With My David Cameron change is possible!
Though many aspects of Spain are incredibly backwards, there’s something incredibly modern about their politics.
They don’t have silly minority parties like the Lib Dems, they don’t have mad communist parties like in France, and they actually talk about the problems instead of personalities, unlike Britain.
What most struck me though, is their campaigning, and I have two main examples of how Spain is miraculously ahead of the game.
Here’s the first example. You are all familiar with this picture of Obama with the slogan “Change.” below:
I then realised that this ground-breaking piece of imagery was nothing but a jumped up PSOE campaign from 1982. Have a glance at Felipe Gonzalez:
The topline reads “Vote PSOE” and the slogan means “For change.” Suspicious, no?
Anyway, this is just an aside compared to what I want to go into. My second example pertains to the infamous Conservative Cameron poster campaign:
Which bears an amazing resemblance to the Spanish Conservative Party’s (el Partido Popular) election posters in 2008, which was also just a picture of their leader with a slogan. Take a look at “Make it to the end of the month” “With Rajoy it’s possible“:
Note that the British Tories decided to drop the blue coloured background.
So, the next interesting development is that in Britain, everybody lauded the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the My David Cameron website for it’s (very good, I shall add) instant poster parody maker of the above poster, and subsequent campaign editions. However, back in their elections in 2008, that’s right, they had their own DIY-Rajoy poster generator!
And they call it New Media!
This Post Has 2 Comments
Leave A Reply
Badges
"They don’t have silly minority parties like the Lib Dems, they don’t have mad communist parties like in France, and they actually talk about the problems instead of personalities, unlike Britain."
I can't say that this statement is entirely true. Spain has far more political parties, and though most of them are regional parties, Spain has two national minority parties, Izquierda Unida and Unión, Progreso y Democracia. I don't quite know what you mean by 'silly', but if you mean in terms of Parliamentary representation being insignificant, then the Lib Dems are a superpower compared to IU and UPyD.
Again, the idea that they don't have 'mad communist parties' is wrong. El Partido Comunista de España is the driving force behind the aforementioned IU (I forgot to mention that it is a coalition of left wing parties), and in terms of membership it is one of Spain's largest. That said, I feel that it is declining – much of its initial success in the 1980s hinged on the back of right wing resentment as a result of Franco's dictatorship.
[comment continued]
Funny how true it is that, in the UK, the focus is on personality, e.g. 'I don't like Cameron, he's smug', 'Miliband is a bit of a loser', and the rest. Sadly, in Spain, regional identity and the politics associated with that often comes into play, especially in the more regionally areas such as Catalonia or Euskadi.
As for the rest of the post – strangely true.