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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.

Lost archive of Spanish Civil War photos discovered after 72 years

31/8/2019

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TA historian has located more than 500 images taken by the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna between 1937 and 1938, when she was working for the CNT anarchist labor union
by PEIO H. RIAÑO
El Pais
Madrid 23 AUG 2019 
English version by Heather Galloway.
elpais.com/elpais/2019/08/23/inenglish/1566551435_700469.html?ssm=FB_CM_EN&fbclid=IwAR2kYntAca0o7-dCozFXqg1uOvWiMdfPE0fntb1mafbgPSMg0WvSp4uw0U4

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he forgotten legacy of the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna has been unearthed by a Spanish researcher from the archives of the CNT anarchist labor union in 48 wooden boxes. The CNT got the archives out of Barcelona in April 1939 and, after a long journey with stops in Paris and the British cities of Harrogate and Oxford, they arrived safely at the International Institute of Social History (IIHS) in Amsterdam in 1947.
The boxes contain more than 500 negatives of photos taken between 1937 and 1938 by Horna, a Jewish banker’s daughter born in Budapest in 1912, who came to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to offer her services to the CNT anarchists and the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) in their foreign propaganda department. The extraordinary find completes a series that includes 250 negatives now kept in the Documentation Center of Historical Memory in Salamanca, which was sold by Horna to the Spanish state in 1983 for two million pesetas (around €12,000 at today’s rates).
These 250 negatives had been salvaged by Horna and carried into exile in a small tin box. Her journey out of Spain was made in the company of her partner, the artist José Horna, who would be arrested and sent to a concentration camp in France. Once he was freed, the couple fled the Nazi invasion and settled in Mexico, where Horna developed her career as a photographer and surrealist. The whereabouts of the rest of her Civil War photos had remained a mystery until now.

Referring to their precarious journey to Amsterdam, Henk Wals, the director general of IIHS, explains that the photos were not sent directly to the institute because they feared that the Second World War would reach the Netherlands, despite its neutral status – and in fact the Nazis did invade in 1940.

The IIHS was set up in 1936 to protect collections of archives that were considered at risk from the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe. “The catastrophic end of the Spanish Republic was exactly the kind of situation the founders had in mind,” says Wals.

The wooden boxes remained locked in the IIHS for more than three decades until the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 allowed the CNT to resurface. The boxes were opened and the material organized with published inventories. Only the CNT-FAI Foreign Propaganda Offices’ photo archives remained. These were set aside, pending classification, which didn’t happen until 2016 when the art historian Almudena Rubio, a researcher at the center, started to organize the copies first and then the negatives.

Political militancy
Rubio is still drawing up the photo inventory from the Spanish Civil War – more than 6,000 celluloid negatives and more than 200 glass plates, which have emerged in good condition. A comparison with other stocks of photos associated with the war offer some idea of the scale of the discovery; the archive from the Propaganda Delegation of Madrid in the Culture Ministry has 3,051 images while the famous Mexican suitcase found in 2007 and belonging to Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Chim Seymour contained 4,500 negatives.
On the Culture Ministry’s website, it still says: “A large part of Kati Horna’s photographic series from the Civil War is probably scattered or destroyed.”

According to Rubio, the new negatives are complementary to the Salamanca collection rather than repetitive. “Until now, [Kati Horna] was recognized as a photographer and artist but she was taken on by the anarchists in 1937,” says Rubio. “She never worked for the Republic. She worked for the CNT-FAI and you can’t properly understand the photos without taking her political militancy into account.”

The discovery offers an insight into the years Horna spent in Spain. Horna has been considered a rearguard portrait photographer who also captured the essence of daily life of women, for instance in her iconic photo of a mother breastfeeding her child in Vélez Rubio, Almería.

The breastfeeding photo made the front cover of the 12th edition of the anarchist magazine Umbral and was used to illustrate a report called Maternity under the symbol of the Revolution. Almudena Rubio says that the photo is among the negatives in Salamanca because these types of photo, taken in refugee centers, fitted the requirements of the Umbral publishers.

