new excuse for not talking with Catalan leaders: they don’t want to talk with him.
Catalan lawmaker Gabriel Rufián, whose Republican Left usually votes with Sánchez’ minority left-wing government, asked the prime minister in Congress when the negotiations he promised at the start of his term would resume. Sánchez argued they could only continue if Together for Catalonia, the region’s second-largest independence party, rejoined the negotiating table.
But the reason Together walked out is that Sánchez has delayed negotiations for two-and-a-half years. (more…)
Alberto Núñez Feijóo took over Spain’s conservative People’s Party two months ago. The hope was that the relatively moderate Feijóo would put an end to fruitless purity contests and return the once-dominant Christian democratic party to the center-right.
He may have achieved the first, but he seems less interested in the second. (more…)
At what point will Catalonia’s Republican Left decide enough is enough?
The separatists have kept Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in power for two-and-a-half years, but I argue in EUobserver they have little to show for it.
Sánchez most recently did a deal behind Catalans’ backs with conservatives to reduce subsidies for independent film and television productions, including those made in Catalan. The subsidies were the only concession Republicans had wrangled out of Sánchez’ Socialist Party in budget talks last year.
The about-face could be the final straw. “You have destroyed the agreement you had with us, which cost us a lot, which we defended to the end,” Republican Joan Margall told Socialist deputies in Congress. (more…)
There are parallels between Vladimir Putin’s need to dominate Ukraine and right-wing Spain’s intolerance of Catalan nationalism.
Modern Spain wouldn’t bomb Barcelona. Putin’s aggression is in a league of its own. But the last conservative government of Spain did send riot police into Catalonia when it organized an independence referendum in defiance of Spanish courts. It did depose the regional government, arrest its leaders and sentence them to between nine and thirteen years in prison for inciting “sedition” and participating in a “rebellion”. It did hack the phones of dozens of Catalan separatists, including non-politicians, to read their messages and listen to their conversations.
Putin uses tanks, conservative Spain the law, but their motivation is the same: neither can accept the independent aspirations of a people they refuse to recognize as separate from themselves. (more…)
The revelation that dozens of Catalonia’s separatist leaders were hacked should compel Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez to finally make good on his promises to the region.
The Citizen Lab, based in the University of Toronto, Canada, discovered that at least 65 Catalans, ranging from the president of the region to its members of the European Parliament, were targeted or infected with an Israeli spyware that is only sold to governments. Spain’s National Intelligence Center hasn’t confirmed it was behind the hacks, but who else would be interested in spying on Catalan leaders?
Catalans didn’t have much faith in the Spanish government to begin with. This news threatens to shatter what little hope there was of negotiating a way out of the impasse that has lasted for five years.
“It is really hard to trust anyone when everything points to the fact that they’ve been spying on you,” Catalan president Pere Aragonès told reporters.
Imagine if the British government had been listening in on the conversations of Nicola Sturgeon and her cabinet. Would Scots still trust London to negotiate in good faith?
The difference, of course, is that the United Kingdom recognizes Scotland’s right to self-determination and allowed the country to hold an independence referendum in 2014 whereas Spain sent riot police into Catalonia and suspended the region’s autonomy when it voted to break away in 2017. (more…)
Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League, visited the Polish-Ukrainian border this month to “help refugees.” But he made headlines for a different reason. In a video that went viral, Salvini could be seen squirming away from a news conference when the mayor of Przemyśl, a Polish town across the border from Lviv, taunted him with a T-shirt emblazoned with a visage of Salvini’s “friend,” Vladimir Putin. Salvini wore a similar shirt when he visited Moscow in 2014.
Salvini’s embarrassment is part of a broader blowback against Italy’s populist right over its cozy ties to Putin, one that could discredit the anti-American strain in Italian politics. (more…)
Corsica was rocked by violent protests this month after Yvan Colonna, a Corsican nationalist, was attacked in a French prison by a fellow inmate. Colonna died of his wounds on Monday.
He was serving a life sentence in Arles, a small city west of Marseilles, for the murder of Claude Érignac, Corsica’s top regional official in 1998. Colonna had petitioned several times to be transferred to a Corsican prison but was denied every time.
Despite widespread condemnation across Corsican society of Érignac’s murder, Colonna was still viewed by many as a nationalist hero. The fact that he died in a prison in mainland France added insult to injury. As did the fact that he was killed by a convicted jihadist of African descent. Relations between Corsica’s native and immigrant populations have been tense for years. (more…)
Spanish media widely reported this week that support for Catalan independence is down.
Most media have learned not to read too much into any one poll, and report averages or trends instead. Spain’s not so much.
I’m not surprised conservative newspapers like ABC and El Mundo would make hay out of the story. They have been trying to convince their readers Catalan independence is a fringe movement for many years. I am disappointed the center-left El País and Basque El Correo didn’t give their readers more context. (more…)
A power struggle has broken out in Spain’s opposition People’s Party.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the popular president of the region Madrid, has accused national party leader Pablo Casado of trying to “destroy” her by hiring private detectives to investigate allegations of corruption.
Casado’s right-hand man and party secretary, Teodoro García Egea, has accused Ayuso in turn of making “almost criminal” insinuations.
Other conservatives are taking sides. Esperanza Aguirre, who governed Madrid from 2003 to 2012, has defended Ayuso. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the president of Galicia and leader of the moderate faction, has called the investigation into her “unforgivable”. Casado has the support of the mayor of Madrid as well as the party’s group leaders in Congress and the Senate. (more…)
Catalan nationalists, up to and including the deposed regional president Carles Puigdemont, see the Spanish judiciary as part of a “deep state” that frustrates Catalan ambitions at every turn.
That diminishes the meaning of the term “deep state”. Spain isn’t Egypt or Turkey.
It does have judges who are more political, and more reactionary, than the rest of Western Europe. I saw the consequences after more than two million Catalans defied a Constitutional Court ban to vote in an independence referendum in 2017. (I lived in Barcelona at the time.) Politicians and protest leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Spanish courts overturned a Catalan presidential election. As recently as last week, judges ordered a Catalan lawmaker to give up his seat in the regional parliament. Spanish “lawfare” against the Catalan independence movement has entered its fifth year. (more…)
Portugal’s far left put purity before power and lost power.
Until 2015, neither the Communists nor Left Bloc had ever been in government. That year, the Socialists fell short of a majority and António Costa made a deal with the smaller parties. In return for policies like free textbooks in schools and a higher minimum wage, the far left would vote to make Costa prime minister. They were involved in annual budget negotiations, but they didn’t join his cabinet.
The right dubbed it a “contraption,” but it worked. Costa could avoid the stigma of forming a coalition with extremists. The Communists and Left Bloc could still criticize Costa when, for example, he refused to raise salaries in the public sector or overturn the labor market reforms of his conservative predecessor.
Until the left decided they wanted more. When Costa insisted on reducing Portugal’s budget deficit, from 5.8 percent of GDP in 2020 to a projected 4.4 percent in 2021, the Communists and Left Bloc withdrew their support. (more…)
