Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly
loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
If you've
arrived here because of an interest in Galicia or Pontevedra, see my
web page here.
Life
in Spain
- A day or so after I noted that press freedom is greater here than in the UK, reader Maria advises - I believe seriously - that the Spanish government has threatened fines for everything it considers 'propaganda' in respect of the imminent referendum on independence in Cataluña. Because it has been declared illegal. Seems a tad heavy-handed to me.
- Education is a matter devolved by Madrid to the 17 regional governments. So, policies naturally differ. One result is 25 different textbooks for the 'same subject on the same course'. Presumably the baccalaureate exam taken at 17/18. But, then, the annual revision of textbooks is a long-standing scandal in Spain. Though some say it's the only thing keeping publishers alive these days.
- The Bank of Spain has admitted that only €14bn of the total 54bn chucked at the country's banks will ever be paid back to the taxpayers. Or 25%. What a surprise. As I recall, President Rajoy has regularly claimed there's never been a bail-out. I wonder what he calls this, then.
- Another non-surprise . . . The Supreme Court has annulled a huge fine levied on Telefónica for abuse of its dominant position in the telecoms world. One wonders why this keeps happening.
- As soon as there's a major accident in Spain the blame is thrown by all and sundry at the person most incapable of defending him or herself. Usually the dead driver of the plane, train or bus. So it is that negligence of the (Portuguese) driver of the Vigo-Oporto train which crashed in nearby Porriño last year is universally said to be the reason for the disaster. The latest theory is that he forgot that the amber speed-reduction signals are (astonishingly) different between Portugal and Spain. Why, for god's sake?
Actually, I found the meaning here.
Further along the street in which this is to be found is a restaurant which I regard as a typical traditional menú del día place. Unpretentious and always full of happy eaters midday. Which in Spain is around 3pm, of course.
In between them, though, is another such place which I noticed yesterday only beause of the aroma coming from it. Apparently, it doesn't even need to tell anyone what it is and what it's called!
Finally . . . You might find this hard to believe but the Galician Xunta has come up with yet another way to fine me. And others . . . . For feeding stray animals. Even more if I bring one home. Say one of the abandoned dogs I often feed and occasionally rescue from the forest behind my house. There are at least 5 different police forces in Spain, so I imagine the real aim of this law - among others - is to give the poor bored bastards something to do.
Today's cartoon:-
THE ARTICLE
The world is deluded if
it thinks Angela Merkel is the salvation of the liberal order: Kati Krause
She sells her strengths
abroad, but weaponises her blandness at home
“In parliamentary
work, ‘standstill’ may appear agonising, yet for voters it
doesn’t hold any horror in times of crisis,” the late German
journalist Roger Willemsen wrote after witnessing a Bundestag debate
in March 2013, six months before the last general election in
Germany. “The [Social Democratic] opposition may have found the
government’s blockades a hard nut to crack—citizens however
desire above all to maintain the status quo. For them, the inertia…
isn’t an argument for voting anyone out. ‘Standstill’ simply
has too good a reputation these days.”
The subsequent
September 2013 election gave Angela Merkel her third term as
Chancellor. As it stands, Willemsen’s observation could just as
easily apply this summer. Then as now, Merkel’s conservative
Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) alliance
was the largest party in a coalition government. Some ministers have
changed and the Social Democratic Party (SPD), then the main
opposition party, is today part of the government—not that it makes
much of a difference. Then, the crisis Germans worried about was of
the euro and Greek debt; today, it is of refugees and a shifting
world order. Then, the man prodding Germans with his visions for the
future with signs of increasing desperation, was Peer Steinbrück;
today, it is Martin Schulz. We will be forgiven for mixing them up in
10 years’ time. In Germany, 24th September 2017 could just as well
be called Groundhog Election Day.
In much of the west,
voters have been keen to break things—or at the very least break
with the past. The UK has voted to leave the European Union and is
dallying with the idea of a radical socialist prime minister; France
has given its established parties a good kicking; and the US, of
course, has decided to administer that kicking to not only to its own
establishment but to the world as a whole, by electing Donald Trump.
The Polish, Hungarian and Turkish regimes are moving to undermine
liberal democracy. Countries and communities are ever-more polarised.
But while a common
refrain among pollsters, pundits and random bystanders after the US
election was “we don’t know anything anymore”—the rhetorical
equivalent of throwing one’s hands in the air—there is something
they all predict with increasing certainty: on 25th September, Merkel
will still be chancellor. At the end of July, Merkel’s CDU/CSU
union was polling at 40 per cent, leaving her main rival the SPD out
of view at a distant 23 per cent. Merkel herself had a 69 per cent
approval rating. Granted, campaigning had not yet officially
begun—and Merkel may recall that Theresa May had an even larger
lead than that before the UK election campaign began earlier this
year. But Germany isn’t a country for surprises. The truism that
“elections have consequences” is simply less true in Germany.
