Spanish General Election 2011

[Verily]

The PP was leading the polls in 2008 ? How comes ?

yes, they were tied until the month before the elections. but the impression was that PP was underpoilling. I remember a majority of people thought rajoy would win by a close margin until the presidential debates, where zapatero crushed rajoy.

Weird, at the time I had the impression that Zapatero was safe. Of course medias often suck when it's about commenting a foreign election, but still, the feeling was that PSOE was going to win easily.

Here we thought the election would be very close... and as we know, every PP supporter votes on election day. the problem is that lots of socialists stay at home. zapatero would have lost if nationalists in catalunya and basque country hadn't voted for him (people were really afraid of a PP government).

But what I ask myself is why ? Wasn't everything going fine in Spain at that point ?

the thing is that zapatero won in 2004 because of the irak war. many conservative people voted PSOE only to punish Aznar. remember than aznar won in a huge landslide in 2000.  zapatero lost that vote of punishment, so we thought rajoy could win.. but then, nationalists and communists helped us and zapatero was reelected. never before a president had received 11 million votes here.

My understanding was that Aznar lost the 2004 election because of the obvious attempt to pin the Madrid bombings on ETA, not due to Iraq directly. Certainly he was on track to win reelection until a couple of days after the bombing (which also happened to be a couple of days before the election). True, the bombing was actually related to Iraq, but I thought (perhaps incorrectly) that the real anger that tipped the scales was about the attempted cover-up, not about al-Qaeda launching a terrorist attack to begin with. (i.e., Aznar would have won reelection had he simply admitted it was al-Qaeda, but he tried to cover that up until after the election, and it backfired spectacularly.)

[Verily]

Left-right is a stronger fragmentation in Catalonian politics than independence-union. Pro-union and pro-independence parties frequently team up with their allies on the other side who are also right-wing or left-wing, while CiU working together with ERC and ICV (the main parties of the left on the pro-independence side) is virtually unheard of.

[Verily]

What exactly is this UPyD anyway.

It's a sort of centrist Euroliberal party, stated ideology somewhat like the UK Lib Dems or Canadian Liberals. It's very personalist around its leader, though, like MoDem in France, but more successful mostly due to the electoral system. A big part of its platform is unflinching unitarianism (more robust than mere federalism), though. They're very opposed to any kind of regionalism or devolution, let alone independence movements (particularly the Basque separatists, but also the Catalonian nationalists, Galician nationalists, etc.).

You must be logged in to read this quote.

They're both very left-wing? IU descends from the more "liberal" strain of western European communism and is consequently very much allied with the green movement. And ICV is of course on the left side of the green spectrum (more like the German Greens than the Canadian ones).