Spanish Shilling

For those who yearn for a change in the Spanish government, there’s the problem of the leading opposition champion evidently not being the right person for the job.

The hard-to-pronounce (or spell) Alberto Núñez Feijóo had been the president of Galicia and was chosen to take over the leadership of the Partido Popular following the defenestration of Pablo Casado (for criticising on the television the behaviour of his colleague Isabel Díaz Ayuso during the pandemic). Since he can’t talk about the economy – which is doing surprisingly well (now that everyone has been obliged to pay their taxes), Feijóo must concentrate his relentless opposition on the actions of his rival and his crew, whether actually true or basely dreamed up by the innumerable fábricas de bulos which are endlessly circling the ship of state.

Feijóo (pronounce him fay-who) sort of won the election last year (he has the most seats), only he didn’t since he and his allies – the Vox and a couple of tiddlers – weren’t quite enough to win against the coalition of the PSOE and its partners to the left plus some nationalist parties from the north. ‘I could have been president’, he said at one point, if it wasn’t for his partnership with Vox, producing the jocular rejoinder of Pedro Sánchez in the Cortes with "That’s a very good one! Sr. Feijóo, you are not president because you do not want to be. In fact, you have even proclaimed that you are the first Spaniard to renounce being president of the Government when you could have been".

They’ve been at daggers drawn ever since, with Sánchez only last week complaining of Feijóo’s ‘vinegary’ and senseless opposition. Why, he will even go against the opinion of the PPE in Brussels in doomed attempts to pull down either Spain’s standing internationally, or Sanchez’ britches at home.

The party (and its supporters) is beginning to have second thoughts about the Galician (and his troubles back in his home region), his lack of constructive ideas ("When there is a problem with Morocco, the PP goes against the Government of Spain; if there is a problem with Algeria, the PP goes against the Government of Spain; if there is an issue in Venezuela, the PP goes against the Government of Spain; always against the Government of Spain and never in defence of the Spanish people" says a government minister with candour), and his recent performance over Venezuela, where his claim that Spain had plotted with the Caracas government to allow the disputed winner of their recent elections, Edmundo González, to seek asylum in Spain – was afterwards denied by the arch-conservative candidate Edmundo González himself.

Feijóo with Ayuso

Feijóo wouldn’t make much of a president anyway – he gabbles and doesn’t speak English – and waiting in the wings is the abovementioned Isabel Diáz Ayuso, who may be a handful with much baggage, but for some reason – she’s bulletproof. Pretty, too, like Meloni.

Talking of the Italian torpedo, Feijóo was over in Rome a week ago, to discuss immigration from the point of an ultra – however it panned out, Georgia Meloni wouldn’t say – and apart from a stolen snapshot, there’s no record of the summit anywhere in the Italian media.

Now we have the pre-budgets for 2025. The Conservative regions want more money from Central Government, but their colleagues in Parliament said they would be voting against the proposals this Thursday, which would include any increase for the regional autonomies (mostly under PP control). They have unlikely support from the Junts per Catalunya. On Tuesday, the government postponed the vote for another more propitious moment.

Pedro Sánchez certainly has problems to keep his majority, but the loosest of his allies – Junts per Catalunya (the exiled Puigdemont’s rabble) – know full well that they would get short shrift if the PP and its friends at Vox were to somehow take over the government.

So, maybe Sánchez and his reckless claim of three more years is not such a fantasy, and with Feijóo for his rival, he may be right.

As someone says: better a Frankenstein government than a Neanderthal one.  

It always seem to me strange that people, using old dusty stories, yearn to take your land, or your city, or your home… and make it theirs.

Historical examples abound, right enough – from Gibraltar to Palestine; from Comanche Territory to The Ukraine; from Belize to uh, Olivenza.

There’s always somebody waving an old document, or maybe a rusty key. My great-great-great grandfather used to live here and then the government threw us all out and now look, we want it back.

The Moors have claims to Córdoba, the Moroccans want Melilla and the 1,200,000 Miami Cubans are the cause of the sixty-six year old US blockade against Havana.

If they come in and take over, will they let me stay? Is there someone with a better claim to my farm because of an old deed, or a tradition of what’s written in someone’s Good Book?

The Moriscos lost their properties in Sixteenth Century Spain and were obliged to head off to North Africa – where none of them had ever been before.

The true gibraltareños living in San Roque, worrying all day long about getting their rock back.

Those who had to flee from their homes thanks to the Spanish Civil War, still living grumpily in France or Germany.

Refugees the world over: war, greed and politics.

Then, if that’s not bad enough, it must also be very trying for the folk who live in a house to know that the bank wants it – because of monetary considerations (the rent, the mortgage, the new tower block that someone plans to build on the same site).

But we were talking about Olivenza.

