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Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

A CONTROVERSIAL EXHUMATION AND A BATTLE OVER NATIONAL IDENTITY By Sebastiaan Faber

15/11/2018

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Spain Digs Up Its Past

PAUL ​
Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right party Vox, with supporters at a gathering in Valencia, Spain, October 2018. 










“Our top story tonight: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Chevy Chase’s running gag on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s remains curiously relevant four decades on. Franco, Spain’s longtime military dictator, is still dead—and he continues to be a top story, as a dispute over his final resting place unearths old fissures in Spain’s national consciousness.
Upon his death in 1975, Franco was buried in a monumental tomb in the so-called Valley of the Fallen, a war memorial about an hour’s drive from Madrid. There, the dictator lies below a towering 450-foot stone cross, in a subterranean basilica hewn almost 900 feet into a mountainside. The monument is an unsettlingly bombastic reminder of Spain’s troubled past and a pilgrimage site for Franco’s admirers to this day.
Hoping to change this, the Spanish parliament voted in September to exhume Franco’s remains from the Valley. Franco’s family, the government assumed, would rebury him in a more private location. But the family decided otherwise and announced that it would inter the Generalissimo with military honors in a crypt in Madrid’s largest cathedral. This plan has sparked widespread protest, as it would defeat the government’s purpose of removing the body from public space, but it’s unclear whether the government can do anything to prevent it. 

 The vote to exhume Franco passed with support from Spain’s progressive parties and the Catalan and Basque nationalists. The two main conservative parties, the Partido Popular (PP) and Ciudadanos (Citizens), abstained, but their disdain for the measure is clear. Conservative commentators have railed against what they perceive as a gratuitous affront to a leader whom many on the Spanish right continue to see in a positive light. (In the most recent nationwide poll on the topic, from 2008, more than a third of Spaniards agreed that Franco’s decades-long strongman rule had maintained peace, order, and national unity.) Others, such as former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, are careful not to praise Franco but still warn that revisiting Spain’s violent past is unnecessary and divisive, tantamount to “opening old wounds.” 
Still, the controversy surrounding Franco has fanned the flames of a militant Spanish nationalism that first reemerged last year, following Catalonia’s attempt to declare independence and split from Spain. Although not all Spanish nationalists are nostalgic for Franco, the right’s radical core is. In July, the far-right “Movement for Spain” organized a “pilgrimage” to Franco’s grave to protest the government’s plans. “Half of Spain is opposed to the exhumation of Franco and the profanation and pillaging of the Valley of the Fallen,” the movement’s leaders warned. Images from the gathering show groups carrying Francoist flags, their hands raised in the fascist salute. 
The Spanish legal code, in contrast to those of many other European countries, does not prohibit extolling fascist ideologies.
Events like this have even EU leaders in Brussels worried. In late October, the European Parliament passed a motion against the rise of neofascist violence in Europe that included several incidents in Spain. Among other things, the motion condemned Spain’s Francisco Franco Foundation as “an entity that glorifies a dictatorship and its crimes.” The foundation, dedicated to “spreading and promoting” knowledge of the dictator and his accomplishments, is not only legal in Spain but until 2004 received state subsidies. The Spanish legal code, in contrast to those of many other European countries, does not prohibit extolling fascist ideologies. 
Franco rose to power in 1939, after emerging victorious from three years of bloody civil war. The war had started when Franco helped lead a coup attempting to overthrow the democratically elected government of Spain’s Second Republic, pitting his forces against an alliance of republicans, socialists, and anarchists. Franco prevailed thanks to extensive military support from Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. From the outset, his crusade against the republic—and its secularism—also enjoyed the full backing of the Vatican. 
Once in power, Franco ruthlessly persecuted his political enemies. In the 1940s, according to the historians Paul Preston and Javier Rodrigo, his regime executed more than 20,000 prisoners. Half a million Spaniards passed through concentration camps, while more than 200,000 went into permanent exile. In addition, Franco allowed the Germans to deport close to 10,000 Spanish exiles from occupied France to Nazi death camps. 


