The air went out of the balloon for Spain's Socialist government, led by Pedro Sanchez, on Monday when he called for "snap elections" on November 29. Sanchez's Socialist Party is wildly unpopular, and his government is a veritable Petri dish for growing corruption and self-dealing. His brother has been banned from politics for nine years for nepotism-related misconduct. Unlike the kid glove treatment received by Hillary Clinton, Sanchez's wife has been indicted for "embezzlement, influence peddling, corruption in business dealings and misappropriation of funds." She is awaiting trial and quite probably a long prison sentence.
Should Sanchez lose, which seems probable given that his party is polling at 26 percent while the two major center-right parties have a combined 54 percent support, he would be the last socialist head of government in Europe. Only Denmark and Malta also labor under the burden of that ridiculous and self-contradictory political system.
Unable to start an actual war to gin up political support. Sanchez has waged a figurative one against those enemies of civilization, Israel and Donald Trump. He has been at the forefront of defending the right of Hamas terrorists to rape and pillage free of consequences and has refused to allow U.S. airbases on Spanish soil to be used to support the war on Iran. Even though Spanish women may be afraid to leave their homes because of the throngs of Third World migrants who strangely seem to be mostly military-age men, Spain can take comfort in knowing it is leading the way to hell for the rest of Europe because Sanchez has “transformed Spain into a global benchmark for peace, feminism, and prosperity, allowing us to achieve the best economic, social, and environmental results of any democratic government in our country’s history,”
The proximate cause of the fall of the Sanchez government is not its failure to pass a budget for three years, a feat our own Congress has not managed to accomplish; it was its failure to pass a law to alleviate a housing crisis. Rather than talk about the root cause, which would be untrammeled illegal immigration with those immigrants receiving housing subsidies that price Spaniards out of the market, Sanchez's Socialists proposed to do what socialists always do: curtail property rights.
The government’s efforts to address the housing crisis were set out in two decrees that contained a range of measures from a ban on evictions until 2030 to the regulation of temporary lettings and lettings by room.
But the decrees were voted down in congress on Friday by the conservative People’s party (PP), the far-right Vox party, and the rightwing Catalan pro-independence party Junts. The PP, which is leading the polls but which may need to rely on Vox’s support to form a government, said it believed construction, and not regulation, was the best way to tackle the crisis.
Apparently, Sanchez's election strategy is to ignore the 800-pound gorilla in the room, illegal immigration, and try to gaslight the nation into believing the real issue is a housing crisis that suddenly happened.
BACKGROUND:
I'm not a student of Spanish politics, but I don't see that strategy working.
Sanchez's government is the last gasp of the socialist experiment in Europe following the fall of the Soviet Union. Virtually every nation has had at least one socialist government. That has produced an unmitigated track record of failure that hopefully will drive a stake into the vampire of "real socialism has never been tried."
Along with that repudiation of socialism, we're also seeing the demise of transnational governance. The credibility of the UN and EU is at a low ebb. One can easily see the EU bureaucracy withering away under the onslaught of illegal immigration. The World Health Organization, which tried to arrogate to itself the right to create international health policy, is a joke. Technology is devastating our self-styled cultural elites' ability to set the agenda by controlling entertainment and cultural institutions.
Many Europeans are awakening to the joy of being Germans, Italians, French, or whatever, instead of the monotonous gray mass of "European." Freed from the oppressive control of international governance and self-loathing socialists, Europe stands on the cusp of a revival. One hopes Sanchez lives to see this happen and all of his works repudiated.