Olivenza, also known as Olivença, is, says Wiki ‘a town in south-western Spain, close to the Portugal–Spain border. It is a municipality belonging to the province of Badajoz, and to the wider autonomous community of Extremadura’. It was Portuguese for a long time, but it was ceded by treaty to Spain in 1801 following a squabble. Presumably the locally defeated Portuguese burghers have been talking of little else since then, Bless them, fingering their old iron keys and maybe a contract or two.

Maybe there’re a few well-oiled flintlocks in a chest somewhere in the attic held just in case. Two hundred and twenty years is but a moment in time, right?

And those 12,000 Spanish oliventinos who live there now? What to do with them – give them Portuguese identity cards and build a few flats? They’d rapidly become a nuisance.

See, Nuno Melo, the current Portuguese Minister of Defence (that’s to say: the man in charge of the Portuguese army) is now claiming Olivenza (or Olivença) because you know: the treaty/schmeaty.

For España for once, the shoe is on the other foot.   

By the way, some idiot from the Vox party stole a breeze-block from Gibraltar in 2014 and it’s now taking pride of place in the foyer of that party’s head office in Madrid.

The Gibraltarians want it back.

Maybe the Portuguese could help…

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Some notes on Olivenza:

‘The treaty by which Spain may have to return a stolen town to Portugal’ says El Huff Post. A treaty signed in 1297 between the Kings of Castille and Portugal cedes Olivenza to the Portuguese. A second treaty, during the Napoleonic Wars, gives Olivenza back to Spain in 1801. 

"The girls of Olivenza are not like the others, because they are daughters of Spain and granddaughters of Portugal," goes the popular song from Extremadura.

‘The Spanish town claimed by Portugal is considered by the CIA to be an area of ​​international dispute’ says El Economista here.

‘The mayor of the town of Olivenza in Badajoz, Manuel José González Andrade, urges the Minister of National Defence of Portugal, Nuno Melo, to abandon "speeches that raise walls and cause divisions"’ says 20Minutos here.

‘Nobody in Olivenza wants to hear about its annexation to Portugal: "We are 'typical Spanish'"’ says El Confidencial here.

The Spanish are generally an easy-going people, happy to be a little early, or more likely, a fraction late for an appointment. They will – and this is part of their charm – round things upwards: an extra dollop on your ice-cream or a shrimp on your tapa.

Only the statisticians will be prone to the sin of exactness, of putting a number down to several decimal points. They would probably get fired if they said something like ‘half of the customers were satisfied’ rather than ‘49.27% admitted to being pleased’.

Well, they use a comma where we use a point, so it would be: ‘49,27 per cent’.

That’s out of a hundred (although only 99 people were there, plus a small dachshund).

Our bean-counter, working for the INE – the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas – is paid to be exact, but his numbers will not make sense to anyone except another accountant. He might claim that ‘85,056,528 foreign visitors visited Spain in 2023’, where a mathematician would probably say ‘85,060,000 foreign visitors’ and a journalist would lead with ‘something over eighty-five million visitors’. 

Who is going to remember, or even read properly, that first number from the INE?

Secondly, of course, despite being exact, it is hopelessly misleading and wrong. Did they count the people in transit through the airport to another foreign destination? How about the cruise ship passengers, or the people who drove across the border from Portugal? What about the ones who stayed… or live here as foreign residents?

It’s a useful figure to draw political conclusions maybe, or to contrast with the year before or after, but not much beyond concluding what we already knew: a whole lot of tourists.  

Our favourite example of this anal delight in myopically clicking away at the abacus next to a flickering candle comes from a Canary Islands newspaper: ‘In July this year Lanzarote recorded just over 275,363 tourists according to the Lanzarote Data Centre’.  

A confusingly exact figure, although the article suggests maybe they missed one somewhere…

But hey, at least they couldn’t drive there.

The problem then, is not the exactitude of the numbers fielded by the statisticians, but the error that they can easily make, which in turn breeds false results. Otherwise, why bother to add them up anyway?

A town’s population is based on its padrón: its official census. That doesn’t mean that it’s right, what with long-term visitors, people who are registered in one town but living in another (for a variety of reasons), sundry vote-stuffing activities, foreigners who either aren’t on the padrón, or maybe have moved away without taking their names off the list. 

Let’s be fair though – the information is provided painstakingly and to the last level of accuracy, as is to be expected. On the other hand, there’s the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’, where the numbers are just plain wrong, due to false information, or corners cut. Take the Spanish fiscal information, the Gross Domestic Product – used, says Wiki, ‘to measure the economic health of a country or region’, and thus very important for comparison, European funding, reputation and so on.

From elDiario.es we read ‘The main official indicator of the Spanish economy, the GDP figure, is wrong. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has been measuring it incorrectly for at least three years. At best, we are talking about a huge negligence, the most serious in the history of Spanish statistics, the one that will cost us the most…’

The title to this story is ‘The most expensive statistical error in history’. Not good. The methodology which may have worked in the past is now obsolete – there are simply more useful figures available.

