Who Chose José Montilla?

My last post touched on democratic accountability and the Barcelona mayoralty. Both Barcelona and Catalonia are governed by Socialist-led coalitions, and Spain by a Socialist parliamentary minority. The Catalan Socialist Party (or PSC) is a thus a party of government on three levels for the city's residents. The quality of democracy obtaining in the PSC thus speaks to the quality of Barcelona as a democratic polity. Now, As a democratic organisation, is the PSC more comparable to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the democratic centre-left parties in the UK, Canada, or the US? How are electoral candidates, leaders, and the party hierarchy chosen? I'll begin with the party leader.

Obama was chosen by party delegates to a national convention; the delegates had been chosen by party members and sympathisers in primary elections and caucuses. Though his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had released her delegates, she nonetheless received about 23% support, and Mr Obama just over 72%. Gordon Brown was not opposed when he stood for the leadership of the Labour Party in 2007, but in 1994 his predecessor Tony Blair was elected by an electoral college in which party members, trade unions, and the parliamentary party had equal weight. Blair and two others competed for the post of party leader: he received 57% of weighted support.

The Catalan premier, José Montilla, did not compete for the support of the party rank and file. He was designated by his party's National Committee, receiving over 98% support. The National Committee is sufficiently opaque that the party's website gives no account of its composition or electoral regime. At least formally, Montilla's ascension to the party leadership resembles Gorbachov's election by the Soviet Politburo more closely than it does the processes for choosing party leaders in the Labour and Democratic parties. He is not directly accountable to his party's membership. This has nothing to do with the justice or efficacy or his policies and their administration, but with the quality of the process of which he is the product. If democracies are characterised by citizens' right to chose their leaders, it would seem natural that democratically run parties would confer on their members the same right. Montilla's party does not confer that right. Like nearly all Spanish parties, then, it suffers from a democratic deficit, and exists more as a cluster of organisational posts than a mass movement.

Who Chose Jordi Hereu?

I am not fond of the mayor. It's not personal. He is representative rather than exceptional, an embodiment of a political class that stands unopposed at every election. He is a professional politician, a party man. I have been trying to discover who chose him--or at least how he was chosen--on the resignation of his predecessor in August 2006. The issue was and is so immaterial to city politics that is was not reported in the city press. The 30 August 2006 edition of El Punt comes closest to broaching the topic. According to El Punt, Hereu was told by the Catalan Socialist Party that he had been chosen. There was not and has not been any involvement of the party rank and file: as far as I can ascertain, he has never stood for open election in his party and only been elected to anything as part of a list.

Another Fifth Place: The Winter Olympics

The mayor wants--or wanted--to bring the winter Olympics to Barcelona in 2022. Whatever else might be said of this bid, it does not reflect local interest in winter sports. Coverage of the Vancouver games in the main Barcelona daily, La Vanguardia, was consigned to the back of the sports section (often on the fifth page).

Paying the Piper, Calling the Tune

Spanish democracy is hobbled by un- or anti-democratic practices. This hold for all levels of government; today's example is municipal, and the practice is that of advertising good vibes. To promote a city to its own citizenry is tantamount to promoting the view that it is well governed, and its governors worthy of extensions to their tenure in office. Sell the city to itself and you sell the mayor to the city. Thus the following advertisement in La Vanguardia on 22 February 2010:

A full page ad to celebrate a fifth-place showing in a ranking drawn up by a British business magazine. The same story had been reported by the same paper two days earlier, at no expense:

What on the 20th was informative was pure spin by the 22nd; what had been the press acting freely became a sort of media-sized mood pill. Here's the kicker: the footer on the 2oth attributes the chart to FDI Magazine. But the original charts used a different colour scheme:

They also used proper English spelling, while the City of Barcelona has chosen "european" over "European". Why the new colours and typeface? They match the City's on-going feel good advertising campaigns, such as

Branding a city to draw tourists is innocuous: tourists don't vote. Branding a city in a city, for the benefit of the citizens, is not a hallmark of open and transparent government. Democracy is not predicated on moods. It requires that citizens be informed and able to judge policy rationally. Tweaking the public's mood with public money, as a recession deepens and lengthens, is self-serving and wasteful. It favours the re-election of the party in power. Media buying on the scale practised by the public sector in Spain lessens media independence, as government--in this case that of the city--assumes a dual role as object of scrutiny and revenue stream.