Spanish Shilling

Gosh, it ain’t half hot.

It’s so hot I’ve got a towel wrapped around the pillow. The window is wide open and the screen has been checked (somehow, the little buggers still manage to get in to the bedroom and bite. They probably carry wire-cutters within their dental array – the mosquito’s answer to the Swiss Army Knife).

The noise from the passing traffic and the odd summer concert drifts through the curtain and refreshes me – it’s come that I can’t sleep until I’ve heard that particular summer song at least twice.

It’s dark, apart from the moonlight and the little red and green glows from the television switch, the extension cords, the mosquito plug-in and the electric clock which winks throughout the night (it’s more trouble to get up and reset it following the regular power-cuts that plague the barrio). If I wake up for a pee, which I do around 3.30am, the room glows like the approach to a small provincial airstrip: and I half expect a small follow-me airport vehicle to escort me to the loo.

Maybe detour past the fridge to drink some cold water on the way back to Runway One.

I pull the fan a little closer to the bed and fall back into my pit, now damp with sweat. Try and get back to sleep, but maybe check the Facebook first. Maybe read for a spell (I much prefer books to the television). Maybe spray the room and scratch for a bit.

So hot. I’ve taken to having two (or even three) cold showers throughout the day. I haven’t done that since school all those years ago. At least there’s no one here to flick me with a towel.

An hour has passed, so I’ll try and sleep again. The concert has stopped, but there’s an owl on a nearby tree that lets out a liquid hoot every fifteen seconds. I noisily shut the window – maybe he’ll take the hint.

I look again and now it’s 7.00am. I’ll get up and make myself a toast and coffee.

While that’s going on, I’ll have another pee and brush my teeth.

I’m told by the fellow on the TV that I have bad breath, so I go for a quick gargle of mouthwash, making my tongue look like I’m a lizard-person. The product has a child-proof lid on it, which means that it won’t fall open by chance in the shopping-bag, or indeed in the bathroom. I too need both some wire-cutters and some patience, hard to do when I’ve just heard the toast-launcher eject my breakfast onto the kitchen floor.

Outside, it looks like it’s going to be another nice day. 

For some reason, we are getting lots of telephone calls in these times from unknown numbers. My Android phone is good enough to say: ‘watch out, this is probably a spammer’ which is ammunition enough for me to press the ‘refuse call and block number’ button.

It used to be someone from a cheap-energy company wanting you to switch out of Endesa, or maybe a salesperson from some dodgy newspaper or magazine hoping for your business. These days, it’s likely a robot which is checking to see if anybody is on the other end of a phone-number. If you do pick up, it lets out a cheerful little beep, and hangs up.

Yes Boss, we’ve got a live one here.

The numbers are collected and sold – either to spammers, crooks, thieves, con-men, or that fellow who wanted to sell you a cheap health insurance.

In my phone memory, I have several calls refused by me in the last few days as ‘Llamante no deseado (sospecha)’ and others as ‘Fraude (possible)’.

There’s a new service I’ve found, a kind of reverse phone number directory for fraudulent callers called ListaSpam. They say they have a list of over a million crooked phone-numbers between Spain and Latin America. You can download their app – free – and your phone will automatically bounce any of these bogus callers.

ListaSpam is a simple dot com, so let me look up some of the calls I’ve had recently:

The number 951125163 from Málaga has been checked 22 times by unwilling victims.

The number 624156344 has been checked 205 times, and has four complaints.

The number 613592067 has been checked 297 times, and has four complaints

The number 613889843 has been checked 337 times, and has two complaints.

The number 625028220 has been checked 504 times, and has seven complaints.

But the prize goes to 951823073, checked 5,835 times, with seventy-one complaints.

