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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.

Some reflections on Cataluña

11/10/2017

1 Comment

 
Yesterday I talked to many people, some British, some Spanish about what is happening in Cataluña and I read some of the millions of words on line.
By the end of the day I felt so depressed.  I had returned to Spain from Labour party conference in Brighton energised by a sense of purpose, a feeling that real that change is coming, and coming soon. But from the events in Cataluña  I now I see parallels with other times and I have a bad feeling that once more the left have forgotten lessons from history.
Today in Spain, in my opinion,  the ills of the country are caused by the neoliberal austerity of Partido Popular government, led by Mariano Rajoy.  They govern, mired in corruption, without a parliamentary majority after two inconclusive election. Rajoy, the serving President was forced to attend a court hearing into corruption.
I know no one who admits to supporting the PP, as you might expect my friends from every country tend to be people on the left. But sadly the majority of people I spoke to yesterday seem  to support in some way the actions of the Rajoy government against the Generalidad of Cataluña. They all say they do not support the violence, obviously, and yet I sat in a meeting of Labour International yesterday when the majority of members voted for a long and complex resolution which, among other things, condemned the disproportionate use of violence by the Madrid government. I voted against the resolution, wondering what a proportionate use of violence would have been against men and women, their children with them, who went to local schools to take part in a referendum declared illegal by the Spanish government.
 I am sure that my feelings about the right or not of people in Cataluña to gain independence stem from my feelings as a Welsh woman. I am very proud of my three grandchildren here in Spain who are tri lingual in English, Castilian and Valenciano – the eldest is also fluent in French. But I remember the fight for the right to a Welsh language television channel, and before that the right to teach Welsh in the schools of Wales. A politician went on hunger strike. Was that legal?
How many times in the past have citizens all over the world taken part in illegal acts when a state has declared legal laws which took away freedoms of expression and action? Most of the horrors of the past two centuries and more have been legal, according to the states which carried them out. Slavery was legal, the Holocaust was legal, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were dropped in a perfectly legal way. Apartheid was legal and the people who opposed it were imprisoned, tortured and killed for their actions against the South African state. Many of us in the UK supported the Anti-Apartheid movement, but not the Conservative government of Thatcher, nor very many British citizens. They upheld the right of the South African government to commit violence because they were upholding the rule of law.
The second republic in Spain was partly defeated by a divided left and the British Labour party and the British government failed to support the Spanish government, even when it was attacked by the fascist forces of Germany and Italy. Forty years of fascist dictatorship followed. The left was divided In Germany in the 1930s. The SDP and the communist party were capable of defeating the Nazi party electorally. But they were bitterly opposed to each other and a minority Nazi party took power. Until they abolished elections.
Many governments throughout the world use the economic violence of neoliberalism to subdue their citizenry – Greece is an example. But, as we saw on Sunday, if the government is weak and the citizenry strong it doesn’t take long for the jackboots to appear. 
Below is a picture of the Madrid remonstration of 7 October,  no flags, just the message to talk "parlemhablemos".
​
Picture
1 Comment
Les lunt link
11/10/2017 16:46:14

A very articulate Blog Nina. Perhsps giving Catalunya fiscal autonomy is the answer. It worked for the Basques as only 17% want independence.
Basques fiscal autonomy is probably the most generous in any region in Europe.
The problem is if it were extended to Catalunya the Spanish state would lose €16 bn.
(extract from Wednesday's i . )

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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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