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And what is the PP proposing? Is it promising a way out of austerity? Why is it that all through Europe the apostasy of the Socialists (a process with a long history though recently accelerated) means turning to the original Thatcherites? What are people voting for?
What I mean is that the pictures from Puerta del Sol and the electoral results I'm seeing seem to not add up. An interpreter is needed. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake
Rosa Díez quit the PSOE in exasperation at ZP's negotiation with ETA and his support for the Catalan Socialists' project for reform of the Catalan Statute.
In a way they're similar to Ciutadans/Ciudadanos which started out from a movement seeded by Catalan-speaking, progressive, anti-nationalist intelectuals.
Rosa Díez has been more successful. Economics is politics by other means
[Rosa Díez]'s party keeps garnering citizen support since it was founded in September 2007: it got, newly born, one seat in the General election of 2008 - 3006k votes, more than [left Catalan Nationalists] ERC and nearly as many as [right Basque nationalists] PNV --, another seat in the 2009 Basque regional elections and, that same year, one MEP. In those European elections it was the only party that grew in votes since the General: no less than a 47% increase. In these elections, with more candidates on their lists than party members (some 6000), with a budget of barely 1.2M and with a campaign os street events throughout Spain, the party succeeded in establishing itself and getting into the Madrid city council and regional goverment.
I haven't seen opinion polls about the protesters - but even people who would vote a straight PSOE ticket even in these circumstances approved of them. As an anecdote, people celebrating the PP victory by the party headquarters in Madrid were both chanting against the protesters and against Bildu. Also, the extreme right wing of the PP party, or at least Madrid regional president Esperanza Aguirre, was extremely bothered by the protests and though they were a PSOE operation against them. The more moderate wing though it was just an issue internal to the left, and they were probably right.
The PP actually lost 50k votes in the Madrid municipal elections:
(That's regional level - in the city itself it was worse - they lost 120 thousand votes, the same amount the PSOE lost, and the same amount UPyD got. IU increased their share by 30k votes)
The PP also lost votes in the regional election in Madrid:
Where are you getting the 55% figure? That's form last time around. Economics is politics by other means
Similarly in the municipal elections, region-wide:
Economics is politics by other means
No future.
The optimistic one is: people in Sol have not yet got an influence on the people in the country. Hopefully in the following weeks/months the link will get bound and the movement may get an influence, especially if relayed in other european countries, with always the ajor risk that it be used by the far right.
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