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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.

Spanish state repression in Catalonia may be shocking – but it’s nothing new

23/10/2019

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As we learned in the Basque country, true democracy requires there to be peace on both sides
From The Guardian, Wednesday 23 October 2019
• Arnaldo Otegi is the leader of the Basque independence party EH Bildu

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/23/spanish-state-repression-catalonia-democracy-basque






 
Protest outside the Spanish government’s regional office in Barcelona on 21 October. Photograph: Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty

The Spanish supreme court’s deeply unjust verdict, handing out harsh prison sentences to nine Catalan government and civil society leaders for organising a peaceful referendum on self-determination in Catalonia, is for many the sign of a country slipping towards authoritarianism and away from western European-style democracy. But truth be told, for us Basques, this kind of behaviour is nothing new.

For years Spain was able to disguise its undemocratic essence under the cloak of the “fight against Basque terrorism”. Denial and rejection of the political nature of the armed conflict in the Basque country became quite easy for them, especially after 9/11. The line was that there was not a political problem in Spain, just a criminal one. “Spain is a democracy,” they used to tell us. “Everything is possible without violence” was the repeated mantra. We still remember the words of Spanish home secretary Alfredo P Rubalcaba: “They must decide: bombs or votes.”

 The truth is Basque violence was ended not thanks to the government's efforts but despite its persistent obstructions
Yet when some of us in the pro-independence Basque movement began to convince those who still believed in violence to continue our struggle for self-determination by peaceful and democratic means, we were arrested and sentenced to lengthy jail terms.

The truth is that Basque violence ended –not thanks to Spanish government efforts – but in spite of its persistent obstructions. (It is probably important here to clarify my position: many wrongs were done by the Basque side, many things happened that should not have done. We have acknowledged our share of the blame for the violence that was committed by both sides during years of conflict). My arrest – along with others – happened 10 years before the Catalan politicians were convicted of sedition, and it was only after we had served our prison term that the European court of human rights ruled our trial had been unfair (the second time the ECHR had ruled against Spain). The same could easily happen to the Catalans. The fact that the Spanish state still holds more than 240 Basque political prisoners in jail despite ETA ending its armed campaign in 2011 shows its lack of interest in a lasting peace.

The verdict against the Catalan pro-independence leadership for organising a democratic and peaceful referendum, and the subsequent violence the Spanish police used against peaceful Catalan demonstrations, shows us what we always knew: the Spanish state is not interested in democracy and will use violence to conceal its undemocratic nature.
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This is why the state plays up, and at times instigates, violence in the region. The Spanish media and courts have even started talking about “terrorism” in the Catalan case. Spain will not hesitate to use this lie. Its government would love to transform Catalans’ legitimate and peaceful demand for self-determination into violence. That is what the police and military forces have been trying to do the last few days with their violent tactics.

Fortunately, the Catalan nationalist movement is committed to peace. As we are in the Basque country. We know that our “force of reason” is stronger than their “reason of force”. At the same time we both are committed to achieving our fundamental democratic rights – Catalan and Basque demands for democracy will now only get louder. It is time to complete the unfinished business of Spain’s phoney transition to democracy – and there will not be real democracy in Spain until its plurinational character is recognised, just as in the UK or Canada.

Rather predictably, Spain is going in the opposite direction: the direction of authoritarianism, counter-reform, the recentralisation of powers and responding to democratic demands with an iron fist. All this gives wings to the fascist extreme right. History shows us where this leads in the end.

Repression, imprisonment and centralisation will not work. Like in most similar cases around the world there is no lasting solution to this kind of conflict without dialogue. Like in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Quebec, the only way to solve these tensions is through democracy. And anyone with a bit of political sense knows that the state needs to engage with legitimate Catalan representatives. A policy of repression with no talks and no negotiation is unacceptable.

All the while, European institutions and states look the other way. Other European governments should be encouraging Spain to change track. Yet at the moment a desire to maintain internal stability within the bloc trumps all, and that means blind loyalty to Spain. This conflict can only be resolved internationally – European institutions and states should raise their voices in favour of a negotiated solution, before it is too late.
 Spanish politicians are spinning the Catalan crisis to suit their own interests



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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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