Spanish General Election 2011

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Found it.
PP 186 (majority)
PSOE 110
CIU 16
IE 11
AMAIUR 7
UPyD 5
PNV 5
ESQUERRA 3
BNG 2
CC 2
COMPROMI S-Q 1
FAC 1
GBAI 1

ad in the Senate
PP 134 (majority)
PSOE 50
CIU 9
PSC (et al) 7
PNV 4
AMAIUR 3
CC 1

In english

186 - Conservativ - PP
110 - Socialist - PSOE
16 - Catalonian Centre - CIU
11 - Leftists - IE/IU
7 - Basque Left - AMAIUR
5 - Liberal Left - UPyD
5 - Basque Right - PNV
3 - Catalonian Left - ESQUERRA
2 - Galacian - BNG
2 - Canarian - CC
1 - Asturian - FAC
2 - ??

The PSC seems to be a Catalonian alliance

I can't make heads or tails of GBAI or the S-Q party

The GBAI is basically the PNV (basque "right") here in Navarra. The PSC is the PSOE branch in Cataluña. The BNG is a Galician nationalist left-wing party. CC is more center-right, but hard to classify ideologically. Not as nationalistic as the others. FAC is the personal project of the conservative Francisco Alvarez Cascos, so the Asturian right. That "S-Q party" is actually a coalition between the Coalició Compromís, the Valencian nationalist left, and Equo, a watermelon party.

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I can see that Julio predictions for Madrid failed, PSOE ended being smashed. UPyD got enough votes from soft-right (Vargas Llosa endorsed it).  I'm surprised that Revilla is failing to get his seat in Cantabria. Cascos failed to make major inroads, as PP is winning Asturias and FAC has a small margin over IU.

Rajoy still did worse than Aguirre in Madrid though.

The Cantabrian PP did a great job tying Revilla to Zapatero. It was a superb result for Diego, first time a party wins 4 seats.

UPyD got some support from the not so soft right too. For example, Jiménez Losantos said he'd vote for them and I know a few persons who generally vote UPN/PP who did the same, including my very conservative boyfriend. I think Diez benefited primarily from the PSOE implosion but to a smaller extent from the certainty of the PP majority.

I didn't want to vote for Rajoy unless absolutely necessary, but I can't stand Diez and the UPyD, so I ended up not voting for the Congress and voted DNE for the Senate as a protest vote. People like me could have delivered GBAI that escaño at the expenses of the UPN. As Rick Perry would say... ooops. They should have nominated Aguirre.

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Scoopa looks the likely FAC voter...Epic fail...

FAC is a local Asturian party, it's not in the ballot in the rest of Spain. If I were an Asturian, I'd probably vote for the FAC as long as PP's victory wasn't in risk, but not because I particularly like Álvarez-Cascos, even though I reckon my dislike for Rajoy is larger - it'd be more of a protest vote. Why do you think I'm the likely FAC voter? I'm not even sure there's a likely FAC voter and you certainly wouldn't find one outside of Asturias and Álvarez-Cascos circle of friends.

What was an epic fail? The FAC's result? Meh. The FAC was just a tool for Álvarez-Cascos to wage his private war against the Asturian PP and to make himself the President of the Principado de Asturias. I wouldn't read too much in his national elections results.
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Thanks for the welcome, belgiansocialist.

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Is this a threat, that the CiU has swept the area? Is Independence on the horizon?

CiU isn't independentist - I mean, there are some independentist factions but they're fairly weak. I don't think it means anything special. People just didn't want to vote for the PSC (PSOE) and the CiU candidates are fairly popular. I don't think there's any thread of referendums.

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I actually have asked this question once in the past (and gotten no answer)... why is the city of Cordoba relatively right-wing, voting for PP in 2008? Sevilla is totally different.

There must be other local factors, but I believe it is wealthier than Sevilla. At any rate, most Andalusian cities are to the right of the countryside.

There's an interesting local factor: Cordoba is known as the "Califato Rojo" (the red califate) because the communists (IU) have hold the municipality since the first local elections in 1979  (the former PCE and IU leader, Julio Anguita, was the first mayor - Alcalde - of Cordoba) till this year's 22M (when finally the PP conquered the city, José Antonio Neto), with the exception of a cycle in the 90s when even the IU won without an absolute majority and the PSOE councilmen made a coalition with the PP to get one of the Populares as the Alcalde.

So the PSOE has historically been very weak in Cordoba, generally the 2nd force in the left and because of local factors that happened during the transition: in the late 70s, Felipe Gonzales was trying to consolidate the non-communist left under the PSOE umbrella, so he made a deal to absorb a small leftist party, the PSP, which was basically the vehicle for a veru influential and charismatic leftist politician called Enrique Tierno Gálvan, who was loved by many in the left because of his anti-Franco and intellectual bona fides. Part of that deal was that the PSP would get the leadership in the lists to some alcaldías - Tierno Gálvan himself run for Madrid's Alcalde (and won). One of those cities was Cordoba. The problem was that the PSP indicated candidate was hugely unpopular, I think he wasn't even from Cordoba, the local PSOE rebelled and that allowed Anguita to win.

This is largely irrelevant in presidential elections, as leftists tended to concentrate their votes in the PSOE anyway, but it still makes a small difference. There are many people in Cordoba who tend to be suspicious of the PSOE as a party who cares more about Sevilla and Madrid then about Cordoba.

And yeah, in Andalucia the urban areas tend to be more rightwing then the country.

