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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.

The Anatomy Of A Moment, By Javier Cercas, trans. Anne McLean

10/8/2018

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  • Reviewed by Michael Eaude 
In his prologue, Javier Cercas cheerfully calls this book a "humble testimony of a failure" to complete a novel he had drafted about Spain's defeated coup d'état on 23 February 1981. He came to feel that the real coup was too messy, full of contradictory events, and that a novel would make this untrimmed reality too neat. In addition, the night of the coup was already seared into people's memories as if it were fiction or legend: especially, the television images of the braggart moustachioed Lieutenant Colonel Tejero brandishing his pistol as he occupied the Parliament with his Civil Guards at 6.23 pm.
So Cercas discarded his novel and embarked on the non-fiction narrative now published (including three dramatic photographs of the "moment"). His aim was to explain the coup without imposing any fictional order: in a sense, to return a historical event, fictionalised (falsified) to rigidity in people's memories, to its real complexity. The Anatomy of a Moment is extensively researched, rigorous with the facts. It is not only history, though, for where the facts end Cercas enters people's minds and speculates on their motives.
Javier Cercas became famous ten years ago with Soldiers of Salamis (winner of the 2004 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), a novel of the Spanish Civil War. He followed that with The Speed of Light, another excellent novel, about the Vietnam War and its consequences. Like the present book, both these novels on the effects of war are open-ended. Cercas rounds off his books beautifully, but a satisfying finish does not mean he ties up the plot: he likes to leave readers wondering. In Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas takes as his starting-point how a militia-man spares the life of a fleeing Fascist leader he stumbles across in the woods. He squeezes the brief moment for all its meaning, exploring the contexts and lives of the two men.
Here, the moment Cercas anatomises is when Tejero, just after storming into Parliament, screams at the MPs to get down on the floor. His Civil Guards let off a burst of gun-fire. Everyone flings themselves under the benches, except three people, who remain in their seats while bullets whirr past – Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, Santiago Carrillo, leader of the Communist Party, and General Gutiérrez Mellado, the Deputy Prime Minister, who had courageously advanced on Tejero and ordered him to lay down his arms.
Cercas hangs his enthralling story round the defiance of these three. Delving into their motives, he explains their central roles in Spain's 1970s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Against them, Cercas sets the three protagonists of the coup: the bluff soldier General Milans del Bosch, the wily courtier General Armada and Tejero, the compulsive organiser of coups, the "idealist prepared to bend reality to his ideals".
When General Franco, the dictator who had ruled Spain since the 1936-39 Civil War, died in November 1975, his chosen heir was Juan Carlos, who became king in a restored monarchy. Despite having sworn loyalty to Francoism, Juan Carlos perceived that a democratic system was necessary if the newly recovered monarchy was to survive and if Spain was not to remain the pariah country of western Europe.
In July 1976, the king sacked Arias, Franco's ineffective last premier, and appoints the relatively unknown Falangist, Adolfo Suárez, as prime minister. With supreme energy, always dancing one pace ahead of his opponents on left and right, Suárez carried out the king's wishes and organised within a year Spain's first free elections since 1936. Simultaneously, he headed off the threat of army rebellion, persuades the Francoist Parliament to vote themselves out of a job by agreeing a new democratic framework and browbeat the Communist Party into accepting the monarchy and abandoning any pretensions to a deeper rupture with Francoism. He legalised the Communist Party at Easter 1977, with army sabres rattling loud at this "betrayal" of Francoism, and rounded off this magical year by winning the June 1977 elections.
Suárez becomes the main character in Cercas's book. This cocky, provincial upstart overcomes all obstacles with his lack of scruple, good looks, charm and grasp of manoeuvre. Then, after triumphing as the man who got rid of the dictatorship, Suárez is less skilful at administering the democracy. The background of the 1981 coup is the increased ETA terror campaign targeting army personnel, Suárez's own incompetence and, most of all, widespread irresponsible chattering among the political classes that Suárez must be replaced by a unity government headed by a military figure.
The coup was a combination of various coups. For some, it was to be just "a touch on the rudder" to get the new democracy over its teething troubles. For others, like Tejero, it was to defeat the traitor Suárez and return the country to his Francoist ideal: a barracks, with military discipline and Catholic morality.
​

Cercas moves back and forth from historical background to the tense events of the long, cold night of 23 February, when the whole Parliament is held captive and the whole country crouches in suspense around their radios. Certain parts may make heavy going for English-language readers without direct knowledge, but Cercas is a masterly storyteller: the more analytical passages are rarely dull and the book is rich with vivid images, paradox and action.
Inevitably, there are points of discrepancy with Cercas. In his assertive defence of the settlement made in the transition, essentially between Suárez from the regime and Carrillo from the anti-Franco opposition, Cercas overloads his argument. He maintains that Carrillo was a revolutionary who gave up being one, when for over two decades Carrillo had been advocating national reconciliation, not revolution. Also, he ignores the mass movement driving the transition from below. And he dismisses too readily the large minority who wanted a deeper rupture with Francoism that would involve justice for the victims of the dictatorship as a rigid "ultramontane left" (a category including this reviewer).
Unlike the shimmering, lucid prose of Cercas's two great novels, here he has adopted certain mannerisms and stylistic infelicities. The twisting sentences over-use colons and semi-colons. His skilful translator Anne McLean is sometimes drawn into following too closely the Spanish in these long sentences studded with multiple sub-clauses. Cercas is attempting to be precise and express every nuance with this style; but it is tiresome that sometimes one has to read back to grasp the meaning.
Cercas is a major novelist who has written a fascinating account of a key event in Spain's recent history. Although 30 years have passed, the coup still reverberates. Many argue that, though the coup failed, it triumphed (one of the many paradoxes Cercas delights in): it forced the political class to grow up or, a more sinister consequence, it made politicians fall over each other to give the military what it wanted, a modernised NATO army and a more restricted democracy. Cercas's decision to write fact not fiction is vindicated. He forces us to abandon the fiction, the legends of the coup, and look at the pictures and story anew in all their complexity.








​https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-anatomy-of-a-moment-by-javier-cercas-trans-anne-mclean-2203547.html

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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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