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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.

Spain’s Coming Election Will Determine the Next Phase of Its Constitutional Crisis

5/11/2019

2 Comments

 

​https://novaramedia.com/2019/11/05/spains-coming-election-will-determine-the-next-phase-of-its-constitutional-crisis/?fbclid=IwAR2_1CqtD3zLy3u418RrPgUzMMn86pgXwFcO5pMVrsTHlQZzY9H-BcF7uT0

On Sunday 10 November, Spain will hold its fourth general election in as many years, in what is essentially a re-run of April’s vote.

The streets of Barcelona may now be clear of the barricades that followed the recent sentencing of the organisers of 2017’s illegal independence referendum – for the time being – but the Catalan crisis is itself a symptom of a broader malaise: a crisis of the state inaugurated by the post-crisis revolts of 2011 which, in the absence of decisive constitutional reform, keeps flaring up in different forms: from the indignados and Podemos to the Catalan revolt, to the emergence of the far-right party Vox.

Back in 2015, this crisis managed to erode the two-party system that had defined Spain’s modern democracy post-dictatorship. Since then, a consistently unstable balance of forces has manifested at the parliamentary level, with the proliferation of new parties reflecting the increasing polarisation of Spain’s main political axes: left/right and centralist/federalist.

In this election, voters will decide how the next phase of Spain’s constitutional crisis will unfold. Will it be presided over by a centrist restoration, a dying old order finding life-support in Spanish nationalism? Or will it be steered by a left-wing government in alliance with the Catalan left, a new order hinted at in recent years but which so far struggles to be born? Or will events take Spain down an alternative, more morbid path of a hard-right coalition with authoritarian features?

The Catalan question.
The politics surrounding Spain’s national minorities divide the Spanish left. Correspondingly, for the past 20 years the Spanish right has adopted an aggressive rhetoric along these lines as a strategy to galvanise the conservative electorate, while simultaneously dividing the working class. In the wake of the mass anti-austerity protests of 2011, the Catalan right began to reciprocate this strategy and both sides became locked in a process of escalation that culminated in the unilateral referendum of 2017, which was dramatically repressed by the Spanish state.

The Catalan issue was at the heart of the failed government negotiations of 2015-6, when the two largest parties on the left, the centre-left PSOE and radical left Podemos, couldn’t reach agreement on the issue of Catalan self-determination. Though harbouring broad federalist sympathies, PSOE is a firmly unionist party that won’t contemplate the idea of an independent Catalonia. Podemos, by contrast, is the only Spanish party open to the idea of holding a Scotland-style referendum in order to find a route out of the crisis.

Following the most recent general election in April, the problem arose again. The parliamentary arithmetic created the possibility of a PSOE-Podemos government pact, yet PSOE insisted a coalition was impossible due to insurmountable differences over the Catalan question. Short of a PSOE landslide majority in Sunday’s election – an option that simply isn’t on the cards – the potential formation of a left-leaning government seems bound to keep running into this obstacle.

PSOE’s balancing act.
Over the course of government negotiations this summer, Podemos kept calling PSOE’s bluff on demands ranging from ensuring the absence of Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias from a potential coalition government to a joint position on Catalonia along PSOE’s party line. Over time, PSOE’s excuses made it evident the party was motivated by a reluctance to acquiesce to Podemos’s key demand for ministries with competences over social policy, particularly with the prospect of a recession looming.

PSOE figureheads were occasionally afflicted with bouts of honesty, such as publicly admitting to additional reservations including Podemos’s housing policies and the pressure exerted by nervous employers’ associations. Rather than a full-on government coalition, PSOE’s preference was a confidence-and-supply agreement, presumably so it could break an agreement more easily should the government deem austerity measures necessary. Podemos stuck to its guns, leading to this month’s re-election.

Podemos bore the brunt of the electorate’s anger over the 2016 re-election, when the party was perceived to have been too intransigent following the initial election in 2015. This time, however, it seems the tables have turned. When negotiations broke down over the summer, PSOE had a widening majority in the polls; something that has only fed the perception that fresh elections are to be blamed on PSOE’s opportunism. Moreover, the party’s reluctance to join forces with Podemos will likely come as a disappointment to the party’s more left-leaning membership, which propped up Pedro Sánchez as party leader back in 2017 amid promises of a left-wing turn and talk of recognising Spain’s ‘plurinationality’.

PSOE is determined to govern alone rather than as part of a coalition, which has led to it pursuing a delicate balancing act to court potential confidence-and-supply arrangements. On one hand, the Sánchez administration has decided to exhume Francisco Franco’s remains from his sinister mausoleum and relocate them to a less ‘honourable’ place – a timely gesture to the left on a symbolic issue which has prompted far-right outrage.

