Snap Spanish general election and the ongoing Brexit crisis

After only 8 and a half months in power Pedro Sánchez has called a snap general election in Spain after failing to get parliamentary approval for his 2019 budget. Some political commentators have called him jokingly 'Pedro el breve' as his government has been one of the shortest in modern Spanish history. Sánchez and the PSOE became the new legal government of Spain after winning a surprise parliamentary motion of no confidence last June and forcing his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy from office.

Sunday, April 28, has been chosen for the date of the general election to deliberately avoid coinciding with the municipal, regional and European elections due to be held a month later on May 26. The exact reason why remains to be seen, but many journalists have commented that it's due to the insistence of a number of regional PSOE party leaders who fear being directly associated with Sánchez in the public mind, after the debacle of the failed alliance with radical Catalan separatists, if all four elections were held on the same 'super domingo' election day in late May.

Although opinion polls suggest that Sánchez's incumbent socialist party will be the most voted party, no single party is predicted to obtain a clear overall majority on 28th April and the likely scenario of two big rival left-right block coalitions looms large on the political horizon and looks even more likely after Ciudadanos have publicly stated their refusal to make any post electoral pacts at a national level with the Spanish Socialist Party led by Pedro Sánchez.

Which of these two big ideological blocks will win most parliamentary seats has created an atmosphere of great expectation and electoral fever in Spain these days. Many people are interested to see if the triple alliance of the PP, Ciudadanos and Vox, which successfully ousted the ruling socialist party in Andalusia after 36 years of uninterrupted rule, will be repeated at a national level to oust the PSOE from the Moncloa.

The alternative to the rightwing block is the left-wing multiparty coalition made up of the PSOE socialist party, Podemos and an array of minority nationalist parties mainly from Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Who knows what the final result will be; nobody really knows for sure as it seems to be a very tight race between the two big opposing coalition blocks competing for power. This election is particularly important as the winners will have to deal with the very difficult Catalan question and on its successful resolution depends the future of Spain as a unified country.

Whoever wins we know for sure that by deciding to hold separately the general election a month before the other elections at the end of May the total additional cost to the public purse will be around nearly €200m extra. Some politicians, mainly from the PP, have criticised this decision by Pedro Sánchez as a tremendous waste of valuable public money for partisan reasons.

The big novelty of these elections in April and May is undoubtedly the continuing political impact of the emergent right-wing conservative party Vox, first set up in December 2013 by disgruntled former members of the Popular Party unhappy at its increasingly liberal secular character and constant concessions to regional nationalist parties. Most analysts and opinion polls currently give Vox nearly 13% of the vote, or perhaps even more. Most of these votes will be from disaffected Popular Party voters who feel betrayed by the watering down of traditional conservative values, particularly relating to Cataluña and the issue of abortion.

Vox is set to cash in on this frustration amongst large swathes of conservative traditionalists and is predicted to win between 43-45 seats in the Spanish lower house of Parliament, thereby becoming the fifth most important political party nationally, and to make big gains in the European Parliament and municipal council elections across the country as well. Just six months ago nobody would have taken believed this sudden meteoric rise of Vox to be possible in such a short period of time.

Added to the volatile atmosphere of bitter political rivalry we have the race against the clock by the Socialist government led by Pedro Sánchez to remove the remains of General Franco from his tomb in the Basilica of the impressive Valley of the Fallen mausoleum in the mountains to the north of Madrid city before election day. A protracted legal battle with Franco's family has yet to be definitively settled about the final resting place of Franco. The family have repeatedly stated their desire for Franco's remains to be definitively laid to rest in the familys´ private tomb in the crypt of Madrid city's Almudena Cathedral, next door to the Royal Palace, in the very heart of Madrid's tourist area, but the socialist government has refused to agree to this citing reasons of public order and the express desire to prevent Franco's new resting place possibly becoming a site for his 'glorification' in the centre of Madrid.