All these numbers, plus others, have called me in the past week, even though I’m on the Lista Robinson – a useful register of numbers not to be called by importune sales-folk or telemarketers. It has saved me a large number of calls, and if they get through to me and I say I’m on the Lista Robinson, they’ll say they’re sorry and hang up. If they don’t, then I hang up. It’s evidently not fool-proof, but it helps. If you do speak to them, tell them that you intend to make a denuncia to the AEPD – the Spanish protection of data agency (they are acting outside the law). They’ll disconnect soon enough.

So how do they get my number? Maybe someone at the electric company or the town hall is making a few euros on the side selling a list of phone-numbers to people with wonky accents.

These spam calls are something new, probably starting – in my case – about a month ago.

Right now, between Facebook (‘Oh, I do love your posts, would you please be my friend?’), sundry texts about small debts I’m said to owe to Tráfico or the electric company or my bank (what was your pin number again?) as sent to Messenger, and then the email spam (I now get 20 or 30 of these each day – usually to tell me I’ve won a prize), I’m getting far more junk than real calls from friends and family.  

Today (Saturday) I got a call at 2.00pm, as I was settling down to a sandwich, and then another at 3.00pm, just as I switched on the news. It’s like they have a sixth sense to call at an inconvenient moment. The phone warned me both times and I blocked the numbers at once.

Say, that wasn’t you calling was it?  

Last week we saw that the National Court had material to show from various police agencies (known under the general heading of ‘la policía patriótica’) that the previous government had spied on fifty-five deputies of the left-wing Podemos group and affiliates – including the party leaders (as were back in 2015 and 2016) Pablo Iglesias, Irene Montero, Joan Baldoví and Yolanda Díaz. The Minister of the Interior from the Rajoy government and Opus Dei supernumerary Jorge Fernández Díaz is already notorious for its actions against its rivals (when not honouring Nuestra Señora María Santísima del Amor – a plaster saint from a Málaga church – with the Medalla de Oro al Mérito Policial back in 2014).

The question must be – have things changed?

Yolanda Díaz on Twitter: ‘The PP has never accepted the rules of democracy. They spied on us massively to prevent changes in Spain. They didn't get it. Such serious news should push us to continue democratizing institutions. The PP must respond to Spanish society’.

Pablo Iglesias says ‘The dirty war has been enormously successful. I had to leave politics while our party, although it remains alive, has less electoral strength now than it did eight years ago’.

Joan Baldoví (Compromís) thinks that this is: ‘One of the most serious things that has happened in our democracy’.

Juan Carlos Monedero (co-founder of Podemos) claims in a TV interview that: "Worse things have been done to Podemos than were ever done to the Catalán independentistas".

Journalist Javier Durán on Twitter: ‘The PP has used the Ministry of the Interior and the Police to spy on political rivals. - The Guardia Civil has confirmed the party's meddling in several elections, including the last ones in which it came to government’.

From the beginning, it was a ‘dirty war against Podemos’, with the creation of the fake-news that Pablo Iglesias was financed by Venezuela and Iran through the Operación Pisa (‘Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima’), as promoted in January 2016 by El Confidencial, OKDiario and other far-from-impartial sources. Then, as the Chief Inspector José Ángel Fuentes Gago said a few months later (after flying to New York to investigate another fake claim against Iglesias), ‘If it helps us prevent Podemos from getting into the Government, then so much the better for everyone’. One title chosen at random from OKDiario claims ‘The confession of the Narcodictudura Chavista (i.e., Venezuela) spy chief to Judge García-Castellón, that Maduro's assistant gave $600,000 to Juan Carlos Monedero at the Meliá Hotel in Caracas’.

Venezuela in those days was as frightening to a conservative Spaniard as Cuba was (and is today) to a conservative American.

How extensive were the police inquiries? A report says that ‘fifty-seven detachments, from special units to simple patrol cars, were involved in consulting restricted databases to find out the background, travel and accommodation of Pablo Iglesias and other party members’. Some 6,900 improper searches were made in the Ministry of Interior’s sensitive files in 2016 and 2017 by the national police says another source.

