The President - Mr Zapatero – has insisted his government will be ‘inflexible’ with local corruption, regardless of which party controls the town councils.

Talking of pie-in-the sky . . . pre-election periods in Spain are times of great fun, when we all have a good laugh at the increasingly preposterous promises spewing from the candidates who clearly think the electorate comprises mostly gullible imbeciles. Here in Pontevedra, the best so far have come from the PP party, which will be giving us more police, a ‘light metro’ system and a tunnel under the river. But is this any worse than Tony Blair saying he will rescue Africa and put an end to global warming? Or his claim that he’s a ‘pretty straight kind of guy’? Everything is just more local in Spain.

There were media reports at the end of last year that pregnant German women were delaying partition so as to qualify for benefits coming in on January 1. I was reminded of this when I read last night that, to get the equivalent state aid a German mother gets with just two kids, a Spanish woman would need a mere twelve. I suppose this a statistic to set alongside the now-regular claims that Spain’s booming economy ranks no. 8 [if not no. 7] in the world. True but . . Where’s it all going? Not to mention Where’s it all coming from?

Galicia Facts

Galicia is dying. Literally. In 2006, it lost 8, 212 residents. This would have been more but for an influx of immigrants. The main reason, of course, is that Gallegas of child-bearing age manage only 1.0 progeny each. Apart from neighbouring Asturias, this is the lowest rate in the entire EU.

Inevitably, the population is ageing relentlessly. Three out of the region’s four provinces have a high percentage of people above 65, with Lugo and Ourense provinces having the highest numbers of all Spain. At some point in the future, the native populations in these will be overtaken by incoming Brits, especially as the latter now include young families. Not to mention women of child-bearing age. Then Galicia really will have a claim to Celtic-ness!

More seriously, I would have thought this depressing situation provided the backcloth to the debate taking place in the posts to this blog around how much Galician nationalism is sensible. Surely it would be wise to avoid measures which alienate your potential lifeblood, whether this is to come from within Spain or outside it. I fancy it would rank as a Pyrrhic victory to have an ever-reducing number of residents who are immersed in the region’s history and culture, speaking only fluent Gallego to each other. But I will return to this subject later today.


Finally, I can’t resist quoting this comment on events in Italy from a Sunday Telegraph columnist this morning:-
"We now have an abysmally boring government," explains Giuliano Ferrara, editor of the conservative Il Foglio, "and suddenly, out of nowhere, there is this explosion of vitality and, OK, weirdness, that gets the heart pumping. People miss that style. It may not be healthy, but it's Italian." . . . As a pairing, the Berlusconis could barely exist outside Italy. She rarely appears at state occasions but when she does it’s in eye-popping outfits to outshine every other political wife in sight. He goes down with the international set like a platter of rancid linguine; his ideas are seen as dangerously populist, his sense of humour delinquent and his probity close to nonexistent.
There seems to be an even greater emphasis on fun in Italy than there is here. I can’t see Berlusconi prospering in Spain, where politics are so serious they sometimes seem hardly to have moved on from the Civil War. But, then, we do have a major domestic terrorism problem. Not to mention at least three Nationalist movements. And a still-powerful Catholic Church. Sometimes it’s hard to laugh.