Election Day

The general elections were held today. I wanted to do a post earlier in this week describing election-related things I had seen, but I was lazy and never got around to it. Anyway, polls have been saying for weeks and months that the Socialists were going to be defeated badly and that the Populares would be the new governing party. I bought the newspaper one week ago and the headlines flatly referred to the Socialist defeat (that still hadn't happened at that point) as a "debacle." So you can see the attitude people were coming to this with. Of course Spain has 20% unemployment (and 40% youth unemployment) so it's no surprise that the incumbent party was expected to lose. I mean, people talk about Obama not being reelected for mainly economic reasons--now imagine what it would be like if we had 20% unemployment. The strange part of the whole story is that the Partido Popular is a conservative party that is certainly going to pursue a politics of fiscal restraint, which I can't imagine being really popular during a crisis (semantics lesson: rather than talking about a recession or whatever, Spanish people always refer to "la crisis"-- this is a totally ubiquitous phrase to the point that stores will advertise their special deals as "crisis prices"). The other important part of the story is discontent/anger with politics in general, with the indignados and so on.
So what did I see in Vigo? Not too much actually. There were a bunch of PP campaign cars driving around. I mean cars decked out in blue with the PP logo (in Europe red=leftist, radical, etc, and blue=conservative) with loudspeakers mounted on top that drove around playing music and urging you to vote for their party. There are a lot of posters in the area where I live that express a general discontent with the foreseen outcome of the elections. One poster for some leftist Galician party showed the two main candidates and asked, "Are you going to vote for the right, or the extreme right?" A communist poster said "Gañe quen gañe, a pobo traballador galego perde" which means "Whoever wins, the Galician working people lose." The other day an indignado handed me a flyer telling me to vote for Bert and Ernie "since you already know beforehand that they're puppets manipulated by hidden hands." At the bottom of the flyer you were informed of various voting strategies (not voting, voting blank, writing-in candidates, writing nonsense on your ballot as a protest) and their results (for example, if you vote blank your ballot is still counted and added to the total, which makes it more difficult for small parties to break percentage thresholds). There are posters that combine the names and logos of the two major parties PP and PSOE to make PPSOE.
Anyway, the PP had a big victory today, but other that these observations I don't really have any interesting analysis or insights. On facebook I saw some doom&gloom statuses, but this isn't suprising, I can only imagine what my facebook will look like if Obama loses in 2012.