Playing at Punditry

I’m one of those foot­ball fans who likes the game, and in fact still plays, but only keeps a cur­sory eye on fix­tures, re­sults and sign­ings. How­ever, that changes when it comes to those peak mo­ments in the sea­son, when the last few teams bat­tle it out for a place in the final, or when a big in­ter­na­tional tour­na­ment like the World Cup comes around. At those mo­ments I find my­self think­ing of lit­tle else, read­ing every re­port, watch­ing every game, and even fill­ing out wall charts to keep track of the events as they un­fold.

I seem to have a sim­i­lar re­ac­tion to pol­i­tics. I try to keep up with what’s going on among the po­lit­i­cal par­ties and in the var­i­ous cham­bers, but my in­ter­est is only truly piqued at elec­tion time. This is one of those mo­ments, with the Span­ish gen­eral elec­tion just over (see our overview of the re­sults on pages 14 and 15) and with local and Eu­ro­pean elec­tions on the hori­zon.

Yet, un­like foot­ball, get­ting your head around what ex­actly is going on is not easy in pol­i­tics. In foot­ball, there’s al­ways the odd, and often de­ci­sive, oc­cur­rence that is open to in­ter­pre­ta­tion, but in gen­eral it’s pretty black and white. While pol­i­tics might also seem black and white, the re­sults are just the start of a process of in­ter­pre­ta­tion that can go on for years.

The re­sults of the re­cent gen­eral elec­tion are a good ex­am­ple. With the ERC party win­ning a record num­ber of 15 seats in the Span­ish par­lia­ment, some see this as a growth in sup­port for in­de­pen­dence. Yet, the other major pro-in­de­pen­dence party, JxCat, lost a seat, while Front Re­pub­licà didn’t even get on the score­sheet. At the same time, the union­ist Cata­lan So­cial­ists were boosted into sec­ond place in Cat­alo­nia, with 12 seats, while En Comú Podem, which favours a self-de­ter­mi­na­tion ref­er­en­dum, dropped five seats in Cat­alo­nia.

Or we could see things in a dif­fer­ent way. ERC’s good show­ing could be down to it being a party on the left, and with the gains made by the So­cial­ists, it was a case of the rise of the rightwing par­ties stim­u­lat­ing left­wing vot­ers into ac­tion. Yet, the left­wing Podemos party went from 71 to 42 seats, and even though they were the big win­ners with 123 seats, Pedro Sánchez’s So­cial­ists are way off the ma­jor­ity of 176 votes they need to form a gov­ern­ment.

Then there’s the far-right Vox party, which came out of nowhere to win 24 seats in the Span­ish par­lia­ment, in­clud­ing one in Barcelona, while their po­ten­tial al­lies be­fore the elec­tion, Ciu­dadanos, in­creased their num­ber of seats from 32 to 57. So does this in­di­cate a swing to the right? Per­haps, but then the con­ser­v­a­tive Par­tido Pop­u­lar had a dis­as­trous night, its worst in three decades, with its num­ber of seats drop­ping from 137 to 66.

I don’t know which of these sce­nar­ios re­flect the true sit­u­a­tion, and per­haps all of them do to one ex­tent or an­other. How­ever, with so much up in the air, I do look for­ward to fol­low­ing how things de­velop. The only thing I do know is that the many self-styled ex­perts we will see com­ment­ing on TV, on­line, in news­pa­pers, and on the radio don’t re­ally know ei­ther.