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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.

Crushing Franco’s Heirs                                              By EOGHAN GILMARTIN TOMMY GREENE

1/5/2019

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The Spanish Socialist Party swept to victory in this Sunday’s general election. Yet the risk of a liberal-centrist government shows the need to do more than just mobilize progressives against the far right.
From Jacobin magazine
jacobinmag.com/2019/04/spanish-election-psoe-sanchez-vox-podemos?fbclid=IwAR1dCfZZ-TRmHht04ldKYSWJwvGNiWFlktmjkrDlYGp8JSozy79kOQ8O2zg

There was only one winner in Sunday’s Spanish elections. Securing the most seats by a comfortable margin (though not an overall majority), incumbent premier Pedro Sánchez successfully harnessed the apparent threat of a hard-right government to mobilize progressives behind his center-left PSOE (123 of 350 seats). While the Franco-nostalgists of Vox made a significant breakthrough, securing 10 percent nationally, ultimately they fell short of preelection expectations, and the Right performed poorly overall. As for the Left, Unidas Podemos, campaigned strongly despite the polarization over the national question, and managed to retain 42 of the 70 MPs they had gained last time out.

While Vox entered parliament for the first time, arguably the biggest shock of the night was the collapse of Spain’s major conservative force, the Popular Party. Also facing competition from the liberal/center-right Ciudadanos, it saw its share of seats more than half from 137 to 66. If the decisive Andalusian contest last December saw the parties of the Right take over government in Spain’s largest region, this failed to translate into gains on the national stage, in a ballot marked by greatly increased voter turnout.

Sánchez was effective in casting himself as a bulwark against an increasingly radical right, in which Vox also set the policy agenda for Ciudadanos and the PP. However, this also displays the precariousness of the PSOE leader’s position. Far from fighting the election around the promise of serious social-democratic reforms, his message was mostly defined in negative terms, by what he opposes. In recent years his PSOE has swung from the center to the left and back again in rapid succession. As he weighs up whether he can govern without Podemos’s potentially destabilizing presence, Sánchez faces a fresh moment of truth.

The Two Spains

The election was fought between two polarized blocs. The Right’s strategy was based on the belief that the wave of Spanish nationalism sparked by the Catalan independence crisis would be the decisive factor in mobilizing voters. The three right-wing parties (the Conservative PP, center-right Ciudadanos, and far-right Vox) also wagered that the fragmentation of their vote could in fact help appeal to distinct sectors and mobilize a greater combined vote than the previously hegemonic PP had been capable of alone.

Things didn’t work out that way. In a country still coming to terms with the legacy of Franco’s dictatorship, many feared Vox more than the Catalan separatists. If the competition among the right-wing parties encouraged them to outbid each other in attacks on Sánchez and the left bloc, ultimately this also alienated centrists. The PP’s strategy of appropriating some of Vox’s more radical rhetoric and anti-feminist stances, as a means to halt the flow of votes to their more extremist rival, backfired spectacularly. One of the most memorable moments of the campaign came when the PP’s Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo questioned the principle of active consent and in a seeming reference to notorious “Wolfpack” rape trial asked: “Is a silence a no?”

In contrast, buoyed by tensions over the national question, Ciudadanos’s sharp turn to the right clearly paid off. On Friday, its leader Albert Rivera promised a ten-year intervention from the central state in Catalonia while his histrionic display in the debates positioned him as Sánchez’s harshest critic. On the back of this, Ciudadanos picked up twenty-five seats and came only one point off the PP’s result of 16.8 percent. But this was more a question of stealing votes from the PP than of making inroads among centrist PSOE voters.

Nor did Vox’s “hidden electorate” materialize. Many commentators had predicted that Santiago Abascal’s party would reach new voter demographics who normally abstain or vote for the Left. It was imagined that its staunchly anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, and ultranationalist rhetoric would appeal beyond traditional conservative voters. Yet its 10.3 percent score on Sunday shows that the party created in 2013 is nothing but a scion of the PP. Rather than bringing together a new transversal electorate, its breakthrough has been based on giving autonomous expression to a hard-right element that had previously occupied a subordinate position within PP ranks.

Before the election, Steve Bannon predicted the party would gain third position on 15 percent. Yet Abascal made no effort to reach out beyond his solidly middle-class base in an effort to attract forgotten working-class voters as Marine Le Pen has achieved in northern France with her protectionist rhetoric. The party’s economic program is staunchly neoliberal and its purely identitarian appeal had a clear electoral ceiling.

United Against the Right
In contrast, Sánchez had measured the political mood perfectly — with most of Spanish society feeling fatigued after eighteen months of tensions around Catalonia and many ex-Podemos and Ciudadanos voters willing to cast their ballot tactically against Vox. His strict anti-right strategy successfully painted the Socialists as Spain’s best hope of avoiding a regression to the worst of its Francoist past.

