Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain- That nun arrested for envelope-stuffing was actually swapping PP votes for PSOE slips and now faces a 3 year prison sentence.
- Be warned: As cities around the world embrace the bike, Malaga appears to have taken the extraordinary step of banning cycling in the city centre – but only for tourists. Local bike rental companies claim police have informed them that tourists are now barred from not just Segways and scooters around the historic centre but also bikes. On pain of a €200 fine.
- It's the wedding season. So, inevitably, some advice from The Local. Am told it's accurate.
- Galicia's farmers are worried about the encroachment of wolves. And so have begun to deal in the old canards about these admirable ancestors of our canines. Campaign Fear.
- I went to Pontevedra's wonderful fish and seafood market this morning, looking for the gastro-hall on the first floor. It wasn't here. So I took this foto of part of the ground floor below.
The UK
- Brexit has shown that the Brits are xenophobic racists, no? Think again. Britons are the most positive in Europe on the benefits of immigration. Findings contradict the assumption UK is more hostile than European neighbours.
- And the country is really well run: We live in the age of the anti-expert; anyone worth listening to is casually dismissed as not knowing what they are talking about. These trends are being actively encouraged by a Cabinet of quite breathtaking incompetence, riddled with futile infighting for the empty crown of a dying administration where all gainful government has long since ceased.
- The rise of the far right is especially troubling in a nation haunted by its past. See the article below.
- How Germany went wobbly on the West. Click here.
- Poor old Deutsche Bank.
- Britons trust social media platforms less than any other major nation and favour stronger regulation of Silicon Valley’s technology companies, according to a survey of 23 countries. This contrasts sharply with folk in middle-income countries such as Brazil, India and Mexico, where trust is far higher. More here.
- Not before time. . . Facebook bans Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and other far-right figures.
- The dangerous demise of the middle class. In the West at least.
- Well, I managed to put a notice re my Pontevedra Guide in 8 out of 9 'pilgrim' establishments yesterday, the only rejection being in one public albergue, where they claimed the regional government barred all ads. As of this morning, the number of requests has risen to nil. Apart from the owner of one albergue who wanted to read it herself . . . And for me to promote her place in it.
ARTICLE
Heir to evil: Nazi sentiments could be flourishing within Germany’s AfD
The rise of the far right is especially troubling in a nation haunted by its past, reports Oliver Moody in Jena. The Times.
In the May Day sunshine, a beaming, middle-aged gentleman trundles through the city of Erfurt on a mobility scooter with a giant German flag furled up in the crook of his arm. Fixed to the front of his shopping basket is a homemade poster that says “Merkel Must Go”.
Up on the stage, Alexander Gauland, 78, the inveterately tweed-jacketed leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is fulminating to wild applause against haughty socialists who sneer at ordinary Germans for eating sausages and driving diesel cars.
Marching through the streets a little later, several black-shirted men in the crowd raise their right arms stiffly into the air. This is precisely the sort of scene for which the AfD, the most successful right-wing populist party in modern German history, is infamous. And if a controversial study is to be believed, its passing resemblance to a Nazi rally is more than coincidental.
Three academics have needled one of Germany’s most sensitive taboos with a paper arguing that the long-dormant resentments of the 1930s are being reawakened by the AfD.
The central thesis is simple. Davide Cantoni and Felix Hagemeister, both economists at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and Mark Westcott, of the consultancy firm Vivid Economics, took two maps.
One shows how each of Germany’s 10,873 modern-day municipalities voted in March 1933, at the last vaguely free election before Hitler became chancellor. The other shows how they voted at the general election in 2017. There are some glaring differences between the two, but it is also clear that the AfD is prospering today in many of the same districts where the Nazis did more than eight decades ago.
At first this link seems bizarre. Germany has been through so much upheaval since 1933 — purges, war, vast columns of refugees, followed by de-nazification in the west and communism in the east — that it is hard to see how any far-right views could have survived in one place for so long.
Yet Professor Cantoni argues that the smaller towns and villages of the countryside have changed less since the 1930s than one might think. Many have roughly the same size and demographic composition they had 90 years ago. The families that stayed in them, the theory goes, passed on a certain susceptibility to heady right-wing rhetoric all the way down to the present. The AfD is simply the first credible party to come along and harness it.