Following a complaint by Iglesias and others, we read that ‘Judge Santiago Pedraz agrees to investigate the dirty war of the PP Government against Podemos. The magistrate admits the party's complaint against Mariano Rajoy’s secretary of state for security together with the operational chief of the Police appointed by the PP and other commanders of the Corps for "alleged prospective investigations" and without judicial control’.

Ctxt, a Podemos supporting news-site, says that ‘…The determination of the PP and Rajoy to remain in power explains this dirty and illegal spying operation. It is probably the most serious affront to Parliament since the failed 1981 coup against Congress by Antonio Tejero. In both cases the goal was to subvert the popular will expressed at the polls…’

Like Podemos or not – one still needs to be seen to be abiding by the rules.  

Let’s talk about immigration. Not in the sense that some people might prefer to use this word over the out-of-fashion ‘expat’, but rather focus on those poor folk who make their way here in leaky cayucos from the coast of Africa, with an outboard motor and a larcenous captain wearing a life-saver.

Many drowning in the attempt.

People dream of moving to Spain. They come from Latin America (speaking Spanish and usually practicing Catholics). They come from the Orient to open a bazaar and make life cheaper, if more confusing, for the rest of us. They come from Africa, and work in the fields and the greenhouses, doing the jobs that no one else will do. Rate them for the Spanish as easy, middling and difficult (unless they’re good at football).

I don’t know where you stand on this subject – after all, there are one thousand five hundred million people living in Africa, and on a bad day, they might all decide to move to Spain, whether because there are no jobs there, or because of climate change, or civil war or rampant disease, or just a strong desire to see the Alhambra once in this lifetime (and anyway, granddaddy still has a key). And no, of course there’s not enough room for all of them – but there’s certainly room for some of them.

There aren’t many solutions to this – let’s call it a threat – and one of them, as proposed by the spokesperson for the Partido Popular last week, certainly isn’t the answer.

He says: send the Spanish navy to patrol the Mauritanian coast.

And then what – if they don’t stop (or politely wait until dark), then sink them with a judiciously placed artillery shell?

Admiral Teodoro López Calderón gave his answer to Pablo Casado back in 2020 on this very point: “If any Spanish warship encounters a boat in a situation where the lives of those on it are in danger, its obligation of all kinds, legal, moral... is to rescue them. And that's what would be done".   

I suppose we find those from Africa to be more of a threat to us, and this (with a little encouragement from the right-wing) will skewer us towards calling for protection from the nationalists. Whether Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, the AfD or (here in Spain), Vox, Alvise, Hazte Oir, Abogados Cristianos, Manos Limpias and a disturbing number of judges. So far, we have more or less dodged the bullet from these false prophets, but we can be sure that they will keep on banging that particular drum.

Somebody on Facebook says: ‘Let’s hope Le Pen wins. It’s about time Europe closes its borders and solves the migration crisis by moving millions of people out of Europe’. Maybe send them all to Ruanda – one place in Africa being much like another?

An editorial at elDiario.es says: ‘With few issues you can be more irresponsible and more incendiary, in exchange for a handful of votes, than with immigration. And the PP has decided that it does not want to give Vox even half an inch of advantage. Feijóo has launched his closest spokesperson to demand that we send the military to prevent migrants from reaching our shores by boat. Party spokesperson Miguel Tellado wants Navy ships, prepared for war and useless for small boat rescue, to be deployed off the African coast. It is unfeasible at many levels, even the head of the Navy says it, but it doesn't matter: what the PP wants is to match the xenophobic populism of both Vox and Alvise, in the hope of plugging the flight of young votes that are moving to even more radical options’.

The lure of the far-right perceived threat of the ausländer is a popular call. The more they come, the more we become angry or fearful, and the more we support the right-wingers. Whether the immigrants are going to both take our jobs (while going on benefits), move into five-star hotels paid for by our taxes and either disrespect our women, infect us with terrible diseases or perhaps blow us all up, the far-right will make gains. If the dreadful Madame Le Pen lost this time around, there’s always another chance somewhere.

