Social Europe: The Catalan pardons: what do they mean?

 The talk of the town across Spanish media for the past week has been the pardoning of the Catalan political prisoners jailed following the unofficial referendum on independence in October 2017. Despite heavy opposition from Spain’s Supreme Court and the conservative opposition party, the Partido Popular (PP), the socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, confirmed the pardons at Barcelona’s Liceu Theatre, striving to promote concord rather than revenge.[...]

Opposition to the pardons has come from two very different standpoints. The PP, the far-right Vox and the Spanish-nationalist Ciudadanos—as well as the Spanish Supreme Court— claim that the political prisoners should not have been pardoned: their actions were unconstitutional, they included ‘sedition’ and misuse of public funds, and the prisoners showed no signs of remorse.[....]

The exiled Junts leader and 130th president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, criticised the Spanish state for releasing the prisoners over three years late and said no one should be ‘sold’ that the pardon would solve the political problem. The party vice-president, Elsa Artadi, also affirmed this would not be a ‘turning point’ in the Catalan conflict, claiming the Spanish government was seeking to mask its own violations of rights against the independence movement. [...]

On Monday of last week, a resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe urged that the prisoners be released and that Spain ‘consider dropping extradition proceedings against Catalan politicians living abroad’. An aggressive response followed from the judiciary in Spain, leading some to ask: are the pardons a step towards peace, or a red herring in the face of increasing international condemnation of the Spanish judiciary?

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Social Europe: Catalonia: a fraught dialogue begins

 The date for the dialogue between the president of the Generalitat and the prime minister of Spain was organised in June, following the pardons issued by Sánchez to former political prisoners. It symbolised the start of what both sides describe as a transition towards progressive deliberation between Spain and Catalonia. [...]

Aragonès has consistently championed two main objectives for the dialogue: amnesty for exiles and former political prisoners and another referendum for Catalan independence. Sánchez, referencing the Spanish constitution (a clause about Spain’s ‘indivisibility’) and consistent with his dialogue throughout this year, said ‘neither amnesty nor a referendum are possible’ and suggested the two sides need to talk about ‘closer issues’. [...]

Controversy was sparked the day before the dialogue when the Catalan president rejected proposed attendees for the meeting from Junts—the other half of the ruling Catalan coalition. Aragonès justified his decision by saying that the attendees should only consist of members of the government.

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CityLab: Barcelona Wants to Ban Renting Private Rooms to Tourists

Since 2011, Barcelona has required entire apartments offered for short stays to have a license from the city, but it froze granting new licenses in central Barcelona in 2014. In 2018, the city introduced a host ID system that allowed it to verify whether apartments offered online were done so legally, making it easier to identify and pursue rule-breakers. And in August 2020, the city imposed a temporary rule to ban room rentals for less than 30 days; the new proposal would make that rule permanent. [...]

The plan, which will now undergo three months of public consultation before being submitted to a vote in the city’s council chamber, would extend the city’s campaign against short stays to a new front line. In extending permanent controls of vacation lettings into shared apartments, the city’s goal is, according to its press release, is to “guarantee the social function of housing and avoid a saturation of tourist rooms that would cause problems of coexistence, impact the housing market and harm neighborhood trade.” [...]

The arguments for the ban made in the city’s proposal make for dramatic reading. If no regulations whatsoever were placed on tourist rooms, it says, a potential 670,000 homes might be able to rent out rooms. This figure far exceeds the actual numbers of tourist rooms offered before the pandemic — 14,000 beds, overwhelmingly clustered in the Old City and Eixample district, But the city also expressed fears that its own efforts to regulate platforms like Airbnb could drive more landlords towards the tourist room sector.

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openDemocracy: Catalonia mon amour

The answer wasn’t too difficult to find. First, there was the “great recession” of 2008-2014 which led to record high rates of unemployment, in particular among young people (Spain’s unemployment rate was twice the eurozone average in 2012, with a staggering 57.9% of youth unemployment in 2014). Then, there were the politicians eager to tap into the “pool of rage” created by the unprecedented economic crisis to further their own agendas. Chief among these was Artur Mas, former President of the Government of Catalonia (2010-2015) and the former leader of the centre-right Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union), who succumbed to intraparty pressures in 2012 and decided to break with the traditional – middle-of-the-road – approach of his predecessor Jordi Pujol to carry the banner of independentism, till then brandished by Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (The Republican Left of Catalonia) and other groups; and Mariano Rajoy, the notorious Prime Minister of Spain between 2011-2018 whose centre-right Partido Popular (Popular Party) initiated the process which ended with the amendment of the 2006 Estatut on Catalonia’s autonomy by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2010, after it was approved by both the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, and by the Catalan people in a referendum – thereby partially crushing Catalonia’s hopes for more self-rule. [...]

