Liberal wannabes crumble.

Rosa Diez's new party, UPD, the new liberal wannabe party in Spain is crumbling even before it started campaigning. Rosa Diez, the eternal second in line candidate to the PSOE leadership, decided to leave PSOE in September to become leader of her own right of the left (whatever that means) party. She, together with Fernando Savater, thought they could build a new party which could claim the political centre of Spanish politics. The sad thing is that Diez, and certainly Savater, don't have much of an ideological drive. Their only common believe, as they are both Basque, is that PSOE has given too much away to nationalist parties from Catalonia and the Basque Country. Their new party is based on the idea of a Socialist party without the so-called centrifugal forces within PSOE represented by the present President of Spain. Their error has been to label themselves as economic liberals, when they aren't as they are more of the protectionist Socialist kind, and political liberals, which is PSOE policy minus the previously mentioned centrifugal policy. Such liberal label has no base in Spain where, as argued in my earlier entry about Spanish electoral behaviour, the centre is a marginal political position among the electorate. The need to create a new image has forced them to create a new party that: a) hasn't got a militant or electoral base b) hasn't got a clear differentiated ideology c) isn't any different from many currents within PSOE itself.

I believe that Diez is gone into some kind of massive egotrip. She knew she never had enough support within PSOE to win the leadership of the party and has decided to play into the hands of PP on the Spanish nationalism card. It hasn't really worked out, today her entire party executive committee in Catalonia resigned over an internal infight over who was going to be the candidate for Congress for Barcelona! How can it be that a party that is three months old, that has never contested a national general election is already fighting over a leadership contest as if they were a natural party of government? It seems to me that her egocentrism is the only value Diez has transmited to the very few activists that have joined her party in the last three months. Good luck to her and her sect, they'll need it to even be in the ballot on the 9th of March.