Small-Vox symptoms: Spain’s elections

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Ora Ogunbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Russia's warships are getting a makeover and not just to look pretty. The Navy is repainting its vessels for tactical reasons because the art of deception at sea has to become slightly more artful in the era of AI controlled weaponry.

And have you ever had cheese and pickle flavored ice cream? Trust me, you probably don't want to try it. We take you on a trip to a shop, doing weird and wonderful things with the frosty treat.

But first, Voters in Spain have awakened today to a political reality a bit different from what polls and pundits had widely predicted. The general election was expected to neatly oust the governing Socialist party, making way for the center right People's Party. But in the end, it wasn't quite so neat. The People's Party did get the largest share of yesterday's vote and its leader, Alberto Nunez Fejo, crowed that it had won the election and deserved to form a government. That isn't as straightforward as it sounds. No party got a majority, so forming a government means some horse trading with parties further from the political center. Principal among them is Vox, a youngish hard right party which had been predicted to do better, a prediction that in the end horrified lots of voters. Santiago Abascal, the leader of Vox, said that it had been a day of concern. He predicted that the horse trading wouldn't go anywhere and that VOX would soon have another shot because there would probably be another election. For his part, the Socialist Party leader, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, declared that those who had proposed a regression on rights and freedoms had failed. There are many more of us who want Spain to continue moving forward, he said. Vox's star may have faded, but how Spain moves forward from this mess of electoral maths is exceedingly unclear.

Last night was an unexpectedly close race, with the center right Party, the People's Party and the far right party VOX failing to get an outright majority of seats.

Lane Greene is the Economist's Madrid bureau chief.

The big surprise was the better than expected performance of the prime minister's Socialist Party, along with his ally, a smaller left wing party. They won't have a majority either.

Okay, wind back a bit. Tell me how we got here and how these players ended up in the positions and the expectations that everyone had.

It's been a period of real instability in Spain. There had been two elections in 2019 because the first one, earlier in the year, failed to produce a majority government. The second one finally did and gave a minority government of the Socialist Party with Pedro Sanchez and a further left party. But it's been a fairly stable government, but a very tense political season since. So a lot of division, very polarized situation, and lots of people saying that Pedro Sanchez has to be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

So how is it that the right and the far right became such a part of the story here for this election.

Well, the center right elected a new leader last year, Alberto Nunez Feho, and he's been quite a centrist. He's been moving the party back to the middle, both on tone and and on policy, and has recovered its fortunes. But the problem is that the People's Party doesn't have a majority of seats either. Was never really shown in polls to have a good chance at a solo majority. So they need a partner and everyone was looking to the other party on the right, but in this case, to the hard right of the right of Fayo and the People's Party, and that is vox, the party that everyone was worried might come into government. This would be the first time that this sort of hard right has entered government since the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship when he died in 1975.

So tell me more about VOX and what it is they stand for VOX.

Is a splinter to the right of the People's Party. And in other words, they oppose a lot of the changes in Spain. They are sort of Spanish centralists. They want to take powers away from the regions like the Basque country in Catalonia and the others and give more power to the government in Madrid. They pick up Catholic supporters who are unhappy with the liberalizing of abortion and euthanasia. They are much more male than female. They oppose the law on gender violence that Spain has passed and say that it puts the burden of guilt upon any man in a nasty divorce or a domestic violence case. They bring together bull fighting aficionados and country folks who feel like the way of life is changing too fast. In other words, there's kind of a rag bag of very different grievances. But the thing that had people talking is their constant refrain of stopping illegal immigration. They say they like the good, orderly, hard working immigrants and particularly Latino ones, but don't like the illegal ones and those who don't integrate in sp. And that was widely taken as a sort of racist swipe at immigrants from Africa.

And so now we know the parties that were in the running. How did the election actually turn out?