Yet facts can help only so much when it comes to understanding the current crisis in Catalonia where reality is bifurcated, with few, if any, points of contact between the opposing secessionist and unionist visions. In this bifurcated world, one’s “independence referendum” is another’s “illegal consultation” just as one’s “political prisoner” is another’s “imprisoned politician”. But truth is not the only casualty of this battle of realities. Another important casualty is rule of law, the sine qua non of any democracy. After voicing his concerns on la sentencia, or the final ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court on independentist leaders, Xavier Arbós, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona told me, “The Spanish government acted as if the only thing that exists is the law whereas the Catalan government acted as if the law didn’t exist.” [...]

First, independence means different things to different people. According to the latest barometer of the Catalan Centre for Opinion Studies, only 34.5% of the population believes that Catalonia should be an independent state – as opposed to 27% who would want Catalonia to remain as an autonomous community in Spain (status quo). But there are also those who believe that Catalonia should be a state within a federal Spain (24.5%), thereby bringing the total percentage of people who would like to see a change in the existing state of affairs to 59%.

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UnHerd: Who voted for Vox?

One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975. [...]

Vox offers an affirmation of traditional, unapologetic, masculine Spanishness. “The Left will never succeed in making us feel ashamed for that which only merits pride,” said Abascal at a rally last autumn. This is Spanish politics, cowboy-style: Vox’s campaign video shows its leader crossing a plane as a lone ranger on horseback.

Abascal proudly invokes Spain’s unity and Catholicism while calling for drastic measures against immigrants, particularly of a Muslim background. He defends family values and stands up for men against the oppression of “feminazis”. He champions hunters and bullfighting, opposes gay marriage (which has been legal since 2005), and wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape. [...]

The Catalan crisis is definitely a factor in Vox’s rise in a country that was long considered immune to the anti-immigrant, right-wing populism that has emerged in many other countries. But more important is the feeling that the progressive urban political elites have neglected their needs and disparaged their traditions and culture. This disconnect is something we are seeing throughout Europe. And is felt particularly strongly in rural populations. But the Vox message has also found purchase in wealthier, culturally conservative voters; this could be down to the fact that the party twins its conservative nationalist message with more liberal economic proposals (it seeks, for example, to reduce corporate tax rates, and abolish inheritance tax and estate tax altogether).

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The New Yorker: The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelon

Park Güell’s shift from a shared public space into a cultural zone occupied almost exclusively by tourists is understood by some worried residents of Barcelona as a story about the prospective fate of the city itself. Albert Arias, a geographer with the local government, told me that he had publicly criticized the selling of tickets as “a very bad solution,” adding, “It is acknowledging a problem by fencing off public space.” [...]

Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought specifically as short-term-rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties. Especially in coveted areas, Airbnb can drive up rents, as longtime residents sell their apartments to people eager to use them as profit engines. In some places, the transformation has been extreme: in the Gothic Quarter, the resident population has declined by forty-five per cent in the past dozen years. [...]

Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in the Eixample, an elegant fin-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally equipped, with ikea furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has five other properties in the city listed on Airbnb. [...]

By 2017, tourism had risen to the top of a list of Barcelona’s most pressing concerns. According to an annual survey taken by the city, sixty per cent of residents felt that Barcelona had reached or exceeded its capacity to host tourists. Three years earlier, only thirty-five per cent had felt this way. That summer, anti-tourism protesters lined the waterfront, standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean bearing banners reading “this is not a beach resort,” in English, in the face of bikini-clad visitors who were somnolently tanning themselves. Thousands of protesters marched along La Rambla and loudly informed tourists that they were not welcome. Pardo and other activists staged protests against illegal Airbnb apartments by renting them on the site, checking in while using a hidden camera, and then refusing to leave, with the media there as witnesses. They staged an action to expose a landlord who was illegally renting out thirteen apartments in the Ribera neighborhood. After obtaining access to one of the apartments, the activists were about to film themselves reading a manifesto when the manager suddenly came back—and they had to flee. “We forgot to lock the door!” Pardo said, with chagrin. It was the kind of rookie mistake a tourist would make.