Another headline says: ‘Official statistics admit a deviation of 32,480 million euros in the Spanish GDP. The INE carries out the largest revision in its history and corrects upwards, for the third time, the growth data of the Spanish economy in 2021’. Naturally, the lower figures for 2021 (following on from the Pandemic) paved the way at the time for opposition attacks on the Government: “These are your green shoots? This is where we came out stronger?”…and so on.

A sober report from The Corner says ‘The main change that has caused this increase in the volume of GDP is mainly due to the incorporation of the information derived from the new Population and Housing Census 2021, which has led to an increase in the number of inhabitants and, therefore, this has an impact on GDP…’

Sometimes, a journalist may need to go to the INE page. It’s hard to find the information one is looking for on this complicated site when one visits there and also, at least with the Firefox web-browser, when we do, we get a sinister ‘Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead’ which is a bit off-putting.

They need to not only buck up their ideas, but also their Internet presence.

Thus many news-sites will make up their own numbers, based perhaps on their experience, their politics, or perhaps on other more-or-less reliable sources.  

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Note: The Europeans use a different mathematical nomenclature from the Americans and British. The Google translation of ‘32.480 millones de euros’ correctly reads – for Anglo readers – as ‘32.48 billion’. This is to do with ‘the long and short scale’, a confusion one doesn’t want to make.

Just to be clear, a Spanish billón (a ‘thousand million’ or 10⁹) is the same as an American million million (that’s to say, a trillion).

Silly? Hey, they still use Fahrenheit.

One of the questions now being asked, now the local fiestas, celebrations, concerts, rallies, expositions and sporting events are largely over, is this:

Who exactly do they benefit?

The apocryphal story from the mid-sixties is told of my mother stomping down to the main square from our apartment by the church wearing her slippers, dressing gown and a hand bag – with which she slugged the mayor shouting ‘turn the music down, I’m trying to sleep’. 

In those days, there’d be a few strings of bunting, a local pop band, the bar doing a brisk trade, and the old deaf-and-dumb lady, la muda, selling cigarettes (single, or a half- or full pack), along with Bazooka Joe bubble-gum and wax matches, cerillas from a tray hanging from her shoulders. The families would dance together – small children up to the oldest grannies, all holding hands and bobbing around. There were songs like La Chica Ye Ye or the grisly Las flechas del Amor…

Brandy was three cents a tot. A small glass of a kind of red wine which would make one’s teeth rot was even cheaper.

They were different times. The only visitors would be family who had emigrated to Barcelona or France or Germany. I remember a family known as los marseilleses, who would come for a few days around that time in their Citröen Ami, look down their noses at their country-cousins, and then disappear again.  

There’s the World Day of the Tourist coming up in late September (when they’ve all gone home again), but in our town, neither this nor the non-existent Day of the Foreign Resident are pencilled in. No celebration as such, even if we are here all year long putting money into the economy. Mind you – I think there’s another Saint’s day which pops up around then.

These days, as we’ve all seen (only too vividly) the fiestas are a joy for the shop-keepers who will obligingly stay open until late, but there’s not much pleasure for the locals. Even if one does attend, and has a pricey beer at the metal chiringuito raised in the square (next to the deafening dance-band), who ya gonna talk too? Who ya gonna dance with? So, what with the visitors all enjoying their last few days of the holidays, the instant traditions taking up the usual parking spaces (medieval market anyone?), the far-from cheap drinks and tapas or the ride on the roundabout, I’ll take vanilla.

They’ve even extended them an extra day or two, since one can never have enough fun.

In the old days, maybe a neighbour owned a black and white TV and would kindly leave his window open for the curious, at least for the football game, but now everyone has a huge flat-screen with a hundred channels and a fridge full of beer. Why go out, say the vecinos, when one can be dazzled at home for free?

It comes down to this – a local event can be for the local people, or, if it’s the summer and you are in one of Spain’s ‘Most Beautiful Villages’, then it’s for the business-folk and the tourists. The visitors will all have to sleep somewhere – and for that we have the Airbnb hosts and the hotels, all rubbing their hands.

The Residents don’t stay in them; and for that matter, they don’t buy souvenirs either – making us very disappointing as customers.

And if we do need to drive into the centre to join the festivities and see the fireworks, where can we park that's not a half-hour walk away?

So if something is a bit expensive, yet perceived as cheap by the tourists, then that’s the price of a fiesta without the people it is meant to be for (and, one way or another, who paid for the music and the bunting).

Or who knows? Perhaps we are just getting old.

Meanwhile, and sad to relate, there’s no one left prepared to stomp down to the fiesta at three in the morning, waving her handbag, to tell the mayor to go and pull the effing plug.