Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/01/the-s-word-2.html
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Absent from this report is that the PSOE was, for a lot of years, the hand implementing the EU austerity program.
Me, I dont give 1 cent of an euro for any of the players - hate the PP, the PSOE is traditionally willing to sell you a new and nice progressive future and then forget to do anything of substance (not to mention, very much corrupt too), Podemos and IU I have personal reasons to hate, Ciudadanos is becoming an hysterical bunch of falangists (or just removing the mask)…
But I’m happy this happened. It doesnt matter that I dont like any of the new guys. It matters that a precedent has been set. One that maybe should have come with more actual public pressure, but one that we should take to heart.
That we are not going to be ruled by thieves.
All the rest is political - austerity or not austerity, central vs federal, whatever. Vote what you believe and work it out in the Cortes (our Congress). People may have different, and obviously wrong, ideas about the economy or any other thing than me. Thats what we “fight” in democracy.
But not crooks. Crooks dont have the right to “represent” anybody.
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This is how representative democracy works. The government serves at the pleasure of the people’s elected representatives, and if the government doesn’t do what it is supposed to be doing it can be removed and replaced with a different one at short notice.
Compare this to the situation in the USA, where Congress can, in theory, get rid of the president by holding what amounts to a court case, but that will only mean that the sitting vice-president will become president, and so on down the official line of succession. In the US constitution there is no such thing as a “constructive vote of no confidence” that will let Congress vote out the current government and establish a completely different one, where in modern representative democracies like Spain or Germany, if you can find a majority in Parliament of representatives who are dissatisfied with the incumbent government’s performance then bang, out they go and in comes a new one.
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Could we get an exception? Please? Just this once?
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Amazingly enough, a lot of people here either dont understand or pretend not to understand that we are not in a presidential, but a parlamentary system. One of the defenses of the PP in this (to their fanbase) is that this is a disgrace because “Sánchez lost the last election” and “they didnt win the presidency with votes”.
And of the few that actually understand that, they dont care and DESIRE a presidential system.
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That PSOE logo. Jesus fuck but it’s awful.
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It’s like one of those safety infographics that show you not what to do, don’t stick your hand in the saw blade. Don’t hold a thorny rose tightly.
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Here in Germany we have a federal president as head of state but that office is, for the most part, representative. Neither the federal president nor the federal chancellor (head of government) are elected directly by popular vote – the latter is elected by the Bundestag (federal parliament) and the former by a special body called the Bundesversammlung (federal assembly) whose only job is electing the federal president.
This underscores that in our political system it is the federal parliament that calls the shots to a greater extent than in, e.g., the USA. The current German constitution was drawn up in light of the experience of nearly 200 years of trying to make democracies work in various parts of the world, and, while not perfect either, it avoids some of the problems inherent in the US constitution that only came to light with ongoing use and are, by now, virtually impossible to fix.
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It was avant-garde and exciting once.
In 1977.
Kinda like me, it hasnt aged gracefully 
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The “fist with a rose” logo goes back to the Socialist International, a world-wide organisation of mostly democratic socialist, social-democratic and labour political parties. Here in Germany, the “Young Socialists” (or “Jusos”, the German Social Democratic Party’s – SPD – youth organisation) are still using a fairly similar picture in their logo.
(image from Wikipedia)
The Dutch Partij van de Arbeid (Party of Labour) also used to have a rose in a fist:
More recently they replaced it with a first in a rose:
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