After World War II Franco refashioned himself as “the sentinel of the West” and quickly became a Cold War ally of the United States. At home, the regime continued to persecute dissidents.After World War II—in which Spain officially stayed neutral, although a contingent of Spanish soldiers fought with the Nazis on the eastern front—Franco refashioned himself as “the sentinel of the West” who had valiantly fought the forces of communism. Spain joined the United Nations in 1955 and quickly became a Cold War ally of the United States. At home, the regime continued to persecute dissidents. As late as 1975, it executed five political prisoners. (Surviving torture victims in search of justice have had to resort to an Argentine court, which has investigated Francoist repression under the umbrella of universal jurisdiction since 2010.) 
After several years of declining health, during which he gradually withdrew from his government duties, Franco died on November 20, 1975, at the age of 82. “Despite Franco’s death and expected burial tomorrow,” Chevy Chase remarked on November 22, “doctors say the dictator’s health has taken a turn for the worse.” 


Like most good jokes, Chase’s quips contained a kernel of genuine anxiety. Would Franco continue to rule Spain from the grave? As a soldier and politician, he had been the ultimate survivor. And he’d made careful arrangements for his legacy to continue after his death. In 1969, he announced in his annual Christmas message that he’d leave “everything solidly nailed down.”
A few days after his death, following Franco’s express wishes, Juan Carlos I, the grandson of the country’s last monarch, was proclaimed king. Under Juan Carlos’ oversight, Spain went through a quick and relatively peaceful transition to democracy, brokered between representatives of the regime and the opposition. Political parties were legalized, a general amnesty declared, and a new constitution adopted. Emerging onto the world stage as a young constitutional monarchy, Spain was finally ready to be a part of modern Europe. 
Or was it? Beneath the apparent break with 40 years of authoritarianism was a great deal of continuity. Thanks to the general amnesty, those who had broken the law fighting Franco went free, but so did every member of the regime. In fact, most Francoists in the government, police, army, and judiciary simply held on to their posts. Even the king had been appointed by Franco.
To be sure, the country adopted a modern constitution and instituted free elections. It reorganized itself into 17 “autonomous communities,” a semifederal 



makeup that allowed the Basques, Catalans, and Galicians a measure of self-government that Franco, an obsessive centralist, would never have stood for. In 1982, the center-left Socialist Party (PSOE) came into power in a landslide win; it would govern the country for the next 14 years. Spain underwent a rapid process of cultural and economic modernization. The crowning achievement came in 1992, when Madrid was Europe’s cultural capital, Seville hosted the World’s Fair, and Barcelona held the Olympic Games.
For decades, traces of Francoism remained at every corner.
All this time, however, traces of Francoism remained at every corner. Thousands of street names continued to commemorate the dictator and his generals; hundreds of plaques, memorials, and statues celebrating his rule dotted the country. And the Valley of the Fallen, where the dictator lay buried alongside José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spain’s fascist party, remained exactly as Franco himself had designed it in 1939: a 330,000-square-foot esplanade leading up to the subterranean basilica, a giant monument to Franco and his Civil War victory, built in part by political prisoners. 

