BRITISH people know that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party all but became a cropper in last week’s local elections.
Calls for Sir Keir’s resignation are even being heard among the ranks of the Labour Party itself – with rumours abound that the prime minister will offer a timetable for his resignation at a cabinet meeting this morning.
The Spanish press is following these events fairly closely. After all, in Pedro Sanchez, Spain has a relatively unpopular left-of-centre prime minister of its own.
So what does the Spanish press have to say?
STARMER IS STAYING!
El Mundo, probably the nearest thing to The Times, is emphasising Sir Keir’s defiant stand.
“He insists he is not going to resign,” it says, “and he is lashing out at his critics, saying that it’s dangerous, in the present world climate, to destabilize the government.”
The lamentable election results – in which Labour lost a thousand council seats nationally – are described as a ‘debacle’.
It is surprising, says El Mundo, to hear Sir Keir talking of winning in 2029, which suggests that he sees himself remaining at the helm for at least three more years.
His problem, as Spain sees it, is that he is now vulnerable to attack from the Left: the prime minister (described as ‘living on borrowed time’) tried to look ‘folksy’ as he made a speech to the cameras, with his shirt unbuttoned, and not wearing a tie.
He tried to remind the public that the Conservatives have spent the last 15 years fighting among themselves, as a way of deflecting attention from the harsh words coming from his own backbenches.
AN EPIDEMIC OF UNEASE
The other big national newspaper, the left-leaning El Pais, preferred to see Labour’s problem in a wider European context.
The paper points out that no-one really cares – the crisis in the UK Labour Party didn’t make it into its top-ten most-read political stories.
For everyone in Europe, says El Pais, last Thursday was a win for the anti-democratic Right.
“The local and regional elections in the United Kingdom have given Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party a clear victory, dealing a resounding blow to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.”
If the two-party system, so stable in Britain for centuries, is now at risk, then all of Europe is in danger.
Poland and Italy have both seen centrist governments collapse, to be replaced by the far-right. Is this now a universal trend?
Though it is hard to see beer-swilling Nigel Farage as a threat to our liberty, says the paper, no-one feared Victor Orban when he first came to power in Hungary, but he soon turned out to be extremely authoritarian.
Modern methods of communication are largely to blame.
We get our news, not from a general, shared source, but from online influencers who tell us what we want to hear.
El Pais sees what is happening to Sir Keir and his party (less than two years on from winning a thumping majority) as a warning to us all.