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CityLab: Why France’s Former Prime Minister Wants to Be a Mayor in Spain

His candidacy is a grand gesture—one that represents the ideal of the European Union, of late so beleaguered, as a space where national borders and identities can dissolve into a glorious, larger transnational project. In practice, Valls’s campaign is a living example, even a cautionary tale, of how all politics is local, and of how that European ideal can be a vague and elusive abstraction in the rough-and-tumble of an election. [...]

By then, Valls was one of the most disliked politicians in France. Socialist voters felt betrayed not only by his joining En Marche, but also by the policies he had championed while in power: market-friendly labor reforms that didn’t go over well with the party’s left-wing base, and his stance in what could loosely be called identity debates, such as his efforts to strip French jihadists of their citizenship, a proposal the Socialists ultimately withdrew for lack of support. Valls was essentially seen as a neo-conservative. [...]

At the height of the independence push, when Valls was still an elected official in France, he made impassioned speeches in favor of Spanish unity, saying that “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” and in this moment, the germ of his candidacy first sprouted. Valls has repeatedly said, including to me, that he’s a republican in France, which replaced its monarch in the French Revolution, and a royalist in Spain, where he sees the royal family as defenders of Spanish democracy. Opposition to the Catalan independence movement is a pillar of his mayoral campaign. One of Valls’s opponents in the race is an independista running his campaign from jail, adding an element of romantic martyrdom to the political drama. [...]

Barcelonians don’t seem to resent Valls for being an opportunist or a carpetbagger. The city has a pretty open heart for welcoming newcomers from all over the world, to say nothing of Catalans such as Valls. But it isn’t so keen on the fact that he lived here for only a matter of months before announcing his intention to run in September. That he keeps making gaffes doesn’t help. Valls got some flak after a television interview in which he admitted that he didn’t know how much a metro ticket cost here.

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Quartzy: Scandinavia may not be the happiest place on Earth, after all

We recently applied the scale in Denmark and compared the national mental well-being estimates of Danish people with people living in Iceland, Catalonia, and England. We found that people in Catalonia scored considerably higher on mental well-being than people in all three northern European countries—challenging the prevailing idea that places in northern Europe are typically happier than those in southern Europe.

In the World Happiness Reports, which tend to show the Nordic countries as leading, happiness is measured using Cantril’s ladder of life evaluation. This asks people to rate how they currently view their life on a ladder scale in which zero is the “worst possible life for you” and 10 is the “best possible life for you.” But such measures are strongly influenced by economic conditions and are poor proxies for mental health and well-being. [...]

In other words, high income may buy better life evaluations, but this is not the same as positive mental health and well-being. A recent report also showed that inequalities in life evaluation appear to be rising in several places in Scandinavia, and that a considerable amount of people in the Nordic countries appear to be struggling, contrary to what these countries are famous for.

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openDemocracy: #ElectionsSpain2019: Populist radicalisation, Catalonia, and the far-right

However the Catalan issue remains plagued with negative emotions, and that inheritance was too heavy to deal with by the new Moncloa palace (siege of the president of the government) lodger. The negotiations for governance, and above all, to pass the annual budget through parliament, have left their mark on Sánchez’s short but sweet stay at the Palacio de la Moncloa, and Catalans ensured its lack of viability towards the end.[...]

Traditionally, governments have governed with either an absolute majority or with minority governments that gained the support of the Basque and Catalan nationalists, that were pragmatic in character. The nationalists often acted as bargaining chips in favour for benefits for their territories, have become kingmakers in Madrid on several occasions, and have heavily invested the gains in nation building at home.[...]

This radical shift in Catalan consevative nationalism, acquiring clear populist traits, inreasingly demanded a referendum to gain territorial independence, putting in the centre of the political agenda something which is not permitted by the Spanish constitution.[...]

An ultra-right reaction to the threat of the breakdown of the Spanis State is certainly taking advantage of the current state of affairs to create a dangerous scenario for Spain, and as a consequence the whole European Union.

