Europe holds elections this Sunday

USPA NEWS - At midnight this Friday, the campaign for the European elections that will be held on Sunday in around twenty countries of the European Union ended in Spain. The peculiarity in Spain is that these elections will be held nationally: none of the main parties that go to the polls have spoken about Europe.

On the contrary, the highlighted issues in the electoral campaign that has ended were the investigation opened by a Madrid Court into the wife of the Prime Minister, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, for alleged corruption and influence peddling; the alleged conspiracy of the extreme right to damage the image of the Prime Minister, and the open war between the Government's partners - the Socialist Party and the extreme left formations Podemos and Sumar - as a result of the official position of the Executive on the war in Gaza.

That and the Amnesty Law, which pleases the Catalan independence parties that support the Government and which has been appealed before the Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The law, approved a week ago, will take time to come into force... if it does. Because both the investigation into the Prime Minister's wife and the Amnesty Law are worrying in Europe. The European Union Prosecutor's Office sees signs of crime in the actions of Pedro Sánchez's wife and, on the other hand, Brussels is concerned about the inequality established by the Amnesty Law.

This being the case, Spaniards will reflect this Saturday on the meaning of their votes. The polling stations will open at 9:00 a.m. on Sunday and will remain open until 8:00 p.m. The results of the European elections, not only in Spain but in all the countries of the Union, will be known next week. Pre-election polls anticipate a victory for the conservative right, supported by the growth that conservative and extreme right parties have been experiencing in recent years across the continent.

The elections officially began on Thursday, June 6, with voting held in the Netherlands. But a small European country - Estonia - launched its voting, electronically, last Monday. In all countries, however, the elections will end on Sunday, June 9.

For Spaniards, the European elections are not as attractive as the national or regional elections held in Spain. Europe renews its Parliament every five years and, after it, the Council and the European Commission. 60 percent of the laws that apply in Spain come from Europe, despite which the Parliament of Strasbourg and the European institutions are largely unknown to the majority of Spaniards. Knowledge of Europe is greater in cities than in rural areas, despite the fact that the Spanish countryside suffers from the provisions of the CAP (Community Agricultural Policy) and the aid with which Europe intends to compensate for the abandonment of crops and the limitation of the productions.