The new images, on the other hand, do not particularly focus on women’s issues. “She constantly takes portraits of villagers of both sexes and boys and girls. I believe Horna went further – she was seeking the narrative, the story,” says Rubio, who never considered Horna to be a feminist photographer even before stumbling across the new cache of her work. “The negatives in Amsterdam don’t reveal a new Horna, although we have found series [of photos] whose existence we were unaware of until now, such as the funerals of the anarchists, [Camillo] Berneri and [Francisco] Barbieri.”

The recently discovered negatives cover Horna’s stay in Barcelona from her arrival at the age of 24 in January, 1937, until her move to Valencia in July. She was not a professional photographer, although she had received some training. However, she became the official reporter for the anarchists and their Spanish Photo Agency, thanks to a photo that was published in the UK magazine, Weekly Illustrated.

After seven months working for the propaganda office, Horna published Spain? A Book of Images on Stories and Fascist Smears: The Anti-Fascist Propaganda Album. With her Rolleiflex camera, she covered various fronts, including Aragón, Valencia, Xàtiva, Gandia, Silla, Vélez Rubio, Alcázar de San Juan, Barcelona and Madrid. She also took portrait photos of a number of the FAI commanders as well as the famous anarchist Emma Goldman and soldiers from the Ascaso Division stationed close to the Carrascal forest.

“Her work was done in the service of an ideology; a work of propaganda that continued to evolve along with the war,” says Rubio. “She worked day and night. She was a militant photographer, not an artist,” adds the historian. Horna’s photos were also used in response to a smear campaign launched by Franco against his enemies.

Kati Horna’s recently discovered work is imbued with unique dramatic narrative without the immediacy of actual war photos. In contrast to the images taken by Capa, Taro and Seymour – who were on the front line – Horna went in pursuit of a life that ran parallel to that of the trenches, in which death was not at the forefront. She preferred authenticity to news, reflected in her picture of soldiers shaving, and sought a different connection with what she was photographing, preferring a degree of involvement.

Mexico and surrealism
Katalin Deursch, Kati Horna’s real name, never saw her camera as an appendage, but rather as an extension of herself. Her life and her photos were inseparable. Her vision was an integral part of who she was and she was in control of a destiny that took her to the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City where she continued her career until her death, collaborating with a number of publications, as well as exploring surrealism and associating with artists such as Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington.

Editor José Luis Díaz, who was a close friend during those years, would describe Horna, as “an aristocrat by birth, an anarchist by conviction, a seductress by nature and a vagrant by vocation – a combination that carries an implicit nostalgia for what is lost and surprise for what has been found.”​
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From bombs to Benidorm: how fascism disfigured the face of Spain

28/8/2019

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​Papal snub … the Basicilia at Arantzazu. Photograph: Ainara Garcia/Alamy Stock Photo


Two buildings were deemed to be the pinnacle of Spanish architectural 

As dictator, Franco built a cemetery with slave labour and orphanages for his murdered enemies’ children. Then Spain discovered tourism – and the lager louts flew in



The Basilica at Arantzazu in the Basque country was a collaboration between the sculptor Jorge Oteiza, who had just returned to Spain after 15 years in self-imposed exile, and the architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza (who would become celebrated for his Torres Blancos building in Madrid). Though they won the competition for the building in 1949, it was not consecrated until 1959, after a disputatious decade of ecclesiastical factionalism and local objections. The latter were preposterous given the building’s remoteness at the end of a vertiginous mountain road.

The Basilica is the earliest of several Spanish churches whose novel dispositions of space anticipated and influenced the liturgical changes that would be stipulated by the second Vatican council in 1962. The exterior is tough, fortified
, uncompromising. Its break from the conventions of sacred design was a papal snub to Franco, a reminder that his power was merely temporal.
Luis Buñuel was the greatest Spanish artist of the 20th century. He believed that Picasso’s Guernica was a meretricious work that should be burned and that mortadella was made by the blind. St James, whom Franco would restore to the position of patron of Spain from which he had been ignominiously removed by the Republic, encountered the Virgin while praying on the banks of the Ebro at Caesaraugusta, later Zaragoza. She was held aloft on a jasper pillar born by angels, hence the name of Zaragoza’s basilica, El Pilar.

