Friday 22 April 2011

Andorran Elections

Reading newpapers or watching news reports can be a great way to learn Spanish, but it can be difficult to follow the news if you don't know the political background of a country.

Starting with where I am right now, Andorra has just held a general election, and has had a change of government as a result. For such a small country (there are just over 20 000 voters out of a population of around 90 000 as many residents do not hold Andorran nationality) there are a lot of political parties. The most significant, at least this time around, are the Social Democrats (Partie Socialdemócrata - PS) to the centre left of the political spectrum, and the Democrats for Andorra (Demócrates per Andorra - DA) to the centre right. Despite the similarity of names the parties seem to have quite different policies with PS taking a more interventionist approach than DA.

In the recent election, the result was a substantial win for DA, making Toni Martí the new head of the government (jefe del gobierno). DA are the orange (naranja) party here, so the papers were talking about a sea of orange.

You can read more about the Andorran election (in Spanish) in this article from El Periodico.

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