Spanish Shilling

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…’

The arrival of June means summer is here, which brings with it hot days and steamy nights, lots of visitors to dodge (or greet, depending on one’s age and inclination) and above all, lots of noise.  

There are fiestas and concerts plus, if you live anywhere south of Madrid, the Moors and Christians thrashes – which in our town’s case means three days of very noisy cap-guns, stunning outfits, parades and music from the marching bands.

I live in the campo, which has its own challenges. The visitors tend to have six legs, come out in swarms, and bite. A dab of repellent behind each ear usually keeps them away – or failing that, a green incense coil does the trick. The noise is provided by the hordes of brightly-coloured Argentinian parrots ('cotorras') who come and perch outside my window, the barking of the dogs who weren’t invited to the fiesta, and me shouting at the wild boar which have recently multiplied in my neck of the desert.

The pigs will come out at night and dig for grubs and the tender roots which are an unappreciated detail of my flower beds and modest fruit orchard. They will also pull down rocks from the stone terraces which are a fixture of southern Spain. They have noses like bulldozers. Sad to relate, I have found that putting the rocks back where they were doesn’t seem to work as it should. There must be a lot more to building a good terraza than meets the eye.

Oddly, the most destructive brute of all is a charming looking kind of wild goat called an ibex (or maybe it’s an arruí, a Barbary sheep, say some of the local naturalists doubtfully). It looks like a deer and it can stand on a thimble. Or, if there isn’t one to hand, then the top of a fruit tree will do. This cabra montes doesn’t just eat the fruit, or the geraniums when dallying in my garden; it breaks off the branches, or throws down heavy planter-boxes, while one of them even bit off an entire potted shrub the other day and then it pooped in the suddenly empty and unappealing flowerpot: a little souvenir of its visit, bloody thing!

There are about twenty of them local to me, and I’m told that they have moved, like the wild pigs, down from the hills and into the municipality. For most of my life, I had never seen a single one, but now I must rush outside and go ‘Hoo!’ several times a night.

Maybe I should get a dog to frighten them off, but the last one died of leishmaniasis, which comes from the no-see-ums – the tiny biting flies.

I was just talking on the phone with my son, who is in Missouri. There, they have a lake full of a kind of aggressive fish called an alligator gar which he tells me makes a barracuda look like a beginner. One simply can’t swim there and these things apparently reproduce at an amazing rate. They are from foreign-parts, he says, and thus an invasive species. A bit like the ibex and the cotorras, or maybe (to stretch a point), your humble correspondent.