Well, the Socialists were the big story in that they did better than expected. They were expected to lose about 20 seats and in the end they didn't. They're still well short of a majority, but with a bunch of tiny parties, most of them regional parties like in the Basque country and Galicia and Catalonia, if they all voted with the Socialists in Sumar, they'd still be a bit short of majority. But VOX lost a couple of percentage points from about 15 to about 12%. And the people's Party underperformed its expectations a bit as well. And that left them a few seats of a majority as well. So neither the big rainbow coalition on the left nor the two party bloc on the right has a majority at this point. And everyone's scratching their heads about what's.

Going to happen now and what's your guess? Or at least what's the procedure?

Well, the procedure is that the king will talk to the big party leaders and ask them how they're doing forming a possible majority coalition so that when the parliament comes in in August, it's meant to have a debate and then an investiture vote, which is essentially to choose a prime minister who will then name his government. But right now nobody's got a government and the king will be scratching his head along with the rest of us. If after that first debate and vote fails. That starts about a two month clock to try to find an alternative. And if that clock runs out, we could be looking at repeated elections later in the year.

But on balance, on the basis of what you've seen so far, what kind of coalition might emerge from this, if.

Any one is that the balance of votes that we haven't mentioned yet is a strident independentist separatist party called Juntz in Catalonia. And they've currently said they will not vote for Pedro Sanchez to install a government of his. And there are seven votes could get Sanchez over the top, but they've compared him unfavorably to a used car salesman and that's going to be very hard to back off. And it would be very tough for Sanchez to assemble a group including them because of the enmity between that party and basically everyone else in Spain at this point. The other possibility is the distant possibility of a grand coalition between the two big centrist parties. About 65% of Spaniards voted for either the People's Party or the Socialists, the two big traditional parties of government. A lot of people would love to see them get together, sideline the extremists and govern for the center of Spain and get problem solved. The thing is that they've never governed together. Spain has gone back and forth between left and right and has no tradition of grand coalitions of the two big parties like say Germany has. It would be a big surprise. It hasn't happened so far and that's going to take some very tough negotiations if we're even going to think about it.

But among them, you haven't mentioned VOX and the possibility of them ending up in government. What, what does it tell you about the, the Spanish electorate? That big fear wasn't realized?

Well, it seems that Spain is moving back towards the center with both big centrist parties gaining lots of support this time and together having their best result in quite a long time. A lot of people were looking at VOX to come into government because the far right has come into power in Italy and is supporting or taking part in governments in Finland and in Sweden. So this seemed like part of a trend and everyone basically took that almost for granted. But it seems like VOX has a ceiling and we've seen it hit and then fall back from that ceiling. The ceiling was about 15% last time, it's fallen to about 12% this time. In other words, this is not some inevitable rise of the far right in Spain following everywhere else. VOX has actually fallen back a bit and this shows that Spaniards are really kind of Nostalgic for centrist government. This is not the rise of the angry right that so many feared, and in that sense, at least a good result, if a chaotic one from last night.

Lane, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks to you, Jason.

In the first days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this radio recording went viral. Naval officers on the Russian warship Moskva hailed Ukrainian border guards on Snake Island, a small island in the Black Sea, asking them to stand down or they would open fire. There was a brief pause from the Ukrainians before they told the Russians to, well, go away, but in a very direct and derogatory manner. This moment, seen as a significant act of defiance, was commemorated on the first limited edition war stamp released by Ukraine's postal service. The encounter was made even sweeter for the Ukrainians when the Moskva ended up at the bottom of the Black Sea two months later. But despite the middling role of Russia's naval force in this war, Moscow is stepping up efforts to protect its fleets.

In June, we saw the Admiral Essen, a Russian warship in Sevastopol, which appeared to have acquired a rather striking new paint job. The bow and the stern were black and the midsection was white.

David Hambling writes about defence and technology for the Economist.

So the overall effect of this is you can see a white shape in the distance when you may not notice the front and back. So it gives the impression of a much smaller vessel than it actually is. And since then, we've seen three other Russian ships of the Black Sea fleet which have similarly been redecorated.

So they're resorting to optical illusions?

