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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 People Betrayed by Paul Preston review – a magisterial study of Spain's turbulent past

2/4/2020

1 Comment

 
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www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/02/a-people-betrayed-by-paul-preston-review-a-magisterial-study-of-spains-turbulent-past
From Primo de Rivera to General Franco … a lively account of corruption, political incompetence and social division in modern Spain

​By Helen Graham, The Guardian, Thursday 2 April 2020

Paul Preston is Britain’s foremost historian of contemporary Spain. A People Betrayed is a magisterial study of its turbulent past, seen through the optic of those apparently ineradicable twins: corruption and political incompetence. Preston’s central argument is that these phenomena undermined the possibility of political and social cohesion in Spain when the country emerged into the 20th century as an urbanising and industrialising society.

While corruption and political incompetence were, and are, prevalent in Spain, they are scarcely unique to it. Yet there has been a pronounced tendency among British authors to write with condescension about Spain’s “troubles”. Preston himself has never done so, and has never engaged in the mythologising of “untroubled” Britain that accompanies it. The fact that he wrote A People Betrayed in the shadow of Brexit, with its home-grown pathology of lies, corruption and eye-popping incompetence, means there is much in his acute analysis of another country’s ills to illuminate our own present malaise.

The book’s dual valency – past and present – is a helpful bonus, though not a surprising one. For the corruption Preston investigates in Spain, especially its tentacular embeddedness, comes with the territory of modern states and societies. Their ever greater complexity creates new opportunities for dishonesty and manipulation, notably now at the opaque interface between government and private and corporate interest. Reading Preston on the state as milch cow for the privileged in 19th- and early 20th-century Spain has a depressing present-day ring to it. (Even though for some decades we have lived with the neoliberal paradox that rightwingers are happy to milk the state but now do so while lambasting it as “expensive”, restrictive and a bad thing all round.)
In Spain, the milch cow state was challenged to some extent in the 1930s, as Preston relates, by a new political project of social levelling. Some republican leaders had begun to think in terms of an inclusive nation and of politics as a form of public service. These ideas were defeated when the republic lost the war of 1936-39 – fought against Franco, and against the interventions of Hitler and Mussolini.

The war was triggered by a military coup against republican reforms, and was largely bankrolled by the Mallorcan smuggler and speculator Juan March, then one of the richest men in the world. His image as no-holds-barred, can-do, “made in Spain”, is stripped down by Preston’s observation that he wasn’t so much the epitome of Spanish super-hombre, as just one more robber baron, an epitome of capitalism tout court. He had earlier been implicated in the assassination of a business rival who’d also been his wife’s lover. After intimidating journalists and investigating magistrates, March finally had the case shelved, in consummate oligarch fashion, via the unbeatable combination of money and high political connections.

Franco’s military victory produced nearly four decades of a personal dictatorship (1939-75), which Preston rightly assesses as the most corrupt, violent and unequal era in modern Spanish history. Francoism, underpinned by the military and proclaiming its mission as “saving the nation”, ended up serving the interests of a very small sector of society while violently reinforcing social and political hierarchies and expanding state nepotism. Around Franco (who amassed a vast personal fortune) revolved generals, Falangists, “national Catholics” and his own family, all enriching themselves – the family members via notorious property speculation. His sister Pilar, who presented herself as a widow rendered penniless by her honesty, in fact made a fortune in illegal property deals, all based on elaborate swindles and massive subornment, and all dependent on her connections. Franco’s rule solidified Spain’s historic divide between the people and the governing political class, not least because, in the end, his support in the poor rural heartlands was the source in the 1960s of migrants for Spain’s expanding industrial centres. All of this Franco achieved on the basis of a military victory underwritten by Hitler; the Nazis’ ferocious dream of irreversible hierarchy lived on in Francoism.
Elsewhere in western Europe the scale of human destruction involved in the overthrow of the Third Reich made it hard for the opponents of social democracy to argue against states becoming more socially inclusive. Those opponents did not disappear: instead they focused their critiques on the easier target of “totalitarianism”, while also going to ground to await a more propitious moment. That moment is now fully upon us, and has taken the form of an ideologically driven, and violent “austerity”. Aside from assuring the personal enrichment of the “well-placed”, this austerity seems otherwise to be imposing the restoration of pre-1914 forms of politics, social hierarchy and patronage. In the UK we face something reminiscent of the earlier Spanish model, described in terms both colourful and bleak by Preston, in which the state enacts sectarian policies that cause very large sectors of the population to look on it as alien and illegitimate.

But if corruption and enduring forms of nepotistic state practice and social behaviour have never by themselves made Spain, or Franco, “different” then something about its powerful military once did. In July 1936, longstanding mistrust between army and civil society led ultra-conservative sectors within the officer corps, angry at civilian politicians they blamed for the end of empire, to “colonise” Spain itself, thus triggering the civil war. Preston points to the many ways in which the military itself had long been corrupt, before this reached new levels under Francoism. Since Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 70s the army has been transformed. But the severe limits on how much change was possible also mean that corruption and nepotism remain embedded in the Spanish state and society, just as much of Francoism does.

 A People Betrayed races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes
The history recounted in A People Betrayed is a long one, but it races along in riveting fashion, replete with eye-catching and often blackly humorous anecdotes – especially for the Franco period and after, involving politicians, bankers, policemen and the royal family. Preston’s narrative combines his gift for cogent, summarising clarity and for telling detail – that the traffic in monopolies included one for rat extermination will stick in many readers’ minds. So too will his account of the ongoing and celebrated Gürtel case. As a stratospheric example of crony capitalism, Gürtel has it all – extensive bribery, traffic in public posts, embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion, involving top conservative party politicians (from the Partido Popular) as well as moguls, fixers, consultants and city councillors. Gürtel’s unravelling also exposes levels of acquisitiveness bordering on the psychotic

Preston’s most original chapter is on the Primo de Rivera military dictatorship of the 1920s (the rat extermination scam era). De Rivera had a taste for making off-the-wall public pronouncements – a tweeting Trump of his times. Franco learned much from him, especially about kleptocracy laced with patriotic spin: both dictators siphoned off coerced “national” subscriptions to their personal coffers, and De Rivera even funded a new house for himself by ordering deductions to be taken from people’s pay. It was under De Rivera too, as this admirable book makes clear, that the key ideas of national Catholicism were honed, which later underpinned Franco’s fascist state. Preston has written an admirable book – a lively, comprehensive history of modern Spain, but also, at barely one remove, a compelling essay on contemporary corruption, which is especially worthy of attention today, as we confront an emergency that underlines what states are really for.

Helen Graham is the author of The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction
OUP Oxford, Mar 24, 2005 - History - 192 pages



1 Comment
hire writers review link
15/5/2020 07:55:28

Because of your post, I got intrigued with A People Betrayed! I know that there are still many things that I need to know about this matter, that's why I am thinking of reading the whole study that is written on A People Betrayed. Some people might not be interested with it because it's already in the past; something that has been forgotten for years now. But if you are a sucker of history and still wondering why we end up like this, looking down at the history will give you the explanation for everything.

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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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