SPANISH GENERAL ELECTION 2015

The Spanish general election 2015 was held on 20th December, Sunday to elect the 11th Cortes Generales (national legislature) of the Kingdom of Spain.  Since the Spanish transition to democracy, with a gap of 4 years and 1 month since the previous general election of 2011, it marks the longest time span between two general elections. Analysts deemed the polls to be the most unpredictable Spanish general election in decades, as a consequence of the two major political parties giving way to a new political landscape and the introduction of two new parties, who are popular with the public.

The ruling party, People’s Party (PP), with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, has been credited for successfully steering Spain out of recession and boosting the country’s economy. However Rajoy’s term had been plagued with allegations of corruption. Furthermore, the party is known to have a strong Atlanticist ideology, fostering closer ties with the US and the UK, instead of France and Germany, and is therefore believed to be harmful to Spanish interests in the EU. Though never credited as an honest leader, Rajoy has tried to sell himself as the only viable option for safeguarding Spain’s economic recovery, despite the fact that the country’s unemployment is still the second highest in Europe, after Greece. Betting on continuity in fiscal policy, it pledged to bring the number of employed people up to 20 million by 2020.

The Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE), ideologically located to the left of centre, considered this election to be an opportunity to return to power after 4 years in the opposition. Pedro Sanchez took over as party leader in 2014. With the charisma of being a former basketball player, he promised a revival of the party following its crushing defeat in the last general election, a result of its much-criticized handling of the beginning of Spain’s economic crisis. However, Sanchez struggled to really stand out during the election campaign. The party proposed to respect Eurozone fiscal rules, trying to negotiate looser deficit targets for the coming years, to amend the balanced budget rule introduced in the Spanish Constitution in 2011, and to scrap the ‘Labour Market Reform’ passed by Rajoy’s government.

Popular newer parties on the political stage include Podemos (Spanish for “We Can”) and Ciudadanos (Citizens in Spanish, C’s). Podemos, a radical-left party, was founded by a political science professor Pablo Iglesias, 37 just a few months before the elections as a coalition of anti-capitalist political organizations, social activists who opposed the ruling People Party’s adjustment policies and a few science scholars who had attained popularity in Spanish media. It did much better than expected in 2014 European elections and even played a part in the election of left-wing mayors to Barcelona and Madrid, as part of left-wing coalitions. As part of its manifesto for the general election, it proposed to increase income tax for higher earners, boost public spending and scrap Rajoy’s ‘Labour Market Reform’.

Ciudadanos began as a regional party in Catalonia in 2011 by leader Albert Rivera, 36. After launching nationwide during the first half of 2015, it did well in the 2015 regional elections. A centrist party with liberal views on social issues and more conservative views on economy, it poses a threat to both PP and PSOE. It used the social media to attract young voters and recruited 15,000 “cyber activists” to spread the party message on social media. It proposed to respect Eurozone fiscal rules, while asking the European Commission to slightly relax the deficit target for next year, along with promising to provide newly hired employees with full protection rights.

This election was largely dominated by economic factors - particularly with regard to unemployment. Spain is among the fastest growing economies in the EU despite its economic recovery over the past two years having been exclusively driven by domestic demand. However, doubts remain over the long-term sustainability of this recovery in a country where debt is projected to remain above 200% of GDP until at least 2020.
The result, as expected, was inconclusive – the ruling PP won maximum votes but fell short of the required absolute majority of 176 seats, raising the need for a coalition or re-election. In the 350-seat legislature, PP won 123 seats (and a vote-share of 28.72%), PSOE won 90 seats (and a vote-share of 22.01%), Podemos won 69 seats (and a vote-share of 20.66%), and Ciudadanos won 40 seats (and a vote-share of 13.93%). The results only brought on the onset of what could be weeks of complicated negotiations, leading to a deeply fragmented parliament. Although, the results do leave open the possibility for Rajoy to become one of the first leaders in Europe to be re-elected after imposing harsh austerity measures, but he faces a tremendous uphill battle to take power as the PP has limited possibilities when it comes to the alliances it needs to form a stable government. “I’m going to try and form a government,” Rajoy told cheering supporters on Sunday as the results came in. “But it won’t be easy.” In order to be able to govern for the next four years, PP will have to rely on other parties, suggesting that a protracted process of negotiations lies ahead for Spain’s political leaders.
Several scenarios are possible; many analysts had predicted that the new government would be made up of the PP and supported in some way by Ciudadanos. But now the two parties are still short of a majority. Any alliances would require a third partner which will be very complicated. An equally unlikely option is that the PP and the Socialists could get together and form a “grand pact” like that of Germany but the problem with that is that the two parties are wholly opposed to each other in terms of their beliefs. Another alternative, echoing developments in Portugal, would be a coalition of the Socialists, Podemos and Ciudadanos. Such a coalition would clash over issues such as Catalan independence – with Ciudadanos opposed to any talk of a referendum. This complex coalition calculus is unprecedented for Spain.
Despite a result that ranks as their worst in the party’s modern history, the Socialists are now key to the question of what comes next. However, even if the Socialists are able to amass enough votes to gain control of the lower house of parliament, their government’s attempts to push forward initiatives such as constitutional reform would likely be quashed by the country’s senate, where the election left the PP with an absolute majority.
Spain’s King Felipe VI, who will soon have to name the party that will have the chance to try and form a government, has highlighted the need for shared constitutional values in spite of regional diversities. The public is left with a large question mark over their heads on whether the Eurozone’s fourth-largest economy is threatening to become ungovernable, just as it emerges from a humiliating bailout and its worst economic crisis in over 20 years. All signs point to a difficult period of negotiation, followed by either a weak minority or coalition government or new elections if the issue is not resolved within two months, which seems like the only way; the problem is that of the 28 seats not accounted for by the 4 biggest parties. “The next government will be fragile, and the political backdrop is set to become more volatile,” Antonio Barroso, a political risk analyst with Teneo Intelligence, wrote.  He further added that, “a new election should not be discarded”. After the results came in, Ciudadanos’ head Albert Rivera addressed supporters and the media. “Spain has changed. Enough of a red and blue Spain,” he said, echoing descriptions of the U.S. electorate. He was right. The percentage of the vote received by the two big parties fell from more than 73% in 2011 to barely over 50%. But how the mix of colors that will be formed next functions is far from clear.