Effectively, yes, but this is in fact, a technique that's got a very long history in naval warfare, because on land it's possible to achieve very good camouflage. So you actually can't be seen at sea. There's no way of hiding. The best is to hope to merge with the background as best you can, and that's why you end up with ships painted this colour. That's known as Battleship Grey. Grey, which is the best colour not to stand out. Obviously, it doesn't make you invisible, but it means the ship might be spotted at, say, 10 miles away rather than 15 miles away if it was wide. So during the First World War, both the British and the Americans began to look at various visual deception paint schemes as ways of protecting their boats, particularly from submarine attack.

And does it actually work?

It certainly seemed to at the time, though looking at the statistics after the war, the effectiveness is quite disputed. But the most striking, a striking one, which certainly appeared to work in tests was known as dazzle camouflage, which was developed by Norman Wilkinson, who was a British artist. And the idea was that he would paint ships with these huge geometric shapes in bold, contrasting colours. So what you ended up with looked very much like a Cubist painting. And even though it made the ship very conspicuous, it made it quite difficult to tell the shape of the ship. And at the time, the biggest threat to ships was submarines, German U boats. And by breaking up the outline of the vessel, it made it difficult for a U boat commander looking through a periscope to judge exactly what angle the ship was travelling at. Now, that was really important because the U boats were attacking with torpedoes and the torpedo has a running time of one or two minutes to get to the target. So the U boat commander has to judge very accurately just what angle and what speed the ship is travelling at. And the dazzle camouflage apparently made it quite difficult to do this. The problem is, we don't know how many torpedoes did miss as a result of it, because no one has records of that. But certainly during tests, this dazzle camouflage appeared to work as a way of deceiving about the shape and orientation of the ship. That will come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about fashion, who knows that stripes do have an effect. Vertical stripes can make you look taller, horizontal stripes make you look wider. So it's this similar idea of using human visual perception to deceive someone about what they're actually looking at. The idea. Then, In World War II, the camouflage schemes were a bit more modest. But in particular, the American Navy developed a whole load of techniques for painting different parts of ships different colours to again make it difficult to see exactly what was there. And the big idea was so that the valuable ships, like aircraft carriers in particular, couldn't easily be distinguished from lower value vessels like transports or cruisers. But after the war, basically everyone gave up on camouflage paint schemes because it wasn't relevant, since ships were now mainly being detected via radar, sonar and other means.

And why are these naval paint jobs making a comeback?

Well, it seems to be because visual recognition of ships is now becoming important again. In particular, the Russians have suffered a series of attacks from these Ukrainian kamikaze drone boats, or USVs, uncrewed surface vessels. And some of them have been described as robot jet skis that come in at high speed. The operator is guiding it with a video camera in the bow, so they only have a very short time as they speed into harbour to find the right ship and guide their USV towards it. And because you've got a camera with limited bandwidth, you've got a relatively poor image. There's a lot of spray. So, like the German U boat commander looking through his periscope, your USV operator only has a very short length of time to try and pick out what he's aiming at. And the idea is that paint jobs like the ones on the Essen should make it just hard enough to cause just a bit of confusion and create some chance that they will go for something low value rather than a warship. Then there's the other idea, that this might also actually help the ships avoid satellite tracking, because there's a lot of satellites out there which automatically follow ships around the place. By using this paint scheme, they can make the ship look smaller than it is, so it might not be correctly identified as a warship. And that will help fool people trying to track where the Russian fleet is. That probably won't work for high end operators like the US in particular, who would be using human analysts to track everything. But anything that requires artificial intelligence to do the tracking for it is relatively easily fooled, and that might have difficulty picking out the camouflage chips from other traffic. Looking forward, we might actually see even more sophisticated paint schemes if the aim is to fool AI because there's a whole field of study on what are called adversarial examples, which are examples of images which will fool machine vision systems, but which a human could see through immediately. But because artificial intelligence can be quite brittle, it can be fooled in quite bizarre ways.

And David, what are some examples of that?

There's a famous example of one team that developed a printed 3D plastic turtle, which Machine vision actually thought looked like a rifle. So if you can do that kind of thing, you should be able to fool machine vision systems, whether they're on satellite watches or on drones or other vehicles around the place, quite easily. As to exactly how well this will work and whether it will be worthwhile. Well, a pot of paint is a very cheap way of giving you some protection. And if it gives you a 1% less chance of being spotted or targeted, then that's an extremely good investment.

