If you’ve got election fatigue in the UK, spare a though for the poor people in Spain. This year they have a triple whammy of local, regional and national elections to ‘look forward’ to. The election season kicked off yesterday with regional elections here in Andalucia and the socialists remain in power (they have never not been in power in the post-Franco period) in a coalition with a much smaller left wing party. I’m sure that you couldn’t sleep last night in trepidation of hearing that result.

Anyway… It’s interesting to note that the ‘socialist’ party here in Spain is actually known as the ‘Socialist Workers’ Party’. Perhaps Ed Miliband should consider a name change. The right wing People’s Party didn’t do so well losing 17 of their seats, mainly to the Podemos party (who seem to sell themselves on not being any of the other parties). If you know a little bit of Spanish that word – podemos – might look familiar. It’s the second person plural form of the verb poder in the present tense. Poder is the verb to be able to so podemos translates as (come on, I’m doing all the hard work here!)… we can. I like that and think that more political parties should adopt this approach to naming themselves. At this point I’m tempted to get overtly political and make some suggestions of my own, but as this is an apolitical website (I don’t want to alienate any of you!) I’ll refrain from doing so.

The socialists in Andalucia haven’t had a great time in recent years. Their former leader has now been charged with corruption but it doesn’t seem to have knocked their support. Under their new leader, Susans Díaz – she took over in 2013 – they have managed to retain exactly the same number of seats in the regional parliament. Her name is being mentioned as a future prime minister of Spain. You heard it here first.

In the absence of Peter Snow, here are a couple of charts detailing the results:

Yes, they are copied from Wikipedia which is where most of the information above has come from (although retold in a far more engaging manner and they didn’t go off on the poder tangent…)

But as I sit here in my regular bar sipping my morning coffee, not much has changed here in Cádiz. Apart from the weather. The rain appears to have stopped falling and we are promised a return to blue skies and temperatures in their 20s as from Wednesday. Let’s hope so. Most of my fellow students at the language school have now left although there will probably be new ones starting today. I’ll find out in about half an hour. I myself have only this week and then three days next week to perfect (!) my level of Spanish. Progress is being made and then I have a month of cycling through Spain to put it all into practice… Have a good week!