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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 new Spanish minimum wage

16/7/2019

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Raising wage floors is one way to reduce inequality and stimulate recovery in Europe. A big uplift in the Spanish minimum wage this year provides a test bed.

The Socialist-led Spanish government which emerged last summer approved by the end of 2018 a hike in the statutory minimum wage. This was agreed with the left-wing Podemos party, as part of an attempt to secure the parliamentary support needed for the passing of the proposed 2019 budget—although failure to do so issued in the April election.

The new minimum wage came into force on January 1st, rising from 14 monthly payments of €735.90 per year to €900 for those in full-time employment. This entailed an increase of 22 per cent—the highest in more than four decades in Spain and the most  significant among EU countries in 2019.

Loss of purchasing power
The elevation was framed as a tool to counterbalance the loss of purchasing power among those employees who had suffered the worst consequences of the economic crisis. Although there had been prior increases in 2017 and 2018, the rise implemented in 2019 constituted a more determined policy approach.

The crisis had a strong and protracted impact on the Spanish labour market. Real wages had progressed much less among those employees with the lowest wages during the boom and after the crisis they were worst hit—especially the lowest quintile, whose wages continued to decline until at least 2016 (Figure 1).









Figure 1: Evolution of average real wages by wage quintiles (index: 2004=100)
Spanish minimum wage
Source: EU-SILC

Is the Spanish statutory minimum wage high? It does not seem so even at its new level (Table 1). Spain ranks eighth among the 22 EU countries which implement a statutory minimum wage and would occupy a more intermediate position if those countries which do not were included—since they have relatively high wage floors negotiated by social partners.

Table 1: Statutory minimum wage across EU countries (prorated over 12 monthly payments)
€ (2019) Percentage of the average wage (2017)
Luxembourg 2,071 42.7
Ireland 1,656 38.3
Netherlands 1,616 39.3
Belgium 1,594 39.8
Germany 1,557 42.5
France 1,521 49.9
UK 1,453 44.2
Spain 1,050 33.9
Slovenia 887 48.0
Malta 758 44.4
Portugal 700 43.5
Greece 684 32.8
Lithuania 555 43.4
Estonia 540 35.2
Poland 523 43.6
Slovakia 520 38.2
Czechia 519 35.4
Croatia 506 41.5
Hungary 464 40.2
Romania 446 43.6
Latvia 430 38.7
Bulgaria 286 43.4
Sources: Eurostat and OECD

Spain is at the bottom in terms of the proportion the minimum wage represents of the average wage. Apart from the fact that its minimum wage level is not high, this is explained by Spain being one of the EU countries where a smaller proportion of employees receive wages around the level of the statutory minimum wage, due to higher collectively-agreed minima in various sectors. Therefore, while the recent increase brings Spain more in line with other advanced EU economies, it does not directly affect large swaths of the workforce.

Estimated impact
The impact of the new minimum wage on the wages of the different types of Spanish workers can only be estimated for now using prospective analysis, as done here using the latest available pan-European wage microdata (the 2017 wave of the EU-SILC survey). These show that in 2016 only 7 per cent of employees earned wages falling between the statutory minimum wages of 2018 and 2019. Since Spain had almost 16 million employees, this means approximately 1.13 million would have been directly affected by the 2019 rise (the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility, using recent national statistical sources, estimated that 8 per cent of employees, around 1,2 million, would be affected).

The new Spanish minimum wage
by Carlos Vacas-Soriano on 16th July 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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