POLITICAL ROUND UP BY MURIEL PILKINGTON

Election on their minds While we mere mortals give ourselves up wholeheartedly to the festive season, the politicians will only one thing on their minds this Christmas – and that’s the general election next March which, if the politicians’ normal behaviour is anything to go by, will be a vicious one. On the economic front, both the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE) and the main opposition party, Partido Popular (PP), are outdoing each other when it comes to promises of more money for everyone. Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has promised to raise pensions gradually over the next four years if he is re-elected. The initial rise would be a modest one, well below the 150 euros that opposition leader Sr Rajoy has promised pensioners immediately if he wins. Sr Rajoy has been much more liberal on the tax front – having promised to raise the tax threshold and to abolish the inheritance tax. The latter would win him a lot of votes if foreigners could vote in the general election but it’s also a vote catcher for Spaniards. Finance Minister Pedro Solbes keeps asking the PP where’s the money going to come from to pay for all their promises but he should also be putting the same question to the PM. Meanwhile, price rises, inflation and higher mortgage repayments will work against the Socialists. The PP has already said that instead of giving 210 euros a month to young people who rent, starting in January, the government should be giving something for home owners weighed down by mortgages, something they will do if they win. The government has done a lot for deserving minorities in the past four years but the cost of living affects everybody so the battle on the economic front is going to be a tough one. The most problematic issues for the government will be Basque and Catalan nationalism. During the 2004 election campaign, in an effort to get the Catalans to vote for the Socialist Party, Sr Zapatero rashly promised to respect the reforms to the autonomous statute that the Catalan regional government was due to present to the central government after the election. It wasn’t taken very seriously at the time because the Socialists were not expected to win. However, the Socialists blamed the tragedy of the March 11th Madrid bombings on Spain’s involvement in the Iraq war and managed to get the younger anti-war voters out on March 14th. They didn’t get an outright majority so to be able to form a government Sr Zapatero allied himself with the Izquierda Unida (IU, United Left), and the most radical of the nationalist parties, the Catalan Republican Left, ERC. The latter used its new political clout in Madrid to push through a very radical reform of the autonomous statute in the regional parliament in Barcelona which bordered on outright independence for the region, rather than more decentralisation. Sr Zapatero was forced to turn to a less radical Catalan nationalist party, Convergencia i Union (CiU), to get a statute that would not cause an uproar in the rest of Spain, which naturally upset the ERC. Since then, the latter has been using its political clout to give Catalan nationalist sentiment a relevance that it hasn’t had since before the 1936-39 civil war. This has brought about a renaissance of Basque nationalist sentiment, which has only been strengthened by Sr Zapatero’s willingness to talk with the Basque terrorist group ETA. One of the PP’s election promises is to introduce reforms in the Constitution that would strengthen the central government in Madrid, withdrawing some of the powers granted to the regional governments and aimed at putting an end to the national government’s dependence on the regional nationalist parties to govern. This would involve allowing the party with the most votes to govern without an absolute majority. Recent polls show that some 70% of Spaniards approve of such a constitutional reform. And if neither of the two main parties win an outright majority in the next election, some 60% would prefer a broad alliance between the PSOE and the PP to avoid either having to depend on a nationalist party. Apart from the Izquierda Unida, nearly all the other parties in Parliament are nationalist ones, although none are as radical as ERC. While public rage about the recent murder of two Guardia Civil in France by three ETA terrorists has forced the government to take a much tougher line against ETA, Sr Zapatero has not promised not to renew talks if he is re-elected, and a motion presented by the PP to get Parliament to withdraw the permission it gave for the talks has just been defeated. If Sr Zapatero thinks the PP will not use this against him in the election campaign, he’s living in a fool’s paradise. Next week: A political wish list for the New Year.