Many a troubled citizen
of this troubled world have come to invest an awful lot of hope in
Merkel—regarding her as the redoubtable, backstop defender of the
world’s liberal order, and “the last adult in the room.”
Predictions of her re-election will, no doubt, be music to their
ears, but if they imagine Angela the Fourth is going to push the
planet in a progressive direction they are deluded. For despite her
image, gained during the refugee crisis and in the midst of global
confusion, as a great humanitarian as well as a great stateswoman,
Merkel is in truth a smaller and more managerial figure—reactive,
and in some senses at least, essentially reactionary. The upcoming
elections could leave her at the helm of a more conservative
government still, with repercussions for Europe and the world.
Indeed, even if it resolves itself to vote for a “standstill,”
Germany may be on the brink of a period of profound change.
It is a cliché that
Merkel governs by public opinion—and like all the best clichés, it
is true. The chancellery’s press office commissions several
detailed polls every week, providing Merkel with insight into what
the electorate currently cares about, what can fall by the wayside
and which issues are too toxic to touch. It is hard to attack
somebody who is so tuned into her electorate’s whims, who puts
virtually no demands to the German people, a woman who has weaponised
her blandness.
Germans appreciate
Merkel’s image of a responsible administrator, which she distils in
her current election slogan: “Fur ein Deutschland, in dem wir gut
und gerne leben,” which translates as “For a Germany in which we
live well and enjoy living.” To which one can apply the test of the
late British journalist Simon Hoggart, who argued “that if the
opposite of something is absurd it wasn’t worth saying in the first
place.” The reverse of Merkel’s slogan would be “For a Germany
in which we live badly, and dislike living”—laying bare the
emptiness of her appeal.
Schulz’s SPD,
meanwhile, is trying to convince Germans that they don’t live well
enough—or that, at the very least, the good times can’t last
forever. He has made social justice his core theme during this
election. As with other ageing leftists (think Jeremy Corbyn or
Bernie Sanders), his focus is on class rather than ethnicity or
gender, and social justice within Germany, rather than the planet or
the continent—an irony, since Schulz was President of the
European Parliament until the beginning of the year, and remains a
devotee of the EU’s supranational institutions.
He has identified
undoubted problems: a dearth of public investment in infrastructure,
a tax system that doesn’t protect the neediest, increasingly
insecure employment terms and expensive urban rents. His problem,
however, is that most Germans simply don’t feel the system as a
whole is inherently unfair—at least not in the way he portrays it.
Only 20 per cent of Germans rate social injustice as an important
problem, compared to 44 per cent who believe that refugee policy
needs to be addressed. The language of class warfare may enjoy a new
purchase in today’s vastly-unequal United States, and in Britain,
where neoliberal policies have also left a deep mark. But many of the
most aggrieved Germans are those who bear grudges against Merkel for
what they regard as the prioritisation of refugees in the welfare
system. They might be more tempted to vote for the far-right
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) than the SPD. By trying to appeal
to as broad a base as possible, Schulz has purposely omitted groups
who might truly feel disadvantaged and be sympathetic to the left,
like young women and minorities. Indeed, the SPD conspicuously
remains a party of older white men, which makes it hard to build a
Corbyn-style surge among the young. In effect, Schulz is trying to
convince risk-averse Germans that change is necessary without
rattling their overall sense of comfort and security. The result is
an electoral programme that is so sensible and uncontentious that
Merkel can safely pilfer all the best bits.
Hijacking other
parties’ popular ideas is, of course, another Merkel trademark.
Over the past years she appropriated many of the Green Party’s core
proposals on environmentalism (think of her famous swerve against
nuclear power), making the Greens—which were a junior partner in
Gerhard Schröder’s government in the early 2000s—appear
obsolete. By brokering a grubby deal between the EU and Turkey and
encouraging the Bundestag to tighten asylum laws, she also recently
curbed the influx of refugees into Germany—quietly calling time on
the move which much of the world regards as her great achievement. It
deprived the AfD of its most salient argument without, of course,
ever airing or even acknowledging the far-right’s demands. It
worked. On 27th July, the AfD polled at 9 per cent in infraTest’s
weekly survey, far from the 16 per cent at its height in September
2016, and media coverage of the party has withered. The Left, the
Greens and the liberal FDP all polled at 8 per cent. In sum, as the
election campaign gets ready to begin, Merkel once again looks
unassailable.
Germans who dream of a
radically different domestic agenda will be frustrated by this.
Liberals outside Germany, however, may not spot any problem—indeed,
they are more likely to look towards Merkel’s prospective
re-election as an much-needed shot in the arm for a global liberal
order in disarray. After all, this is a woman who has steered the EU
through several crises, and is working to keep international
agreements and the spirit of multilateralism afloat even as Donald
Trump tries to sink them.
Such a sanguine reading
of what Merkel means for the world is, however, completely wrong.