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In the past, for evil caciques. Nowadays, on modernized large farms.

Most of the people who works in farms these days are either non-voting immigrants or hands-on small-farmers in the coastal areas who never voted PSOE in the first place.

The PSOE was able to keep that large reserve of votes by mounting a huge rent-seeking operation that basically paid those voters to stay unemployed and by handling out public jobs via their domination of every level of government. They were still working for caciques, only political ones.

That's a big factor to explain PSOE's debacle in Andalucía: they run out of others people money to distribute, the party is over, so their clientéle abandoned them.

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.

But not with the voters. It's still very difficult for the PP to penetrate that electorate of catalanist right-wing voters, as yesterday results show. The best they can hope for the time being is their neutrality: that they vote for the CiU and allow them to win nationally. But a large percentage of the CiU electorate is willing to vote for the PSOE - PSC to punish the PP, but they'll never vote for the PP to punish the PSOE-PSC. Most of the CiU electorate will never vote PP. Future generations, sure, but it'll take time.

The PP growth in Cataluña was due to a transfer of votes from leftist españolistas who usually vote PSC-PSOE, not right-wing nationalists.

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Couldn't Rubalcaba stay at the lead of the party ? After all, Rajoy lost twice before winning...

Yeah, but Rajoy never lost by a difference of 4 million votes and he wasn't a member of the most unpopular government ever.

I would say considering the circumstances, Rubalcaba ran a decent campaign. At least he managed to contain the PSOE's polling free fall.

He lost by 16 points and went below 30%. Out of almost 90 polls published this year, only 4 estimated the PSOE at 29% or less.

There's nothing to suggest Rubalcaba's campaign helped the PSOE numbers. I think his decision to turn left and to attack the PP by scaremongering didn't do them any favors. It made the PSOE look schizophrenic and from the perspective of the center electorate, irresponsible and disingenuous, in denial. Voters aren't stupid, they're aware the status quo is unsustainable.

Some thougts, tomorrow more...:
-Here in my city, at the north of Madrid (conservative areas) PP has got 49.5% of the vote. what does that mean? that we did a good campaign here

I haven't looked at Madrid's numbers yet, but I suspect Rajoy underperformed in Sierra Nuerte, the Northwest exurbs and the Henares Corridor. I think he lost votes for the UPyD in those conservative bastions.

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The PP used to win the generales in Cordoba because of the IU overperforming, but this year they got more votes than the PSOE and IU combined.

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Disagree.

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Agreed. UPyD is a fresh party, with fresh faces and with an empty, but feel good and morally self-righteous, rhetoric. And without the baggage of being part of the "system"...yet.  

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Centrist PSOE voters, some PP voters. I wasn't surprised by UPyD doing well in Madrid.

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ETA-Amaiur shouldn't be allowed to form a caucus. They didn't get 15% in all the provinces they ran or 5% nationally. It'll be interesting to see how that plays up. Not that I have my hopes up, they'll probably adjust the law to allow them to form a caucus.

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He almost got us there, but we didnt' give him enough time. Not that the situation is substantially different, we're a couple of weeks from being Greece is immediate action isn't taken.

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CiU doesn't want independence, similar to how the Lliga didn't want independence either. It basically wants sovereignty-without-the-problems-of-sovereignty and might use self-determinationist rhetoric from time to time for political purposes, but they would probably never hold a direct referendum on independence. If they held a referendum it would be on something similar to what Ibarretxe had proposed in 2005, though without the racial undertones and probably less radical. What it wants now is the ability to raise taxes on its own through a concierto economico, like the Basques and Navarrese have. Something which they can dream for as long as the PP is in power, imo.

As for the PP's growth in Catalonia, 2010 and May 2011 results showed that growth came from traditionally Socialist working-class hinterlands around Barcelona (such as Badalona, which now has a PP mayor), where their campaigns on immigration and criminality worked out for them. I haven't checked yesterday's results, but I suspect the patterns were similar.

Yeah, in my Andalusian cursory analysis I had forgotten to mention the agrarian subsidy, opponents of which say is a clientelistic government handout (by the PSOE) to its voters, and to an extent it is quite that and in practice it is rife with corruption and all types of abuses, but in recent years its effect has been much diminished as qualifications for it are much tougher (Aznar's government changed it, iirc) and today they're running out of money. Tradition mixed in with traditional poverty and alienation is becoming a more important reason in the PSOE's vote in Andalusia. But it is noteworthy that long-term demographic changes in Andalusia are unfavourable to the left with the perhaps-halted tourism/coastal old people who go there to die phenomenon plus the new types of agriculture in Almeria.

I agree with most of that.

The regional Andalusian regional elections next March are going to be very important. If we could extrapolate Sunday's results, the PP would win 60 out of 109 seats. If the PP conquers the autonomic government, I think that will  break the spine to the socialist machine in Andalucía and put an end to the dominance of the socialist caciques like Guerra, Chaves, Zarrías or Griñán. Once that happens and that system of patronage is gone, I think Andalucía will quickly become a competitive playground, no need to wait for long run demographic trends. It's going to be very interesting to see how the March elections play out.

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Next March? How do you figure?

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Next March? How do you figure?

How likely is this government to get a honeymoon period, exactly? But then I won't pretend to understand the Spanish electorate(s), so this is more... I don't know... general speculation. And I suppose the PSOE will remain somewhat on the discredited side. Maybe the IU will do very well.

Why wouldn't it have a honeymoon period? Because of the "unpopular" spending cuts and the economic situation?