The socialist government presided over by Pedro Sánchez has publicly vowed to exhume Franco's body out of the Valley of the Fallen before April 28 and thereby strike a major propaganda victory for all left-wing sympathisers in the run up to the general election and be in a good political position as a result to attract voters from other leftwing parties like Podemos as well.

The other big event of the moment in Spain is the trial of Catalan separatist political leaders in the Supreme Court in Madrid, which began on February 12 and is expected to go on until at least May. It certainly ranks as another major polemical issue at a national level which is more than likely to have a big impact on the April general election. The Popular Party, Ciudadanos and Vox are all hoping to obtain more votes as voters across the country are reminded of the illegal attempt by Catalan separatist leaders to unilaterally take Cataluña out of Spain at the beginning of October 2017. The trial of seven Catalan independence leaders is one of the biggest court cases held in Spain since the infamous 23F military court case in 1982 against the leaders of an attempted military coup the previous year in February 1981. Interesting times in Spanish politics!

The next three or four months will be fundamental in determining the medium to long term future of Spain. We wish Spain the very best of luck!

Turning our attention back to Brexit Britain, the ongoing Brexit crisis gives us, almost on a daily basis, a new depressing story of one company or another which has decided to relocate out of the UK, cancel its UK based production or, like the Flybmi airline, has gone bust because of Brexit related problems and uncertainty.

The list of companies cancelling production in the UK or shutting up shop in Britain gets longer daily and includes famous names such as Honda, Sony, Panasonic and Nissan amongst others like Airbus who have threatened to do so.

Japanese companies are not happy with project Brexit. One of the main reasons they chose to set up production in Britain in the 1980s was because the UK was seen as a favourable and convenient point of entry into the EU single market. Now that Britain is about to leave the world's biggest trading block Japanese companies are voting with their feet.

At an official level, reportedly Anglo-Japanese relations have been under tension these days as the Japanese government apparently expressed its frustration at UK government pressure to rush negotiations for a post Brexit UK-Japan free trade deal.

The recently announced EUJapan trade deal has taken seven years to bring to a successful conclusion. The UK Tory government, under intense political and media pressure to sign as many trade deals as possible as Brexit day fast approaches, has apparently only been able to conclude four trade deals (Chile, Eastern and Southern Africa, the Faroe Islands and Switzerland) from the forty which the UK currently enjoys as an EU member. Hardly a propaganda victory for the Brexit cause! Another broken promise from the 2016 Leave campaign.

Britain's lucrative financial sector and the City have not escaped the Brexit woes. Many banks and financial companies which together make up about 6.5% of Britain's total GDP have already taken precautionary measures to prepare for Brexit by setting up HQs and transferring jobs and investment to alternative European locations like Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt and the Irish capital Dublin.

A lot of damage has already been done to the British economy, so much so that the act of leaving the EU itself is, at this late point in time in the Brexit process, increasingly irrelevant to many companies by now.

A Frankfurt lobby group has claimed that between €750 to €800bn in financial assets and up to 10,000 jobs will have been transferred to the German city by the time Britain leaves the European Union next month on March 29.

Tragically, even if Brexit were somehow cancelled, these strategic decisions and moves by many important companies will not be reversed. Therefore enormous damage to the British economy and to British jobs has already been done, despite the empty claims of pro-Brexiteers in the media.

Let's hope that UK parliamentarians are capable of sorting out this chaotic shambles in the national interest, something that Theresa May's government has been utterly incapable of doing. Britain should not leave the world's biggest and most successful trading block at high speed without even knowing what our final destination is and under what terms.

This would be an unprecedented recipe for national disaster and MPs should simply not allow this to happen. HMS Britannia, with all of us on board, must not be allowed to strike the hard Brexit iceberg and sink. Let's hope it's not too late for the pro-Brexit Tory/Labour leaderships to see some common sense and take the necessary evasive action to save the country and all of us with it. The recent split of seven MPs from the Labour Party is a promising sign for a new beginning in British politics, free from the constraints of the two party system, and it looks to be a matter of time before something similar happens in the ranks of the Tory Party as well.

Country before party should be the guiding principle for Westminster MPs these days. We all depend on their good sense and decisions.