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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.

Podemos was the dazzling new force in Spanish politics. What went wrong?

19/2/2019

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​www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/19/podemos-spanish-politics

Internal strife and a narrowness of vision has halted the party’s rise – and left room for the far right to creep in
By Giles Tremlett, The Guardian, Tuesday 19 February 2019


It was only five years ago that Spain’s break-out party Podemos became a dazzling new lodestar for Europe’s lost and troubled left. But with a snap election just weeks away, it now risks a crash as spectacular as its rise. Has the leftwing populist model of ponytailed rebel Pablo Iglesias and his gang of talented young thinkers, so admired by many Jeremy Corbyn backers and others around Europe, proved a failure?

Polling suggests the party is in deep trouble. Podemos once led the polls and very nearly snatched leadership of Spain’s left from prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist party at the 2016 elections, but it is now only the voters’ fourth favourite party. The meltdown means it is slated to lose half its deputies, while Sánchez gallops ahead, taking well over twice as many votes as Podemos on 28 April.



The far-right populist party Vox is now also snapping at its heels, adding ideological insult to electoral injury. In April, Vox will target the same working-class city neighbourhoods as Podemos – claiming that immigrants and Catalan separatists, not austerity, are the problem. Mainstream parties will undoubtedly argue that this is merely one populism replacing another. That misses the point.

Although Spain has changed since Podemos picked up the banner of the indignado protesters and charged dramatically on to the scene in the 2014 European elections, the damage is largely self-inflicted. In the latest of a series of internal bust-ups, Iglesias’s former No 2, Iñigo Errejón, is leading an alternative coalition into elections for the powerful Madrid regional government in May.

The split matters partly because Errejón was, after Iglesias, the most visible and charismatic of the talented young leaders who created Podemos. Such was the passion they provoked that the two politicians could do stadium tours, filling seats with excited supporters chanting “Yes we can!” Those queuing to see them afterwards were just as keen to plant a kiss on the boyish-looking Errejón as they were to grab a selfie with Iglesias.

More importantly, Errejón was also a key theorist in a party that pledged to break moulds and shed the shackles that had kept the reforming left out of power. He was the most forthright proponent of a philosophy of popular “transversal” coalitions that knitted together a wide variety of groups opposed to the status quo in one of Europe’s most corrupt and unequal societies. This allowed Podemos to channel the rage of the spontaneous indignado protests, which had occupied city squares in 2011. It also prevented it repeating the doomed coalitions routinely put together under the dead hand of Spain’s communist party. Everybody was welcome, the message became, under Podemos’s bright, purple-coloured umbrella.

 
 ‘Pablo Iglesias’s former No 2, Iñigo Errejón, is leading an alternative coalition into elections for the powerful Madrid regional government in May.’ Photograph: Juan Medina/Reuters
That message is no longer so clear. Indeed, the party appears to have forgotten that its success has always depended on the fact that it is part of a much broader movement of leftwing regeneration.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Spain’s two greatest cities, Madrid and Barcelona. These are where Podemos holds greatest sway, having helped to form the local coalitions that brought Madrid mayor, Manuela Carmena, and her Barcelona counterpart, Ada Colau, to power. The two cities, home to 10% of the country’s population, are the main laboratories for Podemos-style policies in Spain. They are also, traditionally, a launch-pad for political change.

Both mayors have performed remarkably well as they seek to make cities more liveable, rather than merely richer. Carmena has even pulled off the apparently impossible trick of reducing the debt inherited from big-spending rightwing mayors without instituting austerity. Charges that the new left is radical, dangerous and irresponsible now ring hollow.

Neither mayor allows herself to be bossed by Podemos, a party that is only half-joking when it repeatedly references the power battles waged in Game of Thrones. Colau remains on friendly terms, but the relationship with Carmena has soured as Podemos has shed allies.

Errejón has joined Carmena and her alternative umbrella group, Más Madrid. This will compete with Podemos (and the communists who are now its most important coalition allies) for votes in the regional elections in May. To confuse things further, Errejón still claims to be a loyal Podemos member.

Monica Oltra, the deputy premier of Valencia’s regional government, has already said that her Compromís party, a key local ally, will not repeat an electoral coalition with Podemos in the April general election. En Marea, a similar ally in Galicia, has also walked away. As a result, Podemos’s broad coalition looks increasingly skinny and self-centred.

Podemos should also ask itself why the three most powerful women on Spain’s new left – the two mayors and Oltra – all operate outside the party. Even within Podemos, and despite gender-balanced quota systems, women complain that the party suffers from an overload of testosterone.

The only really visible woman in Podemos is now Irene Montero, the party’s spokeswoman in parliament. She and Iglesias are a couple. A recent decision to raise their children in a generously-sized country house with a swimming pool has helped take the shine off a party that claims to represent ordinary Spaniards. Podemos members, when consulted, voted to keep them in their positions. Ordinary voters, unused to such luxury, will not be so understanding.

The Podemos story remains remarkable and the party has a history of proving naysayers wrong. A year after its foundation, it packed Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square with supporters as Iglesias told the crowd to challenge the monsters of “financial totalitarianism” and “take their dreams seriously”.

That was four years ago, when the damage caused by the global financial crash and a burst construction bubble at home was rawer than it is now. In December, a Podemos-led coalition lost a third of its votes in regional elections in southern Andalucia. Instead of asking Podemos to take over the traditionally leftwing regional government, voters in one of Spain’s poorest regions ushered in a rightwing government backed by Vox. When that happens, something has gone badly wrong with the “Podemos revolution”.

• Giles Tremlett is a journalist and author based in Madrid



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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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