{"id":182077,"date":"2015-12-27T20:21:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T01:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/12\/27\/spain-is-going-pear-shaped\/"},"modified":"2015-12-27T20:21:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-28T01:21:00","slug":"spain-is-going-pear-shaped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/12\/27\/spain-is-going-pear-shaped\/","title":{"rendered":"Spain is Going Pear Shaped"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In response to the election result the representatives of the center-left Socialist Party met with the Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing Peoples Party, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/intl\/cms\/s\/0\/25956ed8-a98b-11e5-9700-2b669a5aeb83.html#axzz3vJqUIq6g\">only to tell him to piss off<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The arduous task of assembling a new government for Spain got off to a bad start on Wednesday after the leader of the Socialist party flatly ruled out any deal with the Popular party of prime minister Mariano Rajoy.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Pedro S\u00e1nchez, the leader of the Socialists, held a brief meeting with Mr Rajoy in the prime ministerial compound outside Madrid \u2014 but apparently only to reiterate his opposition to any accord.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe will vote against the Popular party and against Mariano Rajoy as prime minister. Voters have asked for change,\u201d he told a news conference after the meeting.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The meeting was the first encounter between two party leaders since the inconclusive general election last Sunday. Spanish voters delivered a deeply fragmented parliament in which the two mainstream parties \u2014 the centre-right PP and the centre-left Socialists (PSOE) \u2014 will have a much-reduced presence.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The PP will be the strongest bloc in parliament once again, but it remains 53 seats shy of an absolute majority in the 350-seat chamber. The Socialists will be a distant second, followed by the upstart anti-austerity Podemos movement.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">A second new entrant is the centrist Ciudadanos party, whose 40 deputies will make a useful addition to any alliance but are not enough to hand a majority to the PP on their own. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Much like in Greece, and Portugal, the two mainstream parties have been following a consensus that is opposed what appears to be a majority of the electorate, which has the electorate moving far right and far left.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, the response of Brussels to this trend is to become even more opaque and undemocratic.<\/p>\n<p>It is a recipe for disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In response to the election result the representatives of the center-left Socialist Party met with the Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing Peoples Party, but only to tell him to piss off: The arduous task of assembling a new government for Spain got off to a bad start on Wednesday after the leader of the Socialist &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1000,984,1110,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections","category-europe","category-european-union","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182077\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}