Our citizens are dying and our hospitals overwhelmed. Either we respond with unwavering solidarity or our union fails, writes the Spanish prime minister
www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2020/apr/05/europes-future-is-at-stake-in-this-war-against-coronavirus
Europe is enduring its worst crisis since the second world war. Our citizens are dying, or fighting for their lives in hospitals that are overwhelmed by a pandemic which represents the greatest threat to public health since the 1918 flu pandemic.

The European Union is facing a different war from those we have successfully averted over the past 70 years: a war against an invisible enemy that is putting the future of the European project to the test.

The circumstances are exceptional and call for unwavering positions: either we rise to this challenge or we will fail as a union. We have reached a critical juncture at which even the most fervently pro-European countries and governments, as is Spain’s case, need real proof of commitment. We need unwavering solidarity.

Solidarity between Europeans is a key principle of the EU treaties. And it is shown at times like this. Without solidarity there can be no cohesion, without cohesion there will be disaffection and the credibility of the European project will be severely damaged.

We welcome a number of significant measures that have been announced over the past few weeks, including the European Central Bank’s new temporary emergency purchase programme and the European commission’s SURE plan for those who have lost their jobs. But these measures are not enough on their own. We must go further.

Europe must build a wartime economy and promote European resistance, reconstruction and recovery. It must start doing so as soon as possible with measures to support the public debt that many states, including Spain, are taking on. And it must continue to do so when this health emergency is over, to rebuild the continent’s economies by mobilising significant resources through a plan we are calling the new Marshall plan and which will require the backing of all of the EU’s common institutions.

Europe was born out of the ashes of destruction and conflict. It learned the lessons of history and understood something very simple: if we don’t all win, in the end, we all lose.

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We can turn this crisis into an opportunity to rebuild a much stronger European Union. But to do so, we need to implement ambitious measures. If we continue to think small, we will fail.

The United States responded to the recession of 2008 with a stimulus package, while Europe responded with austerity. We all know the outcome. Today, when we are on the brink of a global economic crisis of an even greater magnitude than that of 2008, the US has implemented the greatest mobilisation of public resources in its history.

Is Europe willing to be left behind?

It is time to break with old, national dogmas. We have entered a new era and we need new responses. Let us hold on to our positive values and reinvent the rest.

In the coming months, the EU member states will inevitably take on greater volumes of debt to deal with the consequences of what is not just a health crisis, but an economic and social crisis. That is why the response cannot be the same as that envisaged for asymmetric economic shocks, such as a financial or banking crisis in a single state or group of states. If the virus does not respect borders, then nor should financing mechanisms.

Provided that it is universal and not subject to conditions, the European Stability Mechanism may be useful in the initial stages to inject liquidity into EU economies through a line of credit. But this is not going to be sufficient in the medium term.

The challenge we face is extraordinary and unprecedented. It calls for a single, united, radical and ambitious response to preserve our economic and social system and protect our citizens.

The Spanish have always protected and defended the European project. It is time for reciprocity. With us, with Italy and with each and every one of the 27 countries of the union.

It is time to act with solidarity in creating a new debt mutualisation mechanism, acting as a single bloc for the purchase of essential medical supplies, establishing coordinated cybersecurity strategies, and preparing a major emergency plan to ensure that the continent’s recovery is rapid and robust.

This solidarity has to ensure that there are no gaps between north and south, that we leave no one behind.

These are very challenging times which require bold decisions. Millions of Europeans believe in the European Union. We must not abandon them. We must give them reasons to keep believing. And we must act now or never, because, right at this moment, Europe itself is at stake.

Pedro Sánchez is the prime minister of Spain

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

Rafael Gómez Nieto, who has died from coronavirus, was last survivor of WW2 La Nueve force


www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/ex-soldier-death-casts-light-spaniards-helped-liberate-paris-rafael-gomez-nieto

The death from coronavirus of a 99-year-old former soldier who was the last surviving member of a company of predominantly Spanish troops who helped liberate Paris from Nazi occupation has thrown a spotlight on one of the lesser-known events in French history.