This left Podemos fighting an uphill battle of a campaign as it found itself positioned as the junior partner in PSOE’s broad left-wing bloc. In its first electoral assault in 2015, it had surfed the wave of social-movement protest that erupted in the country after the financial crash, and largely set the terms of the debate. Articulating a new class-based left populism, it divided the political space between “those from below” against the elites at the top. Yet with the exhaustion of the Indignados movement and the ebbing of anti-establishment feeling which coursed through Spain in 2011–16, Podemos has struggled to come to terms with its new institutional role.

The formation of Sánchez’s minority government in June 2018 had been seen, within Podemos’s ranks, as an opening to harness its parliamentary weight, so as to force the PSOE into accepting substantive social measures. Yet with Sánchez’s “Frankenstein coalition” (also including regional nationalists) unstable from the beginning, this tactic never gained traction. Instead, the PSOE was able to dictate the pace of events from office, deciding to call snap elections in February after the Catalan nationalists withdrew their support for his budget, indeed at a time when Podemos was itself embroiled in its split with former deputy leader Íñigo Errejón.

With polls showing a considerable swing away from Podemos to the PSOE, the radical-left party’s leader Pablo Iglesias concentrated on fighting the idea that the election was a simple choice between the radicalized right and the assorted left under PSOE’s leadership. In the electoral debates he successfully put Sánchez on the defensive by repeatedly daring him to rule out a centrist coalition with Ciudadanos — big business’s favored option at a time of great instability in Spanish politics. This was enough to minimize the party’s losses, as Podemos moved from 12 percent at the beginning of the campaign to 14.5 percent on election night. Yet this was still way off the 21 percent Iglesias’s party achieved in 2016.

A Defensive Stance

Positioning himself as the only bulwark against Spain’s “new-old monster,” Sanchez’s win bucks the trend of the European center-left. Yet it also resembles Emmanuel Macron’s victory against Marine Le Pen more than Jeremy Corbyn’s historic gains in 2017.

Sánchez secured his second stint as PSOE chief in spring 2017 through a mass revolt of the membership against their party hierarchy. Yet with PSOE members having an average age of sixty, this was not exactly a campaign driven by “millennial socialists.” There was no equivalent to the pro-Corbyn Momentum movement in Labour and instead of attracting a new wave of members with a new class-based politics of “the many,” Sánchez’s core appeal played on the sense of betrayal felt among activists at the party’s decision to back a PP government. Greater cooperation with Podemos was a key plank of Sánchez’s platform, but he has often pursued this with the clear objective of curtailing the radicalism of Iglesias’s formation.

Beyond the PSOE’s increased parliamentary weight, three further factors have reinforced Sánchez’s position. First, he took advantage of the elections to clean house, deselecting en masse MPs who had been loyal to his major rival, and leading party right-winger, Susana Díaz. Many of these MPs had been at the point of open rebellion in February when Sanchez was in negotiations with the Catalans. His majority will not now depend on the support of these pro-independence Catalan parties, which had voted down his budget in February. In particular, former Catalan Premier Carles Puigdemont and his center-right PDeCAT will not be able to exercise the same type of influence as they have over the last year. In turn this should allow for a political agenda less dominated by the national question. Finally, Podemos’s reduced haul of seats should see it become a more manageable force on his left flank.

Yet given his repeated tactical shifts over the Catalan question as well as economic and foreign-policy issues, it is not clear what Sánchez’s next move will be. As he addressed supporters at PSOE’s Madrid party headquarters on Sunday night the triumphal Socialist leader was met with a chorus of “Si se puede” (“Yes we can”), the slogan of his left-wing rival Podemos. If his base has made it clear — now as in his primary win — that they favor a left coalition of some kind with Iglesias’s formation, Sanchez’s response was characteristically ambiguous, attacking Ciudadanos’s own promise not to back his government: “unlike them we have not laid down any cordons sanitaires.”

Yet the response from the Spanish elites was equally swift. In a report to its major clients Spain’s largest bank Santander recommended a PSOE/Ciudadanos government rather than one with “populist” Podemos. This was followed by a string of editorials uniting the major right-wing and center-left newspapers behind some form of centrist arrangement.

As things stand, the parliamentary numbers offer no one obvious outcome. Vice-premier Carmen Calvo has said the PSOE’s intention is to govern alone, seeking external support from other forces. With Ciudadanos now intent on reinforcing their gains by taking up the leadership of the Spanish right, it looks like an agreement with Podemos and the Basque nationalists is the PSOE’s only realistic option. Iglesias has made clear his price for such a deal would be a full coalition government, in which his party can impose serious reforms. This will be vehemently opposed by the economic establishment, as with the pressure that scuppered such talks in 2016. In coming weeks will see if Sánchez will satisfy his base by opening to such a pact, or instead seek a new centrist turn under the cover of alliance with Ciudadanos.

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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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