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Jacobin Magazine: Spain’s Troubled Spring

Today, Sánchez’s government is at the end of the line. And again the issue at the center of Spanish politics is the national question. With Spanish nationalists on the rise and the Catalan and Basque independentists withdrawing support for Sánchez’s budget, fresh elections are now set for April 28. The result of the campaign is uncertain. But things are not looking promising for the forces of social transformation. With the Catalan independentists lacking a strategy for a way forward, the Left is once again buried in in-fighting. [...]

Vox’s breakthrough and the rise of Ciudadanos (with the PP also holding firm) meant that there were enough right-wing MPs to hand the presidency of the Andalucían region to the PP for the first time. This union of the three right-wing forces is key to the reconstruction of the political camp so dear to former conservative premier José María Aznar; the absolute majority he won in 2000 may indeed repeat itself in the April 28 contest. Though they act separately, these forces today make up a three-headed beast, with the conservative soul of the PP in concert with the liberal soul of Ciudadanos and the ultra-right Vox.

Such are the forces of Spanish nationalism. Yet from the outset the Catalan independentists had been decisive in getting Sánchez into office. They unconditionally backed his bid to oust Rajoy in June 2018, in the hope that a PSOE government would make gestures toward dialogue with the Catalan autonomous government and some kind of solution for the Catalan political prisoners. This contrasted with the right-wing Basque nationalists of the PNV, who played their hand best, selling support for Sánchez in exchange for greater economic powers for the Basque Autonomous Community. [...]

With this question we get to the most tangled knot in the current situation. The PSOE can hope to bind the left-wing electorate behind itself on the basis of two main developments, namely the fragmentation of Unidos Podemos (with divisions at the regional level, but especially the bad image resulting from Iñigo Errejón and Manuela Carmena’s plan to stand separately of the party in the Madrid local elections) and the danger represented by the far-right Vox, which the polls predict to be on the brink of a historic breakthrough. Calling the elections so soon will leave all of its right-wing rivals relatively unprepared, and also exploit a moment in which Unidos Podemos is internally divided and lacks a strategic perspective.

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UnHerd: What snapped in Spain?

Spain was due to hold a general election next year anyway, but it was always more likely than not that the PSOE would be forced to go to the polls before then. The party ousted the scandal-hit Rajoy government in a parliamentary vote of no confidence that won the backing of 180 MPs back in 2018. The vote followed a ruling by Spain’s highest criminal court that the PP had profited from illegal kickbacks from government contracts. Yet the anti-Rajoy alliance – which Sanchez himself described at one point as the “Frankenstein coalition” – crumbled soon after the PP had been deposed.[...]

In a country that had grown tired of the financial scandals surrounding the governing PP, Sanchez’s ruthless action in toppling Rajoy proved popular. As such, the PSOE currently sit at around 24% in the polls – granted a modest improvement on the 22% it was polling at prior to Rajoy’s departure, but nonetheless the largest share for any single party. [...]

Support for Podemos has almost halved in the polls from a high of 27% in December 2014 to 15% today, putting them in fourth place, and only four points ahead of Vox, a party of the hard Right. The steady decline of Podemos – in part the victim of that familiar curse of Left-wing political parties, the factional squabble – offers Sanchez breathing space on his Left. [...]

Only a fool would write off ‘Mr Handsome’ – as Pedro Sánchez is nicknamed. Like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Sanchez has been written-off many times in the past by establishment politicians and commentators only to re-emerge ahead of the pack. After almost a decade of austerity, fatigued voters may yet throw a spoke in the wheel of Spanish politics and return the Prime Minister who promised more money.

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CityLab: Amid Tourists and Gentrification, Barcelona Faces a Crime Wave

That may sound like an extreme reaction, but Barcelona is indeed enduring an alarming spike in crime. Across the city, reported cases of crimes rose by 20.5 percent over 2018, with just over a quarter of the city’s residents becoming victims of a crime over the same period. Zoom in on the figures, however, and one area sails far ahead of the rest—the four tourist-filled neighborhoods that make up Barcelona’s Old City, called Ciutat Vella in Catalan. According to figures from the city, 36.6 percent of Ciutat Vella residents reported being victims of a crime over 2018, with the rate of robbery with violence or intimidation reported in August 2018 in the area having doubled year-on-year.

That figure should rightly sound alarming, but the idea of a Barcelonan crime wave needs to be put in perspective. Spain as a whole still has one of the lowest murder rates in the world—lower than Germany, or its neighbors France and Portugal—and Barcelona’s rates do not necessarily buck this trend. According to the Spanish publication La Vanguardia, by far the largest category of reported crimes in Barcelona’s Old City are thefts without violence, which in August 2017 constituted 74 percent of all recorded offenses; robberies with violence and intimidation constituted 5.7 percent.[...]