Why? First of all, Germany is in no position to defend the
west—neither ideologically nor militarily. Occupied West Germany
may have joined Nato after the Second World War, but armed alliances
have never quite fitted with Germany’s self-image. Moreover, German
international leadership is simply something the country itself is
uncomfortable with, to say nothing of how its European neighbours
feel about it. And given the German public’s distaste for military
embroilment, Merkel is most unlikely to pursue a more active use of
an army, which has anyway been struggling with recruitment since the
abolition of universal conscription in 2011. In a recent op-ed in Die
Zeit, the Green former deputy chancellor and foreign minister Joschka
Fischer called Germany’s army, the Bundeswehr, in its current state
“an overpriced spare parts inventory.” He added that “no
country… is as little prepared as ours” for dealing with the
power vacuum that Trump’s America is creating.
The solution, Fischer
and many others argue, is more European integration, military and
otherwise. But Merkel, unlike Schulz, is no European integrationist.
German interests must come first—it’s what voters expect, after
all. This explains another of Merkel’s dubious campaign slogans,
unusually presented on a background of the European flag mingling
with the German black, red and gold: “Strengthening Europe means
strengthening Germany.” Yet bolstering the Franco-German alliance
or investing in eurozone stability will take a back seat—as will
fulfilling environmental obligations under the Paris Agreement which,
the way things are going, Germany will probably not meet.
Moreover, the upcoming
elections are likely to render a distinctly more conservative
government than the current one. Merkel’s party has long been
locked in to a permanent pact with its distinctly right-wing sister,
the CSU, standing aside to give it a clear run in its conservative
Bavarian home. For the past four years, the CDU/CSU have led a “grand
coalition” alongside the Social Democrats, necessitating compromise
and weakening the hand of the internal CSU wing. Looking ahead, even
if the CDU and CSU somewhat undershoot their current polling, they
are unlikely to need another grand coalition. This will increase the
CSU’s influence and pull the new government further to the right.
One could think of the CSU as the German equivalent to the Texas
Republican party. Granted, conservatism works differently in Germany
than in the US; the CSU isn’t trying to abolish business
regulations or abortion rights. But it is the strongest proponent of
the traditional West German ideal of the nuclear family with a single
(male) breadwinner. It was the CSU which in 2012 managed to introduce
a childcare subsidy for stay-at-home parents commonly derided as a
“cooker premium,” which bribes women to avoid returning to work.
That was just one
distinctly Bavarian move that the CSU has pushed through on a federal
level. Its current pet project is an official upper limit on asylum
seekers, which Merkel has so far resisted. It operates by an unstated
rule that it can never allow there to be a legitimate party to its
right, so it responded to the rise of the AfD by matching its
anti-Muslim and anti-refugee rhetoric. Horst Seehofer, the CSU’s
head, was for months the harshest and loudest critic of Merkel’s
refugee policy, before the two made a show of publicly reconciling
this spring. The Bavarian state parliament has just passed a law
extending preventive detention of potential criminals from
two weeks to three months, and indefinitely when a judge gives the
green light. There are echoes here of Tony Blair’s failed attempts
to increase detention of terror suspects in the UK to 90 days. This
is not a liberal agenda.
Civil servants at the
Interior Ministry already predict a CSU, instead of a CDU, interior
minister. A stricter asylum policy, new immigration controls and
increased surveillance could well be their top priorities. Much more
generally, with a more conservative government, Germany will likely
regard the world outside less as an opportunity, and more as a
threat.
Yet the more
fundamental reason why it would be a mistake to regard Merkel as the
great saviour of the liberal order is that she herself is no paragon
of high principle, or at least not of progressive principle.
International observers were surprised when they saw her vote against
same-sex marriage in a hastily arranged division in the final
Bundestag session in June. They seem to have forgotten that she is a
Protestant minister’s daughter, the head of a party with
“Christian” in its name. It is perfectly possible that she voted
her conscience, which is what she had urged MPs to do. But conscience
or not, on the gay marriage issue, the shrewd tactician was
undoubtedly at work: by hastily allowing the Bundestag vote, she
removed a potentially thorny election issue, something that had
majority support among the population but not in her own party.
Similarly, opening
Germany’s borders to take in hundreds of thousands of refugees was
in truth more another act of calculation than a humanitarian impulse.
As Die Welt journalist Robin Alexander shows in his
book Die Getriebenen (The Driven Ones),“The woman who
will enter the annals of German history as the refugee chancellor has
during her chancellorship avoided few people as long and as
consistently as refugees,” he writes. During most of Merkel’s
reign, asylum applications were at historic lows. Even as the crisis
became ever-harder to ignore during 2014, Merkel did not publicly
address the issue, and she didn’t visit a refugee centre until
August 2015, when political pressure forced her hand. Her mind
changed on the policy only after there was a massive wave of
sympathy for refugees among the German public. It was politics rather
than principle that lay behind her signature initiative, and politics
which has undone it since.
Merkel is certainly an
experienced stateswoman, and—to most Germans— a safe pair of hands
in confusing times. But she is also a ponderous ditherer who, on the
whole, follows rather than leads. Those searching for a lodestar for
the liberal world must look elsewhere.
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