Rafael Gómez Nieto, who fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war before joining the allied war effort, died after contracting Covid-19 in a nursing home in Strasbourg.

Gómez Nieto grew up in a town in the Almería region of Andalucía, the son of a career soldier who had been part of the royal guard to the Spanish king Alfonso XIII.

After fighting as part of the republican forces in the civil war – and seeing action in the four-month Battle of the Ebro, considered to be the conflict’s longest and bloodiest battle – he crossed the border into France along with about 500,000 of his compatriots.
Following a brief internment he travelled to north Africa, where he joined the 9th company of the Régiment de Marche du Tchad, part of the 2nd Armoured Division, commanded by Gen Philippe Leclerc. Not for nothing was the company known by its Spanish name – La Nueve or La Española.

One hundred and forty-six of the company’s 160 men were Spanish and, despite serving in the French army and under a French commanding officer, they were permitted to stitch the red, yellow and purple flag of Spain’s second republic on to their uniforms.

They were also allowed to paint the flag on their vehicles, which rolled into Paris emblazoned with names such as Guernica and Don Quichotte (Don Quixote). Spanish was the common language within the company and all had fought during the liberation of French north Africa.

The company, led by the Spanish Lt Amado Granell, was the first to enter Paris on 24 August 1944 through the Porte d’Italie, in the south of the city. As they awaited the official surrender of the German governor of occupied Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, La Nueve troops were sent to occupy public buildings and those taken over by the German military command, as well as Place de la Concorde.

Granell entered City Hall at about 8.40pm local time and met with the head of the national council of the French resistance. Captain, later colonel, Raymond Dronne, the commander of La Nueve, wrote in his memoirs that he fell asleep in the early hours of the morning to the sound of Spanish songs.

Allied troops led by Gen Charles de Gaulle entered Paris the following day. More than 50 members of La Nueve received the Croix de Guerre for bravery.

In his victory speech a day later on 26 August 1944 , De Gaulle did not mention the Spanish soldiers.

“Paris is outraged. Paris is destroyed. Paris is martyred. But Paris is liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France,” he said.

La Nueve’s contribution to the city’s liberation has only recently been recognised. The company was forgotten or left out of the French history books for political reasons – with the liberation presented as an exclusively French triumph. It was only in August 2004 – 60 years later – that Paris officially paid homage to the division with a plaque.

Granell died in 1972 in a road accident on his way to the French consulate in Valencia, Spain, where was going to claim his veteran’s salary.

“They liberated Paris, but not just Paris,” the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has said. “The liberation of this city was celebrated all over the world as a victory for freedom. Although much lay ahead in the struggle to defeat Nazism, people say the bells rang out as far away as Buenos Aires when they entered Paris.”

Later, Gómez Nieto was awarded the Grande Médaille de Vermeil and the Légion d’Honneur.

José María “Chato” Galante, a veteran campaigner for truth, justice and historical memory in Spain who was imprisoned and tortured under the Franco dictatorship, also died recently from coronavirus.

On learning of Galante’s death, Spain’s deputy prime minister, Pablo Iglesias, tweeted: “Covid-19 has taken Chato Galante, freedom fighter, political prisoner during the dictatorship, campaigner for universal justice and against torturers – one of Brecht’s indispensables. My heart is broken. So long, comrade.”

Sam Jones in Madrid and Kim Willsher in Charny-Orée-de-Puisaye

Wed 1 Apr 2020

​
Poor and vulnerable hardest hit by pandemic in Spain
Rate of infection in and around working class near Barcelona is nearly seven times higher than upmarket areas
www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/poor-and-vulnerable-hardest-hit-by-pandemic-in-spain
The Guardian
Stephen Burgen in Barcelona and Sam Jones in Madrid
Wed 1 Apr 2020

The coronavirus pandemic in Spain is taking a disproportionate toll on the poor, the elderly, the marginalised – and those working in low-paid but vital jobs – experts have warned.