We have elections in the UK, where no one will talk about Brexit. In France, there’s elections as well – with a likelihood of the far-right getting in (dare we ask: ‘Frexit’?). In the USA, following that dreadful televised debate between Mr Biden and Mr Trump (talk about Jekyll and Hyde) the chances for us all surviving to 2030 appear to be receding by the hour – unless someone pulls the plug on Brandon (Biden’s nickname) and they can find someone a fraction younger for November 5th. You saw – by the way – that the Supreme Court, packed with Trump appointees, just gave the Orange One presidential immunity?

Over here, we are about through with elections for the time being – the Europeans are over, the Basques and – hopefully – Catalonians are sorted (although they may have to try again in October) and the deadlock with the CGPJ (the judges’ citadel) is finally resolved, five years past its ‘best before’ date.

So let us tiptoe down to Castilla y León, a quiet and un-touristy bit of Spain run by the PP and Vox doing what they do best.

There are nine provinces in this unwieldy autonomous region (the largest in Spain): Ávila, Burgos, León, Palencia, Salamanca, Segovia, Soria, Valladolid and Zamora. Before it was gathered into one administrative chunk in 1983, it was understood that León, Salamanca and Zamora were in one region and the other six were in the other (a bit like the Kingdom of Granada being the eastern half of Andalucía: Jaén, Granada, Málaga and Almería). Then (since we are on the subject), there’s the Basque Country with three provinces, which claims Navarre and its capital Pamplona as its fourth province… plus three more currently located in France: the Greater Euskal Herria (they’ll keep the capital in Pamplona while they are about it). And for variety, don’t forget Catalonia…

León was also looking to be a uni-provincial autonomy (like Madrid) in the early eighties, as indeed – apparently – was Segovia (and don’t even ask about Cartagena which has spent the last 150 years trying to remove itself from Murcia – another uni-provincial autonomy). León likes to think that it has three provinces (counties maybe) which are Ponferrada, Astorga y León, while ‘Greater León’ might be as many as seven provinces (the other four being Zamora, Toro, Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo).

As for its larger and not entirely welcome senior partner, Wiki says that ‘Castilla is a historic region of Spain with imprecise borders located in the middle of the country’ (mind you, there’s also a Castilla-La Mancha down the road with Toledo and other fine cities and provinces). And anyway, don’t we speak castellano?

Still, easier to lump all the 14 provinces into two regions: Castilla y León and Castilla-La Mancha, and how many autonomous regions do we need anyway (there are currently 17 plus Ceuta and Melilla)?

Heading north again, we discover that CyL doesn’t have a recognised capital, but its government offices are in Valladolid.

And so to the issue of the day.

The leoneses want ‘out’. Not just out of Castilla, but preferably out of León as well. That’s right, ‘Lexit’ is a thing. Their plan is two separate entities: León being one, and Castilla y the Other Bits of León We Didn’t Want being the other. Do you think it could fly?

By the way, it’s Llión in Leonés (Leonian as it were).

We wonder why – well, it all goes back to a king in 910 who moved the Asturian court to León (giving the good people of that city presumptive airs). And yes, La Constitución Española allows for changes in the regions (although, they might not have foreseen this particular proposal). A plenary vote in the provincial diputación last week favoured the idea of a three-province Léon, with the PSOE and local party in favour and the PP and Vox voting against (while – for what it’s worth – the other two provinces, Zamora and Salamanca, remain unimpressed by the idea). The mayor of the City of León mostly agrees, but thinks the single province of León should join with Asturias (yet another uni-provincial autonomy).

The government says it would accept an eighteenth region of Spain (if it comes to this), made up of León, Zamora and Salamanca, but notes that there are not enough votes (they would need a two-thirds majority) neither in the three León provinces nor in Valladolid.

Scotland take note!

Argentina is an interesting country. It was – and should be – immensely rich. Indeed, a hundred years ago, it was the seventh wealthiest developed nation in the world. Today, it is bankrupt with inflation running at 280% annually.  

