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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.

Assassinating PodemosBYEOGHAN GILMARTIN TOMMY GREENE

11/4/2019

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From Jacobin, 11 April 2019

Data theft, spying, fabricated documents. The Spanish state is trying to derail Podemos and its challenge to elites.



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It’s been described as Spain’s equivalent of Watergate. With less than three weeks before Spain heads to the polls for a knife-edge general election, its political arena has been rocked by a series of revelations over spying operations directed at the left-wing party Podemos. On March 27 it was disclosed that the presiding judge in the trial of disgraced police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo had opened an investigation into the 2015 theft of the mobile phone of Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias’s assistant, Dina Bousselham, believing that it had been stolen by Interior Ministry officials. Private messages taken from the phone were later published by right-wing press outlets to whip up controversy over offhand comments the Podemos leader had made about a conservative TV presenter.

This was only the beginning. The following day Villajero, who is on trial for running extortion and espionage operations against political targets, admitted to spying on Iglesias as part of a “criminal” investigation, moreover insinuating that former vice premier Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría (of the right-wing Partido Popular) had been aware of the operation. His testimony was then followed by the disclosure that high-ranking officials in the Interior Ministry had granted residency to a Venezuelan man in April 2016 in exchange for documents purporting to show the existence of offshore bank accounts belonging to Iglesias and other Podemos leaders. The payments in the accounts were meant to have come from the Cuban intelligence services and the Chávez government in Venezuela. Though never verified by the police, and later proven to be false, the information was leaked to the right-wing outlet OK Diario in May 2016 and then circulated throughout national media, at a time when Podemos and the Socialists (PSOE) were negotiating over a possible government coalition.

The intent behind these moves was clear: to harness the Spanish state’s law enforcement agencies to smear Podemos and derail talks on creating a coalition of the Left as they reached a critical juncture. Those responsible came from figures in the highest echelons of Mariano Rajoy’s Partido Popular (PP) government, who sought to cling onto to power after inconclusive elections. A 2017 parliamentary inquiry found that “the investigation and persecution of political adversaries” took place with “the knowledge and consent” of the PP’s Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, citing as one example the fabrication of the so-called PISA report on illegal Podemos funding.

Yet the scandal cannot simply be blamed on the PP. To frame this affair in liberal terms, as a straightforward abuse of state power by the governing party, is to ignore how actors from across the Spanish oligarchy came together in a coordinated attack aimed at neutralizing Podemos. As Iglesias has explained, this is a “criminal plot that links corrupt police to the media and major businessmen” and which “cannot operate” without the interaction of these various elements.

Nor do these revelations leave current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) untouched. In the latest twist, last Friday his deputy communications chief Alberto Pozos was forced to resign after it was revealed that as editor of Interviú magazine, he had handled the data stolen from the phone of Iglesias’s assistant. With Pozos now under investigation and some of the latest revelations taking place under Sánchez’s watch — such as the hacking of the security camera at the home of Iglesias and Podemos deputy leader Irene Montero — uncomfortable questions are been raised for the PSOE government. With the campaign heating up, Podemos is now aiming to shift the attention onto the premier’s own failure to confront shadowy forces at work within the Spanish state.

The Plot
In April 2016 a Spanish police chief inspector, José Angel Fuentes, traveled to New York to meet with former Venezuelan minister Rafael Isea. In the recording of the meeting, which was released last week, Fuentes asks the Chávez-era minister to provide dirty laundry on Podemos, telling Isea that “we don’t care if the document are good [i.e., real] or not” as Podemos won’t be able to disprove them. Fuentes belonged to the so-called Patriotic Brigade, a group of high-level police officers and Interior Ministry employees, including Villajero, who were tasked with damaging the political rivals of Mariano Rajoy’s PP government.

Before Podemos was founded in 2014, the Brigade’s chief target were pro-independence parties in Catalonia. In the run up to the 2012 Catalan elections “a police report with no date or signature, and which nobody at the Interior Ministry has ever taken responsibility for” was leaked to the press. In it, former Catalan premier Jordi Pujol was alleged to have concealed millions in Swiss bank accounts. The case against Pujol is still ongoing, but in other cases the information was simply fabricated — as for example with the ex-mayor of Barcelona Xavier Trías. Again the timing was strategic, with El Mundo newspaper publishing claims, during the run-up to the first independence plebiscite in November 2014, that Trías possessed €12.9 million euro in Swiss accounts. This turned out to be completely false.

