From the headlines

If King Juan Carlos had fallen down and broken his hip on his way to the loo in the middle of the night in the royal palace in Madrid,  the only thing the country would be interested in now would be his medical condition and his safe recovery. But no, he wasn’t at home, he was on his way to the loo while on safari hunting elephants in Botswana.

In fact his slip could not have been more unfortunate. The Head of State in a country with an unemployment rate through the roof and an economy struggling to survive goes on a little trip to Africa to shoot elephants. If he had been hunting deer, say, on his estate somewhere in Madrid, then OK, it was only to be expected. Royals and aristocrats hunt; the King’s eldest grandson shot himself in the foot just a few days previously learning to follow the family tradition – another unfortunate incident, now overshadowed by this latest escapade.

If he had been in Africa just visiting friends, we would probably be more sympathic as well. But the fact that he was out to kill elephants of all things is what has caused first disbelief, then amusement (comedy writers couldn’t come up with a better scenario) and finally serious moral and ethical questions.

The unfortunate accident coincided to the day with the anniversary of the proclamation of Spain’s Second Republic on April 14th 1931, when the present King’s grandfather was forced into exile. This week the Government, which has been very shady about whether or not the Prime Minister had been informed of the King’s hunting trip,  has asked that the slip not be used to question the Monarchy. Too late: with drastic spending cuts being made on all sides, questions as to whether the country can afford to keep a royal family, with their expensive, dangerous and controversial pastimes, have been inevitable.

But whether we like it or not Spain has a King and royals spend their time hunting, even elephants in Africa, the bigger the game the better. They have done for hundreds of years. And now in modern times of democracy when a monarch has been relieved of his original duty to govern a country, then there’s more time than ever to indulge in aristocratic fun. We want a monarchy, then that’s what we get.

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Just over a week ago the Spanish government announced its new budget which involved a general reduction of around 17 per cent in public spending, saving some 27 billion euros. The cuts have affected all ministries, everyone will have less money to play with and hopefully each department will administer its reduced budget in the least damaging way possible. At least pensions and unemployment benefits have escaped Rajoy’s scythe, that is, for the time being.

I say for the time being because who knows what is coming next? Just this week Prime Minister Rajoy has surprised us with another blow he forgot to mention last week: further cuts, no sorry, to use the official term, ‘adjustments’, affecting Education and Health. Whatever euphemism is used the hard facts are that the government is to provide the regional health and education authorities with ten billion euros less.  It won’t be easy to apply these ‘adjustments’ – it’s not as though the schools, hospitals and health centres, in other words, basic services, are in a position to spare a few human or material resources here and there.

The Socialist opposition leader, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, says that the system won’t stand it.  But we have all been told that we will have to make sacrifices, tighten our belts. So let’s just go and explain that to the schoolchildren in cramped classrooms and patients in corridors. I’m sure they’ll understand and put on a brave face, for the sake of the deficit.

Everything will be alright though because all the wealthy tax evaders with funds hidden in havens around the world, or perhaps closer to home under the mattress, will  bring their money back into the system, pay their ten per cent and avoid prosecution. They’re bound to make sure that they’ve got some left over for private health care and expensive schooling to avoid making the sacrifices asked of the average taxpayer.

Perhaps the courts started their investigations into the King’s son-in-law Iñaki Urdangarin, just a little too early. With a case open and indictment for embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion, he won’t be eligible for the tax amnesty. Now his millions are likely to stay hidden away when they could have done their bit for the deficit; what’s more the royal family would have saved face (the amnesty declarations are confidential) and the courts would be  able to use their now reduced funds for trying real criminals  – you know, the ones who steal chickens to feed their impoverished families.

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Whether for or against today’s general strike, we must admit that it was inevitable. No sooner had he been voted into office the new PM introduced a major reform to Spain’s labour laws that made it easier and cheaper for firms to fire workers, cut their salaries or change their conditions. Even Rajoy himself, albeit caught on an open microphone, admitted that his reform would provoke a general strike.

The unions have responded and today was the day when the country was supposed to grind to a halt.  Well, a literal halt was never expected, but at least the day’s business has slowed down.

To what extent the strike is a success depends on where you are standing. Industry and transport have been most affected, with some incidents with pickets at the gates of factories and distribution centres. Demand for electricity was  16 per cent  lower than usual this morning. But the average man on the street outside city centres may not see much out of the ordinary, perhaps the lack of fresh fish in the local markets and less traffic on the roads being the most evident signs. A large part of shops, bars, restaurants and offices are open for business as usual, with more closures in city centres where there have been some disturbances.

Unions say that 85 per cent of workers are supporting the strike. The Government says that there are fewer people on strike than in the previous action in 2010 and that in any case there is no way they are going to change their labour reform. So while the unions may not achieve their ultimate aim at least today provides a chance for those that want to to get their message of discontent across.

Tomorrow everything will be back to normal, everyone will go back to work and the Government will announce their revised budget, which is likely to be a harsh one.