How fascinating. David, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Soy sauce, I think. Do you really want to do the ones in the piece?

Yeah.

Well, okay. Well, should we just get a spread then? Yes, we can take a note back, so.

Yeah.

Okay.

Why don't we get a tub of the ketchup one, we take that back and then the cocoa pops.

Branston?

Yeah, just.

Just a scoop of the cocoa pops, please.

Oh, that's lovely. It's not so soft. Oh, the sweet chilli.

Oh.

It's a sunny day in London and we went and bought lots of ice cream. I promise. I am actually working and I'm about to try some.

Right. All right. Here you go. Here's the first one.

What is it? Oh, you're not gonna tell me? Hold on, let me find.

Ah.

I can taste cheese. Oh, that is so bad. I can taste cheese. And more salt. It tastes like a sandwich. It tastes as if someone has made a sandwich into ice cream. It is cheesy. I think I just got a chunk of cheese and cream in my mouth.

Give us a spin.

It could be worse.

Oh, my God.

Actually, just craft it. Does it make more sense to transform a bottle of ketchup into a handbag or a flavor of ice cream? To Anya Hindmar, a British fashion designer, that's a false dichotomy.

Josie Dilap writes our food column World in a Dish, and she's responsible for making us eat that horrible ice cream.

At the Ice Cream Project in central London, you can get both. Although at £3.50 or $4.53 a scoop, the ice cream is marginally more affordable than the 1,195 pound tote. It's not just ketchup. Londoners can buy an ice cream tasting of mellow cheddar cheese with the chunky, crunchy bite of Branston. Branston Pickle is a chutney that has appeared in soggy sandwiches since 1922. Far more palatable are the ones based on Cocoa pops, a chocolate flavored cereal which turns into, admittedly a fairly mild chocolate ice cream and one flavored with lemon curd. Experimenting with unusual flavors is not enough new thing in ice cream. Heston Blumenthal, who's a very experimental British chef, has long been known for his bacon and egg ice cream. The Alchemist, a two star Michelin restaurant in Copenhagen, serves pig blood ice cream, where the blood replaces eggs as an emulsifier. There's even an American ice cream company that flavors its products with Mac and cheese, ranch dressing and pizza. But these kinds of experiments are not. Not that new. An ice cream shop in 18th century London that was called the Pineapple Served Parmesan ice cream. The urge to innovate when it comes to ice cream seems to be insatiable. All of this might suggest that ice cream makers need to keep churning out ever weirder flavors to persuade people to keep slurping. But the charm of ice cream seems to be more fundamental. It's been made around the world in places with vastly different culinary styles and histories. It's something that seems to have universal appeal. From Turkish Don Duma to Syrian booza, Italian gelato to Iranian faloode, Filipino sorbetas to Indian kulfi, some iteration of the dessert is made and loved everywhere. Vanilla, the classic option, which is also a derisive synonym for boring, is often touted as having universal appeal. Now that might be because vanilla is one of the volatile flavor compounds that is found in breast milk as well as in some formula milks. And the pleasure of ice cream is quite childish. The chimes of an ice cream truck will send a ripple of delight through even the iciest hearts. Childish is a term that's usually used pejoratively to describe things that should be put away when you reach the age of maturity. Perhaps that explains the drive to make ice cream ever more sophisticated.

Haagen Dazs is so thick and creamy. That's why it melts so slowly in your mouth.

Haagen Dazs was among the first ice cream companies to market the product to adults. But the best ice cream desserts are not actually that far removed from those enjoyed by children. And the joys of childhood are profound. They win out against innovation, however sophisticated. The marketing people might come for the Branston pickle ice cream, but they stay for the Cocoa Pops.

Oh, that's confusing. Very sweet ketchup. Cold ketchup, I mean, which, you know, that's what says on the tin I unexpectedly delicious. It says unexpected. I'd say, okay, I would have stopped there.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com and if.

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