REFERENCES
Scarpetta, Vincenzo. Spain heads to its most unpredictable election in decades. December 16, 2015
Jones, Nathan. The 2015 Spanish General Election: How a Sea Change May Not Yet Have Reached the Shore of Spanish Politics. December 14, 2015
The Spain Report Ltd. Spanish General Elections: News, Updates & Analysis.
Velloso, Agustin. Spain’s PSOE Socialist Party Follows The Same Foreign Policy As The PP Under Aznar. December 11, 2007
Mount, Ian. Spain’s Election Results Are a Mess. December 21, 2015
Kassam, Ashifa. Spanish election: national newcomers end era of two-party dominance. December 21, 2015
Llamazares, Ivan. Spanish general election preview: Podemos. December 15, 2015
Duarte, Esteban & Sills, Ben. King Felipe Says Spain’s Election Results Show Need For Dialogue. December 25, 2015
The Local. Spanish general election: the key players. December 20, 2015

- Riya Brahma
(Member, India-Spain Youth Forum)

Are the Syrian Refugees Security Threats or Economic Assets for Their Host Countries?

The ISIS is indeed an international security threat, but those fleeing from it cannot be labelled as security threats, even if most of them share the same religious affiliation as the ISIS. To label all Muslims as supporting terrorism would be an extremely bigoted attitude, which is far from reality. Many of the men and women who have laid down their lives fighting the ISIS and helped rehabilitate Yazidis and Christians do happen to be Muslims – whether Kurdish, Syrian, Iraqi or Emirati. While Shias and adherents of Sufi Islam (yes, Sufi Islam does exist even in the Middle East) are branded as heretics by the ISIS and have been targeted, even very many adherents of relatively puritan versions of Sunni Islam have  refused to accept Baghdadi’s caliphate and many such tribes in Iraq have violently taken on the ISIS.

It’s not as though rightists under any religious banner, except arguably those actually resorting to killing innocent civilians, should be dehumanized or can never be logically made to modify their views, as the must-watch Indian movie Road to Sangam, based on a true story, does demonstrate, and to draw an analogy, you can see this video of a Muslim who initially wanted to become a terrorist wanting to blow up Jewish civilians but changed his standpoint about Israel for the better after visiting that country. It is not as though Muslims are another species that can’t be rationally engaged with, the way some extreme anti-Muslim rightists make all of them out to be, portraying Muslims in general as cruel, slimy, backstabbing and aggressive (many Muslims whom the non-Muslim readers would know personally would not exhibit such traits if the non-Muslim readers were to analyze dispassionately, rather than making baseless presumptions, and some of the worst atrocities in history have been committed by the likes of Hitler and Stalin, who were not Muslims, nor was Chengiz Khan who was an animist), but like many people in other communities in different contexts, some (not all) Muslims are in the stranglehold of anachronistic ideas like a global pan-Muslim fraternity and the upholding of Islamic law, other than having prejudiced notions of an exaggerated sense of victimhood, and I have dealt with how to ideologically combat Muslim extremism in some depth in this article.

