Talk:2020 Basque regional election

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion:

• Logotipo EAJ-PNV.svg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 06:09, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Parties within EH Bildu

EH Bildu may not be a formal coalition but some parties that created the coalition still exist, and some members of parliament have party affiliations so why not reflect that in the partliamentary status table? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gandalf Grisa (talk • contribs) 18:51, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

First and foremost, because it is complex to properly represent party affiliations when EH Bildu, as a party, now allows affiliation too. Secondly, I am not sure where do you get your numbers from: do you have any source where it can be checked that there are 4 Sortu, 3 EA, 3 Alternatiba and 8 generic EH Bildu MPs? It was 12 Sortu, 4 EA, 1 Aralar and 1 Alternatiba elected in the 2016 election, and there have been only three parliamentary changes since then. Impru20^talk 19:03, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

If anything it is easier to represent party affiliations now, since the figure of 12 for Sortu assumed that every non-EA/Aralar/Alternatiba member was a member of Sortu, which is not the case at all. I checked every member so I am pretty sure those are the figures now, I can present sources for each one but this is what I got: 3 for EA (Eba Blanco, Maider Otamendi and Leire Pinedo), 3 for Alternatiba (Ander Rodriguez, Josu Estarrona and Diana Urrea), 4 for Sortu (Julen Arzuaga, Iker Casanova, Larraitz Ugarte and Unai Urruzuno) and 8 Independents/EH Bildu (Maddalen Iriarte, Jasone Agirre, Rebeka Ubera (previoulsy Aralar), Oihana Etxebarrieta, Mikel Otero, Eva Lopez de Arroyabe, Nerea Kortajarena and Ibon San Saturnino). Most of the members listed as Independents/EH Bildu have no previous political affiliation except Ibon San Saturnino, who was member a member of ANV and Batasuna. So he may as well be included as a member of Sortu.Gandalf Grisa (talk) 21:24, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

No, it is not; you would have trouble figuring out double affiliations, which is not only allowed but favoured by Sortu, EA and Alternatiba. In fact, sources do treat them all as EH Bildu members anyway.

Independents are typically counted within the party which is proposing them (unless they come as a result of a joint nomination between two or more parties). Since those were part of Sortu's quota within the lists when proposed in 2016, they are considered as Sortu-nominated. Otherwise, under your same rule of thumb, they would not be EH Bildu affiliates either because they would be independents within the EH Bildu lists and not proper EH Bildu members. This would be nigh-to-impossible to determine, sort of asking the involved people themselves. Impru20^talk 22:06, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

OK. However, I don't see why Sortu, EA and Alternatiba should not be listed (along with EH Bildu) within EH Bildu's list in the parties & alliances table? -- Gandalf Grisa (talk) 02:14, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Would be redundant. All three are already constituent members of EH Bildu; listing them separately would be an odd duplication. Impru20^talk 13:03, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

When will the polls open and close?

Does anyone know?

62.226.76.122 (talk) 04:38, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes. They open at 9 am local time (this is, about 10 mins ago) and close at 8 pm. Impru20^talk 07:09, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Seat change concerns

The Results table is not an appropiate place for this. Firstly, the table shows results obtained by lists, and comparisons are done with previously comparable lists. Equo can't be compared to a previous result because the seat it won in 2016 was not won within its own list, but within Elkarrekin Podemos's one, which is still an existing alliance which ran in this election (indeed, sources do make the comparison as presented as of currently in the article, not considering Equo's seat separately in 2016). This also has to do with the fact that list composition can change if elected members resign, meaning that, for coalitions, the number of deputies allocated to the various parties may also change over time (i.e. had Becerra resigned before the election, he wouldn't have been replaced by an Equo member; if PP+Cs's current leading candidate for Biscay resigns (he is a PP member), he won't be replaced by a PP member but by a Cs member). This will depend on how the lists have been set up, but it shows that seats are not really "owned" by the parties comprising the alliances, but by the alliances themselves.

These are some bits of information which can be usefully added elsewhere in the article (which is already done). But doing so in the main Results table, as explained, is not only not "accurate" or "helpful", but can actually be misleading to readers (and random comparisons may also enter in conflict with what verifiable sources report). Impru20^talk 17:54, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

That is a good point with regards to that the next name on the lists is used to replace resigned deputies. However, I don't think that it gets to the crux of the issue. Firstly, we're not a crystal ball that can report on the future. It's not like the article on the 2016 Galician election, for example, discusses the subsequent breakup of En Marea into separate parliamentary groups. Secondly, on election day, the results are what they are, and it is natural for a reader to want to know what happened. (For PP+Cs, that means knowing the results for the whole list and knowing who actually got elected. This isn't a minor point, since Ciudadanos could easily have been left without parliamentary representation despite going in coalition with the PP.) And thirdly, we're not talking about mutually exclusive claims, so your point about how resignations are handled isn't really relevant. It's not like anyone is arguing for deleting the fact that PP+Cs as an electoral list existed and won 5 seats in parliament.