She set a precedent for attention-craving ascetics such as St Simeon Stylites, who lived for 37 years on top of a pillar near Aleppo and was the subject of Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert. Buñuel was the most devout, most observant, most gleefully blasphemous of atheists. After more than 20 years in exile, during which he became a Mexican citizen, he returned to Spain to make Viridiana: all necrophilia, incest and Fernando Rey. Because no one was looking and Buñuel was cunning, it was chosen as Spain’s entry at the 1961 Cannes film festival. Given the Franquist state’s zealous censorship of writers and film-makers, this was an extraordinary lapse. It won the Palme d’Or. All hell broke loose. It was denounced by the Vatican. Its production companies were closed down. Buñuel once again became persona non grata. Viridiana would not be shown in Spain until 1979, four years after the death of Franco – but not of Franquismo. Over 40 years on it’s still loitering, a grubby menacing sideshow.

Equally extraordinary was the state’s habitual tolerance of nearly all forms of art and architecture. Like many dictators Franco considered himself an artist. He brought shame to Sunday painters. He dismissed as derisory the abstraction that was pervasive from the late 40s till the mid 60s. He rightly considered it politically and socially impotent. It wasn’t Goya, it wasn’t Otto Dix. It was harmless, self-referential pattern-making that, while it might provoke strong feelings about aesthetic legitimacy, was not going to fire up insurrection. And the various strains of architecture that asserted themselves over an even longer period were, like all architecture down the ages, near mute. Architecture is not a language. It does no more than grunt generalisations: “looking forward” or “summoning the past” or “aiming for the heavens”. Franco was described by Churchill as “a gallant Christian gentleman”. HG Wells corrected him: “a murderous Christian gentleman”. From an early age the future murderer unquestioningly accepted the Christian dogma he was force-fed at school in the Galician port of Ferrol – which was also an arsenal and a garrison. He accepted too a garrison’s hierarchy as the natural order: martial discipline, martial asceticism and martial mores. Add to those an oppressive, omnipresent religious credulousness that infected all aspects of life. Franco believed his destiny was to become the equal of the omnipotent imperial Hapsburg King Philip II. He also sought somehow to reincarnate the medieval military hero El Cid. When the dreary film with gun-crazy Charlton Heston in the title role was shot near Valencia, Franco loaned the production several thousand soldiers as extras – which no doubt helped with his metempsychotic ambition.

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Two buildings were deemed to be the pinnacle of Spanish architectural achievement. The Escorial was holy as well as regal. Juan de Herrera was commanded by Philip II to make a building that expressed nobility without arrogance, majesty without ostentation – rather like Polonius telling Laertes how to dress. Herrera was also responsible for the Alcázar of Toledo. Their obsessive and repetitive sobriety is, weirdly, as dizzying as the overwrought freneticism of the baroque or churrigueresque. And, just as weirdly, their chilly rigour feels protestant. They provided the model for Franco’s essays in “state architecture”, among them:

The Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), the monumental act of hypocrisy in stone where he is buried. This was the biggest slave labour project in Europe since the second world war. The slaves were captured republicans, political prisoners, housed in a concentration camp and worked to death with the assurance that “el trabajo enoblece”. Whose German translation is “arbeit macht frei”.
The air ministry in Madrid. The disjunction of style and purpose again suggests architectural insentience, as though planes belonged to the 16th century.
The University of Gijón by Luis Moya is the largest building in Spain. It was originally intended as an orphanage but soon became a technical school too. Franco created orphans by the thousand. Like Goya’s Chronos, he ate them by the score.
He built orphanages; more like madrassas really. Indoctrination with lashings – take that how you will – of orthodoxy and obscurantism. The children of murdered republicans would be brainwashed with mariology and hagiology. Their heretical names would be changed from the revolutionary names their dead parents had given them: Passionaria, Luxemburg, Prairial, Germinal, Danton, St Just. Their teachers were brides and bridegrooms of Christ, the rank and paedophile of the Catholic church who enjoyed job satisfaction.
Though Gijón is in the Asturias, the building’s distended classicism has nothing to do with the architecture of that province. It is rather an emblem of Franco’s moral reconquest, his sacralisation of everyday life, his castillianisation of everyday life, his unification. Provinces that didn’t fall into line were likely to suffer aerial diplomacy.


