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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’s Divisions Are Finally Coming to a Head

24/1/2019

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So, very sad.
For a while, it looked as if Spain had a chance of introducing a new kind of politics.
This article chronicles yet another failure of the left, in a time of great danger, to stand together against the onslaught of the far right, never far below the surface in Spain., although hitherto in the "respectable" guise of the PP
But, surprisingly, it omits the part the mainstream media played in this drama.

I have watched horrified as Pablo Iglesias has been made into a bogey man, as has happened to Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. 
It works every time.


by Javier Moreno Zacarés@HarveyMurenow
​

Novara Media 

Last week, the Spanish left was rocked by news of a split in Podemos. Íñigo Errejón, co-founder and strategist behind the organisation’s spectacular rise in 2015, announced he will be running for the presidency of the Madrid region on a new platform in the coming elections.

Errejon has justified his move by pointing to a recent electoral disappointment in Andalusia, in which Podemos stagnated and a new far-right party, Vox, made a significant, unexpected breakthrough. Podemos has grown old too quickly, Errejón argues, and a new political instrument is urgently needed to resist the return of Spain’s old ghosts. But in reality this is the chronicle of a split foretold – the culmination of tensions that have riddled the party since its inception.

Contradictions of the post-indignados left.
In May 2011, a series of mass anti-austerity protests (los indignados) turned the squares of Spain into a large recruitment ground for a new wave of grassroots activism. For all its plurality, this activism was defined by an overarching ethic of direct democracy – values that were repeatedly hailed against representative politics and their elitist bent. However, as years passed, it became evident to many that the conservative government would simply continue passing harsh austerity measures and punitive anti-protest laws until it faced electoral consequences for its actions. In March 2014, Podemos emerged from this impasse, offering a platform to those radicals who sought a more pragmatic way of organising.

The new organisation was an alliance between grassroots activists, accustomed to a high degree of autonomy and internal democracy, and a group of political scientists who were eager to construct an ‘electoral war machine’ along populist lines. The result was by far the most open and democratic political party in the country, yet one with an unresolved tension between a leadership that understood itself to be the cadre of a media party, and those who expected a more decentralised and participatory organisation. Though evident since the party’s inception, this conflict could be put on hold as long as Podemos was successful. And indeed, as early as December 2015 Podemos stood at the gates of government.

This would be the high watermark of Podemos’s success, however. Unable to form a coalition government with their PSOE (Socialist party) rivals, Podemos forced the country into a re-election in June 2016, hoping to finally surpass the centre-left party in votes. To do so, Podemos joined forces with the old eurocommunist party, Izquierda Unida (United Left), and got ready to ‘storm the heavens’, as party leader Pablo Iglesias put it. But rather than broadening its electoral base, this hubris cost Podemos more than a million votes and allowed the conservatives to stay in power. That night a civil war began in Podemos.

Three families.
In the struggles and purges that ensued, it became evident that Podemos was divided into at least three broad factions.

The leftmost faction is that of the anticapitalistas, who are closest to the original grassroots ethic of the indignados years. Electorally, this tendency favours a more combative discourse and a clear distance from the centrism of PSOE.

Against this approach, we have the followers of Íñigo Errejón, a talented academic and politician who epitomises the ‘electoral war machine’ idea. Inspired by the Latin American ‘pink tide’, Errejón insists on the need for a softer discourse that can galvanise a broad constituency: i.e. ‘the many’ rather than ‘the left’. He has long advocated for a ‘virtuous competition’ with PSOE with an eye on forming coalitions with the Socialists in the future as the only realistic way of taking power.

The third faction is that headed by Pablo Iglesias himself, who in the past has defined a balance between the other two with a ‘Bonapartist’ style of rule: banking on his charisma, he tends to steamroll through internal disputes by posing referendums to the membership while threatening to resign if he loses.

At the party’s first congress (Vistalegre I), Iglesias and Errejón formed a common front against the perceived puritanism of the anticapitalistas in order to create a more hierarchical party structure. However, this unity broke down in the midst of Podemos’s alliance with Izquierda Unida, a failed strategy that was spearheaded by Iglesias himself. For Errejón and others, Podemos had abandoned the cross-ideological populism that had made the party so appealing only to situate itself on the side of an old, burnt-out left. As months passed, the skirmishes between pablistas and errejonistas escalated until the second party congress in February 2017 (Vistalegre II), in which the latter effectively mounted a leadership challenge against the former.

The pablista faction won and Errejón was ousted from his position as party spokesperson, disappearing from view for months. In exchange, he was appeased with the prospect of being the party’s primary candidate for the Madrid regional elections of 2019.



The battle of Madrid.
Podemos scored one of its biggest victories with the conquest of the Madrid city council in 2015. There, the party ran as part of a broader coalition of grassroots activists (Ahora Madrid) that was headed at the last minute by an independent figurehead: the former communist lawyer Manuela Carmena. Her style of government, closer to social-democracy, repeatedly clashed with the grassroots energy of Ahora Madrid, a movement that was largely foreign to her. In the coming years, she gradually sidelined these activists and surrounded herself with errejonistas who were more in tune with her political vision.

In late 2018, Carmena and her errejonista allies decided to jettison the strictures of Ahora Madrid and ran without them under a new political brand: Más Madrid. Facing a frontal challenge to Podemos’s internal democracy, the party forced the errejonista rebels out but ultimately decided not to wage war against the popular Carmena and declined to field any candidates of their own against her.

At a regional level, the Podemos membership ratified Errejón’s candidacy in 2018. His ostracism to the capital’s political landscape was not a bad deal: Madrid is the stronghold of the errejonista faction and therefore offers the best opportunity to put his ideas into practice. However, in the coming year he clashed with Iglesias’s leadership once again, as the latter tried to define the parameters of Errejón’s campaign.

The war finally broke out last week, when Iglesias informed Errejón that the number two on his list would be an Izquierda Unida candidate. At this point, Errejón announced that he would be running under Carmena’s Más Madrid brand in order to situate himself outside of party control. Iglesias was swift to announce that Errejón was now out of the party and that Podemos would be fielding candidates against him.

Both the pablistas and anticapitalistas accuse Errejón of wanting to circumvent membership constraints in order to satisfy his personal ambitions. Errejón, in return, reminds them that he was elected by the party membership in Madrid to design a project that has been repeatedly punctuated by top-down interference. Moreover, he cites the advance of the far-right in the Andalusian regional elections last month (where Podemos ran a campaign dominated by anticapitalistas and Izquierda Unida) as evidence that the party urgently needs a new approach.

So far, the split has not been replicated by Errejón supporters across the country – his move coming as a surprise even to them. But this uncertainty extends to Madrid itself, where it remains unclear how many of his supporters, if any, will be joining him on the new platform. The only thing certain at the minute is that the Madrilenian left will be standing divided against the onslaught of the far right.

Published 24th January 2019


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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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