Spanish General Election 2011

[Хahar 🤔]

The ERC vote change is interesting. I'm not terribly familiar with conditions in Catalonia; can someone explain?

[Хahar 🤔]

Mariano Rajoy isn´t fit to run an egg and spoon race... Though this clearly has never stopped people before, least of all in Spain.

I prefer him rather than Esperanza Aguirre.

So why not accept mediocrity?

Anyway, the PP is too a "Spanish" party in many ways to be comparable to any of the other western European conservative parties (this is to say nothing of its origins). It is actually comparable to the Republicans in that sense.

Of course the Republican Party isn't founded on fascism.

[Хahar 🤔]

Does anyone know if any ministers or cabinet officials lost their seats? Usually with a loss that big you would expect that to happen.

No minister lost his/her seat;) They are usually number 1 or 2 in the lists for Congress, so it's almost impossible (the minister of interior could have lost his seat if PP had got more than 65% of the vote in Zamora, but he didn't).

Yes; this is one of the issues sometimes raised against closed list PR (especially in Italy during the DC era).

Didn't Italy have preferential voting back then ?

No. There was a very limited form of open-list PR, but nothing other than that.

[Хahar 🤔]

I also wouldn't classify the CC as economically right-wing, given that the party's old platform plank - to get the government to send more money to the islands - is not exactly the epitome of economic liberalism.

Right-wing doesn't necessarily mean liberal, of course.