The campaign against Podemos followed a similar pattern beginning shortly after the party’s foundation in 2014 and reaching its height after its historic breakthrough at the December 2015 elections. Some of the early attempts to smear the insurgent anti-austerity force were outlandish, even for the paranoid Spanish right, with the Patriotic Brigade seeking to link the party’s finances to drug cartels, Colombia’s FARC rebels, and even Hezbollah. Another crackpot theory found in one of the Brigades’ reports claimed Hugo Chávez was the real founder of the party, with “top Bolivarian experts” planning its organization down to the last detail.

Yet in the crucial nine months in which Spain was without a permanent government between January and September 2016, Villajero and co. got serious. They leaked two internal police reports, as well as contents from the stolen mobile, in a bid to kill Podemos’s momentum and scuppering coalition negotiations with the PSOE. The first of these, known as the PISA report, came only weeks after the party first entered the Spanish parliament and claimed that Iglesias’s formation had received illegal funding from Venezuela and Iran, which supposedly included millions of euros “from the government in Tehran.” The second was the report on Iglesias’s supposed offshore bank accounts in the Caribbean, which was then followed in July by the scandal over Iglesias’s private text messages.

The media impact these produced, and the weight attached to the fabricated leaks was only possible, however, with the collusion of the country’s press and television outlets. A key figure in this respect is right-wing journalist Eduardo Inda, who has operated as a sort of “middle-man” linking together Villajero and his Patriotic Brigade to major media outlets and business leaders. A close confidant of construction billionaire and Real Madrid Chairman Florentino Perez, Inda published exclusives on Podemos, such as the PISA report, on his news website OK Diario — relying on information received from Villajero. As a regular on many of Spain’s most popular news panel shows, he was then given a national platform in which to disseminate the smears further.

If major news outlets could not easily publish such unverified police documents, which lacked official stamps and signatures, or data from a stolen phone, the frenzy manufactured around the OK Diario leaks could itself be reported on. Podemos was forced to spend several weeks fighting the accusations.

TV stations’ and big newspapers’ willingness to play their part is not so surprising when we consider who owns them. Mediaset España, which includes two of Spain’s four commercial television networks as well as various cable channels, has as its controlling shareholder ex-Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, with other investors including vulture fund Blackrock. The largest shareholder of Atresmedia, which owns the country’s other two commercial networks, is the Lara family, one of the country’s richest and, at the time, a major investor in Sabadell bank. Meanwhile Grupo Prisa, which includes Spain’s leading daily El País and the country’s major radio station Cadena Ser, is controlled by the likes of Amber Capital, HSBC, Santander Bank, and Telefonica.

These corporate and financial elites had a clear material interest in seeing Podemos’s advance halted and reversed. Indeed as the ex-editor of center-right newspaper El Mundo David Jiménez has recently explained, such “elites viewed Podemos’ arrival in government with terror and took the decision to avert it.” Elaborating on this Jiménez continues:

When we speak of political power or economic and media power, we normally speak as if they were independent of each other. And it is not like that. This is a triumvirate of power, with common interests, and when they want to crush someone — when their machinery is put into operation — the three work in unison … [In 2015–16] Pablo Iglesias was seen as a possible governing alternative. In some surveys, they were second, not far behind the Popular Party. [Podemos] had broken through in the European elections [in 2014] and the elites were terrified. Some thought they were going to confiscate their beach houses. They compared it to what was happening in Venezuela. And then I believe the decision was taken amongst the establishment — i.e., amongst this triumvirate of which I spoke before of political, media and economic power — to decide to avoid the coming to power of Podemos.

There is no doubt all this has taken its toll on Iglesias, both politically and personally. In personal terms “it is not easy living beneath the hatred of the [dominant] class.” In the words of Manolo Monereo “those who have suffered it know its insufferable, systematic character that frays the nerves, destroys your privacy and fabricates scandal after scandal against you.” In political terms, the constant attacks have added to a certain disenchantment with Podemos, as well as progressive politics in Spain more generally, which has seen the party fall from its high of nearly 21 percent to its current polling position of around 13–14 percent.

