Yesterday’s on-line edition of the Voz de Galicia had three headlines which say everything you need to know about a general election campaign that hasn’t yet officially started but which threatens to drown us in worthless verbiage of escalating vacuity:-
Aznar [last President] accuses Zapatero [current President] of buying votes
Is this a pre-campaign or an eBay auction?
Debate: Do you believe the promises of Zapatero and Rajoy?
Of the readers who responded to the last of these, the percentage saying No was a rotund 92. Which re-raises yesterday’s question of how sophisticated the voters are. Possibly not as much as those Voz readers exercised enough to express an opinion.

Anyway, it struck me last night that Zapatero’s promise to give [almost] everyone a tax rebate of 400 euros in May is a stroke of genius in one respect at least. The voters are being bribed with their own money. You have to take your hat off to him. Not much of Spain’s over-widespread corruption reaches these heights.

I see from the bill I’ve just paid that the price of my gas has risen by 22%. Maybe I’ve missed something but I don’t recall getting any advice from Repsol about this. Or even seeing anything in the media. A good old-fashioned monopoly, then. But at least this whinge allows me to introduce some good news from Brussels. The EU Commission intends to publish details of companies who charge different prices across Europe. Brits will be pleased to know they’re paying twice as much for electricity as the Belgians and the Greeks. One wonders why. But it’s nice to see the EU doing the sort of thing the original ‘common market’ was supposed to be all about. Fifty years after it all began.

If you’re a reader of the UK’s Times, you’ll have seen the Spanish police last week arrested a group of Pakistani Islamic extremists who were planning to explode bombs on the Barcelona underground. But, if you take the Telegraph, you could well be unaware of this incontrovertibly newsworthy development, as the paper chose not to cover it. Again, one wonders why. Is it one more sign of the slow death of once great newspaper?

I cited the other day a few unfamiliar English words I met when I first came to Spain but I forgot about endogamy. This really relates to marriage within a tribe but here is used as a metaphor for, say, the university professor who only ever recruits assistants from within his faculty and not on merit. So a mixture of nepotism and cronyism, I guess.

It’s reported the Argentinian government is prosecuting some Spanish diplomats for the illegal importation and sale of luxury cars. This is a shocking development and one’s forced to ask whether anything is sacred these days. Whatever happened to diplomatic immunity?

Galicia Facts

The Rumanian fraudsters are back on the streets of Pontevedra, silently shoving a clipboard at you and claiming to be collecting on behalf of some charity for deaf and dumb kids. But they’ve clearly done some Spanish market research since last time round, when the collectors were – as I recall - middle-aged, overweight and dressed in headscarves. Now they’re young, slim, pretty, big-breasted and – of course – blonde! I imagine the police enjoyed arresting them. Again. And I guess we’ll see them back on the streets later this year. Like the buskers, they’re a more-or-less permanent feature of the city. Though rather less desirable.

There’s an awful lot of driving schools in Pontevedra, all of them charging a very hefty price for the lessons which are compulsory before you can take a driving test here. The same is true of Vigo it seems, where – strangely enough – all 60 of them were quoting exactly the same price for each option at your disposal. So it’s not a huge surprise to read that 50 of them have just been done for price rigging. But no one has yet been arrested for torching the premises of the school which set up a year or so ago and offered a lower price. And which is no longer operating.

Sixty per cent of Galicia’s town councils saw the number of foreign residents grow in 2007. In fact, there are 10 councils where depopulation has led to there being more immigrant than resident Gallego voters. And there are now so many Gallegos living in Buenos Aires with the right to vote here that the government is paying for a plane to fly over the city dragging a banner behind it exhorting them to Vote for Zapatero. Perhaps the other side says And we’ll send you 400 euros.

It’s an odd world. Thank God.