Rajoy spoof shut down as campaign heats up across the web
Socialists withdraw video depicting patient dying in under-funded Catalan hospital
The election campaign saw a tragicomic day on the internet Thursday with banned controversial spots popping up across cyberspace and parody Twitter accounts closed down, only to be cloned by others in protest.
The shutting down of @nanianorajoy, a spoof on Popular Party (PP) Mariano Rajoy's own account, was seen by many Twitter users as pure censorship. The PP requested that Twitter close the account, which evoked a fierce reaction from people who demanded that it be reopened.
In doing so, the hashtag #freenaniano (free Naniano) became a trending topic on Twitter. Other accounts began popping up, such as @nanianoRajoy2 and @MariguanoRajoy, where Twitter users posted demands that the original naniano be reinstated.
Meanwhile, copies of a controversial video made by the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) were also posted across internet sites, such as YouTube, after party officials decided to pull it. The spot shows a patient dying, and insinuates that their fate is directly linked to health cuts made by the Catalan nationalist CiU bloc's government.
Defense Minister Carme Chacón, who is from Catalonia, asked that the video be taken down. The PSC also demanded that CiU stop slashing away at the public health budget, which has led to a series of protests by health professionals at regional hospitals.
Francesc Homs, the Catalan government spokesman, applauded the Socialists' decision to remove the video because "this is one of the red lines that should never be crossed." Meanwhile, Manuel Chaves, the deputy prime minister for territorial and regional affairs, acknowledged that the spot "was perhaps an exaggeration."
There were still shows of defiance regarding different campaign materials in other parts of the country. In Granada, for example, Socialist Deputy Manuel Pezzi, who is running for re-election, used his Twitter account to circulate a brochure about the PP cuts in education that the regional electoral council banned him from handing out.
PP officials had filed a complaint against Pezzi after charging that the pamphlet contained misleading allegations. Pezzi bemoaned what he called the electoral council's "loss of impartiality."
