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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.

Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, a key figure in Spanish politics, dies aged 67

12/5/2019

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The former leader of the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and one-time deputy prime minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, died today at the age of 67 after suffering a stroke. The veteran politician was taken to hospital in a serious condition on Wednesday afternoon. His condition worsened on Thursday morning, before becoming “extremely serious” according to the Puerta del Hierro hospital in Majadahonda, Madrid. He leaves behind a wife, Pilar Goya. The couple did not have any children.


Pedro Sánchez, the acting prime minister and Rubalcaba’s successor at the head of the party, on Thursday cut short a visit to Romania where an informal EU summit was taking place. The politician took the decision in order to be with the family of his former colleague. Former PSOE Prime Minister Felipe González also canceled an event he had planned for Thursday afternoon, while other PSOE leaders who were outside of Madrid started to return to the Spanish capital as the severity of the former interior minister’s condition became known. Rubalcaba also served on the editorial board of EL PAÍS.

Rubalcaba withdrew from the frontline of politics in May 2014, when he resigned as general secretary of the PSOE after the party fared poorly at the European elections. He went back to his former job as a lecturer at the School of Chemistry at Madrid’s Complutense University, where, on Wednesday morning, he gave his classes as usual.

The veteran of Spanish politics studied at the Colegio del Pilar school in Madrid, his family having moved to the capital when he was a young boy. His father, who was an aviator for Franco’s forces during the Civil War, later worked as a pilot for Spanish airline Iberia. During his youth, Rubalcaba was a sprinter, taking part in the 1975 Spanish University Championships, where he ran the 100 meters in under 11 seconds.

A year later, in 1974, he joined the PSOE. He studied Chemical Science at the Madrid Complutense University and in 1978 received a doctorate. He went on to work as a chemistry lecturer at the universities of Constanza (Germany), Montpellier (France) and Madrid’s Complutense.
His political career began with the Madrid Socialist Federation and in Congress, working with the PSOE on education issues. When the PSOE took office in 1982, he took a position within the Secretariat of State for Universities and Research, and in 1985 he became the general director of University Teaching, a role he occupied until the following year, when he was named general secretary for education. In 1988 he became the secretary of state for education.

His political career in the field of education peaked in 1992 when he was appointed minister of education and science.

In 2006, he was named interior minister, managing the ETA ceasefire of March 2006 and the process of bringing an end to the terrorist violence in Spain

In 1993, he was named minister for the prime minister’s office and for relations with Spain’s houses of parliament. That same year, he won a seat in Congress at the general elections, a victory he repeated in 1996, despite the PSOE losing at the polls to the conservative Popular Party (PP).

From that point on his political career took off. In 1997 he was appointed a member of the PSOE national executive committee, and in 2000, when the PSOE chose future Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as general secretary, Rubalcaba joined the electoral committee for the 2004 general elections.

At those polls, which were won by the Socialists, Rubalcaba again won a seat in Congress and was appointed spokesperson for the party in Congress. He is remembered for a statement he uttered on the day before the elections, which are characterized in Spain as a “day of reflection” without campaigning. “Spanish citizens deserve a government that doesn’t lie to them,” he said, in reference to the then-PP government’s insistence that the Atocha train bombings, which had taken place just days before, on March 11, were the work of Basque terrorist group ETA and not, as it later emerged, an Al-Qaeda-inspired cell.

During the term that followed, he played a key role in the government’s efforts to implement its policies, such as the reform of the Catalan statute, the piece of legislation covering the northeastern region’s autonomous powers. That was approved in 2006 after arduous negotiations, and in a climate of open conflict with the PP, which viewed Rubalcaba as one of its main political rivals. The PP blamed the PSOE politician for having encouraged the demonstrations that were held outside its headquarters ahead of the 2004 elections over the Madrid bombings, and of the accusations of lying about the terrorist atrocity.

"Politics is more hostile than ever, but not so much due to its proponents or external factors, but due to its own inbreeding and self-destructive mechanisms"  ALFREDO PÉREZ RUBALCABA

n 2006, he was named interior minister, managing the ETA ceasefire of March 2006 and the process of bringing an end to the terrorist violence in Spain. The truce came to an abrupt end, however, when the Basque terrorist group detonated bombs in the parking lot at Madrid Barajas airport, killing two people.

Several months later, Rubalcaba took the personal decision to grant concessions to ETA convict José Ignacio de Juana Chaos after a 114-day hunger strike “for legal and humanitarian reasons to avoid a death.” The move was controversial politically and led to further criticism for the Socialist minister.

After the PSOE won the 2008 elections, Rubalcaba once again took a seat in Congress and continued at the head of the Interior Ministry. The counter-terrorist fight continued with a number of arrests of ETA members, in particular from their leadership. In 2010 the politician was named deputy prime minister, retaining his role as interior minister and also acting as government spokesperson.

In 2011, he was designated the successor of Zapatero and ran as candidate for prime minister at the general election that year. After losing out to the PP – the party went from 169 to 110 seats in Congress – he ran for leadership of the PSOE at a congress held in February 2012, where his opponent was Carme Chacón. He beat out the former defense minister by just 22 votes (497 vs. 465).

The poor election results, combined with the loss of nine MEPs at the European elections of 2014, prompted the party to call an extraordinary congress, at which Rubalcaba opted not to stand. He announced that he would be leaving the frontline of politics, abandoning his seat in Congress in September 2014. He returned to his former job at the Complutense University, while continuing to work with his party and attending some campaign events. In December 2018, Pedro Sánchez sounded out Rubalcaba about running for Madrid mayor, but he turned down the proposal.

Speaking about politics in 2018, he told EL PAÍS that “politics is more hostile than ever, but not so much due to its proponents or external factors, but due to its own inbreeding and self-destructive mechanisms. It’s dog-eat-dog. There is a toll that is more difficult than any other: the personal burnout, and that of your environment, your people, your family. When I said goodbye at the last rally in Solares, my cousin, who is completely outside politics, said to me: ‘You have no idea how hard it has been all these years having the surname Rubalcaba’.”

From El Pais, English version by Simon Hunter.










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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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