LEFT IN SPAIN - THE OCCASIONAL RAMBLINGS OF AN OLD LEFTIE
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contact
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

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.

Catalan Separatists on Trial Pay Price for Spain’s Crude Transition to Democracy

25/2/2019

0 Comments

 

 
by Thomas Harrington,  
 February 25, 2019
The Globe Post
theglobepost.com/2019/02/25/catalan-trial-spain-democracy/?fbclid=IwAR2y7tYC3AozoHxAqy2EoJuh-F9D4lh52Chkp3N5YDKWvvOJh9Rp_-Byvo0

Watching the trials of the Catalan independentists now taking place at Spain’s highest court in Madrid, I have been reminded again and again of a scene from director Hal Ashby’s marvelous 1979 movie Being There.

The protagonist of that film, played by Peter Sellers, is a fiftyish man who has never ventured outside the confines of his birth home. His entire understanding of society has been exclusively shaped by television viewing.

When, upon the death of his father, this man-child is finally expelled from the dwelling, he roams the streets of Washington D.C. with his TV remote control unit in his hand. When he comes across sights that disturb him, he points the device at the offending scene the hopes of “changing the channel” of the reality before him. Needless to say, his efforts at discharging his anxiety through this mechanism are fruitless.to edit.
Handicap of Catalan Trials
Each of the ten Catalan politicians and two civil society leaders currently sitting in the dock in the Spanish capital are there for allegedly having committed some combination of rebellion, sedition, and misuse of public funds. The Spanish prosecutors have been relentless in their attempts to underscore a narrative of events that will support the state’s allegations against these promoters of the October 2017 referendum on self-determination and the Catalan declaration of independence issued 26 days later.

However, they are doing so under a very severe handicap.

The empirical facts don’t remotely support their contentions.

And the Catalan defendants, most of whom have been held without bail for upwards of a year in violation of all existing judicial norms, are in no mood to play along with the game. Rather, they have convincingly refuted the serial exaggerations and mischaracterizations of their inquisitors point by point, often stopping along the way to give them eloquent lessons on the basic principles of participatory democracy such as the freedom of expression and the right to peaceably assemble.
Former government spokesman Jordi Turull even mockingly helped one black-robed eminence who – as a high-level prosecutor in an officially multi-lingual state – was struggling mightily to understand and pronounce extremely basic words from a document written in Catalan, a language quite close to Spanish in vocabulary and structure. Imagine the stupor it would cause if an Anglophone prosecutor at Canada’s Supreme court in Ottawa were unable to understand the words “cited” or “taken” in French. But in central Spain, the prosecutor’s patent ethnocentric ignorance did not provoke the slightest bit of embarrassment.

No Basis for Allegations of Rebellion or Sedition
est it seem that I am presenting things in an extraordinary slanted way, consider the following. The Spanish judiciary has twice issued European Arrest Warrants for former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont on the same charges now being levied against his former cabinet members and the two civil society leaders. And on both occasions – in Belgium in December 2017 and Germany in April 2018 – the European courts made clear through back channels to Madrid that they saw absolutely no basis for the allegations of rebellion or sedition. So, on both occasions, Spain hastily withdrew the requests in advance of the official announcements to save face before the rest of the E.U.

Although the German court did not rule out the possibility that Puigdemont could be extradited for misuse of public funds, Spain eventually dropped its extradition request on that charge as well.
Perhaps the decision had something to do with the fact that former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and his finance minister Cristobal Montoro – who had imposed a draconian auditing regime upon the Catalan Autonomous Government in the months leading to the 2017 referendum – both said publicly in its aftermath that the Catalan government had not spent a single cent on the vote.

In short, we have people being tried in Madrid for crimes that the Spanish government has been either unable or unwilling to pursue against the official most responsible for promoting the historic events in the Fall of 2017.

Francisco Franco and Spain’s Judiciary
So, why do these august jurists continue to click their remotes in the faces of the defendants?
Here’s why. Despite what you might have heard, and what many of us believed for a long time, the vaunted Spanish Transition to Democracy after dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 was mostly a carefully managed piece of stagecraft. This was especially the case within the country’s judiciary.

For example, today’s National Court, where parallel trials against allegedly disloyal Catalan police officials will soon begin, started in 1941 as the Tribunal for the Repression of Masonry and Communism. In 1963, it was renamed the Tribunal of Public Order, and in 1977, in the midst of the Transition, it was given its present innocuous-sounding title. However, when that last change was made, its function and its personnel remained the essentially same.

For Franco, no political value superseded that of national unity. He thus created a judiciary that shared his belief that any and all means were justified in the fight to maintain it. And while the world became enthralled with the country’s enchanting “new” and seemingly democratic combination of modernity and high quality living in the 80s and 90s, the courts remained largely as they were during the dictatorship, with chances for ascent within the system carefully mediated by the need to sign off on the belief that national unity can and should trump the pursuit of impartial justice should the two values come into conflict.

Most knowledgeable observers believe that these sociological scions of Francoism will win the draconian convictions they seek against the Catalans. The question is whether the beleaguered democracies of Spain and the rest of the E.U. will be able to survive this great “victory” of deep state authoritarianism dressed up as the triumph of democratic constitutionalism.

​
Picture
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    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. 

    Archives

    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly