If you want to know why Alicia Sánchez-Camacho has decided that she no longer trusts the Mossos d'Esquadra with the job of keeping her alive, you should look a little further back than Metodo3. Policy from on high dictates that the PP's plan now is to foment ethnic and political division in Catalonia. Encouraging people not to trust the police is an excellent way to get started.
And things are only just getting started.
I've been meaning to write about the political corruption cases rocking CiU and the PP over the last few weeks, but every time I start an article, a new case appears. Since Gürtel, we've had (to name a few) Palau, Sabadell, Lloret… and Bárcenas. All the cases are serious but Bárcenas is the big daddy of corruption scandals. It's is a case which could – and should – bring down the government.
Originally linked with Gürtel, the Bárcenas case involves significant cash payments made on a monthly basis to senior members of the PP by its then treasurer, Luis Bárcenas. The money, mainly party donations and kickbacks, was handed out in envelopes. This went on for about 25 years until it suddenly stopped a few years ago, apparently on Mariano Rajoy's orders.
Bárcenas also benefited from the tax amnesty which was one of Rajoy's first policies. He managed to legalize millions of Euros kept previously in Swiss bank accounts.
What's stunning about this case is that firstly, this isn't mere anonymous claims made in El Mundo. It's stuff that Bárcenas and his legal team seems to be admitting to. Secondly, Mariano Rajoy himself allegedly received €25,000 a year for 11 years in dodgy money. And this may have gone on until 2009.
With a spring and summer of protests on the way, I'm starting to wonder if Rajoy's government can survive. If it does, it will be through our failure to act as citizens and residents of this corrupt country.
Aragon, País Valencià, Illes Balears… these are three Spanish autonomous communities with a historical link to the Catalan language. They are also three Spanish autonomous communities where the PP is in power. And what is the result of this combination of factors? Evidence of a distributed, strategic plan to de-Catalanise these regions.
Example: I met several people in their mid 20s-early 30s in Alicante province recently. This is an area where the street names are all still in Valencian-Catalan. Not one of the young people I met spoke a work of this language (not that we discussed this much). Why? Because they had attended local state schools (the PSOE also bears some responsibility here). The PP in Valencia also led the charge for redefining Valencian as a different language to Catalan, something which the Valencian Academy clearly rejects.
Example: The attempts to relabel Catalan and its dialects as part of Aragonés Oriental (Eastern Aragonese) with the support of the PP in Aragon. This despite the fact that Eastern Aragonese is a different language.
Example: Repeated attempts to change place names and street names in Valenican towns, against the wishes of the people who live there.
Example: In the Balearic islands, the PP has started to rename cities. Palma has changed to Palma de Mallorca (Spanish version) and Maó has changed to Maó-Mahon (mixed version). Simultaneously, Catalan has been downgraded from being a compulsory subject in Balearic schools and will no longer be a requirement for civil servants.
Example: Education minister Wert has proposed a new education plan for Catalonia which would take the level of education in Catalan back to how it was in 1978. Making it an optional subject, not needed to complete high school, and abolishing 'immersion' represent a complete redrawing of the Catalan education system. The PP, knowing that Catalan students do perfectly well in Spanish, has opted to put children at a disadvantage – not being able to speak Catalan – purely for the purposes of creating a cultural divide in Catalonia.
When we talk about attacks on culture and the threat of ethnic division in Catalonia and Spain, much is made of Catalan nationalism and the dangerous game it plays. I've never bought this theory because the Catalan separatist parties are now much less ethnically-centred than they were 15 or 20 years ago.
However, the PP is a retrograde party. It cannot deal with the problems it has created in the present and so it turns to policies from the past to fix things. They talk of banning strikes, banning protests… simultaneously, they make people redundant and then cut unemployment benefits, and everywhere they have power, they are now attempting to de-Catalanise Spain. With all the evidence (and what I've presented here is actually just a fraction of what's going on), it seems difficult to deny that the PP is following a concrete, organised campaign in territories where it has power and at a national level.
Frankly, this strikes me as another good argument for independence.
Seats in the Catalan parliament (percentage of votes in brackets)
CiU 50 (30.5%)
ERC 21(13.7)
PSC 20(14.5%)
PP 19 (13%)
ICV-EUiA 13 (9.9%)
C's 9 (7.6%)
CUP 3 (3.5%)
Results from today's elections: a significant drop for CiU, a better than expected result for the PSC, a boost for ERC and C's, a potential for a CiU-ERC national bloc. It seems that people are voting for independence but not for Artur Mas and his cuts. CiU has lost support. The CUP enters the parlament for the first time. The PSC is damaged. The PP will slightly increase support. ICV-EUiA has increased a bit, but not as much as I was hoping it would. C's have done very well. SI is out, as I predicted. The fascist PxC has failed to win a seat.
A few days ago, the pro-PP Spanish newspaper El Mundo published a story indicating that Artur Mas and Jordi Pujol were under suspicion of having secret Swiss bank accounts filled with money gained through corrupt practices linked to the Palau criminal case. The newspaper presented a police memo which suggested that these suspicions were already under court investigation.
In the days that have followed, Mas and Pujol have opened legal proceedings against the journalists behind the story and they've repeatedly denied the accusations. At the same time, they've asked the Spanish ministry of justice to explain how an apparently secret police report could have been leaked, and to identify who's responsible. The judge investigating the Palau corruption case also made clear that he hadn't been given any such police report. The following day, El Mundo accused the Mossos d'Esquadra, Catalonia's police force, of helping to destroy evidence linked to the case. The Mossos are also opening legal proceedings against the newspaper.
Yesterday, the ministry of justice informed the Catalan newspaper ARA that it couldn't find the original police report but that it seemed to be at least partly based on several different unofficial reports that it has found. Meanwhile, the same ministry informed the EFE agency that it thought the rest of the info on the mysterious police report could well be sourced from internet rumours, and not from any formal investigation. The rumours, not hard to find online, contain several names linked with the Catalan government. Many of the other names implicated are of senior PP officials in various central or autonomous governments. El Mundo did not publish any of these names in its story.
El Mundo has a mixed record when it comes to political revelations. In the past it helped uncover corruption scandals and government involvement with the GAL terrorist group. More recently, it spent months insisting that ETA was involved in the 11M Madrid bombings, despite a lack of evidence. Historically, El Mundo's targets for these exposés have been either politically neutral civil servants or political opponents of the PP.
Right now, it's not clear how this story will develop. Is it possible that Mas and Pujol have actually received funds from corrupt public contract deals? Of course it is. But the absence of an actual police report on which the story depends, and irregularities in the info presented by El Mundo suggest that there is at least a chance that this might not join the ranks of El Mundo's illustrious investigations. Some police sources apparently blame central government HQ for the leaks.
El Mundo most likely planned this story as a sort of late 'October surprise'. Will it have any effect on the Catalan elections? I doubt it.
It is currently popular among Spanish nationalists to compare the Catalan nationalism of Artur Mas with Nazism. A helpful argument, I'm sure we can all agree.
Perhaps said Spanish nationalists should reflect better on their political heritage. After all, we know who ordered the lists of Jews in Spain for the SS. Clue: it wasn't Lluís Companys.
Does anyone else get the impression that the PP and PSOE are now positioning themselves for future national elections in Spain rather than the debate over a potential referendum? There's a shared purpose in words from Rajoy, his barons, Montilla, Rubalcaba, Chacon, etc… and it doesn't feel like it has anything to do with the debate I hear going on in Catalonia.
The Spanish PP has directed a vicious attack against a judge. Again. The judge ruled no criminal offences had been committed by the organisers of the 25S protests in Madrid. A PP spokesman described him as "posh anarchist", "indecent", "intolerable", "unacceptable" and "dreadful". He also warned that the judge would be personally responsible for any 'incident' that happens to any MP.
I say again: a spokesman for the ruling party in Spain, hurling insults at a judge. This is not the sort of thing that should happen in a democracy. But in Spain, justice is cheap and when it goes against you, you insult and threaten the judge. All the more so, it seems, if you're the government.