Ciutat Vella’s problems could also describe parts of any number of heavily touristed European cities, where similar tensions exist over crime, affluence, and visitor safety. But the situation here is being exacerbated by a uniquely Barcelonan twist. The city’s policing responsibilities are divided between a municipal department and one under the control of the autonomous community of Catalonia, which has lately been vying for independent statehood. The set-up is complex, politically fraught, and not entirely joined-up. Such is the cluster of responsible bodies that a crime committed in Barcelona can, during the process of investigation, end up involving several different police forces. [...]

Some feel the city’s government should also bear some responsibility for the problems. Under the leadership of Mayor Ada Colau (who still has a narrow majority approval rating), the Guardia Urbana have backpedaled a little on their previous function as agents of public order. Colau’s left-leaning political grouping, Barcelona en Comú, evolved in part from an anti-eviction activist network, and as a result may tend to be skeptical about any form of heavy-handed police deployment. Former police assistant director and current Catalan Green Party politician Jaume Bosch, one of the officials responsible for creating the Mossos D’Esquadra’s role in its present form, noted in a magazine interview that City Hall had “a somewhat hippy idea, according to which they understood that everything could be solved with social mechanisms, and that the police were not really their thing.”

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Jacobin Magazine: A Darkening Horizon

Much of the analysis of Andalusia’s swing to the right has focused on increased nationalist sentiment in the wake of last year’s Catalan independence crisis. During the Andalusian campaign the two major right-wing forces, the Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos (C’s, Citizens), not only stressed the ongoing threat to Spanish territorial unity but also sought to equate a vote for the PSOE with backing for regional “separatists.” Indeed, it kicked off with the PP’s new hard-right leader Pablo Casado accusing PSOE prime minister Pedro Sánchez of being a “golpista” or coup-plotter because of his dependence on Catalan parties for his parliamentary majority.

Such rhetoric played well among conservative voters, and was indicative of an increasingly radicalized Spanish right. Yet probably decisive in securing their electoral majority was a historic abstention among left-wing voters. If the combined support of the right-wing bloc increased by 275,000 votes in comparison with the 2015 elections, this cannot fully account for the 700,000 lost votes between the PSOE and the Podemos–United Left coalition, Adelante Andalucía. As the United Left (IU) leader Alberto Garzón stressed, the reactionary bloc’s electoral weight “would not have been so great except for demobilization in working-class neighborhoods.” [...]

The results in the Andalusian contest also show how this intense competition is reshaping the balance of forces on the Spanish right. Aside from Vox’s historic twelve-seat breakthrough in the regional parliament, Ciudadanos won twenty-one seats — more than doubling its previous total of nine — while the PP lost seven seats even as it finished second overall, behind the PSOE. The viable governing options on the table will either be an unholy trinity of the PP, Ciudadanos, and Vox or a center-right coalition of the PP, PSOE, and Ciudadanos. [...]

This is where Vox comes in. Through some clever marketing – like staging its party conference at Vistalegre, where Podemos held its own famously heated congresses — Vox has effectively worked itself into the space of the “new right” and the “anti-left.” They are the most explicitly anti-independentist, anti-Podemos, anti-left party in Spain, with discourse steeped in openly anti-feminist and anti-LGBT rhetoric. The party did not have any specific program or initiatives for Andalusia as part of its electoral campaign, but it still managed to make the dramatic breakthrough it did.

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Politico: Spanish right eyes deep south

While there is plenty at stake for all four main Spanish parties in an election in Andalusia on December 2, the one that stands to gain the most is Ciudadanos. It enters this contest not only hoping to unseat the Socialists (PSOE), who have governed Andalusia for nearly 40 years, but also determined to assert its dominance in Spain’s increasingly crowded political right.[...]

Since 2015, the Socialists have relied on the support of Ciudadanos to govern in Andalusia. But the recent collapse of that partnership reflects Ciudadanos’ shift to the right and its push to make inroads in the region. Originally claiming to occupy the center ground, in early 2017 the party eliminated “social democracy” from its statutes, relaunching itself as a “constitutionalist, liberal, democratic and progressive” force.[...]