This giant South American state has an interesting president who wants to reverse the economic collapse of his country. One can easily appreciate why that would be a good idea, but perhaps the self-styled anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei is not the best person for this mighty task. He wields a chain-saw in his campaigns – cut taxes and cut services, he says. If you can’t make it till the end of the month, that’s your problem he says.  Social justice is immoral he says. Climate Change is a lie he says. Socialism is a cancer according to Milei, a message which goes down well with the right-wing opposition in Spain (and elsewhere).

Milei was here in May, invited by the Vox leader Santiago Abascal (‘a good friend when I was just a Nobody’, he says). It was a private visit – of sorts – and he didn’t check in with the Government, the foreign ministry or the Royal Palace. He did however remember to insult Pedro Sánchez and his government (and his wife) and it duly caused a diplomatic rift. The Spanish ambassador has been recalled from Buenos Aires and there things stand.

Then, just last week, Milei was back in Madrid to receive a prize from the regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso (who notably failed to invite Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the bun-fight). The occasion was a medal – the Medalla Internacional de la Comunidad de Madrid – very nice. Other past honourees of this medal include Esperanza Aguirre, motorcycle hero Ángel Nieto and the Movimiento Contra la Intolerancia.

This rather off-centre gesture was evidently another political swipe by Ayuso, who stands on the right of the Partido Popular – a potential candidate who is likely taking votes back from Vox and certainly a more attractive contender for eventual president of Spain than the grey Sr. Feijóo.

On the other hand, the Spanish media noted the behaviour of Ayuso as described by the conservative British Telegraph to be ‘deep disloyalty’ towards her country (and her party) and that she is ‘a far-right firebrand’.  We also learn that a German newspaper, Der Freitag, once called her ‘A Spanish Marine le Pen’.  

A prettier version, I grant you.

Regrettably, in an unfortunate example of friendly fire, Milei spoke to the gathered masses of the president’s companion being under investigation (he meant Pedro Sánchez’ wife, but, confusingly, Díaz Ayuso’s other half, Alberto González Amador, is also under investigation over a number of white-collar crimes).

Unlike Begoña Gómez, he’s probably guilty of all of them.

In short, with one thing and another, it’s all what the Spanish call un culebrón: a soap opera.

While Milei’s experiment with Argentina may turn out to be precisely the medicine that that country needs, unlikely as it may be, his fiddling with European matters of state are causing indignation – even among the core of the Partido Popular which now considers that it has had enough of Ayuso’s evident plotting.

Who else has she got up her sleeve? A genocidal president? A convicted felon?

They remember how she blew out the last PP leader Pablo Casado and they wonder if it could happen again.

‘She’s not just standing up to Pedro Sánchez’, says an opinion piece at LaSexta, ‘she also confronting Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who doesn’t appear to have either the power or the resolve to clip her wings’.

 I don't suppose that anybody cares much, but me and Facebook, Facebook and I, are about to part company. 

We had a longish fling together, eleven years according to them, but now the time is fast approaching when we must divide the furniture, the paintings and the dog, and see who gets the car. 

This is because they keep putting me down. 

I post something, and they put it 'lower in feed' (how many people read - or rather see my posts on Facebook anyway?). 'Lower in feed' is kind of like Being Sent to Coventry.

Not nasty stuff, like pictures of dead Palestinian children, or swastikas, or pictures of Donald Trump looking stupid - but, I don't know, pretty innocuous news stories from the Spanish press (one last week showed a graphic from elDiario.es on the voting spread following the European elections). I post these things because they are interesting.

They currently question, or remove, about one post of mine every week. 

They accuse me of posting 'Graphic violence' on this one about the voters spread, and then another of the Argentinian president Milei insulting Pedro Sánchez (also from a press clipping).

Javier Milei was back in Spain last week for another round of insults, invited by the future leader of the Partido Popular Isabel Díaz Ayuso (who notably failed to invite Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the bun-fight). He almost caused a riot as usual.

