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Soriek  1yr ago (text post)   1073 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 23

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. I’m increasingly doing more coverage of countries we’re likely to have a userbase living in, or just that I think our userbase would be more interested in. This does mean going a little outside of my comfort zone and I’ll probably make mistakes, so chime in where you see any. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Spain

The Spanish election continues in both tragedy and farce. After the conservative government failed to form a majority coalition, Pedro Sanchez and the left wing PSOE have until November 27. They’ve now formalized an alliance with the far left Sumar, which was expected to happen, and will result in a few standard left wing policy commitments:

This agreement includes measures such as reducing the working day, regulating dismissals, raising the SMI [minimum wage], increasing the public housing stock and expanding birth permits.

But all of this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, because it doesn’t address the alliance PSOE actually needs to be making with the Catalan Independence Party Junts. Junts has not budged on their demand for amnesty for their leader Puigdemont. Without their support the conclusion of this months long saga will just be another election.

Yeah they could really work on the marketing there.

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