The Campaign
The Center for Sociological Research (CIS), Spain’s main polling body, has shown this week that 42 percent of Spaniards are still undecided on which party to vote for on April 28. At this point in the last campaign in 2016, this figure stood at only 32 percent. So, if Spain now faces the most uncertain general elections in living memory, how is this still-unfolding story likely to affect them?

The election campaign began with a direct confrontation between Podemos and the Spanish media, as a fired-up Iglesias returned to the political fray after several months of paternity leave. In a comeback rally at the Reina Sofia Square in Madrid, Iglesias promised to deliver some “home truths” to supporters both on how power operates in Spain and where it resides. He launched into a polemic directed against the oligarchs and key financial interests in the country, arguing that these unaccountable families and corporate groups “have more power than any MP or elected representative.” Following this assertion, he recounted a meeting he says he had with a director of an Ibex 35 [stock-exchange]-listed firm last October, who told him “They’re coming for you, Iglesias. They didn’t like the photo of you and Sánchez [signing the budget deal] one bit and [so] they’re coming after you.”

Iglesias then took aim at the Spanish media. Over the following weeks he doubled down on this argument in a number of public appearances, taking several presenters to task over media ownership and the corporate capture of Spain’s largest journalistic outlets. Iglesias’s comments inevitably provoked a backlash from many such outlets — notably one from liberal journalist Ana Pastor, whose husband, Antonio García Ferreras (also director of TV channel La Sexta), was confronted on air this week by Iglesias, as the Podemos leader accused his channel of being “one of the main protectors of Inda,” i.e., the middle-man between the “Patriotic Brigade” and media.

Iglesias’s formation has sought to capitalize on the Villarejo revelations, incorporating them into its electoral strategy. It has especially sought to use the latest revelations to help shift the terms of the campaign debate. So far this has proven effective in pushing the media’s focus away from the national question and the ongoing Catalan trial — the terrain on which the Spanish right and the PSOE are seeking to contest these elections. It has instead directed debate towards questions of structural power and how it is maintained, putting the media on the back foot in the process.

It is thus little surprise that the PSOE has proven one of the groups most silent on the latest Villarejo revelations, seeking to minimize the reach of a story it now seems impossible to simply bury. Not only does it benefit from a media framing of the election that avoids these questions of structural power, but its own record looks far from clean. Its connections to the Villarejo case in fact go further than just Sánchez’s Deputy Communications Chief, since last autumn his then-Justice Minister Dolores Delgado was also found to have been implicated in the broader conspiracy surrounding the former police chief.

Just as Pablo Casado’s appeal as the new PP leader partly stems from the fact he represents a fresh-faced candidature, unsullied by the series of corruption scandals that have blighted his party in recent years, such links to one of Spain’s most serious political scandals in recent times risk tarnishing Sánchez’s relatively untainted image. It also risks undermining the overdue “clean-up” in public life that ostensibly formed the basis of his no-confidence motion last summer. Since it went forward, the Socialists have sought to prove that the party’s social agenda and the relative transparency Podemos has brought to Spanish politics in recent years could be carried out without their presence in government.

Iglesias insisted, however, that Sánchez’s PSOE “is not capable of carrying out such a clean-up in the state” alone. He cited as a litmus test Podemos’s demands last year that the notorious Franco-era police torturer “Billy the Kid” be stripped of his medals and all other state-sanctioned honors or decorations he has received. “[The PSOE] didn’t do it,” Iglesias observed. For this reason, he argued, it is fundamentally important that Podemos not only facilitates a government from the outside, as it did last June when it helped lift Sánchez into office, but that it helps form a left-wing coalition of the kind thwarted three years ago.

Podemos faces an uphill battle in this election campaign. Media both within and outside of Spain are framing it as the ballot that may confirm the decline of the left-wing force that lit up European politics only a few years ago. Yet this scandal may provide an opportunity for Podemos to turn the campaign on its head, including by imposing a change of course on the ruling PSOE itself. As Iglesias told a rally in Zaragoza this week: “When we tell the government that this smells bad, they take it as an attack. It’s not an attack. We’re willing to work with the PSOE to clean up this cesspit in the state.”


jacobinmag.com/2019/04/podemos-spying-pablo-iglesias-psoe-elections?fbclid=IwAR26pOE85wuFXVp7n1e4gbsZrv6pcLmj4DCSM7sXuEpTi-7Cwc2QtyHYtmU




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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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