With regards to Elkarrekin Podemos 'still existing' from a prior electoral cycle, that cannot, legally speaking, be true. Electoral coalitions have to submit paperwork at the beginning of every electoral cycle: [1]. While it makes sense to compare results between the 2016 and 2020 coalitions, they were legally separate entities. And critically, for the purposes of displaying the results, they were also substantively different, because the older coalition included Equo and and the newer coalition didn't include Equo. When reading "New" and "±0", most readers will infer that Equo won representation in neither 2016 nor 2020. Since that is false, the way that the table is displayed now is already misleading to readers. Hence, I think that a footnote is in order.

I appreciate that on the second go of deleting my edits, you chose to add the relevant information elsewhere in the article. Presumably this means that you actually do think that the information is both accurate and useful. I think it makes most sense to indicate the information in the results table itself and believe that there is a way to do this without further misleading readers. (A nested table might work nicely for displaying the breakdown of the PP+Cs result. Maybe the best way to deal with the +/− column of the Equo row is to replace it entirely with a footnote, much like many rows of the PP and Cs columns are replaced by a footnote in the opinion polls table.) In any case, the information should be presented under the Results section, not the Aftermath section, where I would expect to find political commentary about government formation, not a plain description of the results in prose. --JECE (talk) 00:58, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I was only bringing an example. But this is important because consistency across articles is important and because there have been countless times in the past where the examples I've put have actually happened (I've been a couple years around here, and believe when I say that I've probably analized and studied (sometimes, even attempted to use) a wide range of proposals such as the one you intended to add. In the end, it's just impractical. Obviously you cannot predict the future, but resignations tend to happen and will happen. The election is meant to elect the overall number of seats by each political grouping, but the internal composition of it is not the election's doing but the politicians' doing, so that is better reflected outside the pure electoral result presentation.

In the end, I'm not disputing a reader cannot know the full results within each candidacy at the time of election; I'm disputing that the "Results" table is the place for that. Specially because you cannot do many things there: it's just a plain table with data. Sure, you can clutter it with several dozens of footnotes if you wish but it'd be increasingly hard to read, would cause many conflicts and the purpose of the table itself (to present plain results and direct comparisons with previous election results) would be lost. For Equo, for example, it's already stated here that they had one seat going into the election (albeit within the EP group).

With regards to Elkarrekin Podemos 'still existing' from a prior electoral cycle, that cannot, legally speaking, be true. Yes, it does. Electoral coalitions have to submit their paperwork and can change their composition if they wish ahead of an election, but in many cases the alliances do exist in a permanent way prior to the election. Would you say that Unidas Podemos does not exist as of currently because it has not submitted their paperwork for the next election? Would you say that the Convergence and Union alliance only existed between the 1978-2001 timeframe during the days that elections took place because of requiring to submit their paperwork? Does Navarra Suma not exist despite them working operationally like that in hundreds of city councils and all parliaments? Did EH Bildu not exist before constituting itself as a party in 2017 because of it requiring to submit their papework for elections? Nonsense. Sources would refute you, and by a great deal. The bureaucratic requirements to contest an election are one thing, but that does not affect the alliances still existing as full-fledged political entities. In this case, EP was the same alliance than the one existing politically and in parliament since 2016: just without Equo. When reading "New" and "±0", most readers will infer that Equo won representation in neither 2016 nor 2020. That is because Equo didn't won representation in 2016. It was EP who did. Equo only did win one seat within EP lists, thanks to votes awarded to the EP list.

I appreciate that on the second go of deleting my edits, you chose to add the relevant information elsewhere in the article. Yes, well, as said I have never opposed adding this info in the article; I'm actually very in favour of it (which you may see in the structure of showing previous parliamentary composition at dissolution with the full list of parties within parliamentary groups, the table showing relevant parties running for election with previous results, etc). Nested tables within the "Results" main table tend to end up into a mess (I also tried it in the past lmao) and definitely not worth the effort; it's simpler to have it elsewhere. Maybe the best way to deal with the +/− column of the Equo row is to replace it entirely with a footnote, much like many rows of the PP and Cs columns are replaced by a footnote in the opinion polls table. I explicitly want to avoid this because I think it's important that seat variations add up (i.e gains + losses equalling to the overall variation of seats, most of the time that would be 0), otherwise readers may get puzzled attempting to find the lost seats.

In any case, the information should be presented under the Results section, not the Aftermath section, where I would expect to find political commentary about government formation, not a plain description of the results in prose. Actually, the Aftermath section does typically cover intrinsecal issues revolving results (not just in Spanish election articles, but in general as well). Information on government formation and such is typically added there if brief, but it's also not rare for such information to be split into different articles, because the main goal of election articles is to cover elections themselves, not tricky government formation procedures. Impru20^talk 01:28, 14 July 2020 (UTC)