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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.

1/4/2019 0 Comments

Why Spain Does not Remember By Alberto Garzón

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​tribunemag.co.uk/2019/04/why-spain-does-not-remember?fbclid=IwAR1xOeNVCH-6p9rm6CeTCJHwjbEaPgdsKu9fyKJRfABCqou7KWT2tVj_wW0
80 years ago today the Spanish Civil War ended. We speak to leftist MP Alberto Garzón about why Spain struggles to remember its fight against fascism.


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In March 1939 General Francisco Franco’s fascist troops entered Madrid, after having subjected the Spanish capital to a brutal two-and-half-year-long siege. When the Spanish civil war ended on April 1st, at least half a million people lay dead – including approximately 150,000 as a direct result of Francoist terror. In the aftermath, 20,000 Republican prisoners were executed and thousands more died in Francoist concentration camps or in refugee camps in Southern France. 

Though a defining moment in Spanish history, commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Civil War’s end will be muted within the country itself. The wounds of Franco’s dictatorship and the brutal post-war years remain raw in contemporary Spain. In the following extract, from an interview to be published in the forthcoming edition of Tribune, the Unidos Podemos MP and United Left leader Alberto Garzón argues that Spain’s inability to come to terms with Francoist crimes is bound up with the limits to the country’s transition to democracy in the 1970s.  

The eightieth anniversary is an important date, but it’s almost better understood outside of Spain than it is inside the country itself. We had Franco’s coup d’etat in 1936, a civil war that lasted 3 years and then afterwards there was a dictatorship that was firstly an accessory to international fascism and then later gradually modified towards its particular Francoist model. This regime was of the extreme right, but with its own peculiarities.

When the Transition [to democracy, 1975-’81] came about, it was a transition directed and orchestrated by Francoist elites together with the opposition‘s own elites. It would not have emerged had it not been for working-class movements and civil society organisations coming out on the streets to confront repression, torture and suffering. They represented a force that was powerful enough to open a path towards a kind of democracy, but not one that was strong enough to overthrow the system. Therefore, what we had was a political transition that consisted of negotiation between two parties.

This allowed the Francoist regime to preserve some of its previous privileges. Advances were made, such as public healthcare, public education and formalised democracy. Certain prerogatives, however, were maintained and allowed to persist: the influence of the Catholic Church, for instance, is enshrined in the constitution; the conception of Spain as a unitary entity protected by the army; and, most importantly, economic power was not touched and did not change in any meaningful way. The large corporations that were greatly enriched during the years of the dictatorship continued to dominate during Spain’s return to democracy and not much has changed since then. Many of them are among the most powerful in the country today. The children that came from successive generations of Francoist ministers continue to make up the Spanish social elite. Many of the judges in Spain today are the children of parents who were judges in the era of Franco.

We have a country that has also inherited all the bad things from the Transition, as well as the good ones. And so, remembering the Transition also entails being conscious of the fact that a ‘pact of silence’ was made at the beginning of this period. It was said that, as those that carried out the Transition were in part responsible for the civil war, it would be better off not to speak about the war or the past ever again.

You have to think that former President Adolfo Suárez, whose name now adorns Madrid’s international airport, had previously been the head of the Falange. This is like being head of the National Socialist party in Germany earlier in the century. Since facts like these made for uncomfortable truths at the time, a mythologised narrative was constructed around the Transition which fostered a kind of amnesia. This was done in part so nobody would remember that the heads and directors of Spain’s national newspapers were those who had been propaganda chiefs during the Franco years, so that people would forget big business’ ties with Francoism and so on. In this way, Spanish elites sought to erase the recent past, including the [1931-1939] Second Republic and all that went with it.

This brings us to a paradox: the democratic values of the Second Republic and the struggles of the International Brigades are defended more widely and robustly outside of Spain than they are inside it. There are Second Republic combatants who went on to fight fascism in the French Resistance and who have had tributes paid to them in France and Germany. They haven’t any such commemoration in Spain. They died without even minimal recognition of their actions. This a historic anomaly – it doesn’t happen in Italy, it doesn’t happen in Germany, it doesn’t happen in France or the UK. But it does in Spain, because the Transition left this legacy.

Forty years after the Transition, new generations of Spaniards, politicised by the Indignados movement, identify in the majority as Republicans. The state is performing a number of manoeuvres in order to avoid any kind of questioning of a monarchy that was chosen by Francoism – and then later ratified in the Constitution. The official polling and survey company in Spain, CIS, in fact stopped asking about the monarchy in 2014 in order to avoid there being proof of the Republican sentiment that exists in this country.

On the eightieth anniversary I believe it should be appropriate for any democratic country to recognise those that fought against fascism. In Spain, unfortunately, this can’t happen because the country’s political Right sees itself as the inheritors of fascism; the left tradition of the Socialist Party views itself as the inheritor of the Transition, which of course isn’t the same. But, in the end, neither of the two take meaningful action to recognise this past.

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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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