This phase of official architecture didn’t last. The civil war and Franco’s collaboration seemed to get lost in a fog of international amnesia. This amnesia was encouraged by America’s strategic friendship of convenience: financial assistance in return for land on which to build airbases. Ideology could be suspended in exchange for white goods, jukeboxes, two-tone cars.

The government was increasingly influenced by the lay Catholic organisation Opus Dei and its so-called technocrats, judicious pragmatists determined to open Spain to the world beyond the Pyrenees known as the continent. The architectural work of the Opus Dei member Miguel Fisac was part of that process. Spain was trying to achieve what would be internationally recognised as a sort of normality: fascism was, by the mid 1950s, a freakish outlier from a past that was to be ignominiously buried, along with its victims. The appetite for recrimination was frail.

One of the few things buildings can articulate is newness, a prospect of a progressive future. Fisac’s quite wonderful Pagoda, which anyone arriving at Madrid airport and driving into the city could not help but see, was an unequivocal message that Spain had caught up at last, it was modern. And the modern state vandalises. This great building was demolished three decades after it was built.

Infrastructure tends to endure more. Land colonies in the form of new villages were built in the 1950s and 60s under the direction of the agromomist Rafael Cavestany. The government feared a recurrence of the second republic’s food shortages and consequent public disorder unless something was done to tackle the inequity of land ownership. Agrarian reform would not only bring improved crops and improved livestock, it would transform still feudal peasants into sort of proper smallholders. The chaos of land ownership would be resolved. And the rural diaspora would be reversed. The villages invite correspondences with Nazi settlement programmes but the latter were more trumpeted than delivered, and where they were achieved they were folksy, wilful expressions of blood and soil.

Thirty thousand houses were built in settlements of diverse sizes, many in areas that had till lately been arid. Franco boasted that his greatest legacy to the country he had otherwise despoiled was his irrigation of it. He built more than 500 dams. He liked to preside at their openings, quite ignoring how ecologically disastrous many of them were. His self-esteem swelled, a goitre of patriotic pride. Changing the climate – whether by cloud seeding or diverting rivers – is the mark of a human god, an aquarian magician who was described as a statesman unique in the world, laying the hydraulic foundations for the wellbeing and progress of his people. Bad geography meant too much rain in the north, too little in the south. Surfeit and deficit: with deficit came drought. The most grandiose of the schemes to overcome the natural imbalance was the Tajo Segura Transfer. Water is pumped to a height of 300 metres above the dammed Tajo in the mountains east of Madrid. Canalised, it flows 300km through a system of reservoirs, dams, tunnels, pumping stations and aqueducts to Murcia, the region of Spain most frequently afflicted by drought and the one that supplied Franco’s Nationalists with its most murderous butchers. It is anyway a great feat of hydraulic engineering. Whose beneficiaries were the latifundistas, the landowners who had backed Franco. And whose favourite sport was jocularly called agrarian reform. It consisted of hunting on horseback with packs of dogs. The quarry comprised destitute peasants, rural reds, bucolic bolshies. They were people who didn’t have a ladder to be at the bottom of – and whose body would be dumped in the usual pit. The other losers were the thousands of inhabitants of villages drowned because they stood in the way of reservoirs. Many of the interventions were also ecologically disastrous: in the age-old battle between environment and profit – here posing as the common good and agrarian reform – it was profit that won. The bottom line is the most potent of ideals. In 1948 Santiago de Compostela attracted half a million pilgrims … or tourists. They enjoyed such pious diversions as fireworks, football tournaments and bullfights, even though the last were not, and are still not, locally popular. It was – still is – the least Españolada province of Spain, that is the least afflicted by castanets, bells, bulls and balls and all the Hemingway/Tynan nobility-of-machismo schtick. But the jamboree was not merely a question of devotion to St James, or of penitence, of absolution, of self-denial. It was an earner. Here was an opportunity for the pariah state, denied foreign aid, to get its fascist gauntlets on some democratic coin: sovs, krone, francs. The germ of an idea was planted.


Pedro Zaragoza was an energetic Franquist placeman born in the small, economically straitened fishing port between Valencia and Alicante. He was sent back there from Madrid to be its mayor at the age of 28.