Meanwhile, the senior government official in the Comunidad de Madrid has called for the right to protest to be curtailed. It seems that she doesn't approve of 'misuse of public space'. She has been campaigning for this since the mid 2000s when thousands of Spaniards were regularly bused in by the PP to protest against the PSOE government. Oh, sorry… no, she hasn't.
Oh and plus: finance minister Luís de Guindos was in London yesterday, looking for vultures investors to come to Spain and pick over what's left of the country invest in (…what?). His talk was interrupted by protestors chanting 'Spain for sale!'. But the worst came when he insisted that Spain wouldn't need a bailout. The audience laughed in his face.
I'm off to San Francisco this weekend. A 6am flight tomorrow. Have a great weekend, everybody.
One of the central planks of the Spanish nationalist argument against Catalan independence is that upon seceding, Catalonia would be obliged to leave the EU and the Euro. But is this true?
Around the time of the 11S march, various confusing messages could be heard from the European Commission, the EU's executive body. A day before the march, the EU broke its previous policy of never commenting on the chance of Catalan independence and stated that while no laws exist governing the secession of a region from a member state, if they applied international law in its strictest way, Catalonia would be out of the EU and would have to negotiate reentry. In fact, I think the day before, spokesman Olivier Bailly said the opposite, but I can't find the quote. Anyway, it was a well-timed message which the Spanish press made the most of, with over 90 stories on Google news.
Since then Spanish foreign minister José Manuel García-Margallo has been constantly warning that not only would Catalonia be out, but that it would never get back in. This friendly gesture is one of many the PP has been trying to use in its campaign against secession. The Spanish government, it seems, is following a game plan of "Oh no, a majority of Catalans want to break away… let's insult them and threaten them so they'll stay".
But I digress. Last Sunday saw EU vicepresident Viviane Reding interviewed in the Diario de Sevilla. The interviewer asked her what she thought of the chance of a Catalonia outside Europe. Misunderstanding the question, she responded that she knows Catalonia and thinks it's a very pro-EU place. The interviewer then clarified the point by reminding her that the Vienna Convention states that any seceding territory immediately secedes from the international agreements of the country from which it's seceding. Her response was to laugh this argument away. "Come on," she said, "there's nothing in international law that says anything like this. Please resolve your internal issues yourselves. I have faith in the European mentality of the Catalans".
In response to Reding, TFW (Alicia Sánchez-Comacho) stated that in two EU treaties, it is made clear that Catalonia would be out. But looking at those treaties, they say nothing of the sort.
It appears to me that this all comes down to how you read the Vienna Convention. Does it say that Catalonia would have to renounce all international agreements to which Spain is signatory or doesn't it? And does this even matter, if Mas is really just planning devomax?
UPDATE: the elections will be held on November 25th.
The Catalan newspaper Ara is reporting that Artur Mas is about to call early elections, likely to occur on November 18 or 25 or December 2.
Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy stated in parliament today that he doesn't agree with the Catalan view that a new fiscal pact ought to be agreed. This was supposed to have been the subject of discussion in a meeting between Rajoy and Mas tomorrow morning in Madrid. It is believed that Mas could call the elections tomorrow, immediately after this meeting.
There is widespread expectation that these elections could take on the form of a referendum on Catalan independence from Spain. For this to happen, the governing CiU will have to form a national bloc with parties sympathetic to independence: ERC, ICV and SI. The Catalan federations of the two main Spanish parties, PP and PSOE will oppose independence, with support from Ciudadanos.
The groups in favour of independence appear to see that speed is of the essence now. They aim to benefit from the upswing in support for separatism seen at last week's demonstration in Barcelona. They probably also fear the Spanish government invoking section 155 of the Spanish constitution, which allows for central government to establish direct rule over autonomous communities seen to be in breach of the constitution.
Does this render independence any more likely? It's hard to say. There can be no doubt that more people here are taking the question seriously. But CiU will have to negotiate a pact with leftwing ERC and ICV to have a chance of an absolute majority. But I get the feeling that there are plenty of Catalans who might balk at the last minute, either due to the uncertainty that independence might bring or because of their dislike for voting for any CiU-led coalition.