An interactive map produced by the Catalan regional government showing the distribution of the virus reveals that residents of poor Barcelona neighbourhoods are six or seven times more likely to contract the virus than those in wealthy areas.

While much of Spain has bounced back from the 2008 economic crisis, many parts of the country suffered deep, lingering cuts. The unemployment rate, which stands at 13.7%, is more than double the EU average, while youth unemployment is at 30.6%. About half the population has some difficulty making ends meet, and poverty is persistently higher for children, migrants, and Roma populations.

According to the Catalan government figures, the rate of infection in working-class Roquetes is 533 per 100,000 inhabitants, while in upmarket Sant Gervasi it’s only 77. Similarly high rates are found in the satellite towns of El Prat de Llobregat (604) and Badalona (597).

Dr Nani Vall-llosera, a GP in Bon Pastor, a low-income Barcelona neighbourhood, and former president of the Catalan primary care forum, points out that many of those deemed essential workers by the government work in low-status, poorly paid jobs where they have high exposure to the virus.

“People who work in shopping centres, supermarkets and old people’s homes, as well as cleaners, are working without protection, often without masks,” she said. “These people get infected, they go home and infect those around them because there’s little possibility of self-isolating if you live in a small apartment.”


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She added: “Furthermore, poverty and poor health are a vicious circle – the poorer you are the more likely you are to have health problems. And so the chances of becoming seriously ill with the virus are concentrated in poor neighbourhoods.”

Like many colleagues, Vall-llosera, is in no doubt that the ability of the health system to react has been “debilitated” by years of spending cuts in public health, especially in Madrid and Catalonia, adding that “those parts of Spain where there have been least cuts are dealing with the virus better”.

The doctor also warns of the distortion to the health system caused by the epidemic. “While we focus all our resources on the coronavirus, which is probably what we have to do, it’s also reducing our capacity to deal with other issues,” she said.

Manuel Franco, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health (USA), agrees that austerity measures – particularly around Madrid – have weakened the healthcare system.

He also says that inequalities in income, gender, education and country of origin are becoming increasingly apparent as the pandemic continues.

“In many societies, care work – cleaning, looking after children and the elderly - is mostly carried out by foreign women,” said Franco. “A lot of them are not on the payroll so they have no rights when it comes to unemployment pay. They also probably live in the worst housing conditions in a city like Madrid.”

He said that homeless people were also at risk and the NGOs and charities that helped them were forced to close.

“How do these people get the minimum they need to survive? We don’t have really good maps or ways to track these people and know what their living conditions are like,” said Franco.

As Spain experiences its third week of lockdown, with all but essential workers ordered to remain at home, income disparities are becoming more apparent.

People need to heat their homes as they stay away from work. But they also have to home-school their children, which usually means a computer, tablet or smartphone is needed for distance classes – as is a good internet connection.

Franco said that while Spain’s socialist-led coalition government was working to minimise the economic impact of the health crisis and protect the most vulnerable, basic structural inequalities were persisting and worsening.

“I think there’s a will to protect those who will be hardest hit and to cover the gaps that are becoming wider and wider,” he said.

“But there are many small details of daily life and the social determinants of health are becoming more relevant: housing, income, education.”

Franco said the global epidemic, which has so far claimed 8,189 lives in Spain, called for action that went well beyond improving health systems.

“Of course healthcare workers are in a very tough situation, dealing with overstretched intensive care units but there are also people working in food stores, police officers, paramedics, firefighters – they’re also suffering the same lack of equipment,” he said.

“We never thought about that; we never thought that we could have such a big public health crisis – and mortality crisis in cities like Madrid, where the usual morgues can’t cope with this situation. But I think that almost every decision that we have to take right now should be taken from the point of view of these social inequalities.”

A report published by Oxfam Intermon last year showed that, as well as a wide disparity of income, there is a difference of life expectancy of nearly 11 years between Barcelona’s richest and poorest neighbourhoods, and seven years in Madrid.