Zaragoza would become one of the most effective urbanists in the world. Not least because he had probably never heard of the pseudoscience of urbanism, had never shown interest in theories that fell off the back of a lorry loaded with dogmatic pretention. He turned an off-the-map village into an enterprise that changed a nation. When he took up his post in 1950, Benidorm had four hotels – hostels really – which provided fewer than 100 beds.

“Render unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s and unto God the things which be God’s.” Together with Jesus’s retort to Pilate that “my kingdom is not of this world”, this may be read as a way of emphasising that the temporal state and the sacred church are separate. So while God-botherers may have indignantly objected to displays of flesh, to displays of public drunkenness, to displays of mob loutishness by Ingerlandlandland’s finest, their opinion counted for little. Impious money will always take precedence over prim morality. Throwing the merchants out of the temple was the work of a prig.

Police were instructed to turn a blind eye, which, given what they would be having to look at, was probably what they wanted anyway – though when they did intervene it was with batons, firearms, chains and daft hats. That’s just good old-fashioned coppering, Spanish style.

Franco hugely approved of the place. Forget the provenance. It’s no more wicked than a Volkswagen car. And it’s an architectural marvel where on any given night you can hear one of the 17 bands that claim to be the authentic Rubettes damaging their throats.​


​​Money over morality … Levante Beach, Benidorm. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images

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One hundred days since election, Spain still no closer to forming government

28/8/2019

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Acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is working on a new strategy to win the support of the anti-austerity party Unidas Podemos, which refused to back his investiture bid in July

elpais.com/elpais/2019/08/07/inenglish/1565172625_667793.html


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One hundred days have passed since the April 28 general election, and there is still no sign that acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is any closer to reaching a governing deal that would allow him to be voted back into office.
The leader of the Socialist Party (PSOE) won the highest number of seats at the April polls, but fell short of an absolute majority, meaning he needs the support of other parties if he is to continue as Spain’s prime minister.

Sánchez failed to secure either an absolute majority or a simple majority in his first investiture bid in July, after negotiations broke down with anti-austerity group Unidas Podemos (a coalition of Podemos and the United Left), which chose to abstain from the two rounds of voting.

The Socialists, who have 123 seats in Congress, depend on the support of Unidas Podemos’ 40 deputies, but the two parties have been unable to reach a governing deal, despite months of negotiations.

Sánchez offered the party a deputy prime minister spot, as well as Health, Housing and Equality ministries, but Unidas Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias demanded a deputy prime minister role for social rights and equality, as well as the Health, Labor and Science and Universities ministries – a demand Sánchez refused.

If Sánchez fails to be invested, Spain will head toward fresh elections in November
Relations between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos have remained strained since the failed investiture bid, and sources from La Moncloa, the seat of the central government, say there is currently no contact between the two parties.

Sánchez is now trying a new strategy to win the support of the anti-austerity party: instead of a coalition government, the acting prime minister wants to reach an agreement on government programs. As part of this strategy, Sánchez has been meeting with women’s associations, environmental groups, organizations that fight against depopulation and education activists. But Unidas Podemos remains suspicious. Unidas Podemos lawmaker Pablo Echenique wrote in a message on Twitter: “Either I keep 100% of power, with 20% of the votes and 35% of the seats, or I take Spain to new elections. This continues to be the last ultimatum-threat of Pedro Sánchez. All the rest is just decoration.”

If Sánchez fails to be invested at a second potential vote in September, Spain will head toward fresh elections in November. It would be the fourth time that Spaniards have been called to the polls to choose a government in four years, and the fifth election held this year alone.

Abstentions
The PSOE has called on the right-wing Popular Party (PP) and center-right Ciudadanos (Citizens) to abstain from the investiture vote to break the political deadlock, but both parties have refused. What’s more, on Monday, PP secretary general, Teodoro García Ege, said PSOE should abstain to allow the PP and Ciudadanos to lead a coalition government headed by PP leader Pablo Casado. “As the only problem Spain has in forming a government is that no one trusts Pedro Sánchez – not even Podemos, or Pablo Iglesias trust him, a space should be made for another candidate,” he said.

His comments came a day after the King of Spain, Felipe VI, stated: “It would be best to find a solution before going to elections.”


NATALIA JUNQUERA AND CLAUDI PÉREZ

Madrid 7 AUG 2019 
English version by Melissa Kitson.


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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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