By Muriel Pilkington, The local voice
If current political polls prove right, Javier Arenas, the leader of Partido Popular-Andalucia, could turn out to be the worst political tsunami ever to hit the Socialist Party. The polls have been indicating for some time that he will narrow the gap between the two parties in the next regional election, having swiped 10 seats from the Socialists last time around. But the latest polls now give him a majority of one in the Seville Parliament next time around making him the first PP premier of Andalucia since it became an “autonomous community” (decentralised region) in 1981.
Unlike former Junta de Andalucia premier Manuel Chaves, who was born in Ceuta, and current premier José Antonio Griñán, who was born in Madrid, Arenas saw the light of day in Seville, and you can’t get much more Andalucian than that.
He started out his political career in the Union of the Democratic Centre, one of the right of centre parties that eventually evolved into the Partido Popular. He has never strayed far from Seville, having been the city’s deputy mayor from 1983 to 1987. Following the practice of the two main parties, the losing side gets to be the deputy. He was elected to the Junta in 1987 then until he went to Madrid in 1989 as the MP for Sevilla. From 1994 to 2000, he represented the region in the Upper House in Madrid. In addition to leading the PP in the Seville Parliament, he also represents Andalucia for the PP in the Upper House in Madrid. He is a leading moderate on the Christian Democratic wing of the PP.
The man Arenas hopes to unseat next year, José Antonio Griñán, has held several positions in the Junta since 1986 – deputy labour minister, deputy health minister – until 2004, when the then premier Manuel Chaves made him Minister of Economy and Finance. Despite this record, he was largely unknown to the general public and he seemed to pop out of the woodwork when he became Manuel Chaves’s successor last year. Admittedly, Chaves had hogged the limelight since he became premier in 1990, to the point that he seemed to be governing Andalucia single-handedly. His detractors always referred to him as the king, with Andalucia being his realm. When he appeared on the “I have a question for you” programme on RTVE a couple of years back, one of the first was from a young man who said: “You’ve been premier ever since I can remember, are you ever going to retire”. He had just been re-elected but there was already talk about the advisability of letting him run again in 2011. As premier, he was pretty ineffective, making wild promises (a computer for every schoolchild, nearly a million council houses) which he never made good on. And his relatives – he has 10 brothers and sisters – kept popping up in the headlines, in scandals related to juicy contracts with the Junta.
The last (known) scandal involved one of his daughters, who was the legal representative of a company in Huelva which obtained a €10 million subsidy from the Junta at the end of 2008. The scandal hit the headlines in January last year and in April, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero whisked him away to Madrid and gave him the newly created post of the third deputy prime minister in charge of liaising with the regional governments. This upset a lot of people in Madrid – who needs another deputy prime minister when we already have two?
In Andalucia, sly tongues whispered that Chaves was whisked away before he could do the Socialists any more harm. He lost ten seats to the PP and had to form an alliance with Izquierda Unida (IU, United Left) to make sure he could stay in government, having enjoyed healthy majorities since he was first elected in 1990.
However, those majorities had been steadily dwindling as more and more people grew tired of a man who seemed to do nothing but live the good life, leaving the actual business of governing to his sidekicks. I know of several Socialists who voted for Arenas the last time around in an attempt to get rid of Chaves.
Griñán recently pooh-poohed opinion polls that show the PP winning next year - “things can change a lot before then”, he said. He has also gone on record as saying that he knows Andalucians want change “but that change can come from within the Socialist Party”. After 29 years of Socialist rule Andalucia still comes second from last in education, health care and council (VPO) housing. Only Socialist-governed Extremadura performs more poorly than Andalucia in these areas.
Older people still remember the bad old days when the gap between rich and poor in the region was enormous, making it a hot bed of revolution, a crucible for any progressive political idea that raised its head elsewhere. But those days are past.
For once, I'm really looking forward to the next regional election because I suspect it won't be “more of the same”.
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