That radicalization has been most visible on the issue of Catalonia. Founded as a Catalan centrist party that sought to counter that region’s swelling nationalism, Ciudadanos, which went nationwide in 2014, has hardened its unionist stance as Spain’s territorial crisis has unfolded.[...]

That is unlikely, with the Socialists almost certainly heading for victory once again, albeit requiring a new partner to help them govern. A more realistic target for Ciudadanos will be to overtake the PP, which it is happy to join forces with to form a government if the two parties gain enough seats.

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Politico: Spain’s 40-year itch

The 1978 constitution marked the end of Francoism and the country’s first steps on the road to democracy. But a series of institutional crises, driven by political corruption and Catalan nationalism, has spurred a growing sense that the country is ripe for another upheaval.[...]

If there’s one point on which defenders and critics of the “transition” agree, it’s that the constitution’s success depended on a remarkable degree of consensus. Former members of the right-wing Franco regime worked together with moderates and leftists — some of whom had been in jail or exile during the dictatorship.[...]

But the last decade has corroded Spain’s self-perception of a model democratic state. Dozens of corruption scandals rocked the Socialist Workers’ Party and the conservative Popular Party, the two major political parties that have dominated national politics since the transition. Coming in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis that left millions of Spaniards out of work and impoverished, it left the country dispirited and distrustful.[...]

Although 70 percent of Spaniards want constitutional reform of some sort, according to a recent poll by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), the question is how — and how far.

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Political Critique: The far right knocks on the the door of Spanish politics

On Sunday October 7, the Spanish far right party Vox achieved what they had been looking for for a long time: their baptism as a relevant political actor in the Spanish public sphere. They did it by filling the Vistalegre palace in Madrid with 10,000 supporters and leaving a thousand people out for lack of space. In the past few years, Vistalegre has symbolically become the venue used by Podemos for their annual congresses. The choice of the venue for this event is not coincidental: Vox is explicitly looking for parallels with the first Podemos. They want to turn the political indignation of a certain sector of the Spanish right into political capital. And to achieve this they hope to use the springboard of the European elections. In this sense, it’s fundamental to note that there are people within the Vox party who are studying the political campaign and strategy of Podemos in 2014, when the party entered candidates for the 2014 European Parliament election, polling with 7.98% of the national vote.[...]

In the arena, well beyond the burladero, there is a first row where writers, historians, journalists and even bullfighters, all identifying within the far right spectrum in Spain, gather together looking at the audience. However, the absences are more surprising: Vox had invited international personalities from other European political parties, both from the ENL parliamentary group (which brings together in Brussels the National Front, the Northern League, the Austrian FPÖ or the Freedom Party of Geert Wilders) and from the parliamentary group of the European Conservatives and Reformists, where Polish, Czech and British conservatives meet. But none of them attended. Not even Steve Bannon, whose presence was speculated a few weeks before.[...]

Vox’s strategy for the next year’s electoral cycle rests on three pillars: appeal to a vote of conviction, use politically incorrect language and indicate very clearly who the enemies are. Namely: the Catalan independence movement, feminism and immigration.With these wicks, the party led by Santiago Abascal will try to be involved in all the decisive issue on Spanish agenda and, in the end, win everything. Some polls indicate that Vox will foreseeable reach parliamentary representation in the European Parliament and that it could be decisive when it comes to deciding the balances between left and right in some regions such as Madrid or Murcia.

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The Atlantic: The Politics of a Long-Dead Dictator Still Haunt Spain

The many Spaniards who revile Franco tend to stay far away from the Valley of the Fallen, the vast, surreal monument outside Madrid where thousands of those killed in the Spanish Civil War are interred along with its victor. Its 150-meter high cross is visible from miles away, looming starkly over what is often referred to as Spain’s largest mass grave. The remains of more than 33,000 people who fought on both sides in the 1936-1939 conflict are buried here, transported—often without permission—from other sites after the Valley was finished in 1958. Their graves, unlike Franco’s, are unmarked, and the identities of more than a third remain unknown.

To many families of the fallen, the presence of Franco—who was buried here after his death in 1975 on the orders of the then King Juan Carlos I—is a final insult, converting what was conceived as a monument to the war dead into the pharaonic tomb of a fascist dictator. Up to 1 million people died in the three-year conflict, which Franco helped spark by leading a military revolt against Spain’s elected government, then run by the left-wing Republicans. Thousands more died during the purges that followed Franco’s victory and the imposition of a dictatorship that lasted until his death. That period remains burned into the memory of many in Spain, which unlike countries such as Germany or Argentina has never undergone a process of reconciliation. The lack of such a process, some argue, has left the wounds of the era seeping into politics and society four decades on. [...]

