~adeodato/ blog/ entries/ 2008/ 02/ 14/ Hating the Spanish voting system

Hating the Spanish voting system

I’m obviously not discovering the Americas here, given the sheer amount of research, theory and whatnot one can find for this topic, but I need to vent. Also, please excuse my terminology and my bias.

In Spain we have two main political parties, the one that advertises itself as the rightish-center option, but is sliiiightly more to the right than that (PP), and the one that wears socialism in its name, but is sliiiightly less to the left than that (PSOE). Then there are some minority parties, like the nationalists, and United Left (IU).

So, ideally, my ballot à-la-Debian would always be:

  [1] IU
  [2] PSOE
  [4] PP
  [3] None of the above

But sadly you can’t vote like that in the real world (?), and can only pick one. Without a fscking second round. So every election I’m left wandering in the cold land of tactical voting.

One last interesting bit: when talking about my wishes for a two round system with a good friend, who also happens to be a PP fanboy, he said: “But with that system PP would never govern!” And I think there’s some truth to that.