On the other hand, the election has been timed to happen in the wake of the imprisonment of the Catalan leaders, the Sánchez administration having quickly ruled out a pardon in an attempt to disable right-wing accusations that PSOE is weak on the national question, which have persisted nonetheless. One problem remains: the scale of the uprising in the streets of Barcelona, which seems to have caught the government off-guard, may well end up throwing the party’s strategy off balance if it turns out to have galvanised the Spanish right and Catalan nationalist parties instead.

More of the same?
After a decisive defeat in the 2016 re-election, Podemos broke ranks and descended into infighting. The party split along two main factions. On one side, the supporters of the party leader, Pablo Iglesias, who had pushed for a hard line against PSOE in favour of an electoral pact with the old far-left party Izquierda Unida (United Left). On the other side, supporters of Íñigo Errejón, the party’s chief strategist, who advocated for a more collaborative stance with PSOE in order to capture a greater share of centre-left votes.

Iglesias won a decisive victory at Podemos’s 2017 party congress, but it did little to halt factional struggles. In response, Iglesias’s leadership style accentuated its Bonapartist features: banking on his charisma, he sought to quell internal dissent through all-or-nothing membership votes. Since then, and in the absence of effective channels of deliberation, internal crises quickly escalated into high-profile desertions, including that of Errejón himself. With internal democracy reduced to confirmationist exercises in ‘clicktivism’, the grassroots lost its dynamism. Subsequently, the party has lost its charm for many former supporters and voters have continued to drift away.

Earlier this year, Errejón founded a new political party – becoming what is now standing as Más País (‘More Country’) – taking prominent members of his former faction with him. His electoral strategy seeks to re-energise a section of the electorate to the left of PSOE but disenchanted with Podemos. His supporters argue that far from dividing the left, it is a strategy that will attract voters who might otherwise have abstained, thereby compounding the left’s electoral share.

But it is unclear whether Errejón is really offering anything new. So far, his party has largely been centred around his own charisma and that of other figureheads and experts, somewhat mirroring the cult of personality he has criticised in others. The role of the grassroots for Más País remains unclear, as does the distinctiveness of its electoral programme, which essentially resembles that of Podemos. More importantly, perhaps, it is equally unclear whether his strategy might actually work. When it was trialled earlier this year during the Madrid regional election, Errejón’s party vastly overtook Podemos, but failed to produce a left majority – the city and region of Madrid falling to a hard-right coalition instead.

Plausible scenarios.
While all polls predict a PSOE victory, the question remains whether a parliamentary left bloc will be able to stack up. Even if the arithmetic allows it, it remains likely that PSOE and Podemos will nonetheless get locked into battle over a potential coalition once again. One variant of this scenario is if the Catalan nationalist left ends up acting as kingmaker; a scenario in which it will predictably demand a pardon for secessionist leaders in return.

One alternative is the formation of an untested ‘centrist bloc’, with PSOE turning to its right and striking a government deal with the neoliberal centrist party Ciudadanos (Citizens), currently plummeting in the polls. More drastic yet would be if PSOE reached even further right to the conservative Partido Popular (Popular party). In 2016, PSOE abstained in a crucial parliamentary vote which allowed Mariano Rajoy’s PP to form a minority government with something just short of a confidence-and-supply agreement. Although both parties are officially denying the possibility that a similar arrangement could be repeated, various Spanish news outlets have referred to off-the-record conversations about it with government officials.

Though less likely at the moment, it is nonetheless possible that a perfect storm of fragmentation and demoralisation on the left, coupled with tactical voting and high turnout on the right, could lead to an upset like the one dealt in Madrid earlier this year. Indeed, if the combustion of nationalist fervour around the Catalan question continues apace, a disastrous scenario in which a radical right-wing coalition ascends to government (likely combining PP, Ciudadanos and the far-right Vox) will become more likely. Several polls are now predicting a considerable surge for Vox, which is advocating the declaration of a state of exception in Catalonia, with some projecting a vote share which surpasses Ciudadanos and potentially even Podemos.

Whatever the result, it will determine the next phase of Spain’s unfolding constitutional crisis.

Javier Moreno Zacarés is a research fellow at the University of Warwick.

Published 5th November 2019​



2 Comments
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12/1/2020 02:52:29

This is the reason why this election is critical for Spain. As always, election is the only platform where people get the power to put the best candidate on the position that there deserve. These candidates are either after the idea of serving people or just the power alone. Spain has been facing several crises, that's why they need to select the leaders that can possibly help them solve the problem they are facing. This is a huge challenge for them, but I am pretty sure that they can overcome it and will win it eventually!

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18/2/2020 12:57:45

the price means that the dragons are the result of a collision of different forces and resources (causing enormous pain relief) such as time , gold and food.

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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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