Argelia Queralt Jiménez, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Barcelona, said the exhumation of Franco and the historical memory drive would help defuse the perception among Catalan separatists of Spain as “Francoland,” a country that had not fully abandoned dictatorship for democracy. In an interview, she said that perception had little basis in reality, but explained that the failure of the Spanish right to discuss the Civil War and subsequent regime had effectively “normalized” and justified that assault on the democratic order. Meanwhile, the story of one side—of the defeated—had been “silenced” and victims treated with “disdain,” said Queralt.

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Politico: A Frenchman joins the Battle of Barcelona

Speaking in slightly accented Spanish and Catalan — and some French — Valls spoke about his origins in Barcelona (his father was a Catalan painter exiled under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco) and his love for Catalan culture and language, which he said was spoken at home after the family moved to France. [...]

Valls is targeting both Catalan unionist voters — the liberal, pro-unity Ciudadanos, which offered him the chance to be the head of its local list, has thrown its weight behind his independent candidacy — and moderate, affluent nationalists tired of what he described as the “grave problems” of the city; namely, insecurity, drugs and illegal street vendors. [...]

Valls became involved in Spanish politics after his failed bid for the leadership of the French Socialist Party and at the peak of the Catalan independence push last year. His tough words against separatism — “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” he said — played well with pro-unity audiences in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. [...]

Much is still unknown about Barcelona’s mayoral ballot, with not all candidates having declared. Some secessionists are calling for a common pro-independence ticket and others are resisting the pressure. Even if Valls ends up as the most popular candidate, a potential alliance of pro-independence parties or one of Colau and other leftist groups could deprive him of power.

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Spiegel: 'I Don't Like Being in Exile'

Puigdemont: Unfortunately, it is indeed different in Spain. The Spanish legal system has more weaknesses. If we Catalans want to split from Spain, it's because of the 1978 Constitution. For example, the judge who will decide on my appeals used to be a senator in the conservative People's Party. How can he be trusted? We can turn to the European Court of Justice, but that would leave many people languishing in jail for years before any ruling in their favor on the grounds that Spain has violated their fundamental rights. [...]

Puigdemont: It wasn't only my doing. It was a combination of two factors: The fact that the people mobilized, and the new communication platforms. What would have had to happen in secret just a few decades ago can now be shared all over the world. When I was in Helsinki, just before I was arrested in Germany in March, I said: We want a society in which the smartphone is more powerful than the sword. [...]

Puigdemont: That doesn't surprise me. I always warned that no one would recognize an independent Catalan state. I have criticized the EU for failing to make an official statement on what position it would take on an independent Catalonia. But above all, as a European citizen, I was deeply disappointed by the silence after the police violence on the day of the referendum. [...]

Puigdemont: We never talk in terms of nationalism, but of sovereignty. What is happening in Catalonia is not a traditional, nationalist struggle for independence. If our aim were to create a nation-state, we would have tried to do so earlier. Nationalism is a danger to Europe.

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Politico: Spanish conservatism’s new face

Pablo Casado ran for the party leadership promising to take a hard line against Catalan separatists and pushing a conservative agenda on social issues. He promises a far more confrontational style than that of the man he’ll replace, Mariano Rajoy, who was ousted as prime minister in June after losing a confidence motion in parliament, a political shock that prompted the conservative leadership contest.[...]

Aged just 37, Casado is not only a fresh face at the top of the scandal-hit PP, but also has an approach that’s far removed from that of Rajoy, who often mirrored Angela Merkel by promoting an image of solid, technocratic management while trying to avoid ideological battles. [...]

When a German court ruled that former Catalan regional President Carles Puigdemont shouldn’t face the charge of rebellion if sent back to Spain, Casado said he wouldn’t tolerate such a “humiliation to national sovereignty,” suggesting the EU’s Schengen free movement zone be scrapped. [...]

An average of recent polls by Electocracia has the Socialists in the lead with 26 percent — a rise of around 5 points from two months ago — followed by the PP with 23 percent, Ciudadanos on 22 percent and Podemos on 18 percent.  

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