A first attempt to grapple with this unprocessed legacy came in 2004, when the socialists returned to government. Starting in 2000, grass-roots groups had begun locating and exhuming mass graves holding the remains of the tens of thousands of Spaniards summarily executed during and after the war. Denouncing the “pact of silence” that had accompanied the transition to democracy, these groups called instead for “the recovery of historical memory.” 
In 2004, the government responded to growing pressure from civil society and began working on what would become known as the Law of Historical Memory. Finally adopted in 2007—despite the opposition from the Partido Popular—the law subsidized the exhumations and ordered the removal from public spaces of any symbols extolling Francoism. It also forbade the annual celebration of Franco at the Valley of the Fallen. Yet when the PP returned to power in 2011, it refused to assign a budget for the law’s provisions. In 2015, Prime Minister Rajoy proudly declared that his government had spent “zero euros” on it.
When Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the PSOE, unexpectedly replaced Rajoy as prime minister this June, he announced ambitious plans to update the 2007 law, immediately sparking widespread controversy. In addition to exhuming Franco and reforming the Valley into an educational or commemorative space, Sánchez has mentioned the possibility of a truth commission on the Civil War and Francoism—a recommendation that the United Nations has been making for years—and promised that the administration will take charge of the exhumation of the remaining mass graves. 
That these measures are controversial shows that modern Spain is in some ways still an anomaly in western Europe. As the historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, Postwar, Europe’s collective identity after 1945 rested on pride in having collectively fought against fascism. In the 1990s, continental leaders began to embrace the idea that to be European also meant coming to terms with a difficult—even fascist or collaborationist—past. There were official expressions of contrition and regret. States built museums and monuments, took judicial action, and worked to provide financial or moral redress for the victims. As countries such as Turkey and Serbia tried to join the European Union, acknowledgment of responsibility for past crimes—and judicial accountability for the perpetrators of human rights abuses—became a more or less explicit condition for EU membership. 
Yet post-Franco Spain, which joined the European Community in 1986, never tied its national identity to anti-fascism or to a sense of collective responsibility. Although many Spaniards had fought against fascism in the Civil War, Spain’s modern democratic governments never sought to turn this fact into a source of national pride. Nor did they embrace as a European virtue the ability to speak frankly about a violent and shameful past.
These anomalies regularly lead to awkward moments. When Spanish politicians wish to present the country as fully European, they have to go into contortions to whitewash its history. Take Albert Rivera, the young leader of the Citizens party, which has consistently avoided condemning the Franco dictatorship or honoring its victims. During an electoral debate in 2015, Rivera argued that Europe should unite in its fight against Islamist terrorism, just as in World War II, “together we beat the fascists.” In October, Inés Arrimadas, the leader of Rivera’s party in Catalonia, raised eyebrows with a comment about Lluís Companys, Catalan’s president in the 1930s. In 1940, Companys was arrested by the Gestapo in France, then executed by the Franco regime. Yet Arrimadas claimed that he had not been killed by the Spanish state—as if Franco’s dictatorship were somehow different from that state.
When Spanish politicians wish to present the country as fully European, they have to go into contortions to whitewash its history.
This stunted national consciousness is also reflected in the political party landscape. On the face of it, Spain has long lacked a far-right, anti-immigrant party comparable to the Front National (now Rassemblement National) in France, the Alternative for Germany, or Geert Wilders’ party in the Netherlands. But while it’s true that immigration was long of relatively little concern to Spaniards, far-right sectors nostalgic for the Franco regime have always existed—they simply felt little need to found their own party. Unlike their counterparts in other European countries, they never stopped feeling at home in the mainstream center-right, in this case the Partido Popular.


The radical right has only recently begun to come out into the open, in part driven by a nationalist backlash against Catalonia’s push for independence last year. Organizations such as Hogar Social, an anti-Islam and anti-immigrant group, and the radical-right party Vox are making inroads into Spanish politics. Vox is still a marginal force, with no seats in parliament, but on October 7, the party gathered 10,000 supporters in Madrid for an exuberant right-wing rally—something the country hadn’t seen since its transition to democracy. The party’s leader, Santiago Abascal, called upon the flag-waving crowd “to make Spain great again” and fight the enemies responsible for Spain’s “division and downfall.” The party, which polls now indicate may win five seats in parliament, has also called for deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally or have otherwise broken the law. 
Vox’s surge has pulled the PP and Citizens further to the right on immigration issues and the Catalonia question. Pro-independence Catalans, meanwhile, cite Spain’s inability to free itself from the Francoist legacy as a major reason for their wish to break with the country. 
t is not clear what exactly will happen to the Valley of the Fallen if Franco’s remains are removed. A 2011 report by a blue-ribbon commission recommended that it be turned into a secular space where the public is taught about Spain’s violent history. The need for such spaces is urgent. In the 2008 poll mentioned earlier, two-thirds of Spaniards said their schoolteachers had paid “little or no” attention to the Civil War and Francoism. The “pact of silence” during Spain’s transition to democracy has allowed Francoist myths to go unchallenged. 
“When Franco died, he left us a magnificent country,” Manuel Fernández-Monzón, a general in reserve, said in a television interview this summer. Fernández-Monzón had just signed a manifesto denouncing the “vile campaign” to tarnish the dictator’s image and the left’s “perverse attempt” to exhume him. “Franco,” the general added, “killed no one.” 

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    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

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