Me, I'm not gonna say nuffing on Facebook, Dear me no.

Today, they abruptly removed an article of mine which comes from the Eye on Spain blog about the odd drinking habits of the foreigners in Mojácar back in the olden days which I had posted a little over a year ago on a Facebook page called Mojácar Golden Years (a page about Mojácar back in the sixties).

A year ago!

They said it was 'spam'.

It is, I agree, a pretty terrifying article - foreigners getting plastered in the town square on five peseta brandy.

I wonder if they had read it. Maybe they had got a complaint from Alcoholics Anonymous.

Indeed, the break-up is edging closer (freeing me up to spend more time with other projects).  

I put Ronald Searle's marvelous cat at the top of this page to try and fool Zuckerburg's Thought Police - in case this article makes its way back to Facebook.

We shall duly see how that goes. 

It’s been so hot here recently (thankfully, the weather changed for the better after the weekend) that I decided it was time to have a look at the two antique air-conditioning units that top and tail my digs. I had only the one mando, which needed batteries, but that was an easy challenge well within my capabilities. The other air-con didn’t have a control or any buttons or knobs as far as I could see.

I know that the global warming – you can believe it or not, I don’t care – is besieging us and each year it’s a tiny bit hotter, and well, I’m a tiny bit older too.

My daughter sent round a capable young fellow called Ashley (born and raised in the pueblo) to see if he could work his magic. 

I thought I had better clean up the bedroom and so moved things here and there, creating some space for air-conditioning mechanics, and discovered why the bedroom unit wasn’t working after I pulled a heavy trunk away from the wall.

Yes, friends, it had been left unplugged.

By the time Ashley arrived, I was down to just one non-functioning air-conditioner.

This particular piece, a relic from the days of Francisco Franco, is in a room full of both books and my computer and is decorated with a cane-and-plaster ceiling which is generally heaving with geckos.

We feared that the small and amiable lizards probably looked on the rather fuzzy looking box located above the small window as a kind of Geckos’ Graveyard. Switch that thing on and there’d be bits of grated lizard all over the house.

Anyway, it turned out that there is a way to open up these things, and buttons are revealed. ‘Huh. Who needs a mando’ I wondered.

And, it works a treat. Sort of. No reptile’s entrails to speak of.  

Now I have to upgrade the computer with a new operating system. Maybe Ashley knows someone. Like the air-con, the old box of tricks has seen better days and it never fully recovered from the millennium bug fright, you remember, when the internal calendar was going to return everything back to 1900: Goodness, how the time has gone.

The power here is erratic, with those annoying micro power outages, which is why I must remember to ‘save save save’ as my late father in law, a retired IBM technician, would say.

To counter this, some years ago I bought an eternal battery (well, good for three minutes anyway) which also controls any fluctuations in the voltage. One can never be sure.

Anyway, it doesn’t work and when the power goes, it goes too.

There’s probably a lizard trapped inside it.

Alvise Pérez and his Se Acabó la Fiesta ('the Party's Over Party') got three seats in the recent European elections.

Simply put, he’s a kind of far-right version of the Monster Raving Loony Party: his main election-promise being to build a huge jail and put one person in it – namely Pedro Sánchez (video).

Another example of him on YouTube here or here in another video, where he supports the anti-abortionists Hazte Oir.

He is known, says Newtral, as a publisher of fake-news on his own YouTube channel.

Alvise is known in the social media world but has barely been noticed by the mainstream media. His arrival in politics and even more so, in the European parliament has come as a complete surprise to all pundits. His party has published no program and he seems to make it up on the spot. The media refer to him as an 'ultra-right agitator' which, eveidently, his followers see as a plus.

Now with parliamentary immunity, Alvise Pérez says he intends to remain in Spain. A subject that is picked up here by El Salto Diario: ‘Alvise Pérez's party (party) has just begun (and he will stay away from the courts). The extremist agitator has achieved his objective of obtaining judicial immunity to hinder the criminal cases pending against him. Currently, he faces two legal proceedings’.