Terrorism, even terrorism citing a theological basis, is certainly not a Muslim monopoly. As you can see here, very many instances of terrorism globally, even in the name of religion, have been carried out by those identifying themselves as Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus and even Buddhists, the victims of the acts of terrorists from each of these religious groupings not always being Muslims. However, just like most people of these religious groupings are not terrorists or supporters of terrorism, and they do not believe that their religion preaches terrorism, the same is the case with most Muslims (and not supporting terrorism even applies to even most of those Muslims with other regressive and not-so-liberal attitudes on issues like gender and homosexuality).

It is possible to quote any scripture (allegedly out of context according to its liberal adherents) to justify malpractices, like some verses in the Bible namely Deuteronomy 13:12-15, Samuel 15:3, Leviticus 24:16 and Matthew 10:34 seemingly advocate violence against “non-believers” and the Purusha Sukta of the Rigved, an ancient Hindu scripture, is taken by some to justify caste discrimination, but these verses do not define the entire religion. This article mentioning an anecdote from the British parliament does make an interesting read in this regard, as does this video make an interesting watch in this connection. There are Quranic verses like 2:256, 5:2, 5:8, 5:32, 6:108, 6:151, 10:99, 49:13, 60:8 and 109:6 preaching peace, religious tolerance and human brotherhood, as does the letter from Prophet Muhammad to the Christian monks of St Catherine’s monastery and there are episodes from Prophet Muhammad’s life, as per Islamic lore, indicative of such an approach too, such as his allowing a woman to throw garbage at him daily and his succeeding in ideologically, winning over her by way of humanitarian affection. Those suggesting that peaceful verses in the Quran are superseded by violent verses (which the vast majority of practising Muslims globally regard as contextual) would do well to note that verse 109:6 appears towards the end of the book, and indeed preaches nothing but peace.

There is a fairly well-known website run by an apostate and basher of Islam who has even offered a cash prize to anyone who can disprove his allegations against Prophet Muhammad (but there are books by apostates of other religions criticizing their former religions too, the most famous one being ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’ by Bertrand Russell, and there’s also ‘Why I am Not a Hindu’ by Kancha Ilaiah, levelling very strong allegations), but practically, he is the judge of the debate, or to go by what he is saying, the “readership” of the website, a rather non-defined entity. In fact, he has acknowledged that he came across a Muslim who “intelligently argued his case and never descended to logical fallacies or insults” and while that Islam-basher “did not manage to convince him to leave Islam”, that Muslim earned his “utmost respect”, which implies that practically, the Islam-basher is the judge of the debate. Likewise, that Islam-basher has mentioned with reference to a scholar of Islam he debated with, that the latter was “a learned man, a moderate Muslim and a good human being” and someone he (the Islam-basher) has “utmost respect for”. So, that Islam-basher’s critique of Islam, whether valid or invalid, has no relevance in terms of making blanket stereotypes about the people we know as Muslims or even practising Muslims. By the way, that Islam-basher bashes Judaism too. And it is worth mentioning that I’ve encountered several practising Muslims on discussion groups on the social media, who have, in a very calm and composed fashion, logically refuted the allegations against Islam on such websites. Indeed, as you can see here and here, there are several other apostates of Islam who have stated that while they personally left Islam thinking that the extremist interpretations are correct and moderate ones wrong (as is the case with apostates of many other religions), they have equally explicitly emphasized that that doesn’t in the least mean that they believe that most people identifying themselves as practising Muslims support violence against innocent people.

And in fact, even speaking of the West, a report submitted by Europol, the criminal intelligence agency of the European Union, showed that only 3 out of the 249 terrorist attacks (amounting to just about 1.2%) carried out in Europe in 2010 were carried out by Muslims. Even in the United States, most terrorist attacks from 1980 to 2005 were not carried out by Muslims. And no, I am not in the least seeking to undermine the heinousness of the crimes committed by some in the name of Islam by pointing to others having committed similar crimes under other ideological banners, for a more highlighted wrongdoing is no less of a wrongdoing than a less highlighted wrongdoing, but only to point out that viewing only Muslims as villains, and that too, all of them, would indeed be grossly incorrect. However, despite jihadist terrorists being a microscopic minority of Muslims, Islamist terrorism has become a bigger global threat for its well-coordinated international network since the 1990s. And, let us not forget that when we had the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, the victims included Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim police officer who died fighting the terrorists (and by the way, there are more French Muslims in the local police, including those who have died fighting jihadist terrorists, than in the Al Qaeda unit in their country), Mustapha Ourad, a Muslim who was one of the magazine staff members killed in that attack and there was Lassana Bathily, a Muslim shopkeeper who gave sanctuary to many innocent civilians during the hostage crisis in Paris that followed. Even in the context of the more recent attacks in Paris, a Muslim security guard Zouheir, risking his own life, prevented one suicide bomber from entering a packed football stadium. More recently, Kenyan Muslims laudably protected fellow bus commuters, who were Christians, from jihadist terrorists.