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The results of the Andalusian elections are hard to explain to a young child. The blue team who got the most points, 50, act as if they had lost; the red team, who got 47 points, act as if they had won. Then the green and yellow team who only got 11 points are the most triumphant of all. It’s not a question of the least points wins. So why are the wrong team celebrating? You see in this game the teams that don’t win can add their points together to make one team bigger than the winning team. So why didn’t those two teams play together in the first place to  get more points?
If this was a board game the rules would probably be declared unfair, or just so complicated that players would give up and go to bed before they even started. But no, it’s not a game. It’s democracy.
There’s more at stake than a couple of minutes of satisfaction at a party. The winners get  to make important decisions….. or in other words the huge responsibility to lift Andalucía out of a crisis in which a third of people who want to work can’t and thousands of families have very little to live on. How are they going to do that then, the child might ask? They don’t really know, it’s a big problem. So why don’t they let the team with the most points in the first place end up with the big problem that no one can solve? It doesn’t sound like much of a fun prize does it?
No, but the power to rule a region is the important thing here. Then we’ll worry about the huge task the honour brings with it.

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I come back to this blog almost three years on – so much has changed since then although much is still the same.

As far as the economy is concerned, a couple of years ago Zapatero’s Government was talking about the famous “green shoots” . Economic recovery was on its way. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The downward spiral has continued its path since then and now Spain, along with the rest of Europe,  is immersed in its worst economic crisis ever.

Meanwhile the Partido Popular has taken over the best part of the country, their latest conquest being the central Government in Madrid, with Andalucía likely to fall into their hands in just two weeks’ time. The new Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has introduced reforms that would have been unthinkable back in 2009 although these are unlikely to stop unemployment approaching the six million mark by the end of 2012. While the official unemployment rate in Spain is just over 20 per cent, the figure here in Andalucía and Malaga is already higher than 30 per cent: it’s quite staggering to think that nearly one in three members of the active population is currently out of work.  Combine these with pensioners, children and students, etc and it leaves those of us still lucky enough to be in work in a real minority. Thousands of households have no income whatsoever, at least officially. It’s quite clear that many are surviving on money gleaned from undeclared work and hand-outs from fortuntely still united families, but all the same soup kitchens are overwhelmed and charities are finding their supply of donations not nearly enough to cope with the demand for aid.

Yes, this is a very different scenario the the one when I left off this blog in 2009.  But be reassured that there are some things that never change: abortion is still an issue under debate, with the new PP Government considering undoing the reforms made by the Socialists just a couple of years ago; chiringuitos and illegally built properties are closer to a solution but not quite there yet; corrupt politicians (and now, allegedly of course, royals) are still crawling out of the woodwork; and the people of Malaga, albeit jobless and on the breadline, are preparing for their Semana Santa with the same fervour as ever.

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If there were any SUR in English readers who didn’t know the word the Spanish use for beach bars and restaurants a few months ago, they certainly do now. ‘The chiringuitos must all come off the sand’, threatened one headline; ‘Government agrees to negotiate over chiringuitos’, promised another, followed by reports of the chiringuito owners threatening to protest in Madrid and eventually news of a respite until the end of the year.

Since March the whole affair has travelled full circle. (more…)

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However much the world is becoming globalised, however much we travel around and even settle in other countries, however integrated a foreigner may feel in a society, foreigners are still foreigners. Even adopting the nationality of your new home still makes you of foreign origin.

The news we read and hear every day only emphasises how the place where someone is born and the culture they were brought up in defines their identity. However different the citizens of a country appear to be from each other within that country, once on foreign soil they have much more in common than they thought.

Here on the Costa del Sol where people of different nationalities have been living together for years our countries of origin are still used to define our identities, however “Spanish” our lifestyles and customs have become. If that wasn’t the case “She’s French” or “He’s Argentinian” would not be the first thing we say when describing a new acquaintance.

So this brings me to the tragic death of the man – the British man – following a late night fight outside a bar in Cómpeta earlier this month. (more…)

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This Monday morning I have noticed that the news on surinenglish.com to have collected the most comments over the weekend is a short item about the Catholic church linking two current issues: child abuse in religious schools and abortion.

“Abortion worse than abuse, says Spanish Cardinal” reads the headline, whose correctness was disputed in one of the comments. What the Cardinal actually said, after apologising on behalf of the Church for the abuse suffered by 35,000 children in over 200 schools in Ireland, was that what might have happened in a few schools was “not comparable to the millions of lives destroyed by abortion”.

He’s right, the two situations cannot be compared. They are completely separate. So why bring them up in the same breath if it was not to say that physically and psychologically abusing children was nothing compared with having an abortion? And would he have brought the issue up at all if the abortion law reform bill was not currently being debated in Spain’s parliament? (more…)

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Two years ago I happened to be in England at the time of the Wimbledon final and I found myself passionately cheering on Spain’s Rafa Nadal in his match against Roger Federer. Yesterday, watching the final of the Madrid Open, I realised my loyalty had changed sides as I rooted for Federer and celebrated his victory.

The problem is that since that 2007 Wimbledon final, men’s tennis has started to get plain boring with Nadal winning everything left, right and centre.

(more…)

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First it was mad cow disease, then bird flu and now swine flu. If we human beings didn’t have enough health fears of our own, the animal kingdom comes along and provides a few more, reminding us yet again that when it comes to examining cells under a microscope we are all more or less the same.

The difference is that we clever human beings invented globalisation, intercontinental travel, high speed transport and massive social gatherings so when we catch one of these ‘flu variations we spread it around the world in no time at all. (more…)

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