Because of the speed with which the independence movement has gathered pace and the possible sanctioning of Catalonia's self-government by Madrid, these elections will likely prove to be the supreme test that separatism must pass if it is going to succeed.
What do you think will happen?
If not precisely inevitable, Catalan independence now seems much more likely than it did a couple of years back when I first framed my questions for supporters and opponents of Catalan separatism.
Many of those questions remain valid. But my main focus has shifted. This reduced list should read as a demand from those leading and supporting the independence movement that they for once and for all clarify various matters that I believe worry many people currently. Because if Catalonia really will be the 'Next State in Europe', these matters need to be clarified now, not later.
1 – What social model will an independent Catalonia have?
While the right are currently in power, and have governed for the majority of Catalonia's post-Franco years, there is a significant section of Catalan society that supports parties of the left. We're deeply unhappy about the cuts that Artur Mas has made to public health, education, social assistance and public sector pay during the financial crisis. Mas has blamed these cuts on Spain's mishandling of the national economy. Very well: if that is true, he must now guarantee to restore, improve and protect public sending and investment in the event of independence.
2 – Will you now, and forever, forgo all claims on the territories in Spain and France sometimes referred to as the Catalan Countries?
I shouldn't need to explain the importance of this question. The only chance of success as a state depends on France's and Spain's recognition. That won't happen unless you formally reject territorial claims on Rosselló, Valencia, the Franja and the Balearics.
3 – What status for non-Spanish residents in Catalonia?
OK, this is a personal one, but it affects lots of people and many businesses. Will you now guarantee our status as permanent residents? What chances for citizenship will we have?
As the crisis in capitalism deepens, the situation in which Spain finds itself seems increasingly hopeless.
Pretty much everyone I've spoken to about Spain recently seems agreed that Spain – and maybe the world – is approaching some sort of cataclysmic reckoning. This sentiment might well be declared a sentimental form of millennialism - after all, aren't we rich and comfortable enough to entertain fantasies of impending doom? – were it not for the gentle crackle you can hear in the air here. This crackle, this oceanic roar heard from a great distance, is the sound of millions of people waiting for the decisive moment at which they will try once again to reclaim their rights.
Spain is fucked. And not because of Berlin or London, but because of us, the Spaniards who have done nothing to stop Spain getting fucked. While Catalans moan about motorway tolls, Asturian miners are blockading motorways with flaming barricades. And protestors are being shot by police with rubber bullets (bullets that give the police a chance to shoot you multiple times rather than just once – possibly the highest embodiment of planned obsolescence at state/capital level), and Greece never quite got the revolution that seemed so possible just a few weeks ago.
Andrea Fabra, daughter of a repulsive conservative politician from Castelló, summed up the attitude of Spain's political class with impressive candour this week. As PM Mariano Rajoy announced higher VAT (designed to hurt the poor) and deeper cuts to the unemployment benefits system (designed to hurt the hopeless), Fabra uttered the immortal words: "Fuck 'em!". She wasn't talking about her colleagues in the PP who joyfully applauded as Rajoy delivered the negative prognosis. She was referring to the 25% of Spaniards who are unemployed. "Fuck 'em!", she declared because that's how she and her colleagues feel about Spaniards in general. If you're not bright enough to fuck everyone else, then fuck you.
The background crackle just intensified a little. Catalonia's conservatives, CiU, have been making themselves busy recently finding ways to criminalise protest. One assumes that pro-flag, pro-independence protest will still be officially encouraged. We've had two useless general strikes in two years with decent turn-outs but no effect on policy. We had millions of people marching against an illegal war and the government ignored that too. It is clear that they do not listen to argument. And when protest is derided so openly by those in power, the same people who raise a regressive tax in order to pay off crooked banks, the citizens must use other tools to make themselves heard.
Someone told me the other day that the only way we in Spain can end this cycle of corrupt parasitism is with war but that understandably, no Spaniard wanted to recreate the disaster of the 1930s. I hope and pray that this is nothing more than sentimental millennialism. But at the same time, I can't see a way out. What hope does this country have, then?