There is indeed absolutely nothing to suggest that most of the refugees are terrorists or even supporters of terrorism, and indeed, they escaped the very same terrorism that Westerners do indeed very understandably dread. Having said that, a certain degree of caution is necessary, for the nefarious designs of the ISIS do involve targeting innocent people across the globe, and so, the possibility of some ISIS members having joined the peace-loving refugees cannot be ruled out. In this regard, it is noteworthy that in the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, one of the terrorists involved was a migrant who had come in with the refugees. It would be prudent to exercise caution by cross-checking with the Middle Eastern governments and those heading the Kurdish fighters the identities of the migrants, and this has actually helped in some cases.

Terrorism apart, it is important that the refugees, even if coming from socially conservative backgrounds, do respect the culture of their host countries and respect women, even if they do not sport headscarves and wear short dresses. They cannot try to impose their own versions of piety and decency on others and the instances of crimes against women in Cologne were a disgrace, and one of the molesters displayed ingratitude, saying they shouldn’t be arrested, for they were Angela Merkel’s guests! That said, of course, the commission of crimes against women is not exclusive to any ethnicity or religious grouping and has a long history (the disrobing of Draupadi in the Mahabharat demonstrates that such occurrences weren’t unheard of in ancient India, for example), and does need to be checked by vigilant policing.

As for whether the migrants offer an economic opportunity to their host countries, on the whole, the answer seems to be in the affirmative, by way of bringing in more players in the labour market, especially unskilled labour (of which countries like Germany have a great shortage), though there are legitimate concerns about the host countries’ spending on basic facilities for migrants as also whether competition with migrants would deprive locals of jobs. However, fortunately, the evidence tells us otherwise.

The Economist points to a study in the OECD’s International Migration Outlook, which estimates the net fiscal contributions of migrants in 27 advanced countries. The net direct contribution of migrants is indeed lesser than that of the locals, but this is owing to the fact the migrants pay less taxes and not because they claim more benefits. The primary reason for them paying less tax is lower levels of employment, especially among women. The net fiscal contributions of migrants could therefore be increased by increasing their labour force participation. The overall inference is that migration is “neither a significant gain nor drain for the public purse”.

When ethnic Indians were expelled from East Africa in the 1970s, conservative British newspapers had expressed alarm, with The Telegraph talking of the “Invasion of Asians Forces Borough to Call for Help”, but forty years later, a conservative minister described them as “one of Britain's greatest success stories.” Indeed, migrants in Denmark, many of them Muslim, actually helped boost productivity and enabled local Danish people to acquire more skill sets owing to competition, as Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri have explained in a research paper dated April 2015. As a report in The Atlantic points out-

“Economists generally agree immigration is mostly good for a nation. They even have a term for it: ‘Immigration surplus’ refers to the positive effect immigration has by creating new demand for goods and services, which encourages employers to hire more people. And if migrants replace incumbent workers, even though wages are lowered, goods and services are produced more cheaply.”

According to a new report from the OECD, despite the ongoing refugee crisis, the Turkish and Lebanese economies will indeed both advance at a steady rate in the near future. Despite an influx of refugees that now amounts to more than 10% of its population, Jordan, too, is bearing up. Its GDP will rise by about 3% this year, according to the IMF.

These figures prove that even in countries facing huge influxes of refugees, the impact on the economy as a whole is usually not enormous. Indeed, there is a cost to screening, housing, and feeding the entrants, but even in Turkey, which has received more Syrian refugees than any other country, this cost has proved manageable. Turkey’s annual GDP is about 800 billion dollars. At about 1.5 billion dollars a year, the cost of resettling the Syrian refugees has been less than 0.2% of the GDP.

Another concern that has been expressed regularly about refugees, especially in Europe over the past few months, in response to the influx of refugees there, has been that refugees take jobs from native workers and reduce wages. The evidence of these Syrian refugees suggests that this is possible and even has happened on some occasions, but isn’t a very large-scale issue. In many cases, refugees take jobs that are rejected by the natives. They also set up businesses of their own and provide more customers for domestic enterprises.

 Not all the migrants are unskilled workers, however. Another study by Soner Çağaptay, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, pointed out that many Syrian traders from places like Aleppo, which has been devastated by the civil war, have moved their operations across the border to cities in southern Turkey, boosting business there. In general, Çağaptay wrote, “Turkish business, and the country’s trademark export market, has registered remarkable success in dealing with the fallout of the Syrian crisis.”

Indeed, the Syrian crisis is a humanitarian one, and should be seen as such. Many people from the West have displayed their compassion, which is indeed laudable.

By:
Karmanye Thadani