‘Why did you vote for Alvise asks LaSexta here (notably, all the voters were male says the article). Well, to make a point, they say...

From El Mundo here: ‘Alvise's ideology: closer to Nayib Bukele (president of El Salvador) than to Abascal with "the largest prison in Europe on the outskirts of Madrid". The leader of Se Acabó La Fiesta is closer in his proposals to the Salvadoran leader than he is to Vox, with whom he shares the campaign against illegal immigration’.

From ECD here: ‘The PP does not recognize Alvise as part of the “centre-right bloc”’.

Onda Cero says it is hard to explain Alvise Pérez – whose party has leached 800,000 votes from Vox: ‘Defining Alvise Pérez from a political point of view is not an easy task. We are talking about a far-right agitator, with a certain influence on social networks and who has quite a few legal cases behind him, some for which he has been convicted. By the way, when Alvise Pérez enters the European Parliament as an MEP - in addition to pocketing more than 400,000 euros in the next five years - he will enjoy parliamentary immunity that would guarantee him, among other things, "to freely exercise his mandate without being exposed to arbitrary political persecution"…’ Plus he’ll take another million or so in government subsidies.

In short (in my opinion), a cockroach.

 Things became a little heated over the weekend, as we arrived at ‘el día de reflexión’ (when campaigning is over, the politicians traditionally go to the beach or stay home with the kids and the media must talk of other subjects) and then the Sunday vote for the European elections – where Spain will provide 61 of the 720 MEPs.

Not everywhere was quiet on the Saturday, as (unbelievably), the Madrid Superior Court of Justice allowed a type of prayathon outside the headquarters of the PSOE in Madrid – you know the drill, people wrapped in flags and calling for Christ the Lord …and the resignation of Pedro Sánchez.

The things which make Spanish democracy interesting.

On Sunday, a few anecdotal stories made the news. Pedro Sánchez and his wife being insulted outside the polling station. One of the list of Alvise Pérez’ Se Acabó la Fiesta (the party that makes Vox look soft and wet) Vito Quiles – a popular fake-news journalist – was asking for the vote on Sunday on his Twitter account. A gussied-up drag-queen called Pitita in charge of a Barcelona polling station (‘there wasn’t time to change for the evening gig’ she/he says).

One editorial over the weekend reckons that the Judge Peinado (the one chasing after Begoña Gómez) and Alberto Núñez Feijóo (I’ll be glad when I don’t have to type that name any more) were converting the European elections into a plebiscite against Pedro Sánchez. 

The PP candidate for Brussels Dolors Montserrat, here with Feijóo and Ayuso. The poster-man on the left appears to be sending us a warning.

In other news, the PP were found to have made an advert using the AI-created fake voice of José Luis Zapatero in an attempt to win over voters.

The European Parliament is important – it decides around three quarters of all laws, and one can only imagine where things would have gone if the far-right were running the shop when the pandemic hit. For a start, we would all be taking the horse-diarrhea drug ivermectin or worse still, denying that there was even a health issue.

So, the results (here in Spain): The PP got more votes than the PSOE, returning 22 MEPs to Brussels (against 20 for the socialists). Vox has six and the remarkable Se Acabó la Fiesta arrives with three seats (and very nearly 4.6% of the vote). The ongoing squabble between Sumar and Podemos did neither of them any good (just 3 and 2 MEPs respectively) and Ciudadanos – unsurprisingly – disappears.

Did the Begoña Gómez story make an impact? I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Across Europe, the big winners were the far-right anti-immigration parties. Nevertheless, the pro-European centre-right held.

Those poor immigrants – blamed by the left for allowing the racism of the right to flourish.

An American report sums up the situation in Europe: ‘For decades, the European Union, which has its roots in the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, confined the hard right to the political fringes. With its strong showing in these elections, the far right could now become a major player in policies ranging from migration to security and climate…’