“Some families or communities may preserve a more conservative outlook on the world: fearful of outsiders, nationalistic, protectionist,” Professor Cantoni said. “These kinds of views can be transmitted from generation to generation: it is generally known that children’s political attitudes are highly correlated with their parents’ attitudes.”
If this is true, it should be nowhere more visible than in Thuringia, the east German state around the city of Erfurt. The state was a stronghold of the Nazi party, which won 47 per cent of the vote in the 1933 regional election.
Today it is one of the most important wellsprings of support for the AfD. The party’s local figurehead, Björn Höcke, has the ear of the national leadership. More than 40 per cent of the people in some of its rural communities, such as the villages of Grossmölsen and Göschitz, backed the party at the last general election.
The AfD is expected to give Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats a good run for their money in municipal votes at the end of the month and in a battle for the state parliament in the autumn.
Yet the first rule of modern statistics is that correlation is not causation. Two things can look as though they are linked without actually having anything meaningful to do with each other.
As far as Stefan Gerber is concerned, the ostensible relationship between the Nazi and AfD votes is a case in point. Dr Gerber, 44, an expert on Thuringian history at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, said the Nazis had seized power in the state because their energetic local leadership cleverly mopped up the right-wing vote in an unusually polarised political landscape.
“All of this has nothing to do with the reasons for the AfD’s electoral success more than 80 years later. The Nazi party is obviously in no way comparable to the AfD,” he said. “If there were above-average returns for the Nazis in Bucha and Lehnstedt [small towns near Jena] eight decades ago, and today there are above-average returns for the AfD, you shouldn’t just issue . . . papers based on the tenuous and dubious grounds of a statistical correlation.”
Not even the AfD’s bitterest enemies are persuaded that the party’s growing strength has much in common with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.
Markus Gleichmann, 33, who lives in Röttelmisch, a hamlet eight miles to the southwest of Jena, has observed the success of the AfD in the area at close quarters while campaigning for the Left party, a successor vehicle to the SED party that used to rule East Germany.
He argues that the study considerably over-egged the pudding: people are simply wary of change in the German countryside. “The voter base of the AfD has shifted in the last few years,” Mr Gleichmann said. “At the beginning they were above all protest voters. Now many conservatives are ready to vote for the AfD too.”
It may be that the AfD’s success in east Germany owes substantially more to communism than to Nazism.
After the end of the Third Reich the region spent more than 40 years in a psychological parallel universe, where it was held up by Moscow as the economic wonder of the eastern bloc, and largely spared the mass immigration that poured into the West.
For many, reunification has been bittersweet. For some it has even been painful. Uncompetitive factories were closed. There are rural towns that have lost appreciable chunks of their population as the young drifted into the big cities. The influx of large numbers of migrants came as a cultural shock.
Michael Kaufmann, 55, a technical engineering lecturer in Jena who helped to found the Thuringian branch of the AfD six years ago, said many in the state voted for the party because they were worried about a return to the political powerlessness of the bad old days.
“Most people got to know slavery, ideological indoctrination and the socialist command economy in the former German Democratic Republic [GDR],” he said. “To have overcome this is a source of great satisfaction and happiness for many.
“[But] now people very often tell me that they increasingly get feelings of déjà vu. You feel as though you have been sent back into the GDR era. Because of political correctness and the laws around language you can no longer openly speak your mind.
“Anyone who makes critical remarks in the wrong place is abused as a Nazi. The reporting in the media is perceived as state-sponsored propaganda. The old parties present themselves in the important areas of policy as a single block, without any discernible differences.”
The Munich study may be unpopular and uncomfortable reading for many Germans. Yet the theory at its core is hard to discount altogether. There is good evidence that this kind of rancour can resurface after lurking in the background for many decades.
One 2016 study found Greek towns that had suffered massacres at the hands of the Nazis in the Second World War were more likely to stop buying German cars during the stand-off over eurozone debt crisis.
Another suggested that the Austrian far right had capitalised on anti-Islamic feelings in some districts that went as far back as the Ottoman sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. On this sort of timescale, the grievances of the 1920s begin to look almost like current affairs.
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