With the approval of savage labor reforms and likely even more savage cuts to come, tomorrow's general strike is a vital chance to show that working people in Spain are willing to stand up for themselves and say ENOUGH. We demand dignity.
Reasons for supporting the strike:
The PP and CiU are determined to destroy the hard-won social model in Spain. They try to blame public spending for the crisis but it's the private sector that really caused these problems. So they're introducing privatization into the health service, cuts to education budgets, cuts to civil service wages (not for diputados, though, of course), cuts to pensions… And all the while, unemployment grows.
This strike is a vital opportunity to express your anger at a set of labor reforms and spending cuts which won't create employment but will only deepen the crisis for working people in Spain.
Spanish magistrate* Baltasar Garzón was today found guilty in an illegal wiretap trial, one of three cases currently open against him. The Supreme Court has banned him from working as a judge for eleven years, effectively ending his career as a famed 'crusader for justice'.
The sentence leaves Garzón the only significant loser in the Gürtel corruption case which he was prosecuting. The case involves businessman Francisco Correa and numerous members of the ruling Popular Party. Valencian PP leader Francisco Camps was acquitted on corruption charges a few days ago.
The reason all this is so awful is that no one has any real doubt that Camps, Correa et al are guilty as hell. The evidence is there. Garzón's defence (and I admit only a very shaky understanding of the law here) is that the wiretaps, which listened in on conversations between indicted suspects and their lawyers, were justified on the basis that the lawyers themselves were managing money-laundering operations for their clients. But again, that's not even what's wrong.
What's wrong in Spain is a determination in a large part of the ruling class to stop anyone from challenging their corrupt way of running the country. The PP and the PSOE have both been accused of significant political corruption (though I think it's fair to say that the most shockingly extravagant cases usually involve the PP). The courts are highly politicised and have accepted private prosecutions against Garzón (a poppinjay and ass as ever there was) which would have been dismissed without a thought in most countries.
But of course, Spain is not most countries. Just a few years ago, foreign journalists were impressed by the forward-looking example that Spain was setting for Europe. Garzón, social legislation, a seemingly stable economy with impressively low deficits… it almost seemed as if Spain had managed to get something right.
All this has been a great lesson for me… perhaps one of the most important I needed to learn in my journey towards becoming a Spaniard. This is not a country with a great history of democracy or getting things right. And the left here is generally even more inept than the right. And I love this country more every day, even though I know it's a tough place which will displease me endlessly with its stubborn refusal to get things right. And I'm sticking by it. And I'll do something to try to make it better: however Sisyphean a life's task that might be.
==
*Via email, the troublesome nomenclature of magistrate/judge/prosecutor has been pointed out. For the purposes of a nicer text, I'm going to stick with what I've already got. But yeah, he's a judge.
Francisco Camps, former PP president of the Valencian autonomous community was today acquitted of corruption after a witch-hunt in Valencia's courts that has lasted nearly three years. The put-upon ex local party leader was ruled not guilty in a near-unanimous verdict of 5-4 by a jury this evening, after 15 hours deliberation. Today's events bring to an end what has been a living nightmare for Camps, whose innocence we never doubted. Last year, he nearly pleaded guilty to the corruption charges just to end this farce of a kangaroo court; but on second thoughts (and after his two friends pleaded guilty that morning), he changed his mind and valiantly fought on. For justice, for liberty, for free gifts that definitely didn't affect his decision making skills.
The devil behind this horror story of a near travesty of justice is none other than Baltasar Garzón, the crusading Marxist-Leninist investigative judge, famed for his collection of anti-PP tattoos. Camps will no doubt find some solace in the fact that Garzón remains on trial himself, for having the temerity to investigate the deaths of a paltry 114,000 people during Spain's "long transition" (1939-1978). It's a shame that Mañuel Fraga didn't live to see the verdict delivered.
"Quin país de merda, tú!" – a traditional saying from Cerdanyola which roughly translates as "Freedom for Francisco Camps! Death to Garzón!".